Experts: No Way to Truly Know if Redditor You're Arguing With Is Bot or Child

Very fitting headline in a day and age where I'm constantly seeing people advocating for giving trump the Whitehouse and finishing the country off because anything less would be SuPpOrTiNg GeNoCiDe. As if the move to help Palestinians would be to elect Trump. These people are very stupid children, bots, or Russian paid actors. Impossible to know which.

There is a very valid point made there. Think about all the weird arguments you had with other users on the internet over really frustrating stances that made you think "no one can be that dense, or with discussion tactics that were just utterly pointless (constantly shifting goal posts, strawmen, weird pseudo-philosphical ramblings that missed the point completely but ended in some smug "gotcha" that actually was nothing but nonsense). Those tend to leave us in a.bad mood sometimes, right? At least they wanted our mozherfuckin time.

Now ask yourself: would the impact on your day, the evaluation of what was said and/or your reaction to it have changed, had you known that your opponent is either a literal child or a teenager who just discovered the message behind an Ed Sheeran song and now thinks of themself as some conveyor of deep thoughts?

I'd bet that around half of all political debates on the internet are useless duels between one person actually arguing something and a child/teenager regurgitating what their dad said and they think they understood but actually didn't.

Everyone's being funny about it, but the Dead Internet Theory is looking more and more rational, especially on Reddit. I really don't have any rational reason to expect that even the dancing TikTok people are real, never mind Reddit comments. I'm fairly certain that I am a living thing, but I have to question everyone else, with all due respect.

Man, Reddit's weird now. I think it's just responding to the cookies that it sets as I use it, but I don't log in and FF dumps cookies every time I close the browser for the night, so when I browse into r/All there's a new "hot" subreddit every time, and it's always kind of random. The usual suspects, like JusticeServed and all that fashy shit, those are kind of conspicuously absent, too.

I think Reddit's on their way out, not because of Lemmy, sorry, but because all the normies getting forced online in 2020 was the last hurrah, and the site is on the way down, finally, I can feel the traffic dropping. Everyone's either getting sucked into the jet engine of TikTok and Instagram or they're just using group chats and avoiding social media altogether.

The fascinating thing about modern Reddit is at long last the Americans all seem to have left, and suddenly the site feels like it belongs to the EU, and even South America a bit. So either it's about to rise with a new flame in this next decade or you should probably buy one share of the IPO as a keepsake and no more. I wonder how long it will take to delist.

My dude, I've spent the last couple years really upgrading my finance chops and now I just keep looking around at the variety of internet based things that seem to be winding down like a shitty old clock while going, hah! interest rates too high now! The current internet was only possible in the free money era.

I mean… welcome to the internet. It’s not just Reddit, but most social media, and some “news” sites.

I usually assume they are a piss drinker.

How is this from the Onion!?!? I don’t know which is which anymore…

This is not an Onion article, this is a research paper

I wonder what Alan Turing would think of this.

Bots write better.

Permanently Deleted

Akshually, Distinguishing between an AI-generated comment and a child's input can be challenging due to evolving language models. Both may exhibit simplicity, occasional errors, or innocence in expression. As technology progresses, this line blurs, prompting reflection on the nature of communication and the expanding capabilities of AI.

... Or me

bot writers can only do so much...

I have a little trick to tell whether im arguing with someone who actually is astroturfin vs someone who's simply ignorant. I just prick their egos, just a bit. Just a a minor one mind you, not a full throated dismissal. I like to work one into an otherwise on-topic reply.

Almost always the other person zeroes in on and rises to the bait. If they don't? Theyre working. Similarly, astroturfers won't get nasty like real folks do, or double down like real folks do if you debunk their argument well. Astroturfers dont want eyes in that so they'll simply ghost you.

Just my hypothesis of course.

Dunno what to do about figuring their age except tell people mine. Sometimes that gives my words more weight. If my experience is instead dismissed, i always have my 30 years of Internet shit talking under my belt! Insults don't hit as hard when they're all re-runs :)

Edit: anyone want to tell me why they don't like this? Points don't matter when it doesn't hide your comment but I am actually confused. You don't like it? Think it's bullshit? I am here for your complaints