Don’t forget small companies too. Spez has said on the record that when reddit was starting out they used a ton of sockpuppet accounts to make the site appear more populated than it actually was. Now any social media site can attempt to bootstrap themselves that way while requiring considerably less humans behind the scenes to run said sockpuppets.
Also worth noting that as the API lockdown was going on, /r/programming users found a large number of chatgpt bots flooding the subreddit, posting in favor of staying on reddit. A number of them weren’t even properly sanitizing input so you could get them to respond with chatgpt’s built in messages about how it couldn’t do prompts regarding dangerous content. Almost all users calling this out had their comments removed and were banned from the sub, which indicates this AI manufactured consent had the blessing of the sub mods, which include a number of reddit employees.
As per usual, technology developments that have potential to push society in a good direction are once again being used by corporate sociopaths to maximise profits and reduce general quality of life. Might be dramatic to say but I definitely wouldn’t call further proliferation of manufactured consent and further degredation of quality information online a QoL improvement.
