alt Hacker NewsThis is not unique to Facebook. Reddit has seen a large uptick in AI-generated posts, or repeated posts from the past.
I think we need to recognize that social media of 2026 is not the same as what we had in 2006. AI generated content, regardless of if it is image, video, or text, is here to stay. And it will only get better and more convincing as the technology improves.
What people really need to ask is this - what do they want to get out of social media? Is it personal relationships and status updates? Is it entertainment? Is it something in between?
The harsh truth is most people at this point use social media for entertainment, and AI content is entertaining, or at least engaging, to most people. Remember that 54% of USA adults read below a 6th grade reading level [1]. It is not perfect, but it is convincing enough that a large enough number of people are beginning to accept it as "real".
[1]: https://www.nu.edu/blog/49-adult-literacy-statistics-and-fac...
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The reddit bots are quite nefarious. Even in technical communities where no advertisement is happening there are so many posts made by bots either recycling old posts or masquerading as humans doing banal things like complaining about end users or something. Hundreds of bots that do nothing more than pretend to be people complaining about work, really curious what the goal of the operators is with these ones. Makes me wonder if they are bots supplied by reddit to artificially boost engagement.
Coining HNs Law
Any mode of communication that depends on advertising for funding will over time t monotonically approach total BullShit Grifting as t increases.
It doesn't matter to any of these companies what their users get out of it so long as those "dumb fucks[1]" keep coming back to the trough and slurping up the slop. Eat your rage bait and like it, piggy. Keep that attention economy roaring!
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
It's not about what users want. It's about what's profitable for the company.
What I want from Facebook is to see what original words, images, or videos my friends and family thought was worth sharing with the world today, and I want to see clearly when I've reached the end of that. I probably don't need to spend more than ten minutes once a day on that.
It's profitable for Facebook to show me as many ads as possible. If I wasn't an aggressive adblock user, the thing I want would have much less potential profit than all the third-party content they want to show me.