Which social media / platforms are flooded by bots the most?
Business Marketing with Nika
47 replies
The essence of social media is that you are social. 🤝
But as more and more communication becomes robotic, will it make sense to be there?
– More comments are generated by AI.
– Also, social networks are starting to use AI to summarize comments (the need arose because people don't want to read those long comments that they know are created by artificial intelligence anyway, see YouTube and Meta – they are already testing summarisations)
– Communication will increasingly begin to move to DM because of that.
Which social networks will face an outflow of people who will no longer want to spend time there for this? Which will be the first?
My personal guesses (Twitter, PH 😅)
Replies
André J@sentry_co
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For SoMe to become more genuine again, more strict rate limits will have to be implemented. But big companies move slow, so I think there will be 1-2 years now where it's a free for all. Rate limits, social points, anti gpt speak filters will be implemented. I think.
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@sentry_co I think some social networks will not accept this. Especially the limits for comments. Networks must be fed with content, because the longer you are in the app (through content creation and consumption), the better - a social network where you spend a lot of time is interesting for advertisers. So I don't know to what extent they would apply this point. The rest maybe.
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@busmark_w_nika Yes, accounts with proven social points, will get increased rate limits. I.e: Like here on PH. it's easy to gauge which accounts are genuine and bring value, same with stackoverflow, a lot of social point gamification built in. And when your account on stackoverflow gets powerful, you get more admin control, and can shape the platform. This encourages gd behaviour. But not in a Orwellian 1984 kind of "good behaviour" way 😅
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@sentry_co how do you want to secure social points, what will it depend on? how are you going to ensure that someone doesn't get to the point where they're credible enough and at the expense of their size they're already slightly automating? Something like when you write on Wikipedia for a long time, gain credibility, and then put a promo post there (not that I've ever done that... seriously, I haven't... never got that far) :D
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@busmark_w_nika With power comes responsibility. If you want to ruin your reputation, go ahead. the social status will go down immediately. And your reach will be revoked. There are many ways to encourage good behaviour. Nudge theory. Badges like here on PH, where makers are only allowed a finite amount they can give out, so they have to pick wisely. Finite is the clue here. On stackoverflow, you genuinely have to provide some really stellar answers to get points for them. GPT answers are banned outright. Ive never seen a gpt answer on stackoverflow. Altho I don't visit it that much anymore since I use copilot that use in indirectly 😅. But sometimes I do because I need some deeper insight than copilot can comprehend. I have about 5k points on stackoverflow, gained passively over 10 years. I have power there, I can edit things without any approval. And I would never jepordize it. it's very valuable. Also my answers are history, people can see all my activity since day1. And see that I'm helpful, and non-passive aggressive etc. Which is important for a devs rep in general. nothing beats imperial evidence.
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@sentry_co makes sense but we still do not have a solution from the side of social media. As soon as the system can be cheated, some people do it. So at the end of the day (as usual, and like on Product Hunt, we need to rely on ourselves and not on social media or platforms that they will do it for us [ detecting bots, penalising accounts ] .
Only honest comments without bots can be made IRL :D
my current status: losing trust in everything. (I doubt I ever had any) :DDD
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I think that the most trustworthy (in answers and communication among people) will be Reddit.
@busmark_w_nika there are more and more reply automation tools on Reddit, unfortunately it won’t last at all
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@busmark_w_nika yes me too, thought it was a safe place but smartereply or MyreplyGuy broke it 🤣
I think we really need to build that ICQ we talked about and make it AI proof 😃
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I completely agree. It's incredibly frustrating that in most situations nowadays, you're not communicating with people directly.
Therefore, my guess is that the future will be... entirely audio communication. It could be one of the current platforms or a completely new social network, but it will be based on audio communication. This is because voice and sentence structure convey emotion, which is difficult for AI to generate (or it will sound totally fake). That's why Twitter Spaces are a unique opportunity to connect with real people.
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@busmark_w_nika probably current social media platforms will be a better option.
Starting from scratch is much harder.
Maybe you're right. Last week, there was a Youtuber - IShowSpeed who was in Europe. He did livestream from 10+ countires. And more than 200-300k. people watched every stream live. He has 26m.+ followers on Youtube.
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Tidyread
Agreed, PH's comment section is the most likely to be flooded with bots.
I think it depends on each person's purpose. Some people just want to discover some good products with potential, and those people will be more willing to comment honestly. More people want to increase their influence so that more people know about their products, and these people will probably use AI to generate comments quickly. in the beginning, I would use AI, but gradually I realised that sincerity is the only thing that will get me sincerity, so now I always think for myself and comment!
Twitter but now i am seeing it on PH as well 🤦♀️
Product Hunt for sure..
Twitter and Instagram are often cited as being heavily affected by bots. These bots can create fake accounts, post spam, or inflate follower counts. However, other platforms like Facebook and TikTok also face bot-related issues. Social media companies continuously work on improving their detection and removal of these bots to maintain platform integrity.
I think PH has as many as LinkedIn, but on Li there is a bigger proportion of normal human comments so it gets balanced a bit
Overlap
I can't lie, sometimes I use ChatGPT to make sense of my thoughts. Like, I will write it up and say to ChatGPT, "Make this better: [insert thoughts]" And then it takes a lot of finessing to get it just right, but I think that is okay. What do you think?
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@jabrueckner when you can sustain the most of the thought, it is okay, but with each use of AI, the authenticity is less yours. Chat GPT tends to make changes that take something from your post's uniqueness.
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I completely agree with this! There is another side effect, no one is talking about. There is an inflation in the number of likes & comments you need to have a "solid brand". Now anyone with mediocre content can get x number of likes & y number of comments > its not impressive.
I think there will be a new metric- no. of authentic comments. I have a post I am going to make on X about this!
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@my3_murthy Could you please send it to me that post then (or tag me?)
Oh! also, I know LinkedIn has a lot of fake comments too- there are tools to help create AI comments.
This was a big thing when I agreed to work with my cofounders- I didn't want to build another replyguy. I was against- auto-commenting. We are going to start with entirely omitting AI generated comments- but might keep it as an option if people want it (they will have to pay for the extra comments & have to hit post on these comments manually).
I'd say Facebook probably has most bots. The audience there is probably older than, say, Instagram or Tiktok. Which means they'd be more unlikely to differentiate bots. Like how scammers operate by calling old people who're likely less tech savvy or people who don't know much about banking/finance. But this is just a guess, don't have any numbers.
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@aruna_neervannan1 that's true. On the website, there are many "Support bots" leaving reviews, as in comments and DMs :D awful awful.
Facebook for me! Every time I post anything on our company page, I get bombarded with bots messages 'We're shutting down your page in 24h for policy violation'.
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Twitter seems most flooded with bots right now, especially since Elon took over. Wouldn't be surprised if people start leaving due to all the spam. YouTube comments are another cesspool of low-effort AI-generated posts, though at least they're trying to summarize them now. I think DMs and smaller niche communities will grow as people look for more genuine interaction. Curious to see how this all plays out! 🍿
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@nancywright this already happens with IG –> all communication and even developer effort is going into developing DMs options.