If they were just talking about Reddit, I’d assume something dodgy was going on connected with the IPO. But Quora is supposedly back from the dead too… Am I missing something glaringly obvious here?
Election is coming up, all Russian bots
It’s all kinds of bots; Russian, Chinese, Liberal, Conservative, but most of all its Reddits own bots meant to inflate traffic stats ahead of the IPO.
They are probably paying clickfarms.
Reddit probably isn’t, as that would be cooking their metrics and Huffman would get fucked by the long arm of the SEC. They might still be, Huffman loves Elon and Elon got away with tons of shit.
Advertisers are probably paying more content farms to astroturf it though.
Plus without the API, do you really think people just stopped scraping Reddit? They just run a headless Chrome instance now and I bet Reddit doesn’t look the gift horse of traffic in the mouth.
Except I can totally see them committing securities fraud in order to pump up the numbers. It seems very much like something they would do.
I think I’ve comment this before but over the pandemic years I did a little experiment. Every day I bookmarked the obvious content reposting bot accounts on the first few pages of r/all. After a while I checked back on the accounts. The majority of them become cryptocurrency spam bots. A very small percentage spam random things. There was an extremely high success rate of picking out the bot accounts. Pretty much all them were except for maybe a handful.
spez is basically exit scamming with reddit. Whoever is buying the dataset is getting robbed blind. That’s if reddit inc isn’t being upfront behind closed doors. Maybe they are. After all reddit does have well over a decade of mostly organic activity. The recent data has to be absolute trash though.
Yes. Google is strongly favoring both in search results in their feeble, and failing, attempt to combat AI.
As someone who still semi-frequents reddit, it’s mostly bots, more and more of which are clearly using some form of ChatGPT or another LLM. It’s actually kinda absurd, I’ve seen many a comment chains where it’s just different bots replying to each other, both pretending to be real people.
I must say I’ve seen in increase of conversations on Reddit that seem like everyone involved has severe lead poisoning.
If bots actually do start frequenting Reddit, and they get hard to detect, the AI content generation will start poisoning itself. Isn’t that cool?
For me, the cool part is that the vast majority of people can’t tell anything has changed.
Also, we can be rather poisonous ourselves.
Removed by mod
Not even close if we’re talking about current users or active contributers. After they shut down third party apps and sided with advertisers over mods there was a huge migration off platform to several other platforms. Many smaller subreddits are ghost towns and the biggest ones that are still active have a smaller participating community, less total votes, and changing norms.
It’s not just eternal September, it’s the same thing that happened when digg died in reverse where communities grew and changed because people were joining. Users are adding site:reddit.com or whatever to Google searches because of SEO general searches are an advertising dumpster fire, but those search results are going to degrade over time along with the site’s quality if they continue to make such shitty decisions for communities and users or people move to other ai based search tools.
Where did everyone go? I thought Lemmy was the new hangout but it still seems so small, even popular posts are only getting a handful of comments?
It feels much more filled out than after the initial exodus. Smaller/niche communities are pretty bare, though.
I wonder if there was some kind of technological revolution that made it exponentially easier to generate text that happened recently.
Good Post Theory
IPO padding for the CEOs golden parachute.
It’s sort of become a bit of a meme to end every google question with ‘reddit’ to trick it into showing you an actual human response. I’m sure that’s been good for traffic
I’ve had to start limiting the date to pre-2023 to keep ai bs out of the results
Just add
before:2023to your search query BTW.Add what? Didn’t show up on mobile
add “before:2023” to your search query
Only if you count bots lol
I had my Reddit very heavily curated, my subs were mostly smaller subreddits. I was incredibly active and had my settings so that anything I voted on would not appear on my homepage. I got to see a ton of posts because of that.
Around 2021, I started noticing that reposts weren’t just people coming in and posting things we’ve seen a dozen times because they had no way to know it was a repost. It was bot networks that would take top posts and then other bot accounts would recreate the original post’s comment section. The accounts followed patterns and became really obvious to spot after a while.
The original tells were the bots taking really specific posts that only made sense in that context. Popular post from last Christmas? The bot doesn’t know what Christmas is, sees a popular post from a few months ago and reposts someone happy about their gifts in August. Look at this beautiful picture I took of the summer Alaskan wilderness this morning but it’s February. The photography subreddits were obvious because the bots would rotate the picture a few degrees which would sometimes ruin the picture’s aesthetic.
I’m not sure if it was just me spotting them easier or if they were really ramping up into 2022 but by the time they killed API access and I stopped using it, I think over 80% of posts were bots. Made leaving the site way easier.
Yeah, repost bots were out of control and places like freekarma4u helped them propagate for years with no interference from reddit. Would’ve been simple to shut that down if they were really worried about stopping bots but instead they ignored numerous reports, allowing the bots to run rampant.
Like Lemmy. Full with cross posting bots.
cross posting bots are a lot less problematic to me than bots designed to mimic human engagement to said cross posts
I cannot wait for reddit going public, it’s going to generate so much drama, that’s going to be soooo good.
Lemmy instances brace yourself
