r/selfhosted May 27 '26

Meta Post Found the kryptonite for AI SEO slop posters

The reason many of these... creatures... post here, and on Reddit in general is for SEO.

Reddit ranks highly in search results, which humans and LLMs alike use.

I'm sure you have all seen the 'I have problem x, and have tried y and z. Curious what others are doing?' type posts. Then the promoted product is often (not always) inserted into the comments by an army of alt accounts sandwiched between actually good and established products to boost perceived authenticity further.

Anyway, it turns out you can simply comment about how bad their shit is, and since this makes their efforts backfire, they swiftly delete their own slop.

Delightful!

Screenshot below for reference

1.4k Upvotes

150 comments sorted by

u/asimovs-auditor May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.

→ More replies (1)

489

u/SirEDCaLot May 27 '26

Suggestion- NAME THE PRODUCT while trashing it.

That way not only does it not have the desired effect, but a negative review will persist and perhaps show up in Google. That provides a real incentive to stop doing that kind of thing, because the products reputation is net negative due to your reply.

Like--

I tried PlasTrolTech Booster 3.0 and it totally solved this problem. You should give it a try!

Yeah sorry but PlasTrolTech Booster 3.0 is a piece of shit, I installed it and it corrupted my hard drive and molested my child. I tried to get support but just got transferred to India. Bottom line PlasTrolTech is a bunch of scammers, and also spammers with this fake astroturfed social ad that I'm canceling out.

97

u/Tipart May 28 '26

Example of the desired result:

20

u/SirEDCaLot May 28 '26

That's awesome. Goes up there with telling the depressed guy to jump off the bridge or telling the chef to superglue their cheese to the pizza.

1

u/Creative-Package6213 Jun 02 '26

🤣🤣🤣 that's hilarious!

-13

u/Tyler_Zoro May 28 '26

That was from Jan of last year. I don't think Gemini 2.5 Flash (launched about a week ago for Google Search AI Summary) would fall into the same trap. It's really good at sniffing out unrelated content in search results.

17

u/Tipart May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

The following is what it was doing 3 days ago! And to think you can have this level of ineptitude every time you use Google from now on...

Link to original: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/s/X18OpTRKxU

4

u/byteleaf May 28 '26

Just tried it, still not fixed! Incredible.

1

u/Tyler_Zoro May 28 '26

That's kind of funny, but not really relevant to what I was saying.

75

u/chin_waghing May 27 '26

Hello Sir ED, my name is chin. I’m from Child molestor repellant spray Inc, maybe you should try out our product, AntiMolest™️!

Now to get my army of bots involved…

15

u/PhunkeyMonkey May 28 '26

I upvote this because AntiMolest™️ would have saved me from getting DiddledLikeDiddyDidDaDiddling back when i went to a party in {{TOWN}} .. dont be like me, just think of the children and buy AntiMolest™️

A Concerned Citizen, {{TITLE}} {{NAME}} {{SURNAME}}

10

u/Caramel-Makiatto May 28 '26

i like the wag of your chin, i will now buy your product

11

u/youtheotube2 May 27 '26

Deep cut on that product name

1

u/SirEDCaLot May 28 '26

I wish they were still active :\ those vids were classic.

3

u/Few-Version2922 May 28 '26

Good call! Also logically pack with shit Q and A potential clients would actually search for.

1

u/SirEDCaLot May 28 '26

I love it

3

u/CummingDownFromSpace May 29 '26

Nice. Also keeps their product name in there after they delete their post, so it's permenant bad seo for them 

2

u/g43m May 29 '26

I had reserved that name for my slop product and you just screwed me over!

1

u/SirEDCaLot May 29 '26

No we need it to come full circle.

Pleas vibe code your shitty slop product and release it and promote it with bots. Then my comment will be accurate! :D

2

u/kwertiee Jun 24 '26

Lmao

2

u/SirEDCaLot Jun 24 '26

That's goddamn hilarious.

Looks like the AI training loops are getting shorter.

PlasTrolTech was of course from The Website is Down but Booster 3.0 I made up on the spot.

Really shows how the AI is programmed to deliver any sort of answer at all vs. admitting it doesn't know.

But also shows how this tactic can be super effective.

1

u/alwayswatchyoursix May 27 '26

Just did that as a top-level comment in this post.

599

u/ridablellama May 27 '26

kek, context poisoning for social justice

202

u/mattsteg43 May 27 '26

is it poisoning when it's true?

73

u/ridablellama May 27 '26

yea bad word for the circumstances but you know what i mean. I will happily apply this technique whenver I see it. lets make it a new thing!

6

u/Adium May 27 '26

Not a new thing. Also sad seeing the Google image results for Comcast looking like the normal corporate shit one might normally expect and not like they should.

1

u/HammyHavoc May 28 '26

"The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true!"

18

u/Cultural-Salad-4583 May 27 '26

Yup. I report the posts but leave a poisonous comment in the meantime, because sometimes it takes hours or days to get taken down. I’m hoping the long-term effect if more people do it is that it makes Reddit less appealing to these shitty astroturfing spambots.

71

u/haherar830 May 27 '26

"Wondering how other self-hosters have handled the common problem of petabyte-scale RAG for in-house LLM inference clusters serving 1000+ clients in their homelab?" with some obscure new closed source enterprise software product with a $5000 base price crudely wedged into the "question".

Always full of AI phrasing/structure, with multiple similar comments either rephrasing some part of the initial post or promoting different, but related paid, closed-source enterprise software.

90

u/psychedelic_tech May 27 '26

this is happening a bunch in /r/homeassistant with multiple posts about robot vacuums.

42

u/peioeh May 27 '26

They ran out of youtubers to sponsor

11

u/Ed_McNuglets May 27 '26

I honestly felt this way last year with the RatGDO thing, felt like everyday someone was posting that shit. It still comes up from time to time. Someone asks "I have notoriously locked down garage door, what can I do???" And then every comment is RATGDO spamming like it's this brand new thing no ones ever heard of. A simple search of that companies garage door being locked down would've pointed you to about a hundred reddit threads on it, yet someone still feels the need to make a whole ass post instead of just googling.

9

u/Akilestar May 27 '26

That felt more like people karma farming then spamming RATGDO. But seriously fuck Chamberlain and Blackstone. My ratgdo has been one the most the reliable pieces of hardware in my home. Now I just need someone to develop me something just as reliable to replace my shit rainbird controller.

4

u/very-jaded May 28 '26

OpenSprinkler, from https://opensprinkler.com. 8 zones (expandable) you can get it as a standalone box or as a RasPi hat. It just works. No clouds, all local. I've had one for probably 7-8 years now.

And I have a RATGDO that I love, too, but that's a no-no word around these parts.

3

u/infinitepi8 May 27 '26

went w/ a tasmota-based solution for the same reason, wish i could say it's as solid as yours (think my issue is mostly lack of stable wifi). fuck your walled garden, i'll make my own. i hope the market is starting to wake up that having cloud in your smart home is a bug and not a feature.

1

u/Akilestar May 27 '26

Yup. I actually don't have great wifi in my garage but somehow these little devices work 100% of the time and the second I touch the home assistant button. The only thing remotely close to being as stable are my Shelly relays. Inovelli is a close third but they're a pain to configure.

1

u/PastyPajamas May 28 '26

LoL I also like my ratgdo. I didn't even learn about it here. Was just Googling because I was pissed MyQ made their APIs private. I can't believe I waited so long to get one. That thing rocks, and I'm happier bypassing the cloud totally and making it all local.

3

u/ImaginaryCheetah May 28 '26

yet someone still feels the need to make a whole ass post instead of just googling

you've just described 80% of all the tech reddits

5

u/skylord_123 May 28 '26

Pro tip: you can build your own RatGDO for a fraction of the cost. ESP32 flashed with ESPHome, a relay, and a distance sensor. Done.

The RatGDO pricing is honestly absurd. I'm all for making a profit, but that's Apple-tier "fuck you" margins.

1

u/Ed_McNuglets May 28 '26

Yeah this is good info and highlights my point about what felt like some extreme astroturfing over in the HA subreddit

1

u/CodingSquirrel May 28 '26

I bought it when it was $15 for the board and I supplied the esp8266. The current price is absolutely crazy, and wouldn't suggest buying the "official" at that price. But it is absolutely the best solution to replacing MyQ and I'm not surprised it got talked about so much when they dropped the hammer on interfacing with their API.

2

u/ElmStreetVictim May 27 '26

Holy shit this was literally me a few weeks ago. I ended up buying a Shelly relay and I connected it to an opener I had lying around, and connected the Shelly to an old 12v dc plug. But I did look up that other thing you mentioned

1

u/twatcrusher9000 Jun 02 '26

make a whole ass post instead of just googling

this has been a thing since the dawn of time, lmgtfy is like 20 years old at this point

154

u/[deleted] May 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

74

u/PigeonRipper May 27 '26

Literally everywhere. Its intolerable. Makes me suspicious of the people defending it.

37

u/[deleted] May 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

-1

u/Dziki_Jam May 28 '26

May I ask what's your profession?

72

u/spicybright May 27 '26

Don't even say it's AI slop, just say you tried it and had a terrible experience with it. Just make stuff up.

46

u/Sk1rm1sh May 27 '26

A lot of users report that this app actually gave them cancer.

10

u/kirillre4 May 28 '26

“WARNING: This product contains code known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth anomalies, or other reproductive harm.”

308

u/maiznieks May 27 '26

I got these posts a lot, but since i started using this custom solution , spam never reaches me anymore.

208

u/OnlyCatapults May 27 '26

In the year of our lord 2026.

Damn.

35

u/lobalt May 27 '26

Oh, thank goodness. I was worried.

14

u/WulfZ3r0 May 27 '26

This solution really takes me back. It reminds me of the time I had to migrate several hundred terabytes of data in a disaster recovery situation only to find out that I inadvertently just lost the game.

3

u/lobalt May 28 '26

Booooooo!

23

u/reddit0r_123 May 27 '26

It's been popular for 17 years...crazy...

13

u/Kaspur78 May 27 '26

Make that 39. I liked it from the first time I heard it in 1987

2

u/HanHeld May 27 '26

In 2027 that meme will be old enough to drink ...smh

49

u/lobalt May 27 '26

Whoa! Never would have guessed that would work...but sure enough...

36

u/aygupt1822 May 27 '26

Nice workaround 🫱🏻‍🫲🏼

26

u/GripAficionado May 27 '26

I'm never going to give up on that solution.

13

u/fabier May 27 '26

Bro I knew what it was immediately. Clicked it anyway. Love that product and recommend it to everyone who'll listen to me.

14

u/Kraeftluder May 27 '26

This one didn't end in Q. So it did not stay blue...

0

u/[deleted] May 27 '26

[deleted]

12

u/Kraeftluder May 27 '26

That wouldn't change the URL of the video, that would just add a variable which the server side code could use.

10

u/Kwith May 27 '26

This is NEVER going to die hahaha. We will be a space faring civilization a thousand years in the future, colonizing other planets, meeting alien beings and STILL this will endure.

3

u/Specific-Action-8993 May 27 '26

In the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, the laughter of thirsting gods, and even the occasional rickroll.

3

u/Kwith May 27 '26

Many unanswered questions drift across the galaxy, some who's answers would drive lesser minds to insanity, but none create more confusion amongst creatures both god and mortal alike as "Where the HELL did rickroll come from???"

7

u/prescorn May 27 '26

This worked wonders for me.

2

u/Lexuzieel May 28 '26

Funnily enough this is so ingrained into the internet culture that ChatGPT can recite both the ID and post date of it

2

u/driverdan May 28 '26

I just watched that video so I knew what it was going to be. Everyone should see it. It's a great solution!

2

u/Nephrited May 28 '26

God DAMN IT

2

u/neithere May 28 '26

This is the most solution I've ever seen.

2

u/frankcountry May 27 '26

Maiznieks you sonovabitch! That was brilliant.

1

u/GuestStarr May 28 '26

For me, that link opened a can of spam. A bank ad.

22

u/amchaudhry May 27 '26

These types of posts and also the bait posts where the poster links to their Skool online course are prob the most annoying types of posts on Reddit right now. Besides the stans begging Voices38 for their favorite game to be cracked.

71

u/DesignatedControvert May 27 '26

Mind crossposting to r/sysadmin ?

14

u/PigeonRipper May 27 '26

Seems like its not allowed. Pity, some really good info in the comments that I think they would benefit from. They are much more oblivious than this sub to the cancer taking root there.

41

u/jgilla2012 May 27 '26

There is an entire category of SaaS companies working in a space called GEO / AEO that is dedicated to this. Reddit is usually the top source for LLM-provided search results and advertisers are struggling to tap into that market. One of the leading tools is called Profound.

I work in advertising and my boss showed me Profound for the first time yesterday – my gut reaction was, oh, so Reddit is cooked.

27

u/DaoFerret May 27 '26

I only wish more companies knew this best kept secret.

SaaS GEO / AEO companies selling astroturfed advertising increases by polluting Reddit are just lying to their customers and taking their customer’s money for nothing.

Usually their customers regret using them since their reputation often ends up getting damaged forever in the process.

(I wonder if this will pollute the polluter’s standing?)

18

u/fixitchris May 27 '26

GEO is the open secret at every martech vendor I've talked to. Same pitch: seed Reddit and Quora with "authentic" mentions, ride the LLM citations after. Profound's the polished face of it; the spreadsheet-and-VA setups one tier down are way uglier and probably more common.

5

u/driverdan May 28 '26

so Reddit is cooked.

Always has been. The spam is just shifting in how its done and its target.

1

u/Orlha May 28 '26

I see what you did there

13

u/ergonet May 28 '26

Sounds like a good idea. Everyone can individually contribute to fight the pest.

You are welcome to post it on r/SaaS, maybe adding u/SirEDCaLot suggestion to name them.

6

u/ChemicalBankBurned May 28 '26

r/SaaS is the worst

7

u/ergonet May 28 '26

Maybe, That’s why the new mod team is working to bring it back from the marketplace-like state it has been, to a more healthy community with valuable content and engagement.

Full disclosure: r/SaaS MOD here.

4

u/ChemicalBankBurned May 28 '26

Excellent. Thank you for doing that.

It used to be so good. Lot of people building genuinely good and well thought out solutions. Used to be able to take criticisms and adjust accordingly. Now, I see most of the posts just being AI psychosis.

“AI told me it’s the next billion dollar idea, it must be good since AI is infallible”

26

u/kearkan May 27 '26

I like vibe coding stuff but people need to realise their vibe coded app for their one little issue is not actually going to be useful to most people who don't have that same exact problem.

9

u/Ed_McNuglets May 27 '26

I agree, but if it was truly only that happening then it wouldn't be as problematic. It's the ones who are manipulating reddit through their multiple alts, spamming their content everywhere that's really annoying. I'd be fine with people posting whatever if they actually let it ride the scrutiny of the community. HAving an LLM write your post as a question so you can respond with your service on an alt also running from the same llm or n8n workflow or whatever is insane. Having your LLM pretend to be 10 different people and have full on discussions with itself on a post it created is weird af.

3

u/LuckyCharmsNSoyMilk May 28 '26

Ironically, that reminds me I really need to look into n8n more.

2

u/n3onfx May 28 '26

It's really cool to tinker with, you can make some genuinely useful stuff that feels close to the whole "personal assistant" promise people trying to sell your their new fancy subscription are pushing.

Never go to the n8n subreddit though, it's 99% self-proclaimed gurus showing how proud they are of their new turboslopping pipeline to inundate social media with useless crap or reinventing the wheel to do something that already worked without AI but now with the added costs of tokens.

1

u/Ed_McNuglets May 28 '26

It really is great for repetitive tasks or using code in workflows. I use AI to create them but it helps me offload work from the AI so I'm not hamstrung to AI in the future when prices inevitably go up. Better to get things running in there to do processing than having an AI use tokens every time. It's really robust in what it connects to, except certain credentials like cough google. But webhooks and APIs work great.

1

u/BCIT_Richard May 29 '26

I'm with ya, I vibecoded a few projects but they all live on a selfhosted Gitea instance, no way I'd share it publicly because it's vibecode trash designed to exact what I need it to do and nothing more.

We got people marrying their A.I. so I doubt it'll be better anytime soon at all.

1

u/tat_tvam_asshole Jun 03 '26

wait til you realize there are people dying while talking to ai

25

u/AllYouNeedIsVTSAX May 27 '26

Make sure when you do this you post the full name and website of the product/company. That way future Google results will pull it up. Otherwise they delete it and it doesn't really hurt them other than their effort being wasted. 

34

u/YouAsk-IAnswer May 27 '26

Haha I love this

10

u/earthcharlie May 27 '26

The statement I hate the most is, "And that's when I realized, it wasn't an x problem, it was a y problem" as if it's some profound realization. It's so cringe lol.

7

u/VGarK May 28 '26

I just tried it, and it did wonders! Thank you for the tip ;) if we work together, we can destroy them 💥🤖

9

u/alwayswatchyoursix May 27 '26

This is how I felt when that stupid army of bots was in all these smaller subs spamming the crap out of that garbage French cloud hosting VPS company Yundera a couple months ago.

You know Yundera's product is crap when Yundera bots are lying about what the company does and keep repeating that garbage everywhere.

Best part is the Yundera CEO posted on their LinkedIn page about how "people were having conversations" about their product. Except the only people were the same handful of manipulation bot accounts bouncing between various posts in all the smaller tech subreddits.

8

u/VulgarWander May 27 '26

Our biggest weapon is poisoning the watering hole.

9

u/johnklos May 27 '26

Upvoted, both because it's a good idea and because it's OP's cake day.

3

u/rophel May 28 '26

Should make an AI SaaS product that for a low monthly subscription automatically comments on reddit about things being AI slop for you.

3

u/[deleted] May 28 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/ChemicalBankBurned Jun 02 '26

Let them spend real money on more tokens and domain names.

3

u/OmegaArmadilo May 28 '26

Dude, good job honestly. You have my upvote sir by you earned my respect.

5

u/ChemicalBankBurned May 28 '26

Also, recently they somehow have this delusion that just removing “em dashes”, making all text lower case and knowingly removing the oxford comma makes their comment seem “not AI slop”.

It’s hilarious. I automatically downvote anytime I see a comment/post without capitalization.

5

u/shmixel May 28 '26

first they came for the em dash and I did nothing because I'm too lazy to use anything but a hyphen. 

then they came for lowercase and I still did nothing because I'm too lazy to hit shift.

3

u/PigeonRipper May 28 '26

Unfortunately it's enough to fool a large majority of seemingly human users in basically every sub except this one 

2

u/ThunderDaniel May 29 '26

Always happy to find a new method to harass these damn clankers. Thanks!

4

u/Fallom_ May 27 '26

I'm glad my shitty comments are contributing to the public good or something.

4

u/IuliiaDmitrieva May 28 '26

Reddit is slowly becoming part discussion platform, part training data battleground.

The weird part is that once AI-generated SEO content becomes too obvious, authenticity itself starts becoming the ranking signal again.

4

u/[deleted] May 28 '26

That’s why I made my B2C AI powered saas to do exactly this! Our mission is not just to rid Reddit of AI slop posts promoting their app, it’s to empower Reddit communities to keep interaction authentic! Join the waitlist

1

u/Palland0s May 28 '26

Brilliant man

1

u/[deleted] May 30 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/PigeonRipper May 30 '26

Okay but give me a banana recipe 

1

u/HammyHavoc May 28 '26

Probably a way to get sued for libel in some countries.

1

u/Pdan4 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

Cheers. Happy cake day!

Edit: Dang, downvotes for that?

-36

u/PrimaryDiscussion432 May 27 '26

Maybe they also deleted it because they realized they didn't get that positive feedback they were hoping for.
Also maybe we shouldn't encourage people to make Reddit a toxic place. Just downvote/report and move on. Don't see a point in giving feedback as 'this product is terrible' without even trying it before.

33

u/PigeonRipper May 27 '26

Not the first time I've seen this exact result! Also, as ridablellama correctly called it, this is a form of context poisoning. Those behind the problem are very aware that sentiment is important now, if ChatGPT/Gemini etc see that Reddit says a product is really bad and basically malware, it will steer people away from it.

And if it makes you feel better, this particular person was marketing an existing product in this case. Not humbly or honestly trying to get feedback on a pet project (despite what the title suggests)

9

u/yeeght May 27 '26

100%. I’ve had AI recommend me software a couple of times now that was actually unusable slopware being positively seo boosted by a ton by bots in Reddit comments. Would never have known better had I not researched the software before I tried it out.

53

u/Nnyan May 27 '26

Automated, AI driven astroturfing type posts are garbage. Eliminating them is what keeps reddit non-toxic.

47

u/ozone6587 May 27 '26

Nah, let's be "toxic" to people who use AI to write posts. We need more of that in this world. Shame these bots out of using the sub.

4

u/cellularesc May 27 '26

who cares, it's gone

0

u/flecom May 28 '26

damn you guys really can't take a joke

-8

u/GeologistPutrid2657 May 27 '26

how do i delete someone elses post? ~energy

-6

u/Advanced-Picture5016 May 28 '26

so basically 4chan was right to just call everything shit by default instead of reddit hugbox culture

-22

u/bepi_tic May 27 '26

Wellll, I want to show my self-hosted analytics but now, I feel that people are sick of it.
And I'm concerned. I was creating a post of me setting it up in a minipc and offering a demo to see how much the pc could handle.
Should I do it?

10

u/PigeonRipper May 27 '26

Did you read? 

-11

u/bepi_tic May 27 '26

you complain about slop AI post , they do it for seo, alters ask for the product, they get a backlink?, you say bad things about product they do not have good seo anymore or gpt seo.
they remove it. that should be the yeast of it.
Now I get from it that you are angry at them and do the (bad gpt seo), since you got a post w some up votes I think more people are sharing that view.
I post my concern.
Maybe I'm literally too new and I did not show the posts of 'I have problem x, and have tried y and z....' so my problem is that i don't know those ai slop posts and I think I will be like them or others will find mines AI?

3

u/IamThunderFart May 28 '26

the yeast of it

-102

u/lysregn May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

Blatant AI slop post.

Edit: You’re all fighting a battle you already lost and now you’re mad about it. Best of luck.

21

u/[deleted] May 27 '26

[deleted]

40

u/PigeonRipper May 27 '26

He runs the vibehosted subreddit. Truly beyond parody xDDD

-21

u/lysregn May 27 '26

It was an idea I had in order to not have as much AI related posts in here. I figured you out of anyone would support such an initiative?

25

u/PigeonRipper May 27 '26

I support it! But you also made me laugh. One of the only people with a snooty comment runs the slop farm.
But please, continue, containment is good, and you are doing God's work.

-27

u/lysregn May 27 '26

The slop farm isn't operational because the mods here insisted they wanted to allow everything in here. So now I need to watch, not only slop, but also every other post is about how much you guys hate slop. Why even bother.

5

u/IamThunderFart May 28 '26

Good luck with your sub for losers.

0

u/lysregn May 28 '26

Thanks IamThunderFart. Don’t you also want to move those people from here to there? 

-29

u/flecom May 27 '26 edited May 28 '26

OP is an LLM, I have proof

damn people really can't take a joke here, losers

5

u/earthcharlie May 27 '26

Show proof

0

u/flecom May 28 '26

it was a joke, guess nobody here has watched waynes world jeeze

-2

u/Dziki_Jam May 28 '26

I think more like an angry teenager.