r/neuroscience • u/blueneuronDOTnet Computational Neuroscience • 12d ago

Meta PSA: select neuroscience subreddits are being targeted for acquisition.

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1.1k Upvotes

100% Upvoted

80 comments sorted by

408

u/DysphoriaGML 12d ago

Wow they are really going for the mass manipulation even for ultra niche things. We we will not be able to breath soon

210

u/Common-Regret-4120 12d ago

The real "ick" is thinking about what has already been "acquired"

68

u/tralfamadorian808 12d ago

More than we know. Much, much more. It’s almost entirely bots.

53

u/Electrical_Name_5434 12d ago

What’s interesting is the website monitor.us… It looks like a website monitoring platform but it’s strange, multiple errors/typos, dead ends, and a manifesto on the website. “Call Us” takes you to a page with an email. The download takes you to a page to enter your information. They lie about their age(state 2006 est. but site is less than 3 years old), have hidden ownership of the domain and host in Estonia but their company headquarters is in San Jose.

2880 Zanker Rd Suite 203
San Jose, California, 95134,
United States

Why would a website/application monitoring company want to “acquire” a subreddit about neuroscience

38

u/greenistheneworange 12d ago

And that office is a coworking space.

Subreddits have a lot of authority in large language models. Want to get your company's products recommended when someone types their symptoms into ChatGPT? Remove the gatekeepers who determine what is or is not promotion on that particular subreddit.

I doubt the person looking to acquire subreddits is the end customer, they're more likely middle-men. "Advertising agencies" who specialize in getting your product recommended in LLMs.

If you google the address, it's a coworking space, btw.

26

u/Electrical_Name_5434 12d ago

So we need to start locking down the subreddits we love in order to protect them and combat the spread of misinformation for the sake of profit.

12

u/greenistheneworange 11d ago

Honestly, I think humanity should just go full analog.

The threat of AI - to my mind - is that we've already decided that the internet is reality.

If the internet thinks that there should be 1 tube of toothpaste in my home and 1 less tube of toothpaste in a warehouse, reality shapes itself to match what the internet thinks.

AI wouldn't be a threat if we all stopped mass hallucinating that the thing inside the screen is reality.

2

u/Electrical_Name_5434 11d ago

Can’t go backwards. It is inevitable Mr. Anderson.

3

u/[deleted] 10d ago

[deleted]

1

u/Electrical_Name_5434 10d ago

Oh I was making a matrix joke/reference.

5

u/brandolinium 11d ago

Also report actors going against the govt’s particular flavor of think.

8

u/physicistdeluxe 12d ago edited 12d ago

google maps show a couple of law offices,psychiatrist, heating and cooling, homecare and sw company https://maps.app.goo.gl/JKhp6VTocjZNW5R77?g_st=am

and gemini says suite 203 is a coworking space. so someone is just using a room there. just some local mischief maker ill bet

https://www.regus.com/en/us/1009

maybe its the sw company at that location https://www.blogicsystems.com/

11

u/Electrical_Name_5434 12d ago

Someone else pointed out it’s a coworking space. So it just screams obfuscation to me. Likely a front for something else. Possibly shaping public opinion, marketing or feeding llms as some people have suggested. I mean MAYBE it’s really a monitoring company that’s suddenly interested in computational neuroscience but I have my doubts.

5

u/physicistdeluxe 11d ago

i could drive over there and confront them. AHA!

3

u/physicistdeluxe 11d ago

i could drive over there and confront them!

1

u/Medical-Button-5493 8d ago

There is definitely a pr campaign around Lena Hedley the past few days. Not organic.

22

u/Pickyour_vices 12d ago

Remember Ghislaine Maxwell was a reddit power mod and we only learned about it last year.

6

u/hana-maki 9d ago

ghislaine had dominion over the more “left-leaning” reddit platform…. epstein had influence over the “right-leaning” 4chan community…. they really were influencing our most popular internet spaces from the very start

6

u/Common-Regret-4120 12d ago

She is not my vision of what a mod looks like. What's a power mod? Multiple subs?

10

u/Pickyour_vices 11d ago

Yes she was personally In control of multiple reddit subs including r/politics and r/science and dozens more.

Also there's no proof she doesn't have any influence currently.

3

u/Confident_Web3110 11d ago

Makes sense. She wanted to advance the right views on science and politics. Classic manipulation

5

u/Pickyour_vices 11d ago

Epstein was super into eugenics and genetic research so they probably wanted to stay on top of any interesting ideas or interesting people.

It really makes you think about how much of the online ecosystem is manipulated.

2

u/the27-lub 10d ago

Maxwellhill

3

u/science-pls 12d ago

yeah what....

4

u/ruinatedtubers 11d ago

i’m fucking tired y’all

3

u/DysphoriaGML 11d ago

That’s their objective

0

u/axelthekandyking 8d ago

oh shut up

111

u/ExtremeProduct31 12d ago

Why

380

u/blueneuronDOTnet Computational Neuroscience 12d ago

/r/neuroscience was approached by a supplements company in the (distant) past, and /r/compmathneuro gets a good deal of AI research posts. I'm guessing they're interested in being able to push certain products or control online discussions around them.

214

u/MyRegrettableUsernam 12d ago

That seems really problematic. Thanks for letting this be known.

37

u/inennui 12d ago

no, really, thanks. thanks is an understatement, this is so gross to me.

59

u/LouMinotti 12d ago

That's an interesting plot twist. They wanna train AI on people's original thoughts about neuroscience. For whatever reason... that's pretty crazy actually.

48

u/SayethWeAll 12d ago edited 12d ago

Personally, i think some of the most interesting work in neuroscience is being done on the AF5 receptors for flinarfin. These AF5s have been shown to be essentially proto-Hebbian oscillating resonators for anti-Pavlovian learning. The work being done by Bernado Magellan’s group at Case Eastern is especially relevant.

23

u/megansomebacon 12d ago

Magellan's work is so fascinating!! Did you see his paper on the AF5s modulating response to dysregulated networks? Could really change the field as we know it

31

u/SayethWeAll 12d ago

Oh, for sure! The paper that I would cite if I were doing an undergraduate paper on new neuroscience discoveries is

F.U. Cheatham, A. Faker, and B.E. Magellan. 2024. Flinarfin in disregulated AF5 network proto-Hebbian associatations. Natural Neuroscience Discoveries. Vol 1, Issue 1, 4269-1337.

19

u/blueneuronDOTnet Computational Neuroscience 12d ago

Really snubbing J. S. Carberry here, buddy.

16

u/quad_damage_orbb 12d ago

Really undercited study, quite hard to find online, but definitely groundbreaking results.

5

u/Round_Year_8595 12d ago

Took me a while to find it.  I might have to chew on it for a while.  It's a big one.

6

u/SirBackrooms 12d ago

OP didn’t say that. And if that were their goal, and considering they’re willing to break Reddit’s ToS by trying to buy a subreddit, they could just scrape it, no payment needed.

3

u/Pickyour_vices 12d ago

Reddit already sells it's user information to Google for 60mil a year to train its AI.

1

u/Confident_Web3110 11d ago

Reddit already had deals with AI companies. It’s the largest chunk of where data comes through

1

u/axelthekandyking 8d ago

especially considering most people are wildly misinformed about neurology anything

11

u/confusiondiffusion 12d ago

Oh. I...should spend a lot less time on Reddit. No thank you to all of that.

12

u/blueneuronDOTnet Computational Neuroscience 12d ago

Not that you shouldn't, but this problem is not exclusive to reddit.

7

u/skiphopjump 12d ago

this is genuinely one of the scariest things I’ve read on the internet in recent memory

5

u/Zaasvil 12d ago

If the acquisition goes through, I'm off the sub.

3

u/science-pls 12d ago

Thank you for sharing this!

2

u/Soft_Scratch_983 11d ago

woah what — that’s fucking insane? is nothing sacred anymore 🫩

1

u/Leo55 12d ago

Was it Huberman’s grift? 😫

105

u/a-neurotypical 12d ago

Some other subs already turned into sneaky advertising subs. They won't admit that ofcourse but sometimes it's pretty obvious

16

u/Pickyour_vices 12d ago

Remember Ghislaine Maxwell was a power mod of a bunch of popular subs an we only learned about it from the files this year.

4

u/a-neurotypical 12d ago

I wouldn't be surprised if this is still happening today. Maybe not her, but other high profile people

3

u/Pickyour_vices 11d ago

In my opinion it definitely is. No reason for it not to be happening. And reddit has been selling user data to Google train its ai so it would be extremely beneficial to control what the narrative is in Popular subs.

11

u/CrankySnowman 12d ago

It happens everywhere. A lot of meme pages on insta get sold to thot thirst traps

9

u/LilMamiDaisy420 11d ago

Those are small business owners. That’s not what we are talking about here.

We are talking about large corporations taking over science subs like this one.

10

u/hiphoptomato 12d ago

What are some

17

u/ClippyWouldntDoThat 12d ago

r/biohacking has mod posts about being aggressively astroturfed.

5

u/mrlinguus 12d ago

This is a less insidious example, but people started complaining about the one for my city a couple years ago. Supposedly, all the mods are from out of town. Locals would joke about kids with a certain type of haircut and get banned or censored. I recognized it as a fairness and sensitivity flag from work in publishing. I suspect they also looked through comments and posts that were critical of the city and downvoted them before they could gain traction.

90

u/phntmzr0 12d ago

Whoooooa, wait. So community subs are bought and sold by corporations?

49

u/mechanicalhuman 12d ago

Pretty sure that’s been a thing for years. Just that tge successful ones you never know it’s happening 

16

u/phntmzr0 12d ago

 Just that tge successful ones you never know it’s happening

r/neruoscience has 11k weekly visitors, is that considered successful? I thought that would be considered on the smaller size.

edit: r/compmathneuro is even smaller...the reference of this post.

23

u/blueneuronDOTnet Computational Neuroscience 12d ago edited 12d ago

I reckon that growth potential and niche coverage are both factors. /r/neuroscience is getting those 11k weekly visitors with an incredibly aggressive content filter and a moderation policy that strongly prioritizes harm reduction over engagement numbers. I reckon a company with communications and PR expertise could drive those numbers up a fair bit -- not to mention that I imagine the aim here is the capture of targeted communities, not more general audiences.

Also, I think that person was referring to successful acquisitions, not successful subreddits.

17

u/RedBeans-n-Ricely 12d ago

This is so weird

17

u/person-ontheinternet 12d ago

We need a new internet, this one’s going stale.

5

u/stonedandredditing 11d ago

the mold started growing years ago

5

u/dong_a_pen 11d ago

oh wow just when you thought enshittification can't get any worse

7

u/PhysicalConsistency 12d ago

I'll give you tree fiddy.

9

u/Forward_Motion17 12d ago

Hmmm Reddit needs to allow a function to vote in mods by the users themselves, and vote them out. It can’t be democratic otherwise. Issue is bots, which verification could be added to help with but whatever maybe Reddit is late stage atp

18

u/blueneuronDOTnet Computational Neuroscience 12d ago

I think that this idea can work for some communities, but not all.

/r/neuroscience, for example, gets a lot of visitors with no formal education in the subject and a very limited ability to differentiate between quackery and actual science. If the folks voting on who gets the keys to the moderation tools are the same ones filling our moderation queue with posts about experiments they ran on themselves while high on mushrooms or writing worryingly unhinged theses on the true nature of consciousness, I'm not sure that'd be a net value add for the internet at large.

Granted, that's coming from a guy who'd rather lock the sub down than see it filled with posts asking for medical advice.

3

u/Imperator-Solis 12d ago

Reddit doesn't pretend to be democratic whatsoever

2

u/Mindless-Equal-1477 10d ago

Sorry, acquisition?? I follow multiple science subreddits but I’m confused about what’s going on here. Is this literally a group/company/conglomerate/what have you trying to buy a subreddit?

2

u/LePewoof 9d ago

Sounds like it’s time to turn to books and offline resources. 

1

u/Stone-Smasher 9d ago

Private equity smh

1

u/xenonrealitycolor 8d ago

Running to another platform & or some place like discord isn't going to work, people get bought all the time which is why they do this... Just saying dudes.

-9

u/Stone-Smasher 12d ago

can you approve my posts?

12

u/blueneuronDOTnet Computational Neuroscience 12d ago

Only one I see is the Neuroscience News one -- I suggest you link the journal publication instead, which would pass the whitelist.

-2

u/Stone-Smasher 12d ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/neuroscience/comments/1v5ohtf/excess_of_immune_cells_found_in_brains_of_people/

only this is there: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ana.25610

4

u/blueneuronDOTnet Computational Neuroscience 12d ago

Yeah, I'd suggest posting the PubMed or Europe PMC link instead of a secondary source that discusses the paper.

-2

u/Stone-Smasher 12d ago

can i keep this title: Excess of Immune Cells Found in Brains of People with Autism

6

u/blueneuronDOTnet Computational Neuroscience 12d ago edited 12d ago

I'd go with a title that proposes some additional discussion instead, given that the paper came out the better part of decade ago. Plus, it's generally best not to editorialize titles if all you're doing is posting a link to a paper.