A story about the 33-year-old cat Rusty took Reddit by storm. Rusty passed away at the age of 33, making him into top 10 of the oldest cats in the recorder cat history. The poster submitted proof to the mods of r/cats that Rusty was real. People rushed to update Wikipedia’s list of oldest cats, expressed condolences, sent love and wishes. The post generated 134K likes and was probably viewed by most of the non-bot Redditors.
Unfortunately, Rusty was AI slop. Rusty:
The post and the bot that submitted it got deleted.
I think my attempt to restrict Reddit to a few essential subreddits like r/cats is not very successful and I still have exposure to something that I wouldn’t even call AI slop. More like farming for free human-generated text for the purpose of training LLMs. Rusty helps me understand why the sudden rush to gather personal IDs and verify humans on social media. All the social networks are vulnerable to slop and risk losing engagement if they don’t put it under some level of control.
Here’s a real orange cat for you, blissfully unaware about the decay of r/cats.
UPDATE: this is a male cat named Pesho, also known as The Son of a Mother. Likes cuddles and bites for no reason.
Veselin.blog 
Good post x
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Great post. Nice to see a real cat.
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One of the many great this about cats is them being blissfully unaware of pretty much all our human shenanigans
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They are very aware of our ability to feed them and provide shelter.
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This explains why the first photo is scary. And it is the first time to hear of Reddit.
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Reddit used to be a great social network. But they’re either losing the battle with AI, using it to inflate engagement, or using it to train ChatGPT. Or all of that.
People are no longer so willing to write out in the open. So bots spread clickbait content and farm responses.
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The little I’ve seen of reddit was nothing but short form sentences. I consider myself lucky to never have gotten hooked on it so I don’t worry about its decline.
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Why would anyone go to that site, who cares what they think and not to ention all the horrible commnets people make. Unless there is another use for the site.
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For the community? It is a bit prone to trolling but at the same time, Bulgaria’s culture is such that the trolling there doesn’t impress.
I liked it but the last 1-2 years it became a cesspool of bots and AI-generated clickbait. A faith that Facebook and Twitter suffered even before AI.
I’m experimenting with Bluesky but there’s a very small Bulgarian community there and it’s just empty. On Goodreads you almost never get any comments. So all I have is this blog and Reddit but I have to make myself leave Reddit.
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Still can’t top reality for bite. Or cuddles.
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Son of a mother… i like that.
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Pesho cutie. I missed many of the blogs now, including yours, since I take a bit slow on the internet for overall well-being.
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Overall well-being sounds more important than blogs 🙂 Thanks for stopping by, Hazel!
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Thank you, Veselin. And my pleasure to catch up!
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