A16z-Backed Doublespeed Hacked, Revealing What Its AI-Generated Accounts Promote
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The hacking of A16z-backed Doublespeed, a company generating AI-powered social media accounts, has sparked a lively debate about the state of the internet and the ethics of AI-driven influencer marketing. Commenters are divided, with some bemoaning the decline of the internet since its early days, while others highlight the absurdity of Doublespeed's marketing tactics, labeling them "evil supervillain" advertising. As one commenter pointed out, the company's business model likely revolves around advertising and shilling, just like traditional influencers, raising questions about the morality of profiting from AI-generated content. The discussion feels relevant now as it touches on the growing concerns around AI-generated content and its impact on social media.
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Anyone got any good effort post oases I can lurk and help out in?
According to Cambridge's data, $100 gets you around 2k fake but verified tiktok accounts: https://cotsi.org/platforms?view=map&platform=lf
Viewbotting is a pretty big issue on all the streaming platforms. Twitch changed their technical measures recently and a bunch of big streamers concurrent viewers dropped by a large amount. "Fake it until you make it" is a viable strategy with streaming. It's all about fake engagement to game the algorithm and end up in people's feeds.
>Take proven content and spawn variation.
It's almost refreshing how unashamed they are. I hate it, obviously, but I kind of like it better than companies that say something dressed up in marketing speak but actually mean what this site just says outright.
Not just businesses. It's governments, too.
There's a public park near me that is tracked for likes and social media engagement. If it misses the city's goals for social media engagement a certain number of months in a row, it can be turned back into a parking lot.
I objected to this measure of "success" during the public meetings about it, but nobody cares about the old man in the back of the room.
It's obviously marketing. But their marketing strategy appears to be being unashamed about ripping off content and creating bot farms.
What are they lying about?
I can only assume his VC funders have a bomb collar on him or something, otherwise I don't see why anyone would trust him with a penny.
Yes but they also stand to make money offering services to counteract the services they offer.
New generation is less social, more sober, less motivated, more doomer.
And then there's everyone else.
If you want more photos of his phone farm... it's all on his twitter page: https://x.com/rareZuhair/status/1961160231322517997
"Accelerating the dead Internet"? Why are we, as a community, encouraging the acceleration of enshitification of our common spaces? So weird to me...
They are the teachers, coaches, and engineers. The problem is the anti- role models are the ones who get all of the media:
Andrew Tate (mysogenistic pyramid schemer and pimp / sex trafficker of high school girls),
Joe Rogan (his mind is so open that his brains fell out),
Jordan B Peterson (charlatan who dresses up banal self-help advice with pseudo-intellectual jargon to seem profound, drug addict who is still taking very big risks with his health, frequently argues strawmans by misrepresenting postmodernism, Marxism, atheism, etc).
Our heuristics of who we should look up to are skewed because too many young people revere wrath and fame over ethics, morals, and values which may hold us back from success.
If you search "cumtown Nick Mullins Jordan Peterson" on YouTube that should get you there (yes it's crass but in the context of Jordan Peterson it's funny)
Now it seems war is coming from the US it could not be more true that at this moment.
I want to do plenty about it, I want to make the barrier to allow this shit online identity theft to make it too expensive to do.
It's easier to count billionaires who aren't supervillains.
The call is coming from inside the house.
Furthermore: reddit is a platform; Fuentes is content. That's a meaningful difference.
No, Rutgers University did not publish a report that says “if you say ‘Christ is King’ then you’re a white supremacist”. You can read about it here, it’s only 20 pages and well-sourced.
https://networkcontagion.us/reports/3-13-25-thy-name-in-vain...
Seems like the Butlerian Jihad is arriving ahead of schedule, and the real horrors demanding the uprising aren't oppression and violence, but viral marketing and sockpuppetry.
They used to be at the pinnacle of VC investing, and now they seem to actively seek out the most toxic portcos possible.
My actual guess is that they got way too big, both in terms of headcount and fund size, to limit their investments to what is expected to be the best of the best in terms of financial return and societal impact.
But was societal impact ever top of the list? Fundamentally a VC exists to make LPs money. Doing good is secondary / optional.
People who get to what seems like infinite money only do so because they were seeking money as a means to power for which they have an insatiable desire in the first place, its not that getting to (even practically) infinite money triggers the desire for unlimited power, its that it is a symptom of it.
> Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-35542497
> Because using the CFAA as a cudgel against things you don't like, whether it's journalists exposing insecure government systems, or companies engaging in deceptive marketing practices is a bad idea?
I think you're confusing bad ethics with a bad idea. A prosecutor's job is to win, not behave ethically.
It was never a particularly good idea at the scale it's currently deployed at.
Either or both, depending on the SYSOP's resources. I ran a BBS that did store-and-forward between the U.S. and Europe.
The ones with global connections could take a day to a week to forward messages, but that turned out to be a feature. We went outside in the real world instead of staying online arguing with strangers.
I think the general point stands when you look at large-scale platforms, including smaller blogs that use a centralized comment platform, whether that's Substack or something like Disqus.
So it's not unreasonable to say that when demographics of forums was changed, the economic incentive appeared? So it actually depends on demographics?
This human nature shit is empirically wrong. There are quite a few scammers around. You also meet these people in real life, you just don't notice immediately.
Am I to mourn the loss of what I personally consider one of the worst manipulative toxins to ever exist?
Thanks AI.
Hard disagree, and I’ll cite a simple example: Reddit isn’t one community. It’s a hub and spoke model. There are many good communities with curators and SMEs.
My canonical example that’s counter to this is HN. No offense to anyone but Reddit doesn’t have a hive mind - communities do. And HN hive mind is wrong more often than right and has been targeted by all sorts of astroturfers along the way. I personally take very few comments on here seriously, no takes seriously, and mostly show up to read comments by some actual hard cred people (f.e. animats). Everyone else might as well be a shill bot. AI doesn’t change this. I still get cream of the crop from Reddit.
The bots have gotten a lot smarter about making their ads look organic too. Even easier now with the ability to hide post history
The non-default experience is a mixed bag. Specialized communities are usually moderated pretty strictly, including rules against outgoing links, product reviews, etc. That said, you definitely see product placement disguised as questions / off-the-cuff recommendations where some previously-unheard-of Chinese brand is all of sudden mentioned every day.
HN has its problems, mostly in the form of people pretending to be experts and saying unhinged nonsense, but it's far less commercialized. If you want your brand to be on the front page, you sort of need to make an effort to write at least a mildly interesting blog post. Now, AI is changing that dynamic a bit because we now get daily front-page stories that are AI-generated... but it's happening more slowly than elsewhere.
Guess they wanted to hide the a16z connection on frontpage, huh?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307121
Awesome, cool job.
For the record, I replied "Fine!" as a friendly acknowledgement of the community winning the argument. I collapsed some of the subthreads, because, at the time, these meta subthreads were taking up most of the main thread. However I deliberately left some uncollapsed – even though we would normally have collapsed all of them – so as not to hide the fact that there was debate about the title. I also turned off default penalties (flamewar detector, flags) and restored the submission to the front page to give it more exposure.
The original title doesn’t even have the actual company’s name in it, only the name of the investor, which is intended to elicit just the kind of ragey reaction you’re exhibiting in this comment.
On HN, titles need to be more neutral and factual (I.e., include the name of the company the article).
(Also, you seem to be implying some conflict of interest? Doublespeed and a16z have nothing to do with HN/YC.)
I'd say that the change is editorializing more than the original was "linkbait".
The title we’ve set is intended to give enough information to pique curiosity for those who will be curious about the topic - the company name, what the company does (AI-generated promotional content), what’s happened (hacked).
I don’t love the title but it’s the best I could come up with to fit within the 80 character limit.
Anyone is welcome to suggest a better one that is compliant with the guidelines.
Best to drop the contrafactual hyperbole .. unless A16z's accountants really have dropped the ball and can no longer enumerate their investments.
For some of us these exaggerated claims of greater than aleph-null investments send our eyebrows literally to the stratosphere (/s).
I am very sorry, but that's a critical part of the story.
The original title is 75 characters. Your title is 75 characters.
In this case you aren't backing a phone farm creating ad fraud, but rather a "organic paid media initiative backed by a16z"
There is an 80-character limit on titles
This title is 75 characters
A mod changed the title to something other than the originally submitted original article title, to protect a major VC.
Not cool.
And this would be an entirely clickbait-free, fact-based summary of what they are doing.
It's not far off fraud as a service. This activity could get people prosecuted in EU countries and the UK.
This reminds me of some youtube videos when I was researching some stuff to buy. Those videos are just still images plus text-to-speech narration, usually with an annoying background music.
Lmao. Nice.
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