A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote

The usual goal of professional propaganda - of disinformation - is to paralyze, to prevent constructive communication, discourse, progress.

It was never a joke because bots are older than AI

Was it a joke?

Am I to mourn the loss of what I personally consider one of the worst manipulative toxins to ever exist?

Thanks AI.

BBSes and forums have existed for literally longer than the internet

Reddit was pretty solid before people started cultivating their personal "brand"/only fans page/crypto pick.

How about Hacker News?

Adding recommendation engines that optimise for anger makes it even worse.

People like AI created slop because they already like human created slop. AI slop is the way it is because it was trained on human slop.

Interestingly, you can still use `author:username` to search for posts. For my part, if something seems suspicious and the profile is private then I assume it's a bot.

Yeah, I saw some posts on there the other day that felt a bit suspect, went to look at their profile, and nothing. I'd already become an infrequent user of reddit since some earlier changes, but that makes me even less likely to go back.

IME some of the smaller communities on reddit that are based around hobbies are actually MORE astroturfed

The bots have gotten a lot smarter about making their ads look organic too. Even easier now with the ability to hide post history

I mean, yes and no. The default Reddit experience is absolutely overrun by fake content. Or, there are tens of thousands of real people who have nothing else to do in their life but to go to /r/news or other "front page" subreddits and post the same political talking points multiple times a day, whether the story warrants it or not. Frankly, the AI / paid-shill explanation is greatly preferable in my book.

The non-default experience is a mixed bag. Specialized communities are usually moderated pretty strictly, including rules against outgoing links, product reviews, etc. That said, you definitely see product placement disguised as questions / off-the-cuff recommendations where some previously-unheard-of Chinese brand is all of sudden mentioned every day.

HN has its problems, mostly in the form of people pretending to be experts and saying unhinged nonsense, but it's far less commercialized. If you want your brand to be on the front page, you sort of need to make an effort to write at least a mildly interesting blog post. Now, AI is changing that dynamic a bit because we now get daily front-page stories that are AI-generated... but it's happening more slowly than elsewhere.

He just got a $1 mil series A. Better role models? He is a role model, at least in the society we've decided to build.

I think he's old enough to be tried as an adult here. He architected the product, it was no silly accident. I think his choice of role models may be a reflection of his character...

Not too sure about that syllogism. Surely reflection and self-criticism is about the correction part, vs the not-doing-it-in-the-first-place part.

FWIW, I agree with you. I think that great role models are sadly in short supply these days.

No, it's a calculated marketing, not them being honest.

Controversy is currency. Businesses literally try to track and optimise virality these days as part of their marketing.

It's a great reminder that while room-temperature-IQ AI pumpers like Sam Altman talk about "solving physics" or whatever, the actual value of large language models is generating spam marginally cheaper than Filipinos.

A16Z is basically funding toxic fungi growing on the face of society at this point. So much of what they do seems to be a bet that people will want to pay money to do antisocial things and avoid the consequences.

Advertising and shilling, just like normal influencers?

You sell fake engagement to content creators.

According to Cambridge's data, $100 gets you around 2k fake but verified tiktok accounts: https://cotsi.org/platforms?view=map&platform=lf

Viewbotting is a pretty big issue on all the streaming platforms. Twitch changed their technical measures recently and a bunch of big streamers concurrent viewers dropped by a large amount. "Fake it until you make it" is a viable strategy with streaming. It's all about fake engagement to game the algorithm and end up in people's feeds.

Immorally.

Probably moves like affiliate/referral linking, client paid campaigns, cpa lead generating arbitrate at scale, product seeding.

>> Why isn't this company sued for computer fraud and abuse?

> Because using the CFAA as a cudgel against things you don't like, whether it's journalists exposing insecure government systems, or companies engaging in deceptive marketing practices is a bad idea?

I think you're confusing bad ethics with a bad idea. A prosecutor's job is to win, not behave ethically.

I hate that Marc Andreesen' arc went from Mosaic to supervillain.

It's easier to count billionaires who aren't supervillains.

p.s. this is not a great photo of Marc on his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marc_Andreessen-9_(croppe...

This is moral failure.

Nothing makes this inevitable. People like you who want to do nothing about it makes it inevitable.

> Once you have infinite money, you tend to want infinite power next

People who get to what seems like infinite money only do so because they were seeking money as a means to power for which they have an insatiable desire in the first place, its not that getting to (even practically) infinite money triggers the desire for unlimited power, its that it is a symptom of it.

I don't disagree, but lighting money on fire hyping NFTs and whatever other random fad strikes them as interesting doesn't seem to be the way to accomplish that.

My actual guess is that they got way too big, both in terms of headcount and fund size, to limit their investments to what is expected to be the best of the best in terms of financial return and societal impact.

Reddit wasn't explicitly pushing white nationalism.

Furthermore: reddit is a platform; Fuentes is content. That's a meaningful difference.

>The organization that recently released the report alleging the contrary is the same one that released that report earlier this year claiming that if you say “Christ is King” then you’re a white supremacist.

No, Rutgers University did not publish a report that says “if you say ‘Christ is King’ then you’re a white supremacist”. You can read about it here, it’s only 20 pages and well-sourced.

https://networkcontagion.us/reports/3-13-25-thy-name-in-vain...

Today is Wednesday the 11796th of September 1993.

OK thanks for clarifying your reasoning!

wait is there more than one mod on HN? I for some reason have always thought it was just that @dang guy as the only one. Is he just the top mod and there are others underneath him?

Bad call. 'Major VC firm investing in slop farm' is the newsworthy aspect here. 'startup selling slop as a service' is mildly interesting but there are lots of companies like that already.

The baity-feeling title is actually pretty spot-on, honestly.

and it's not a good one.

Nobody knows what Doublespeed is, everyone knows what a16z is. Doesn't putting the part that's pertinent to people in the headline oblige readers-to-be?

I'd say that the change is editorializing more than the original was "linkbait".

But the whole _point_ is "major VC funding spam outfit", surely? Like, who cares who the spam outfit is? There are lots of them. These phone farms are not exactly rare. The interesting bit is the involvement of a supposedly proper company.

>Both for length reasons

The original title is 75 characters. Your title is 74 characters. If it was edited for length reasons, I'm not sure saving 1 character is worth it.