Noticed a post today from a, let's say, pro-AI person who had their posts filled with potentially AI generated comments. Now I'm not sure if they all belong to the same person pretending to fake consumption of their posts and at the same time rewarding all of the comments with votes but either way it made me think.
Now I'm someone who's spent a lot of time on Hive, I have something over 30,000 comments and I don't generally go around throwing them left and right like "nice post", etc, although some times as a curator there's not always much to say so you kinda wanna throw something in there rather than leaving the comment section of a post empty. What I'm getting to however, is that a lot of people follow me, partially because of my activity but partially also because I like to reward them with a vote whenever they leave what I perceive to be genuine comments on my posts. Not all deserve a reward, however. I have quite a few users muted that always leave comments I deem to be indistinguishable from spam/bloat and some of them continue to do so to my surprise. There's also many bot comments that verify someone tipping random hive tokens to the author or another comment that I don't really like all the space they take in the comment section so I'm happy authors are able to mute accounts so they're one click away from being visible and taking up that much space to others.
Since a lot of people follow me and I've been quite active in engagement, curation and building tools and projects on the platform, it makes sense that when I some times make some posts like my last one where I ask simple things a lot of real genuine comments appear on the posts. It's not because the post gets to trending always or because my vote rewards are that big in the comment section but most likely because a lot of the current active users like to engage with my posts (I hope). Whereas they may not spend as much time on an author that doesn't engage back with them or curate them because they just autovote or they go afk often to lose that certain connection from time to time.
I don't really wanna name the user in this example, but let's just say about half of the comments on that post seemed very "fake" whereas most of the comments on my previous post seemed real. And you can verify this because most of those users are active with other things on Hive. They post themselves, they comment on other people's posts, they reply to comments on their own posts, interact with dapps in our ecosystem, do a lot of different things whereas those "fake" accounts on that users posts had quite literally not done anything in two weeks until that user started posting again. This is kind of what I talked about in one of my posts where the transparency that our blockchain brings to us makes it often easy to track and figure out which accounts are real and which may not be. On top of being able to determine that these set of fake accounts were only doing one thing and poorly at that, faking activity on only this one users account.
Now I'm not going to go too deep into the future and people who are going to try harder to fake this kind of activity as it's hard to predict what that's going to look like and how hard it is going to be to figure that out even with our transparent actions on here.
A lot of people say things like "these users are just commenting on your posts for a vote" and honestly it's kind of a dumb statement in my opinion because it's a feature, not a negative thing. If you're rewarding and welcoming any and all comments then it's kind of on you as an author that you're enabling this which may make the consumption of your comment section on posts quite a bad user experience for the real users trying to consume more. Being able to reward your followers and engagements with some rewards is one of Hive's biggest advantage. I'm sure other YouTubers, Twitch Streamers, etc, would love this feature, especially when it comes at no cost to themselves other than the dilution of stake they hold much like everyone else.
There's been many unique accounts over the years of this platforms existence who've had a lot of stake but not everyone has used it well. I could go into long rants about this and the often misuses of their stake or delegations, but very few did it "the right way" so that even if that stake or delegation went away they came out on top as of having gained something from the time they had it in terms of social connections and activities. Maybe they didn't really care about that and were just focused on that short-term monetary gain and I guess over time it showed as people quickly stopped consuming their posts and engaging with them.
Now I'm not going to lie and tell you all the engagement I get is just because I'm such an active and wonderful person, I'm sure there's people who hope for more things than a small comment upvote when interacting with myself such as a follow or checkup on their account but I think it's fine that it works that way and that they try to do so, especially if they're newer accounts being overlooked and trying to do hive the right way.
There are also cases where a lot of newcomers and authors with no stake receive a lot of engagement because of their posts or their activity. Even if they don't have anything to offer the consumers in terms of monetary value they may know that if they've put in the work to grow an audience, recurring consumers and an active presence that the rewards may come sooner or later. That's kind of the beauty of hive and I'm glad to see more and more projects and stakeholders pay attention to mainly reward those people who seem to get genuine interactions and consumption over those just trading votes and creating general whatever content.
Anyway, not sure what this post was about exactly, I kinda sidetracked a bit here and there but generally pretty happy with the way hive and the community here is shaping up and seeing more people "understand" what makes things valuable and what's right and wrong to be doing. Very excited for the future of web3 social so cheers for that and thank you to whoever still keeps reading my posts and following me and ourselves along in this unique journey we can hopefully share with many others soon.
Do people come for you, or do they come for the upvote? Who knows? As I've powered down in the past and then (and now) slowly starting to power back up, I'm not necessarily seeing a change in the way people engage with me over the years.
What sees the biggest change in engagement on my stuff is how much I engage with the stuff of others. If I engage a lot, they get curious and end up thinking "who the crap is this guy anyway"? And I end up seeing them pop up on my new post.
Or, I get people unfollow me if... they don't like my new posts, I guess :D
Regarding the AI generation thing - I'm not done with my study into comments, I was going to spend a good chunk of today looking further into what I can do to generate a confidence score about how "AI" comments are on the chain.
I think the whole thing with AI spiraled out of control. YouTube recently started banning content creators who were using AI generated fake videos of fake movie trailers. I think it is annoying and pretty bad because all those videos were also monetized, so not only generated by AI but also being a complete lie.
Personally I think of AI as a better version of a search engine, so it can find many things very fast, but aside of it everything what it dishes out has to be checked and curated.
For example I was searching what kind of a platform to use to expand on video creation and streaming, and I can say that many things AI found was wrong or outdated.
I also can say it is very hard to monetize for example on YouTube, it takes a lot of effort and it is very difficult to watch how a content you spent hours creating, editing and polishing goes unnoticed. It took me 6 months to get only tips on YouTube and I think about a year to get full monetization, so from that point of view I think that proof-of-stake is very grateful to work with.
Now, if I was smart enough to start working and making videos and live streams on HIVE that would be great. So far I was only successful doing that on YouTube.
I don't know how they can use AI for various things in here because what is relevant for me in written content, AI can completely skip, especially when it comes to summary of blog entries.
As for engagement you receive I think it is because you are involved in HIVE projects or/and you give your audience what they find interesting.
I see significant difference in my own content based on audience interest; some videos receive huge traffic because people want to see that, while other videos which I find personally more interesting, are flops because audience for that kind of content is very limited.
So far what I managed to do with AI is search me this or that and an image prompt for a poster. I have no idea how they make a full fledged video with all of that stuff.
From where I am sitting, your post is about something many of sense but perhaps don't want to speak up about... for fear of getting shouted down: Cheating."
I also read about things like this and it feels like a nail in the coffin of the idea of the "Internet of PEOPLE."
The AI thing is like that element of gaming (at least in the past) where an exciting new game comes to market and the first thing a whole segment of users do is not PLAY the game, but head off in search of cheat codes.
AI on Hive — whether for posts or comments — feels like using cheat codes to arrive at whatever you're doing. I can't help but ask "What's even the POINT?"
Of course, the point is trying to get money for nothing... and we're right back at cheating.
And yes, I feel somewhat strongly about this.
=^..^=
That's disturbing. I have seen some different forms of AI usage before on Hive, but I haven't noticed the thing you mention yet.
You know I run the @topcomment comment curation service, so I'm really interested in this. We don't want to upvote these kind of accounts.
I'll contact you on Discord to get some more details if you don't mind, so we can add these to our blocklist too.
I am quite new on Hive and honestly didn't really understand about the stake and everything. But yes, I like it if people read my blog and there are always plenty of interesting posts to read as well. Glad to join this community and also I enjoyed reading your post though sometimes I didn't understand haha. But I agree that comments should genuinely be written because the person who writes the blog also genuinely shares his/her thoughts.
Would love to engage with your content. Will check it out for sure...
Hi greetings! Thank you, I will stop by as well 😁
Yeah sorry about that, my posts can get a bit too deep into hive details some times where maybe just those more involved may know what it is I'm talking about.
But I try to switch it up from time to time, appreciate you reading them!
No problem! Coz everyone had their interest and your posts give me insight about how things work here as well 😁
The bits I don't understand make me curious though! I've been on hive for a few months and I'm constantly learning new things. That's part of the fun.
Reading this made me think that the issue of AI is so complex and difficult to assimilate... At least to me, that I'm just a guy taking pictures with a 15 years old camera and still processing with photoshop for minutes or even hours, my raw images, and now I'm looking at how people are editing with AI, in batches of photos and in just seconds (and with very good results, by the way), so maybe that would seem logical and could be taken as an “evolution of editing software”, but there are also those who already generate the entire photo with AI... And that really seems scary to me!... The same thing happens to me with texts, I don't know when something is generated with AI, it's hard for me, because it terrifies me just to think that someone wants to write a tale (for example) and simply do it using AI and make it look like his own... I don't know, I'm just an amateur at creating content, but it seems to me that this AI thing is something that will invade too many spaces in a lot of this stuff.... Sorry for going on so long, but it's a topic that worries me and I think many of us who make life on #Hive regularly too... Good article 👍 interesting as always...
Honestly, I think 80% of the people who comment on posts are just looking for a vote. Either that they are hoping to create some form of relationship so that the other person follows them. It's just the nature of a social blockchain. The funny thing is, over time, you actually build those relationships and it turns into something more. So, I don't think people who complain about someone commenting just for a vote really understand how this place works. That's my opinion anyway.
I think this when it's a bland/surface level comment that could be put under anything. When comments show some genuine thought, I think that's a sign they appreciate the work of the person whose work they are commenting on. At least I hope it is sometimes since that's what I try to do.
I think it applies to both kinds of comments to be honest. I just think the shallow ones don't get the job done like thoughtful ones.
At least the thoughtful ones bring some value to the person who gets them. Personally, I don't upvote the shallow ones. Not that my upvote alone is worth enough to not just disappear as dust. ><
I don't usually upvote those either. Or if they just keep commenting back and it's obvious they are trying to milk me like a cow.
well consider that on web2 socials people comment just to get 'likes' and show off how many they got...
Very true.
!HOPE for a vote lol, but really I see at least one AI blunder a day either here or other social media. I enjoy learning about different topics and challenge myself to think of ways that existing things would work together in a way that is not currently done.
There are times using AI in a post could be beneficial such as Thumbnail generation or as part of a how to use AI for a specific purpose. At the same time the current state of AI leaves a ton of space for people to just do the same job way better for not much more effort. I have no faith in info that AI puts together because it mixes up more stuff than I do lol.
There was a recent video put out by a reporter that I watched and the AI she was using was literally making up quotes and claiming they came directly from a book. Personally that seems insanely scary to me since AI will use other AI info and the mistakes will just compound. Next thing you know the sky will be green and the grass blue.
Hello! I'm a newbie and I know I have a lot to learn, but sharing something to the community and getting positive comments inspire me to keep going. I like seeing different posts from different members of the community, too. It is part of them that they share and we get a glimpse of how they feel during the day. I like writing as much as I like talking. So far I find this community supportive and open to a lot of things. I hope I can grow and share a lot to this community, too. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Hi, I'm new member here, as I read your post and appreciate each of your comments and insights. It's very helpful for me as a new member. I really enjoy learning from everyone and make a comment out of other post, which make me that I also include mostly in there travel or journey. Sometimes I can't reply because as a newbie I have lack of RC yet. With these honestly, my writing skills is already improve and learn also from others techniques and strategy. I would to say thank you for share your knowledge.
It is always good to let the voices in the head guide your fingers and let them type away, it has turned out interesting to read once again. My account seems at the moment to be attracting followers and comments from fairly new accounts on here from the far east, comments yes, well written but I am undecided, will let them run or peter out. Had to mute one sub saharan account the other day who hit me on Hive, she had been pestering me a few months back on discord, about her mother having a kidney operation, and "needed help", same mantra on a comment on hive!...Fuck off.
I noticed that this user also changed their witness pattern yesterday to gather some support, it is bad to see one of these witnesses being baited and voting in this AI post.
Mate as they say here "2 things drive the world, money and vagina", some witness prefer to do anything to get voted and earn more
ugh, hadn't even noticed that. It's quite baffling to see an account act this way, many people I usually talk to suspected they may have sold their account to someone else but I'm not sure.
Eventually someone shows their true colors after all it feels like.
My 2 cents on this: Resource Credits are undervalued, and this makes it too cheap to run such spamming bots on Hive; in the end, with no impact of a potential hit on Reputation if discovered. In the post-generative AI era, I believe reputation will be the most important asset for both humans and algorithms.
Yeah, I think RC need to have a heavier tax on "similar" tx's, especially in the comment section. If an account constantly just says
"congrats, you've earned 1 fart token"
it needs to make those cost more than genuine comments unique from one another. But I guess those could easily be gamed as well by just adding a random letter after the original comment.
Blockchain restrictions on abuse and bloat are not easy to deal with!
!FART !CUM !STAIN
Wouldn't surprise me if those existed, even though we're still quite a small community in the crypto space.
That's sad and terrible, abusing the system.-comments on its own post. Problem is you can't challenge them as there's no proof.
I am really annoyed about how much bloat AI has added to the internet. Between AI generated written slop, folks running scams using AI to do their leg work and a host of other things it's just... saddening.
Especially since it makes it harder to find good content!
I wonder if the only solution will be some form of proof of human down the line. Hopefully some open source tech that'll make sure fingerprints/vital signs/etc aren't sold to advertisers/other but just used to prove that you're a human writing a comment/post/other. Cause the way it's looking right now it feels like it's going to be needed.
Yeah, it's hard to figure out a way where it wouldn't be incredibly invasive, esp when crypto stuff is supposed to be well, somewhat anonymous.
There def needs to be something that keeps bots bogged down.
I like your posts because they go deep in hive things, like all the voting circles that was new to me, the dust threshold also, I wasted so much voting mana on it upvoting comments of replies on me that ended under 0,02... You should track if all those bots have a cashout common route and they end up to that user posting ai or someone else, indeed blind vote without any read can be easy abused... Ai comments are quite obvious FOR NOW
Hi, I am a new member, I have read your post and understand your comments, and I am learning from your comments also. I need to learn more from each other, I always read the posting and comment to each other and learn about how to good writing, and update good photography. Thank you very much for sharing.
Best regards,
Sreymom
Keep it up! You have good people who've onboarded you!
In my country, they say that LOVE is repaid with LOVE. People who behave well do well. Interest is sometimes not a good thing. Talking or writing to someone out of interest is not good. I'm here because you behave well and respond to your users. If you didn't interact, I wouldn't be here.
Love is repaid with love.
If you haven't shared this, I wouldn't know also. I am sharing everything here on hive base on my own ideas. Honestly, I am also not grasping the information about power ups and stake and everything. I just post, re blogged other posts and comment. But I love what I am doing.
That's great to hear, hive makes it easy to use without needing to care too much about learning every little detail about it. All in good time, enjoy the early experience for now!
Yes. i am looking forward to it, Thank you!
Hello,
An interesting analysis about the authenticity on Hive makes me think about 'liquidity,' understood as the availability of genuinely high-quality posts and comments.
In an ecosystem where the economic reward is the engine that drives everything, and at the same time, our time is a scarce asset, it's normal that when we find a 'treasure' (our trusted author or truted curator), We let us be carried by their tide. Why continue exploring an 'infested sea' of content that often lacks of soul or feels very forced, written specifically seeking that incentive we all desire?
Unfortunately, by hodling on our treasures already found, we reduce our hunger to search and discover new treasures or potential treasures (new authors or curators). This creates a liquidity problem: people who genuinely read and comment posts tend to settle and contribute their value always in the same places, which can lead us to a centralization of quality.
I had to admit that when I have a complicated day or lack of time, I just check my trusted curator trail and vote according to their judgment, simply by looking at the titles, But why?... Simple as I had already confirmed their affinity with my tastes. The same happens with 'my' handful of trusted authors. By settling this way the search of new voices significantly diminishes.
This makes me think the following question: how can we solve this in an ecosystem that reward popularity and quantity over real quality? Especially when closed voting circles are observed.
Thank you for the post and your analysis.
Pp.
I think the way we do over on ocd can work by assigning some additional author rewards for curators to go out and look for posts and authors that try yet don't get seen or rewarded much.
Many like to say the rewards pool shouldn't be used that way but we all know the amount of work it takes to properly curate and go out and look, research and investigate certain accounts and their activities before deeming them genuine enough to get rewarded - especially with so many attempting to cheat and fake activity for the rewards.
This gives those curators putting in extra amount of work an edge over those who could just use their stake to trail or autovote and earn passively since they'll earn the same as someone putting in a lot of work to help retention and the health of newer or overlooked accounts.
Hello acidyo,
Thank you for your response. I understand how OCD works, and I certainly agree that it's an initiative pointing in the right direction; rewarding the people who undertake this work with more value makes perfect sense to me.
However, as other challenges inherent to the ecosystem, I believe from my perspective that mitigating these problems should not rest exclusively on the shoulders of the users (a selected few, in fact). In an ideal world, one should publish when genuinely have something valuable to say. But this premise changes drastically when the economic factor comes into play, which incentivizes a dynamic of constant publication that doesn't always align with the depth or the actual need to communicate.
That being said, I recognize that many of these Base (Hive's structural) problems will likely not have a clear and definitive solution. Even if one were to exist, it would most probably be highly complex and scarcely viable. This is precisely why initiatives like the ones you (and your team) handle are so valuable: they act as palliatives for several of the existing problems that are very difficult to solve.
Pp.
"farming" so to speak or people posting often doesn't have to be an issue. Sure some may milk more hive than others that way for now but I think over time and with more users we may see that change where curators are forced to ignore certain farmy users because there's so much other more deserving content and newer users to reward.
Hello, me again...
I understand what you mean, and I get the logic behind the idea that an increase in the supply of authors should bring new talents who would eventually displace empty content.
But, we could also apply the logic that HIVE is currently a small sample of a much more larger population, and more people joining doesn't guarante us that we'll be flooded with quality authors and content. On the contrary, it might become harder to us to find them as the waters get denser and denser. Since currently there's no mechanism for rewards to value quality over quantity, the most likely outcome would be an influx of content and users merely seeking to obtain the maximum possible in the shortest amount of time.
That being said, I'd also like to offer my grain of salt, if post rewards were someway linked to reputation, and its calculation were based on recent performance, people would be forced to spend 'x' amount of months building their reputation before the rewards become 'juicy,' so to speak.
Something similar could apply if the RC cost to publish a post were much much higher, this would limit compulsive posting from new accounts and would require users to adapt our accounts or publishing schedules accordingly, more content need more RC, but also mean that all that contet shlould be good to keep a good grade (talking in reputation terms), so people invest (Hive in this case) to publish daily and make good content daily or post weekly which give you more time to make good content.
But hey, these are just ideas that come to me while I´m writing these paragraphs, and as I said before, it's very difficult for someone like me to make a change in such a large ecosystem.
Pp.
Honestly, this is the first time I have entered your account. I am new to Hive, and this article attracted me. In all honesty, I liked your words and I followed you. Thank you for sharing this.
Nice Post :)
Nice Comment :)
:p
Thus, those who upvote the comments should be careful.
Of course, especially in the long term, authenticity and quality always pay off.
The Dead Internet Theory is getting more and more real for every passing day.
Yuuup, the amount of stuff I see on reddit that is clearly by a bot, and at least 1/2 the replies are likely bots.
It's really annoying.
Unfortunately Reddit is the King of comment bots.
It's gotten pretty bad lately, makes me think they'll have to make API costs soon similar to twitter - hopefully not as ridiculous however and manageable.
Nice post...as a newbie..I just comment to get interaction with the people and the post I love...but end up like ai sometimes.
As time goes by, AI content in general is going to be harder and harder to identify. I'm not sure what the solution is to that.
Vital scanners and fingerprint/iris/dna checkups constantly probably.
AI takes the genuity of a lot of things especially are thoughts. Thinking about it makes me a little worried and sad. We should talk more freely and genuinely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
IS IT GOING TO HAPPEN? Hell nah pls