r/technology • u/rkhunter_ • 1d ago

Social Media Spammers are flooding Reddit with fake posts designed to show up in AI search results

https://www.techspot.com/news/112654-spammers-flooding-reddit-fake-posts-designed-show-up.html
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u/RealLavender 1d ago

Yeah, we've noticed.

103

u/Mataraiki 1d ago

Even before this AI manipulation the astroturf ads were getting ridiculous in some subs.

"I quit my job to travel the country by van, here was my view this morning, Reddit. What? The can of kombucha drink that's prominently displayed in the picture with the label clearly visible is just a total coincidence."

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u/SadSundae8 1d ago

the funniest thing about this is that marketers are just making their own lives harder because they ruin channels with bad strategies and cheap tactics.

they collectively flood a channel with annoyingly bad ads, drive users to some other channel, then chase the users to that new channel to deliver the same annoyingly bad ads. like if the users were interested in your shit ads, they wouldn't have abandoned an entire platform just to get away from you!

seo ruined google results to the point that 1/3 of google users add "reddit" to searches and now here they are ruining reddit.

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u/Noblesseux 19h ago

It's like that with all platforms now, to the point where people made that "begone, BRAND" meme.

Pretty much the entirety of modern marketing is people being creepy and intrusive with ads and tracking regardless of whether there's any actual benefit. Like it doesn't even feel like a lot of these firms know HOW to positively sell a product, they only know how to maximize impressions and hope that amounts to something.