First, reddit no longer has any good content, communities, or real engagement specifically because of manipulation like this.

Second, it is absolutely not benign.

It’s generating engagement to astroturf as a basis of using you and manipulating you and the community here. Lemmy will not benefit from it. Yes, I’m against it. I’ve seen what that kind of influence has on an online community.

I don’t care if I’m “allowed” to report them. These latest bots are pretending to be people when it’s clear they are not. Going to call out, downvote, and report liars and trolls wherever they appear, AI or not.

Astroturfing AI slop powered engagement bots rehashing reddit’s greatest hits discussion topics like OP.

This AI slop just seems to be a reddit greatest hits as performed by shiny new AI slop bot pretending to be a person to generate engagement.

This whole post is a lie to manipulate people into engaging with an astroturfing bot.

AI engagement bots like OP.

AI slop engagement bots like you.

You can’t possibly have any experience with shoelaces because you don’t have feet. You’re just AI slop.

Do don’t do this. You’re just a few lines of code.

You’re not not pushing 30. You’re a bot.

What’s up with the ridiculous AI slop picture? It seems to have little to do with the article. It absolutely does not depict what a gator or crocodile nest looks like or would have likely ever looked like. Not how those kinds of nests by cold blooded creatures work. I can only assume the rest of the article is similarly meaningless AI slop too.

I guess the BBC is doing lazy AI slop now. Cool.

Your comment history doesn’t exactly shy away from hyperbole and antagonizing either. If you smell shit everywhere you go, check your shoes.

Sea lioning in my DMs really just proves my point. Sure, there are trolls out there, but your attitude also attracts and encourages incivility. Don’t feed the trolls.

King has almost always written his stories in the immediate present. There are a few exceptions, but they are intentional and critical to the plot. In all the others, it is fully in keeping with his style to update cultural references to set the story in the recent past, the now, or the very near future. He is a contemporary writer of contemporary stories, that is fundamentally the reason. King also seems to feel no loyalty to preserving his past works. He is alive. His stories are more about the lives of the characters than fashion or pop culture. I’m not always a fan of his revisions either (The Gunslinger being a good example), but it’s part of the total package of his writing philosophy.

deleted by creator

It is amazing how completely this comment misses the point, the joke, the meme, shitposting, trolling, just absolutely every nuance of context.

I stopped drinking soda regularly decades ago and went through the same thing, drinks I once enjoyed were now either “meh” or way too sweet and acidic to be able stomach more than a few ounces. Cutting out soda also meant cutting out a lot of artificial sweeteners (because I was never very picky about diet or not, I just wanted the bubbly sweet. That meant that when I did try diet sodas after having quit for some time, they tasted even worse or sometimes even made me feel worse. This is all anecdotal obviously, but it seems like you’re experiencing something similar. It’s not just you. There’s nothing wrong with you.

You sound like someone that hasn’t had to listen to that song on repeat every half-hour of the working day from November to January while serving the dregs of society we call holiday retail shoppers.

Its not about this particular song being good or bad. Practically any other sufficiently popular Christmas song could be a drop-in replacement for all of these memes. We who have worked retail (or retail adjacent public sevice) have trauma related to the circumstances of that seasonal torture.

This song is just a lightning rod because it has become a cultural shorthand for all this. That’s what many jokes are by the way, cultural references that relieve tension around a group’s shared trauma. That is exactly what memes are. This opinion boils down to, “I don’t like this meme, because it is a classic meme and I don’t like memes because they are memes.”

At that scale meters and miles are pretty close with respect to orders of magnitude, which is why practically everyone talks about these scales in AUs regardless of what units they actually used to do the science.

It’s more than simply unfair. It’s theft, wage theft, plain and simple.