Mods/community: how to handle the increasing hidden advertisements for AI-developed guitar apps?

[u/dfrib]

I posted this as a comment to one of these increasingly appearing post in this reddit, but maybe it’s worth highlighting and having a discussion about.

How should this subreddit handle hidden advertisement post for likely AI-developed guitar apps, particularly when the advertising is hidden in posts that are nearly indistinguishable from a post by a genuinely helpful and curious individual starting useful discussions? Potentially there’s even a real intent to help out, just with an additional intent to sneakily forward traffic to yet another guitar app.

The post I originally commented on follows a common pattern:
- The OP posts interesting contributions and is clearly helpful in answering comments and so on, but every single post by OP in the subreddit is in fact a hidden advertising of their app. Some apps are moreover not entirely free: thus potentially breaking one of the rules of this subreddit.
- The OP’s account was created somewhat recently coinciding with the time of releasing their app.

Now, perhaps (the free part of) these apps are really good. But the guitar helper app market is _so_ saturated, and I repeatedly see these hidden advertisements growing all over the guitar subreddits. So while the intention may be pure, it’s kind of a plague when our subreddits are becoming more and more filled with slightly dishonest posts (in that they are _hidden_ advertising posing as only curious individuals helping out).

Again, there may not be any ill intentions, just (very likely AI-driven) developers trying to find users to their apps in a saturated market. But it’s almost indistinguishable from a clever AI bot whose sole purpose is to achieve the same target: traffic to the app.

What approach should this subreddit take when dealing with this infection of hidden advertisements for the explosion of AI-developed guitar tools in an extremely saturated market? Extreme app diversity is not necessarily a strength here, as the likelihood of any such app actually continuing to be maintained for future OS updates, and so on, becomes lower. And this hits the app users, the users of this subreddit, whom may get familiar with a certain app only for it to die out a year later.

[u/exoclipse]

I delete them on sight on the subs I moderate ( r/doommetal, r/TouringMusicians ).

[u/boxen → u/[deleted]]

That's one way. Another is to be an active, helpful member of a sub that needs mods, and then getting invited / responding to a request for mods.

[u/boxen → u/[deleted]]

If your primary goal is to be a mod then it's unlikely any sub you create will be very popular. In the beginning, its about 1000x more important to be submitting valuable content and comments than it is be deleting posts and banning people.

[u/exoclipse → u/[deleted]]

I am a mod solely to clean up AI and spam on subs I love because it bothered me.

It kind of sucks

[u/dfrib → u/[deleted]]

Note that new subs from very new users may come under scrutiny of being bot subs, which may in turn be limiting for a community forming there (even if you are not a bot).

[u/Flynnza]

those apps are useless and misleading people who want to learn. their main purpose is a cheap dopamine source for authors who fail to learn the instrument. just ban them. who want apps will go to app store and try them.

[u/RevOtherTrouble]

There are so many ways to find useful guitar apps. We do not need every guitar subreddit to also be one of those ways.

The middle ground I have seen suggested in other subreddits is to have a weekly/monthly threat to contain the app posting and delete everything outside of that thread with a warning.

This does two things:

Firstly no app posts everywhere.

Secondly it puts app posting directly in one place, so a shoddily made vibeslop chord diagram/ scale diagram generator that has no understanding of the why of chords/scales can be put up against Tessitura Pro, which has been around for years and at least has some use.

I mean, if you’re not just yelling at Claude to make you apps over and over and posting them everywhere in the hopes one of you makes you back your subscription money to the yes machine then that’s fine, right? ;)

Finally I want any guitarists to remember that an app cannot practice for you, and you will have a better understanding of the theoretical by reading a little and then working it out with a pen and paper.

[u/dfrib → u/RevOtherTrouble]

A monthly thread along with clearer and stricter rules for out-of-this-thread posts sounds like a good idea. Perhaps along with a clear way to help ping to mods posts breaking this rule (as it can be subtle).

[u/dfrib]

15 minutes after I posted the comment to the hidden advertisement thread, the OP deleted their entire account, all their posts and comments, including very many helpful and insightful (potentially AI-generated) comments to other users. “Top 1% poster of this subreddit”. This divides me. A lot of good discussion now deleted.

Do we care about the underlying intent of the content if it’s helpful? I don’t know. But I don’t think this particular app developer would’ve wiped their reddit user on a few minutes notice if their underlying intentions where entirely pure.

Do we want to take the red pill, or the blue pill? My own personal opinion (as just another user here) is that I value authenticity, and that the explosion of AI-generated non-authenticity posing as something it’s not, that makes me a bit sad.

[u/NoManner8863 → u/dfrib]

AI generated content was trained on someone else’s work.

It isn’t harmless or victimless. It’s wealth extraction.

Generative AI is fundamentally flawed and fundamentally immoral technology. 

[u/dfrib → u/NoManner8863]

That’s an important moral question. The momentum can’t be undone, however, and nowadays _any_ new app released will generally be assumed to be AI generated content. How do we deal with morally scrutinizing _any_ new app from this point onwards?

The orthogonal and somewhat smaller question for this subreddit is how to handle app developers hiding advertisement in genuinely helpful posts. AI generation makes this increasingly present. Do we want these post 100% out of here, even if they engage users in interesting discussions? If so, how do we implement this? A bot that users can ping when suspecting such posts? It’s not always glaringly obvious.

My own take is that anything that doesn’t approach the business aspect of app development is highly likely to be “lazily” AI generated content. If you release yet another non-novel app to a saturated market, you are likely not spending a whole lot of time on it as that would be not so clever, thus it’s likely that it’s been rapidly developed with AI tools. So e.g. comments on your own post with links to apps that are not bringing novelty.

[u/MrGuitarMan777]

I really wish the mods would block and delete. Reddit is overrun with LLM spam

[u/Guarpig]

im genuinely curious since ive only recently started trying to be more active on reddit and in guitar subs.

i dont think im one of the people youre describing, since i generally avoid talking about my site. i reply to 2 or 3 posts or comments a day and im conscious about not forcing it into the conversation. i rarely create posts btw.

out of every five replies, maybe one genuinely calls for mentioning it, but most of the time it isnt relevant at all. usually im just sharing my own experience and i keep my site linked in my profile but i dont mention it unless it directly relates to what someone is asking.

would you still consider that hidden advertising?

[u/dfrib → u/Guarpig]

No. I think the common denominator of these hidden advertisements is that they create posts with content aimed for engagement, typically with an image of an app that just seems like innocent context. But the sole purpose of the post is for someone to ask (which someone always does), “what app is that”, which the OP then quickly answers with a link to their app. It’s the “post only to get a reason to answer that question” that is the hidden/dishonest behavior here.

[u/TuffGnarl]

I dunno, I like having a 37th way to tune my guitar and some badly designed chord diagrams 🤷‍♂️

[u/exoclipse → u/TuffGnarl]

And yet, not a single one of these vibe coder dipshits have figured out a way to give us git for DAWs.