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bogged cal/ango  3mo ago (news.ycombinator.com) 484 thread views   #176437

Reddit tried to "seed" :marseysneed: country-specific subreddit spinoffs with machine-translated posts

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36211467

From a HN comment:

(...) Aside from this move that is an obvious way to steer user toward the official app and have tighter control, the r/de and /r/France community have find some really concerning behavior by Reddit [1].

Moderator from those community have been contacted by reddit admin to tell them that they created localized version of popular subreddit ( /r/offmychest, /r/tooafraidtoask, ... ) and asked them if they basically could signal boost them. In itself nothing is wrong here. The issue is that people have found that a lot of activity in those subreddit are seemingly just poorly google translated popular post from the original english sub or just plainly generic classique karma bait post (but also clearly google translated).

Karma bots are nothing new but in this case, those subs are brand new, have very few member and very few karma to gain and are basically of interest only to reddit (since the communities already usually had their own better moderated subs). So there is a lot of finger pointing at reddit themselves using bots to try to force engagement in non-english community and virtually (since it is mostly bots) bump their stats before their IPO, which is very dodgy.

Automated :marseybuttfaceshitter:, but with admin approval

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Or and get this. Do bi-directional machine translations keyed on locality of the user basically a translate this so that users and other languages can interact

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Twitter google translate?

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The fact that you cannot automatically translate tweets, and need to actually click on the tweet to then click the minuscule “translate” button, which you will always miss on the first try, is proof Twitter really wouldn’t have lasted more than a few years were it not for the feds seeing its use.

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They can't do it since twitter did it first :marseycry:

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Basically on by default

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Reddit started with this, the first accounts were Spez and Alex's alts replying to each other: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2

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Linked to in that thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34481478 Am I r-slurred? Has this been discussed elsewhere? This is about jannies doing it NOT FOR FREE :marseypearlclutch:

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Translation of the original claims, for anyone interested. I wish the OP of the france thread would have linked to some examples to make a much better case, but I really would have 0 surprise if this were true. That said, it could also be karma farmers for all we know, aging up accounts for advertising in those languages.

Reddit's auto-astrosurfing (again) in non-English-speaking communities

Originally, this was a comment elsewhere, but I think it's worth sharing with as many people as possible because right meow, Reddit is collecting Reddit moments.

TL;PL: title, but without typeface

Disclaimer: everyone's a bot.

Back in January, I pointed out to the right and to the left, notably on /r/FrMods in this topic, that many communities were being invaded by publications that were machine translations of old English topics. But in the absence of any reaction or explanation, I'd left it at the assumption that it was simple karma cultivation for future astroturfing campaigns for political, marketing or trolling purposes. I didn't really look any further, and nobody seemed to care, even though it regularly bordered on the absurd to see people seriously answering bots' questions. I myself fell into the trap more than once on /r/litterature or /r/ecriture. I even saw a topic on /r/ELI5fr where someone used ChatGPT to answer the bot's question in the first degree. But the modos just let it happen, like here, here or here, except when it was really blatant, like in this case, this one or this one.

I'm convinced that these bots have contributed to artificially increasing the visibility of these communities, both locally and for newcomers, to the detriment of others that are more rigorous about their content. They have also contributed to the decline in activity of these communities, since the creation of a publication is not limited to a question or a paragraph that serves as content. Sheepishly, we go where there seems to be people and activity. Hard to compete with r/ on steroids.

But that was just a theory I hadn't delved into. I'd simply unsubscribed from these bots' breeding grounds and tried to forget that part of Reddit I don't like at all, where everything is repeated in a loop for a short-memory, all-consuming mass.

And then I came across this publication on r/de.

In a nutshell, an admin contacted some of r/de's most active redditos to inform them of the creation of German-speaking communities equivalent to big r/ like /r/TooAfraidToAsk /r/offmychest or /r/tipofmytongue. It didn't take long for someone to notice that the publications of these and other older communities were bad translations of originally English content. Promoted by a fricking admin. Members of r/de investigated and discovered that these accounts are sometimes the only ones active there, and reply to each other in broken German.

I was intrigued by the fact that not only publications, but also comments were being inflated, so I went to take a look at the growth in the number of members of certain French-speaking communities. It's worse than anything else, and so pathetically

the manipulation is blatant.

In April 2022, you can see the /r/place effect in the abnormally high jump in the number of new members. Then there's the absurdity of a whole month of dizzying, constant progress in 5 karma-farming communities. The previous month also saw artificial growth in /r/bonjour, the community publicly managed by French-speaking admins. Over the same period of time, it's the same progression, then a slow decline because this page has become a pseudo French /r/all, but editorialized and without much interest. And this artificial crowding-in of members comes at the expense of the activity of smaller communities that require more than asking a question, or more than a paragraph.

All this to say that the exorbitant pricing of API access, with the consequent end of third-party apps, but also the probable loss of certain moderation cow tools, is part of the same logic with a view to increasing the site's profitability and its publicly desired IPO as early as December 2021. Reddit wants to do everything it can to please advertisers, even if it means becoming a shell at the expense of the people who are supposed to run the site.

Added: I don't know why the last part disappeared, I've put it back.

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If it makes the /r/France jannies seethe then it's a good policy. They bend over so hard for the /r/MerdeInFrance leftoid culture war importers I don't care what happens to them.

A while back /r/France banned posting "minor news" because they didn't like people nooticing coincidences with the countless cases of theft, assault and murder, and only allowing them to be posted on weekends where there were fewer people wasn't curbing nooticing enough.

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For your information, "internet comments" aren't some special kind of imaginary or play world. They are real comments from real people. This is still an actual conversation, genius, just like it was happening in someone's house, face to face. Maybe to you, it's just internet comments and comedy because you don't know what real life is. Look at your user name. Everything is just sarcasm to you. Look at your posts. You have no inner compass. Everything is just for a joke.

Snapshots:

/r/France:

/r/offmychest:

/r/tooafraidtoask:

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