Am I to mourn the loss of what I personally consider one of the worst manipulative toxins to ever exist?
Thanks AI.
It was never a particularly good idea at the scale it's currently deployed at.
This human nature shit is empirically wrong. There are quite a few scammers around. You also meet these people in real life, you just don't notice immediately.
Hard disagree, and I’ll cite a simple example: Reddit isn’t one community. It’s a hub and spoke model. There are many good communities with curators and SMEs.
My canonical example that’s counter to this is HN. No offense to anyone but Reddit doesn’t have a hive mind - communities do. And HN hive mind is wrong more often than right and has been targeted by all sorts of astroturfers along the way. I personally take very few comments on here seriously, no takes seriously, and mostly show up to read comments by some actual hard cred people (f.e. animats). Everyone else might as well be a shill bot. AI doesn’t change this. I still get cream of the crop from Reddit.
Having said that, social media isn’t dead. It’ll transform. Two things are eternal: 1) women’s need for attention, 2) men’s need to get laid.
The bots have gotten a lot smarter about making their ads look organic too. Even easier now with the ability to hide post history
The non-default experience is a mixed bag. Specialized communities are usually moderated pretty strictly, including rules against outgoing links, product reviews, etc. That said, you definitely see product placement disguised as questions / off-the-cuff recommendations where some previously-unheard-of Chinese brand is all of sudden mentioned every day.
HN has its problems, mostly in the form of people pretending to be experts and saying unhinged nonsense, but it's far less commercialized. If you want your brand to be on the front page, you sort of need to make an effort to write at least a mildly interesting blog post. Now, AI is changing that dynamic a bit because we now get daily front-page stories that are AI-generated... but it's happening more slowly than elsewhere.
Seems like the Butlerian Jihad is arriving ahead of schedule, and the real horrors demanding the uprising aren't oppression and violence, but viral marketing and sockpuppetry.
Okay, is this just an ad then?
Now it seems war is coming from the US it could not be more true that at this moment.
It's easier to count billionaires who aren't supervillains.
p.s. this is not a great photo of Marc on his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marc_Andreessen-9_(croppe...
The call is coming from inside the house.
If you want more photos of his phone farm... it's all on his twitter page: https://x.com/rareZuhair/status/1961160231322517997
"Accelerating the dead Internet"? Why are we, as a community, encouraging the acceleration of enshitification of our common spaces? So weird to me...
If we never do things that later make us cringe and want to correct, we're not reflective and self-critical enough.
They used to be at the pinnacle of the VC sector, and now they seem to actively seek out the most toxic portcos possible.
> Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?
People who get to what seems like infinite money only do so because they were seeking money as a means to power for which they have an insatiable desire in the first place, its not that getting to (even practically) infinite money triggers the desire for unlimited power, its that it is a symptom of it.
My actual guess is that they got way too big, both in terms of headcount and fund size, to limit their investments to what is expected to be the best of the best in terms of financial return and societal impact.
>"Take proven content and spawn variation."
It's almost refreshing how unashamed they are. I hate it, obviously, but I kind of like it better than companies that say something dressed up in marketing speak but actually mean what this site just says outright.
> Because using the CFAA as a cudgel against things you don't like, whether it's journalists exposing insecure government systems, or companies engaging in deceptive marketing practices is a bad idea?
I think you're confusing bad ethics with a bad idea. A prosecutor's job is to win, not behave ethically.
Edit: The community has spoken and I've come up with a way to include a16z in the title whilst keeping it under 80 chars.
There is an 80-character limit on titles
This title is 75 characters
A mod changed the title to something other than the originally submitted original article title, to protect a major VC.
Not cool.
Both for length reasons and because it was clickbait.
The original title doesn’t even have the actual company’s name in it, only the name of the investor, which is intended to elicit just the kind of ragey reaction you’re exhibiting in this comment.
On HN, titles need to be more neutral and factual (I.e., include the name of the company the article is primarily about).
(Also, you seem to be implying some conflict of interest? Doublespeed and a16z have nothing to do with HN/YC.)
I'd say that the change is editorializing more than the original was "linkbait".
The original title is 75 characters. Your title is 74 characters. If it was edited for length reasons, I'm not sure saving 1 character is worth it.
Lmao. Nice.
This reminds me of some youtube videos when I was researching some stuff to buy. Those videos are just still images plus text-to-speech narration, usually with an annoying background music.
I'm not on tiktok and the videos often won't play for me because of that.
Are they still images as videos with tts or literally just still images?
You are making yourself easier to fool: You don't know which fake accounts you overlooked, and by increasing your confidence you make yourself more vulnerable to them in the future.
In this case some slop is hacked and exposed. I check them out to see if they're good yet. The quality of the slop is unrelated to whether they'd get hacked.
According to Cambridge's data, $100 gets you around 2k fake but verified tiktok accounts: https://cotsi.org/platforms?view=map&platform=lf
Viewbotting is a pretty big issue on all the streaming platforms. Twitch changed their technical measures recently and a bunch of big streamers concurrent viewers dropped by a large amount. "Fake it until you make it" is a viable strategy with streaming. It's all about fake engagement to game the algorithm and end up in people's feeds.
Probably moves like affiliate/referral linking, client paid campaigns, cpa lead generating arbitrate at scale, product seeding.
I want to do plenty about it, I want to make the barrier to allow this shit online identity theft to make it too expensive to do.
In this case you aren't backing a phone farm creating ad fraud, but rather a "organic paid media initiative backed by a16z"
And this would be an entirely clickbait-free, fact-based summary of what they are doing.
It's not far off fraud as a service. This activity could get people prosecuted in EU countries and the UK.
Yes but they also stand to make money offering services to counteract the services they offer.
I can only assume his VC funders have a bomb collar on him or something, otherwise I don't see why anyone would trust him with a penny.
New generation is less social, more sober, less motivated, more doomer.
And then there's everyone else.
Not just businesses. It's governments, too.
There's a public park near me that is tracked for likes and social media engagement. If it misses the city's goals for social media engagement a certain number of months in a row, it can be turned back into a parking lot.
I objected to this measure of "success" during the public meetings about it, but nobody cares about the old man in the back of the room.
Anyone got any good effort post oases I can lurk and help out in?
Amongst more general discussion platforms, HN, Metafilter, possibly Tildes.net.
Anything large is by definition popular and common, both terms with freighted meanings. The more so if they're advertising-driven.
It's obviously marketing. But their marketing strategy appears to be being unashamed about ripping off content and creating bot farms.
What are you suggesting they are lying about? They're actually doing it for the good of the world and just pretending they're a bot farm for hire?
They are the teachers, coaches, and engineers. The problem is the anti- role models are the ones who get all of the media:
Andrew Tate (mysogenistic pyramid schemer and pimp / sex trafficker of high school girls),
Joe Rogan (his mind is so open that his brains fell out),
Jordan B Peterson (charlatan who dresses up banal self-help advice with pseudo-intellectual jargon to seem profound, drug addict who is still taking very big risks with his health, frequently argues strawmans by misrepresenting postmodernism, Marxism, atheism, etc).
Our heuristics of who we should look up to are skewed because too many young people revere wrath and fame over ethics, morals, and values which may hold us back from success.
We do have to recognize that we have societally dropped the ball by allowing media companies brainwash the population into thinking that money and fame is unquestionable success; this has allowed the corporate mouth pieces to blow so much hot air into the bullshit they spew, that turds end up floating to the top.
What is clear as day is that we live in a world where Brandolini's law is being exploited constantly: that there is a constant fight to DARVO the heck out of our perceptions is undeniable.
We need to normalize bringing receipts to back your claims...
How to teach the average person not to follow the siren's song of populism and rage baiting?? That, I have not yet figured out.
Edit: Fine! I found a way to get a16z in there and keep it to 80 chars.
Awesome, cool job. What petulance we have this morning, Tom.
tomhow's acknowledged the criticism and revised his edit to reflect it. You've won your argument.
The title we’ve set is intended to give enough information to pique curiosity for those who will be curious about the topic - the company name, what the company does (AI-generated promotional content), what’s happened (hacked).
I don’t love the title but it’s the best I could come up with to fit within the 80 character limit.
Anyone is welcome to suggest a better one that is compliant with the guidelines.
(Edit: s/ countless / a great many /)
Best to drop the contrafactual hyperbole .. unless A16z's accountants really have dropped the ball and can no longer enumerate their investments.
I am very sorry, but that's a critical part of the story.
If you search "cumtown Nick Mullins Jordan Peterson" on YouTube that should get you there (yes it's crass but in the context of Jordan Peterson it's funny)
For some of us these exaggerated claims of greater than aleph-null investments send our eyebrows literally to the stratosphere (/s).
I think the general point stands when considering large-scale platforms.
So it's not unreasonable to say that when demographics of forums was changed, the economic incentive appeared? So it actually depends on demographics?
Either or both, depending on the SYSOP's resources. I ran a BBS that did store-and-forward between the U.S. and Europe.
The ones with global connections could take a day to a week to forward messages, but that turned out to be a feature. We went outside in the real world instead of staying online arguing with strangers.
For the record, I replied "Fine!" as a friendly acknowledgement of the community winning the argument. I collapsed some of the subthreads, because, at the time, these meta subthreads were taking up most of the main thread. However I deliberately left some uncollapsed – even though we would normally have collapsed all of them – so as not to hide the fact that there was debate about the title. I also turned off default penalties (flamewar detector, flags) and restored the submission to the front page to give it more exposure.
We have no interest in suppressing stories about any company or investor. A16Z is a completely separate entity from YC; It invests in YC companies and also may be seen to be competing with YC for early stage deals. These considerations don't factor into our moderation decisions.
What does matter is HN’s purpose: discovering content that gratifies intellectual curiosity and having interesting discussions about it. That's what we optimise for.
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