What’s happening to reddit 🤦🏻♀️
Great… it’s like dollar store Facebook or Quora for 12 year olds or something.
The only worth it really had were the niche communities. Some of which became meme centric over time and went down the shitter.
I jumped over here on lemmy and till today im still confused on the instances, federation and defederation thing. It seems a lot of the niche communities I used to partake in do have multiple equivalent instances, but none of them are active. I actually feel lost over here if I’m being perfectly honest…
Synthetic engagement.
I think it’s been this way for a while, maybe 8 years. I also think there are certain companies that pay reddit for this kind of engagement. It’s a completely unfounded conspiracy theory of mine own, but I think Disney and Marvel fandoms have been synthetically built up using this kind of astroturfed engagement. By using my bots to build a strong baseline, you create the sense that there is far more involvement than there actually is. Because these bots are owned by reddit, they can steer the engagement. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s a part of an overall strategy.
There is absolutely no question that Disney and Sony are both heavily engaged in viral marketing on Reddit. You can always tell when a new PS5 exclusive is about to drop because subs which almost never hit /r/all end up getting tangentially related gaming memes on the front page with 4000 comme ts talking about how excited everyone is for the new PlayStation game. Same with Marvel movies for a while there. Reddit even had engineers writing code for the Thanos snap thing.
Reddit has very clearly been trying to monetize guerilla marketing for a while, and I think a big part of the API issue is precisely that everyone realized that it’s super easy to just cut reddit out of the equation entirely with bots.
My first time saving a post because, yeah exactly.
For me it was always very obvious, but also clear they were trying to be subtle.
I always thought it was so stupid when people complained about “karma farming bots” when it was obviously synthetic content that primarily benefitted Reddit themselves.
Of course the marketing dept of large companies and sports leagues work directly with reddit. They also have the ability to sponsor and boost organic posts, place top comments etc…
I believe it but I’d like to have direct evidence for it.
Here is an old link about sponsored posts https://www.marketingdive.com/news/reddits-new-ad-program-will-let-brands-sponsor-organic-posts/423434/
And directly from the source https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4upf11/new_ad_type_promoted_user_posts/?rdt=45084
The program has certainly changed since then though
- Question is a common question people Google for. Potentially AI generates.
- Post is filled with AI bots answering to inflate user numbers.
- Post is used by websites to generate new content. Often by AI.
- AI scrapes reddit post for data, and verified it on those websites.
- AI ouroboros
Thanks to those API changes, Reddit is AI free!
You don’t need APIs to bot. APIs provide a “official” method and make it easier.
You can automate web scrapers and bots without APIs since forever.
True, but it was a selling point of the API changes if I remember correctly. Some insane fanboys attacked everyone with stupid arguments like that one when you were critical of the changes. That drove me away even faster.
“Men of reddit: What is something that women do that we don’t want them to do that we could collectively tell them to stop doing? I’ll start: not letting me sleep with their sister“
Followed the next day by, “Women of Reddit, what’s something guys do…”
Followed again the next day by, “Men of Reddit…” by people who didn’t see the original post.
“Men of reddit, what’s your favorite way to receive fellatio?” by ARealWomanIRL
I’m so glad I didn’t have to. I can’t really stand her sister.
Is it a tradition in your family?
Perhaps there really are thousands of worthwhile comments to make about these topics.
Couldn’t even keep a straight face writing that.
AITA -insert fake story that never happened where I’m clearly the asshole-
NTA. Your story, your rules.
So, one of the benefits of decentralization is that I don’t Lemmy will ever get to that point, honestly.
On reddit, there is only one or two places everyone goes to for these kind of “ask the community” kind of things. Due to how reddit works, your comments will be buried in one of these threads big threads if you comment too late, but people will gamble and join the rat-race for karma.
On Lemmy though, since there are a couple of “ask Lemmy/our instance” comms, the people who don’t want to have their comment buries in one of those gigantic threads has options to go to one of the less active communities instead.
Wow, Margot! Such a beautiful input. No wonder how you sold Barbie for the producers.
That’s “Esteemed character actress Margot Robbie of Hollywoo” to you, Mr. Adultman.
Also, how did your business go at the stock market today?
I carry a briefcase and do all the adulthood stuff, things. Some guys at the office wanted to exchange real money for bitcoins, but holding coins is a children thing (and I am not a children). I like paper money.
Sorry for the disrespect ma’am. Next time I will call you as you deserve, Esteemed character actress Margot Robbie of Hollywoo.
Reddit sucks.
Consider nuking your comments then deleting your account:
Already done my dude.
It’s Lemmy for me now and into the future.
Looks like some tacky headline articles from a magazine or something. So glad I left that place. Can we let it rott in silence
Agreeable ad is a trustworthy user with my personal data
The same questions every fuckin day. This was the reason I unsubbed from all of the default subs and in the end at least part of the reason I moved here
Too late to meaningfully join any of them.
I assume on /r?
I don’t know who would do that. The only reason I view all on Lemmy is because there isn’t enough activity to limit what I see. Despite the downhill trajectory on reddit, it isn’t at that point yet.
I browse all, but that can he bot heavy at times as well.
Haha I was just trying out the Stealth client and saw those posts.
And, um… What’s wrong with that exactly? Seems like useful debates. I took a peek at the movie opening one.
Look at Lemmy top posts for hour/Xhours/day, and it’s nothing but memes.
Zero desire to answer a likely machine generated generic question that’s been answered a 1000 times before only for my comment to get lost in 10000 other likely machine generated answers. At least that’s how I view these posts, a waste of time. I dislike when I see a new community on Lemmy that is trying to echo this model.
It’s the “most popular” from all around the world, of course it’s gonna be generic. It’s either this stuff, or more Ukraine war, or memes.
Nothing is preventing you from scrolling down, or switch to different sorting, or watch specific subs… Honestly, going to the Hot section, and expecting something suited to your specific tastes, and being upset that it’s too generic - that’s pretty ironic.
