Just a few years ago, you would never see such a disparity in votes vs comments. But these days, this is pretty much the norm. I’ve seen posts with 10K+ upvotes and no more than 80 comments.
I’d say in about 2 years, the entire place is going to be bots with AI generated content that try to mimic “real users” using their new Dynamic Product Ads tool. Not sure how that’s legal as I thought ads needed to be marked or differentiated from regular content, but here we are.
The future looks bleak and AI even bleaker. Because it’s going to be used against us to make the rich richer and not to make our lives better.
In addition to factors already mentioned by other users, I believe that there are also social/cultural reasons for that lack of engagement.
Commenting in Reddit is like stepping on a mine field - no matter how innocuous your comments are, you’re bound to have users there assuming words into your mouth to screech at you. Plus all the “ackshyually”, one-upping, “wah TL;DR!” (i.e. “I’m entitled to an abridged version of what you said, even if you likely spent far more time writing your comment than I would reading it”).
Eventually you say “why bother commenting? Just to get a headache?” and stop commenting altogether.
It’s also filled with repeat comments. Most posts you read a few top comments and their threads. But then it quickly becomes other people just commenting the same exact thing.
It’s just not worth looking at comments there.
Don’t even get me started on that. I made a post that blew up (7k upvotes) and literally the entire comments section was the same responses. Out of the 100s that replied, only 10% or less were novel.
Does it sometimes seem like commenting in high traffic online spaces feels this way too, not just Reddit?
Kind of. In most high traffic spaces it feels simply pointless; as in, nobody will read it.
In Reddit (and Twitter) however it feels like people will read it, misread it, and punish you for what you didn’t say.
Before I quit Reddit (when Bacon Reader died) I had already curtailed my commenting because of this. It seemed that any time I tried to make a thoughtful comment on a even slightly contentions subject I ended up in a pointless argument with someone who had poor reading comprehension. It was disheartening to realize that while I was agonizing over every word I put into my comment in an attempt to clearly explain my thought, the same courtesy would not be extended by the people mis-reading it. I started to think people were just scanning comments for keywords to get angry about then telling me that I was ignorant of a subject I knew a great deal about or a reactionary child when I am 50 IRL. Commenting became a burden and it lead to a decline in the quality of conversation as more and more thoughtful commenters found that burden too great.
The same thing happens on Lemmy, unfortunately. A lot of people just want to be keyboard warriors.
It’s actually the mods that did it for me. If you don’t have this really weird super specific but vague world view, and you can’t follow 143 different rules (some not specified), then they start censoring you and temp banning your comments and contributions. The mods on my community sub actually permabanned me when I questioned them on it, instead of discussing it. After that I was like this is infuriating, and I don’t really want to participate here. Problem is, they mod anything related to said topic, like city, province, country, most political parties, quite a few special interest topics, etc. Its super weird behaviour.
Don’t forget folks aging bot accounts by downvoting everything they see to generate history.
I didn’t even know this was a thing lol
Yep this is one of the reasons I kept deleting my account even before the whole spez drama.
We can still find engagement in small niche subs on Reddit. We’ve known, for many years, that people were going to move away from large corporate-controlled sites such as Reddit, Twitter etc…
The Fediverse is addressing this. It isn’t a panacea. However, it is a re-imagining of what we want the Internet to be.
There are many others, that will come along after us, to address this further.
What will stop bots from coming here? Registration filters and user reports?
Yes, if it grows large enough, the bots will come.
I think one has to gather more proof before concluding that the gap is due to LLMs. It can also be that the engagement was lost due to third party app drop. We don’t have stats to distinguish them.
To be honest, it feels much more likely to see posts on the Fediverse with many upvotes, few or no comments
Yeah the fediverse has lower engagement all around because the community is a lot smaller. This is especially true in “long tail” communities. However, the upside is that there are no bots, dark patterns, or manipulated feeds.
That being said, while I appreciate the chronological feed I do wish there was some way to “weigh” less active communities so that I can see their activity in my feed without them being drowned out by the busier communities. I’ve noticed that I’ve gone to communities that I’m definitely subscribed to, and seen that there were several posts that I missed because the posts were drowned out by content in busy communities like, for instance, technology@beehaw.org
However, the upside is that there are no bots, dark patterns, or manipulated feeds.
There’s a huge amount of incoming spam, much of it, I suspect posted by bots. I’ve also seen account posting ‘news’ from sites that are clearly AI generated
That makes sense tho given how the FV has pretty low engagement and most of it is still good bots doing housekeeping or trying to boost exposure.
I guess I just didn’t think Reddit would collapse sooooo fast!
Reddit is so useless. I write occasionally, and whenever I hit a wall researching a character’s background, everyone tells me, “ask on Reddit!”
I stopped asking on Reddit five years ago, because I can’t get any feedback besides a handful teenagers making wild guesses. Thank you for trying, kids. I guess.
Been mostly the same for me. If I ask a basic question like how to turn on Find My, I most likely will get a slew of downvotes and then one good samaritan post up the answer. If you ask a more technical question, like why is Find My iPhone using location services indefinitely, literally the entire website is like 🤷♂️
Just wait till the advertisers find out the eyeballs they are paying for are also just AI sock puppets. Enshitification strikes again.
I know there is software that exists that can poison art so LLM can’t use it. I am hoping we make something like that against AI bots and ads. What a brutal future we have coming man.
Can you imagine once we move to androids and other synthetic like machines? Or brain implants? Your bff that’s telling you to eat more eggs because they read they were really good for might literally be saying that because of chicken farmers or some vested third party who makes bank on eggs. Just wild that we are going to be attacked from all sides by corporate greed.
I saw some engagement graphs a few weeks ago for a few niche subreddits. Not necessarily niche in the “small” way, but in the “focused interest” way.
Posts and comments per day completely collapsed during the 3rd party app-pocolypse, and never recovered. Community membership didn’t even show a blip, but actual discussions fell off a cliff.
The Reddit app is really bad, and the website is worse. The mobile website is somehow the worst of the lot. Doing anything but voting and scrolling is painful. Reddit has successfully ended its usefulness as a community space. Most people there don’t aeem to have noticed this sea change, yet.
Or at least, they’ve found no compelling reason to go elsewhere yet.
I can echo the last part. I refuse to use the app so I use the both the website and mobile version. Both are almost unusable. Comments often fail to load, just showing the Reddit logo animation. It takes 8 reloads to sometimes load a reply to one of my comments. Half the time it never loads just stalls at 30% loading. The post options to attach images or media to a comment doesn’t work on mobile; tapping the buttons literally do nothing. It works on desktop.
I’d say in about 2 years, the entire place is going to be bots with AI generated content that try to mimic “real users” using their new Dynamic Product Ads tool
Yeah, it’s just partially like that now lol. A few weeks ago there was a side-by-side reddit screenshot post on Lemmy. It showed the exact same reddit post, with the exact same tens of comments (all word for word, some in response to each other iirc), from different accounts less than a year apart. 100% fabrication. I’d never seen such extensive bot-masquerading as people behaviour; it was a realization moment for me
I think X led the way in robotic hellscape innovation that’s now being adopted by Reddit.
Why am I not surprised! Musk is absolute cancer.
Im not surprised by how quick it dies, base solely on the bad attitude of Spez.
IIRC they changed the way they calculate the scores a few years ago, which generally increased the numbers you saw.
Yes, exactly. The upvotes did not reflect actual real engagement for a long time. I don’t remember anymore where I read about it, but allegedly there is also some artificial correction applied. Maybe to combat brigading of upvotes but can of course be used for manipulation.
Oh I did not now this. Did this happen before or after Spez’s API freakout?
Yeah way before. I had a bit of a look through some announcements and couldn’t find it so I can’t say exactly when.
Damn I didn’t realize how artificial it is now. I remember before the protests I can feel the entire platform reposting stuff over and over with the same content. Pretty much the only good subs are the small niche subs, but those large ones are atrocious.
Reddit also released a new ad system that imbeds products in a “real life way” so you can get bots replying to users asking question that look 100% genuine but are run by say McDs. So if someone asks hey what do you eat in a given day, the bot can come in, totally organically, and say “oh i usually start my day with eggs and toast then for lunch I get a mcwrap because they’re on special for the month of march”. They “learnt” that people don’t write McWrap so they are trying to plug products basically how we do.
Which makes recommendations suss af! I feel almost paranoid going there these days like are half the posts and comments I reply to real??
Genuine question, are mcwraps a thing? Back when I was younger and used to eat from McDonald’s, that was one of the few things worth getting.
I remember them canceling it because I remember they said they didn’t have those anymore. Didn’t really see a reason to go to McDonald’s anymore
I think this disparity in votes and comments is also hugely affected by how the UI has been changing over the years as well as the destruction of third party apps. The site is now designed in a way where active participation is less encouraged than ever before unless you’re running old reddit on a traditional computer with an ad blocker.
Yeah I think this is spot on. Someone else mentioned that Reddit doesn’t really want you spend lots of time (yet anyway, till they can roll out better their new Dynamic Product Ads) on a single post. It would rather you scroll upvote and move on so they can try to get as much of the feed to your eyeballs as possible.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/reddit-sneaky-ai-spam-bots-compete-to-sell-you-stuff/
Reddit is ded, and for good reasons
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