alt Hacker NewsIIRC the Reddit founders used bots for initial traffic to skip over the cold start problem. I feel like this bit of lore is actually pretty terrible but is treated as a nice anecdote because it worked.
IIRC the Reddit founders used bots for initial traffic to skip over the cold start problem. I feel like this bit of lore is actually pretty terrible but is treated as a nice anecdote because it worked.
I think due to the outsized power ads companies (and even those that aren't purely ads founded, like FB, but for which the model of profitability was always ads on the long-horizon) have over the current internet this won't ever go away, in fact it will only keep getting worse, hand in hand with the augmented agentic workflows.
An id-with-options-for-anonymity solution would go a long way but no one is remotely interested in that because it would just crater all these companies valuations if you figured out 60k subscribers were actually 45k bots, and 80% comments were automated agentic replies.
I had launched almost 10 years ago a campaign in indiegogo and immediately got spammed with people selling marketing campaigns, I launched a few days ago one in gamefound and the same happened. Without it, or you investing on your own marketing campaigns it's just impossible to get any traction of sorts, unless you have a network of contacts that themselves can reach organically other people, and the same for other things, like bootstrapping an online social platform. It's almost as if it's a "cost of doing business".
Most of these marketers themselves have automated funnels, now all using agents, there's a lot of tell-tales on the messages you receive and then on the follow ups too - sometimes to the point that the messages just miss completely things you made clear just on the previous message and just follow a funnel to get you through the door. At a certain threshold or when told explicitly sometimes a human goes into the loop, but 2 messages in it's like they reset back to factory defaults...