"Experiment" was probably poor word choice, I mostly just want to see if anybody notices them or if they get kicked out of subreddits by mods. So far none have. I saw a bunch of people on HN say that AI was going to create this new wave of spam so I tried to test out that theory. My conclusion is yes it would make content generation for a prospective spammer easier but there still are a bunch of technical things you have to get right (maybe not for Reddit but for platforms with better protections like Instagram) or your accounts will all get banned in waves. Like your TLS fingerprint, order of headers, or making all the analytics requests that the official app does (I don't even attempt to make these so I assume the accounts will eventually be banned). The other reality is that bots for governments and marketing people usually post low reputation links for their propaganda or affiliate purposes so they are likely to be caught that way anyways. I don't think it dramatically changes things in this space to be honest because I'm pretty sure the large scale disinformation/spam operations were already employing poorly paid foreign people to write posts. Maybe I'm wrong.
This is a sad but inevitable consequences of tech people having no grounding in ethics. And really no education in or respect for the humanities at all. It's a classic case of "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should", and evidences all the shallow fallacies that accompany this kind of thinking. The appeal to hypocrisy, false equivalence, 'whats the harm', etc. Resulting in the kind of amoral, 'look what technically cool and kinda messed up thing I made, but whats the real harm' cynicism that's been used to justify the destruction of the commons online since the creation of the banner ad.
Ironically, I find this to be the height of elitism and disconnectedness with humanity, to believe that people need university education in "the humanities" to have a fully developed and grounded moral code and sense of ethics.
People who live "primitive" lifestyles who have zero academic education and have never heard of let alone from any "experts in humanities" can have a keen sense of what is fair, just, right, and wrong, empathy, etc. So can "tech people".
And students of humanities can be lacking all those things. I have my doubts that studying these things actually changes them significantly in a person, but would be really interested to be proven wrong about that. Certainly it is not necessary or sufficient to be an ethical person though.
I agree. Please note I didn't mention anything about a university education.
You can absolutely teach yourself philosophy online based on freely available resources. You can also do introductory psychology and sociology courses from Ivy League institutions at zero cost - although more advanced work and lab research is harder to replicate without access to an institutional context. Also the curriculums do tend to be quite arbitrary and not so rounded - but that's in common with the US style of multidiciplinary undergraduate degree and specialise later.
Harvard Business school also offer some ethics courses, but these are quite business focused and don't provide a strong general grounding
https://pll.harvard.edu/subject/ethics
To answer your broader point, you're confusing behaving in a commonsense moral or ethical way with understanding and reasoning from a grounding in ethics. I haven't suggested that studying ethics alone makes one virtuous, or that a lack of academic background precludes ethical behaviour. What I am suggesting - and I think your comment further evidences, is that a lack of interest and education in the (two thousand year long) tradition of thinking formally about ethical problems can ensure that our ethical decision making is arbitrary and reactive rather than rooted in our fundamental values. In other words, thinking and reading into this stuff doesn't replace your value system - it gives you a much richer understanding of how you've arrived at your values and can put them into practice.
You agree the post I replied to was the height of elitism?
> Please note I didn't mention anything about a university education.
What do you consider "education in humanities" then, that a "tech person" is unlikely to have received?
> You can absolutely teach yourself philosophy
Again, you seem to have confused having an academic understanding of ethics with a compulsion to act ethically. I don't believe there is much linkage between the two.
> To answer your broader point, you're confusing behaving in a commonsense moral or ethical way with understanding and reasoning from a grounding in ethics.
I'm not. Your comment I replied to suggested that a lack of education in this stuff is the cause of apparent poor behavior, so perhaps it was you who was confusing those things.
Wasting peoples time is a relatively minor harm (in this one case - at scale the waste and diminishment of attention is an enormous issue). Increasing noise to signal ration in online discussions, cultivating a bot net that can be replicated or directly used for nefarious purposes, actively distracting from useful information and authentic relationships, and literally advocating for increasing utility zero spam are all bigger issues.
I think parent's objection is to exactly this logic - a sort of mental laziness demanding proof before willingness to attempt to grok the potential harm.
And then we get stuff like accounts hacked, bank accounts wiped out, people's lives/reputations ruined (social media, poor sec practices, etc.).
There are always consequences, just because it's cool and Shiney doesn't make it otherwise.
> This is a sad but inevitable consequences of tech people having no grounding in ethics. And really no education in or respect for the humanities at all.
I'm going to bet a significant portion of "tech people" have some background in the humanities. After all, many of us are the children of "The Matrix". Also, what does a background in humanities have to do morals or morality. The most evil people in the past few centuries have had significant education and respect for the humanities.
> justify the destruction of the commons online since the creation of the banner ad
It's not the "tech people" doing that. It's the people with a 'background in humanities' pushing for the destruction of the "commons online". Tech people are doing what they are told.
I think a reverse experiment would be far more valuable. Try to find patterns of collective clicknets/botnets trying to swing a subreddit in a certain direction for instance.
