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The content has taken a nosedive in the last three months - just take a look at /r/all and you’ll see duplicate postings appearing on the feed within the first 100 posts.
The quality of the conversation has plummeted as well. Most comments are one or two sentences, and usually just reaction posts. You can see where the AI bots have taken over - entire comment chains where old reddit tropes are just passed back and forth without any real context, critique, humor, or understanding.
It’s no longer a discussion forum. It’s a reaction machine, pushing a narrative that has been stripped of anything original that could be disruptive to the status quo… in other words, stripped of the very humanity that made it valuable for ChatGPT in the first place.
I’ve noticed the same thing. I was a long time user of Reddit. Practically obsessed over it at times. But after noticing how toxic and just plain stupid it’s gotten lately, I’ve almost completely left it. I don’t even have an account anymore. I think the final straw for me was a video of a kid allegedly being a little shit towards an older woman, so this woman’s husband started hitting the kid. And then another guy came and slapped the kid. And the majority of commenters were on the side of the adults hitting a child clearly under 12 years old. No use being on it anymore when it’s clearly just a rage machine now.
I don’t understand what the plan is. Becoming irrelevant and making it hard for users to access your site sounds like a losing play.
I think they got all they needed from us. It doesn’t matter what they do now. They sold years of conversations and information.
In the long term. In the short term, spez makes a lot of money.
Their moat is people not being arsed to make an account on a service that’s not actively hostile to its users.
“For communicators, Reddit’s value is in the real conversations that people are having about your brand today, not where it surfaces tomorrow,” said Adam Collins, Reddit’s chief communications officer.
Reddit defining its platform as a place for consumers to discuss brands speaks volumes about its motives.
Compounded by it being mostly bots doing that.
Reddit is astroturfed from day 1. By that I mean they literally faked it until they made it as in the early days Reddit was 100% consisted of sock puppets, whose activity convinced outside people to join.
I disagree, I met people from reddit at meets IRL and we played darts and drank beer.
Nothing to disagree with. It’s a fact about how they got Reddit going.
Crisis actors. Spez is going for the long con.
It’s long forgotten how reddit was open source. Not only that but people hosted their own instances of reddit as test beds for botting and who knows what else.
The quickmeme incident got memoryholed real fast. That era of image macro memes was basically entirely fabricated.
but to be fair, the first post ever on Reddit was the Downing Street Memo.
remember the silence brand crab? pepperidge farms remembers…
I mean, you’re talking about Reddit, which is a brand, in this comment.
Like, people talk about things, and a lot of things have brands.
It’s just a bit two-faced and dishonest for Reddit to be marketing itself to users as a platform for genuine discussion while in actuality being a marketing platform for brands.
If more Redditors realized what Reddit has become, they might be more willing to join a platform without the centralized control that enables manipulation.
With enough users on the Fediverse, the astroturfing will come. It’s not really inherently resistant to brand placements etc. It’s just not big enough to get corporate attention.
Astroturfing will come, but the platform itself can’t as easily be designed to enable it with preferential algorithms and tracking. If an instance injects ads into its frontend, users can easily switch instances or use an alternative frontend or app; if a specific instance is known to host promotional posts, it can be easily defederated or otherwise blocked.
The same cannot be said for blocking ads or tracking on Reddit, particularly for mobile users.
I mean, it kinda is.
Lemmy is setup in a way that it totally crumbles at around 100-200k active users. The “every instance replicates almost everything while being legally liable if it doesn’t correctly moderate everything” means that it’s close to impossible to run a Lemmy instance if there’s too many people on the platform.
Reddit has more than one billion accounts and hundreds of millions of active users.
Lemmy physically cannot sustain anything near those numbers. Thus it’s kinda hard-coded to prevent it from getting serious astroturfing, for better and for worse.
For comparison: Both the LTT forum and the crackberry forum have more total and more active users than all of Lemmy combined.
If it ever grew that much instances could go private for signups, require referrals, only federate to select communities (it would be necessary at that point to avoid bad actors) Like a whitelist instead of or in addition to the blocklist.
Been a part of reddit since 2006 and as much as it pains to see something that I visited for 2 decades to go away, it needs to be put to pasture because of spez.
Meh. I started on usenet. Reddit had some fun little cultural things, but I just like yakking online in forums; not gonna particularly miss it.
Same. Ditched my account during the API nonsense, but I still lurked occasionally on old.reddit. When they made that require a login, stopped going to reddit entirely. Which leaves this place as the last social media I interact with. I’m expecting some kinda ban on the fediverse in my country, just cause that seems par for this course. Then I dunno, give up on the internet? It’s half bots now anyway.
At this point I am just running a RSS feed aggregator on my home server, and using that to keep up on news and information. If I really want to go nuts, I just feed it into my local LLM and have it summarize the days news for me.
Same here. I occasionally follow a link to normal reddit it and it lets me see the tread for about ten seconds then tosses up a login popup. Looks like they are locking down the whole site.
At least the bots are pretending to be intelligent. A lot of idiots on reddit that are really degrading the site.
And how is putting up barriers going to play out? Fewer users will bother, and overcoming barriers like that is more than worth it if it means you get to run your 1000-bot army.
GEO gurus spent months telling brands to get on Reddit because ChatGPT loves it. Now citations drop 86% and suddenly the strategy is diversify. Amazing how quickly a growth hack becomes timeless marketing wisdom once the algorithm stops cooperating. Maybe building useful, credible information was the strategy all along. 🤷
Advertising on reddit was always a dumb move from the get go. They had to disable comments on ads because they didn’t want people actually discussing products openly and freely. It was such a farce.
I’m glad I did my part and tainted the water supply by shit posting and shit commenting for years.
Fuck em!
