The clear blend of cynicism and resignation in replies to the Reddit thread about the deleted Trap Plan post clearly illustrate how widely pervasive these practices are perceived to be.
I mean, back when professional game reviewing was more of a thing, game publishers used to do things like take said reviewers on outings and stuff to influence them, give them free copies, whatever. Marketers trying to subvert information flow isn’t something that suddenly showed up with social media.
The marketer in the article — as with anyone else trying to do surreptitious marketing of this sort — is in the business of making hype that is hard to distinguish from buzz. If it were trivial to identify hype, he wouldn’t be in business.
If there are enough people who wait until after a game has been out for some time to play it, there will be marketers targeting that group too.
They might promote the thing based on value or something other than what the latest flashy game crowd gets, but put enough wallets together and there’s an incentive for someone to go after them. The astroturfing guy’s shtick was that he was targeting individual communities with crafted material to try to appeal to them. PatientGamers is another community.
r/gaming is shit. Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough. Go figure. Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box, or don’t know some bit of terminology or lore about a game that is “common knowledge”.
Yeah if they hit critical mass the quality drops significantly. I’ve bookmark a handful of my niche subs that haven’t hit that point yet but I saw it all the time over the years on there. Even something as straight forward as a liminal space, not as a term but there is a lot of writings on the topic, subreddit just turns into everybody posting pictures of there closets and and any old building.
I never understood the hate for Aloy. She was at worst bland with a pretty heavy helping of “I’m better at everything because I’m the main character”, but she’s hardly alone in that, and it doesn’t usually attract that much ire.
I really didn’t understand the complaints that she was unattractive or even outright ugly.
That fits pretty much every game where you control a main character. MCs rarely have a suitable explanation for why they’re so special beyond the rule of cool. Why can Gordon Freeman take out teams of special ops? Because he’s the MC. He’s a pretty bland character that doesn’t say anything, but he’s loved by millions.
She doesn’t have massive tits and dresses like you’d expect someone surviving in a robot dinosaur apocalypse to dress. So, not porn/isn’t sexy, therefore game bad.
It boggles my mind that people fucking care. It’s not like porn isn’t freely available on the Internet, and porn of those characters specifically isn’t easy to find. But if you’ve seen some of the criticism coming from that crowd about Ghost of Yotei it’ll make sense.
What’s sad is Yotei has plenty of faults they could criticize instead. But they can’t see past women as purely an object for sex so here we are.
The degree to which people will idolize God of War’s Kratos and shit all over Horizon’s Aloy is crazy, given how these are functionally the same character.
I really didn’t understand the complaints that she was unattractive or even outright ugly.
She didn’t look like the silhouette on a truck’s mudflaps. So she’s hideous by default. But then nobody seems to qualify as “hot enough” anymore. Sidney Sweeny isn’t hot enough. Taylor Swift isn’t hot enough. Ciri from the Witcher isn’t hot enough. Freya Allan from the TV Show of the Witcher isn’t hot enough. Fucking Jessica Rabbit isn’t hot enough.
Pretty sure Horizon Forbidden Dawn was well liked, despite having a woman speaking, but Horizon Forbidden West was hated on for changing the design of her.
I was banned from r/gaming for daring to go against that grain, and as I understand that is typical. It was about a game I liked too , just wished they had taken a few risks. I think it was Breakpoint. I had some very harsh things to say about the Ubisoft formula and how much better that game could have been if they had embraced the sneaky techie gameplay instead of the looter shooter bullshit they’d done instead. What’s funny to me is that shortly after release they updated the game to get rid of the looter shooter bullshit. So I clearly wasn’t alone.
I left myself after being shouted down over criticizing a game for restricting player kits. The game was more fun without the restrictions, but fuck me for wanting more freedom in player classes.
Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough.
Almost as though its a heavily astroturfed community and many of the accounts are exactly this.
Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box
That’s just social media in a nutshell. You’re either a loyal footsoldier or a radical insurgent. But you need to find your opposing faction and do battle with them. And then, if you get too confrontational, the Mods/Admins need to ban you for doing exactly what the site incentivizes.
Funniest was a comment I saw on reddit after the PR statement, saying looks like reddit overreacted and they are glad Rockstar set the record straight that the workers were fired for leaking information and not for anything related to unions. Typical redditors believing anything to get angry about.
It was over course downvoted, but the audacity of taking the position fully believing the PR release was hilarious that I wondered if it was a plant.
This confirms what I expected. I thought I was going crazy the first time I saw an ask reddit repost and I recognized all the top answers. Eventually they bots will outnumber the users and dead Internet theory will prevail
There are definitely pockets of reddit that don’t have their content flooded with bots, but they are the exception in today’s day and age. I especially enjoy the college football subreddit, as there still isn’t quite something similar on lemmy
A lot of the sports subs’ better content is instant reaction. Harder to fake. The only participation I still have on reddit is a similar community for a large video game. It’s more like a chatroom than a message board. Small wonder I spend way more time talking on Discord than anywhere these days.
I love how so many people on Reddit are acting like this is a complete shock. That site has been a cesspool of bots and targeted ads for years now, people still believed they were having real conversations with humans? I’d be surprised if legit content was higher than 50%.
They can literally setup an instance themselves. By the time it is identified as such, the damage is basically done. Just make a new one. Or use one of the many instances not requiring approval. Or fill out the form with ai. They don’t actually need an insane number of accounts for their subterfuge. Having just “some” and keeping them tied to conversational themes/topics seems sufficient?
I’d argue it is resistant. Lemmy is federated, which means smaller instances, making it easier to detect this kind of activity. Crime in a city vs crime in a town situation
Nah, it works for now because no one really tries to spam lemmy. If it gets popular enough companies will pay bot farms to post here and admins want be able to keep up with moderation. Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
I think to an extent yes, but not quite as bad as Reddit. Reddit admins will completely ignore reports about these. I think most Fediverse admins won’t ignore them.
And if everybody hosts their own server, than so will the advertisers and everybody will have to defederate then individually making the problem of moderation even worse.
When it gets bad enough the default will switch from blacklists to whitelists and the user base will consolidate to fewer and fewer popular instances that are able to address the spam.
Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
the user base will consolidate to fewer and fewer popular instances that are able to address the spam.
But hosting servers cost real money so creating thousands of them may not be cost effective for spammers. Paywalls are the best defense against spammers. Of course this is all hypothetical. Self hosting will never be mainstream. Or maybe? 🤔
What if we make self hosting super easy? Like select the services you want to host, choose a domain, pay and bam, you’ve got your self hosted instance of lemmy/mastodon/pixelfed and so on?
There is at least one company that does provide managed Lemmy services (which makes sense, since a lot of people might want to run their own instance, but don’t want to deal with security and updates and setting up x.509 certs and stuff).
Hey dear community, we just launched today our fully managed hosting of Lemmy
We offer to do Deployment / Security / SSL / DNS / SMTP / Monitoring / Alerts / Backups / Automated updates / Handle migrations / Fully automated but with Human support :)
We deploy each instance on a dedicated VM, and we provide full root access as well if you want to customize anything.
Pricing start at $10/month (billed hourly, no contract)
Only $11.25/mo. Risk-free with a 14-day money-back guarantee
Those are the ones that come up in a search. They’re probably hoping that the Threadiverse will grow; enough instances could make writing scripts and whatever pretty worthwhile.
look at Mastodon and it’s practically what’s happening there. bot farms don’t even bother setting up their own servers, they just go to mastodon.social (by far the largest instance) and bot from there. and because .social refuses to have manual approval for each account, and many instances don’t want to defenerate from where almost everyone is, the problem keeps happening…
As someone who never saw Instagram before yesterday, I was a little shocked at just how much crap was AI generated and just useless fake content. I kept hearing how bad AI was, but until I saw just how bad I really had no idea. I imagine reddit is getting closer to this exact model soon enough.
There’s a way to look at the top Karma users on Reddit. Most of them are either bots, or corporate account. There’s a Marvel one that posts movie stuff, and some Turbo something or other for gaming. They don’t comment, they just post what their corporate overlords want you to see, and they probably have bots that push their content to the top. They just aggregate popular sites, though, driving people into the ads.
When I was on Reddit, going to that leaderboard to block people was my first stop. Though, I do think there are a few that are interesting, even bots — like the haiku one is amusing. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s fun to see it try. Then there’s a guy — pretty sure it’s a person, at least — who turns posts into poems. Not quite the same. Got a weird name. Regular Redditors know who they are. “Something for your something”, I think. I don’t block the fun ones. Just the corporate trash.
Poem for your sprog. I had no problem with the novelty accounts, and even the bot accounts there were clearly just some dev with a quirky sense of humor. Though those got hate from the anti bot purists, for whatever stupid reason.
It’s the corporate, vote manipulating, spam, Russian propaganda etc bots that piss me off. And those are much more subtle and harder to detect.
Sprog, that was it. Yeah. What’s a sprog, anyway? It’s not flagged as misspelled. Yeah, I don’t like AIs that steal content, but funny jokes are fine. Novelty accounts are fine. There were a few people who claimed to be famous people. Maybe they were those people. I never cared. They weren’t anything special to me. I just treated them like novelty accounts, same as anyone else really.
The big subs were full of bots, but for some it didn’t really matter. It a post was a bit but it was still funny on memes or funny then it’s fine. I don’t care if karma farming bots were the majority of posts so long as it’s still good content. The content does seem to be significantly worse now though.
That really depends on the community. When I was there, I would avoid the larger communities and seek out smaller communities. When I first joined Reddit, it was to avoid the attention-seeking posts by humans, and near the end it was to avoid attention-seeking posts by bots and humans alike. The best content IMO is on subreddits with <100k subs and <5 posts per day.
Yeah, I suspect most of /r/prisonhooch is still legit content, but it is kinda a rejection of commercialism. Not much you could sell them. A fermenting tub? The fuckers will use a water butt instead.
Reddit be like all the play writers from South Park when Randy Marsh found out that subliminal messages were being sent to women (Episode: Broadway Bro Down)
When I was a kid, I played Black and White constantly and my dad printed off a complete guide from GameFAQs and put it in a binder with page protectors and everything. It was so awesome.
lol I remember discovering this website as a kid, thinking I could stop buying strategy guides for like 10 to 20 bucks, then proceeding to print like 60 pages at a time. Bless my mom for not complaining about the paper and ink!
pcgamer.com
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