It appears someone is using a LLM to make pro-Reddit (ie anti-subreddit-blackout) posts on r/programming. The accounts are all under 30 days old and the posts have that classic milquetoast ChatGPT vibe to them - utterly bland, inoffensive, “safe” posts. If you’ve used ChatGPT you’ll immediately recognize the style.
The link has pretty convincing evidence of astroturfing.
What I don't understand is why take the sub private instead of deleting the post? That's crazy. Were they concerned deleting a post would create more backlash than taking the sub private? Basically the same calculus as a tyrant declaring martial law and expecting the backlash from that to be less than from allowing protests?
You can prob find a better explanation online, but basically faking a “grass roots” movement using bots or a brigade of users. It’s called such since astroturf is fake grass.
Less about the technique and more about the optics. Astroturfing is about building the perception of popular support. Bots pretending to be people can be astroturfing, but so can people putting up signs, people writing legislators, writing to newspaper, etc.
The idea is to make it look like support for/aversion to something is organic and popular (grassroots) when it's entirely artificial (astroturf)
More specific than that. You could describe blackmail like that.
The key characteristic of astroturfing is that it attempts to influence public opinion by presenting a false picture of the current public opinion. It's both of those things together that make something astroturfing.
> the deceptive practice of presenting an orchestrated marketing or public relations campaign in the guise of unsolicited comments from members of the public.
I hope we can keep this in the headlines. r/programming was the subreddit I mostly posted stuff from my reading list (one of the top submitters) to get feedback from comments and now I can't get in. Has the community from r/programming moved somewhere else? I'm posting here if anyone is interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/softwarecrafters/
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 74.3 ms ] thread> Hence post two predicting the sub would not join the protest.
Sorry I don't understand. "post two"?
That’s a bit more red handed than just milk toast language.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230612080526/https://i.imgur.c...
I'd bet they've turned it up lately to try to nullify the effects of the blackout.
Predictable and sad, really.
What I don't understand is why take the sub private instead of deleting the post? That's crazy. Were they concerned deleting a post would create more backlash than taking the sub private? Basically the same calculus as a tyrant declaring martial law and expecting the backlash from that to be less than from allowing protests?
The idea is to make it look like support for/aversion to something is organic and popular (grassroots) when it's entirely artificial (astroturf)
The key characteristic of astroturfing is that it attempts to influence public opinion by presenting a false picture of the current public opinion. It's both of those things together that make something astroturfing.
> the deceptive practice of presenting an orchestrated marketing or public relations campaign in the guise of unsolicited comments from members of the public.
Edit: works by clicking the comments button. Utterly pathetic move, so stupid. You'd think reddit of all services would know how to astroturf