Reddit fever dreams

I’ve been pretty under the weather since getting back to Amsterdam, feverish and too tired to do anything that involves much thinking, which means it’s Reddit time. I normally don’t spend much time there or any other social media, but when my brain is basically melting, looking at aquariums is kind of relaxing.

One thing I’ve noticed is that more and more people start threads as if they’re asking chatGPT something, not with the language you’d normally use when talking to fellow human hobbyists.

I wrote a long, rambling blog post in 2018 (eons ago in internet time!) about how anthropomorphized chatbots were causing people to be rude. Skip the the the post, and read a few quotes:

Plenty of research has begun to look at how technology is affecting our attention spans, precious little is looking at how human-bot interaction is affecting human-human relationships.

I think bots have their place. If I can resolve something in thirty seconds rather than waiting on hold for an hour, fine. I’m not even against mass emails and have purposefully signed up for plenty of them because I want to hear about products from companies I like.

My quibble is with labelling. Tell me that I’m talking to a bot and do something to de-humanize the experience. Give the bot a non-human name and Jetsons style avatar. Don’t creepily personalize mass emails.

And now in 2024, this is only worse. Are posts on Reddit humans who are now copying chatGPT’s style or bots using LLMs?

And unrelated, I think this thread about a person forced to leave a flight because of a political t-shirt sums up American culture in 2024:

• Everything, including t-shirts, has to be political. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a political t-shirt in Europe.
• The headline has some fake technical sounding word that Americans love, “deplaned”. We have perfectly acceptable verbs such as kicked off, removed, forced off.
• The flight attendant in question was on an absolutely wild power trip, which seems par for the course for anyone with the slightest bit of power in the US.
• People are absolutely gleeful at the prospect of the flight attendant having his life ruined.
• People are also deeply concerned about a big corporation’s image and profits.

It’s all just stuff that I don’t understand.