If you ever needed a sign to stop using reddit, this is it.
As bots and sponsored content crowd the internet, Reddit is often seen as a more reliable source of information, and its popularity has exploded in the past couple of years.
Lmfao reading articles like this makes me feel like I’m living in the upside down. The entire site is bots posting content for bots to updoot and comment. Yet here they are getting glazed as “the last site for authentic connection”. Give me a fucking break.
In the same article posted on Reddit one of the top posts is “BuT WhEn ReDdiT aLtErNaTiVe”? Who gonna tell them?
Anyway Reddit was cool up to 5 years ago. Now it’s either bots, AI slop, Trump stuff or furries/hentai stuff.
Reddit’s dead.
I’d go even further back, with hindsight. During the us elections 2016 it became basically transparent the platform was being manipulated, and it wasn’t very sophisticated at that time. It’s really only evolved since then - but there used to be real people to call out the BS.
All before we even get to the corporate fiefdom spez has decided he’d like reddit to be.
Remember in 2013 when reddit made a blog post about reddit meetup day with some statistics and they accidentally left in Eglin Air Force Base as the “most addicted city?”
Of course, can’t have the plebs knowing that the site is manipulated by the US military, so they hid the truth, but archive.org remembers.
It’s just as likely there’s no conspiracy there. It’s reasonable that Reddit was just big at that one particular place, more than other place (per capita), which can make sense given that those people actually talk to each other more than a typical city would.
I do think the US government was pretty good about not propagandizing its own people from within the government. There was a long period of time where non-partisan roles were expected to remain non-partisan. That’s part of why the Biden admin didn’t go after Trump like they should have. They didn’t even want the potential appearance of partisan government. In hindsight, yeah, that may have been foolish. They were fighting a five alarm fire with dollar store plastic squirt guns.
Addicted to what? Reddit?
At least from particular subs, those users would get banned and their comment removed within seconds. 24/7. The response times is what convinced me it wasn’t just volunteer mods handling that.
There have basically always been automods of varying capabilities and complexity. Without those no sub ever would have enough moderation capability.
This wasn’t automod.
“BuT WhEn ReDdiT aLtErNaTiVe”?
Voat exodus imminent
I keep telling them about the Fediverse. I’m certain that because there’s more people on Reddit, they have a higher shot of engagement and attention. So they stick around.
It’s INSANE. The bot flooding started to become notably - and noticeably - bad around the time the API exodus happened. And it’s only accelerated. And most people seem to just be pretending it’s not even happening.
The most prolific posters left and/or came here.
I used to comment 20+ times a day and was always looking for the best time to post my OC to get the most traction.
13 year account. Gone.
Couldn’t give 2 shits, Lemmy is way better.
Well, the humans anyway.
Lemmy shittymorph when
i always like to tell people to look up something they’re really an expert at on these sites (or any kind of “news”/ad-mill shit, notice how wrong they are on the entire thing…then see if they put 2 and 2 together with regards to all the shit they’re not experts on.
anything remotely mainstream and not behind a paywall is just ads and spin
Maybe the article was written by a bot.
Almost certainly. The future is a line of megaphones screaming “It’s never been better!” on autopilot while the world burns
happy studio ghibli AI characters dancing on a projector on a scorched earth with no living creatures and no oxygen
It’s Forbes. One does not have high standards for Forbes content… They seem to write what they are told, not look very deep into issues.
Lmao what a joke. Glad I left that cesspool when I did.
Just a reminder if someone gave you $10,000 a day, youd be very rich and happy. Most certainly set for life.
And with that money alone it’d take 274 years to become a billionaire.
Nobody needs that.
Christ! This is a better description than the ‘million seconds vs. billion seconds’ one.
Even if you got $100,000 a day, every day, it’d take you 27 years to hit a billion with just that money. That’s a working days of an 8 hour, hourly wage of 12,500 an hour. 27 years.
Billionaires need to stop being billionaires.
I can’t even imagine how much easier life would be at ten grand a day. It’s a baffling amount of money. And all we have is proof. Proof that more than that turns these people into something less relatable that an anonymous assassin that shot dead a health insurance company CEO.
Absolute madness.
And you will still never catch up to the billionaires of today because they use that money to make more money even faster than that.
Fuck you spez.
I nominate spez for next neck piercing
There is no justice. Aaron Schwarz is six feet underground while this pestilent boil of a man becomes a billionaire on the back of his achievements.
RIP Aaron
F
The former mod of r/jailbait must be proud of himself
it’s all false growth. it’s the same reason why the economy is tanking yet the exchange is “strong”.
bubble economics.
He took a great place, where there were tons of flourishing communities, that people spent an amazing amount of their free time building and caring for, and took a giant shit all over it to bundle it all up and sell it to the AI garbage lords. Hope it was worth it buddy. Fuck you.
Still a greedy little pigboy, though.
ok
you could at least call him a cunt and drop the reddit-tier verbage.
Why would I want to insult cunts?
Why would you insult pigs? Pigs are intelligent emotional beings.
Greedy little pigboys ain’t, though.
You are absolutely right. He lacks the warmth and depth.
greedy pigbou cunt?
What an absolute disgrace. I’m pissed that Aaron Swartz was the one who died, and that they fired Victoria. Steve Huffman can go choke on a bag of sweaty dicks.
Firing Victoria was really the end of the Old Reddit. It felt like the loss of that side of reddit - the un-guided AMA’s by famous people - just led to reddit descending further into bots and reposts. The site had nothing to talk about other than itself anymore.
I speculate it’s mostly Ouroboros style funding and phony metrics. Bots selling “engagement” to other bots is pretty profitable, I guess. At least for now. The only person I know who still openly uses reddit is an obnoxious drunk white woman in her 60s.
I wish more people converted over, but the user experience for the fediverse is very strange for many people, tech inclined folks I know included.
The lack of active niche communities is frustrating.
Fair, but I did try for a while. Lemmy has a lot of “snipers” who don’t contribute anything more than condescending AKSHUALLY “corrections” or pure snark. You go into their history and that is 90% of what you see. I have blocked several. I think it’s leftover baggage and trauma from reddit. (I don’t consider your meme reply to be a snipe, hopefully that was not implied.)
None taken. Thanks for contributing.
I’d love to create a few niche places like the ones I enjoyed on reddit but when it comes to creating a community on Lemmy, the barrier to entry is steep for me. From what I understand I need an always-on storage medium to host and I don’t really have a spare device that I can reliably keep on 24/7 to host a community on here. I wish it were easier but that’s the nature of the beast I spose.
You only need a server if you want to run an entire instance (ex.
lemmy.world). Anyone can create a community on most instances.The graphics on this guide might help:
https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/detailed-overview
Thank you! I must have gotten instances and communities confused. Still getting used to the fediverse 😅
Okay so im new here and I can’t figure out how to view all communities in one spot on desktop. I can on mobile through the apps. Like reddit’s /r/popular
Where else are people going besides here?
Probably a range of things. Like the fediverse is growing, but look at bluesky’s success. They forgo the real benefit of the structure, but people get a “just make a login” experience.
The kids are probably on something I don’t even know.
I thought about making a bluesky account, but it doesn’t entirely feel all that safe when conservatives are freely posting their misinformation over there too without any pushback.
I get banned from that platform a couple of times a day when over 5 years ago my million karma original account got banned for “threatening violence” Any talk of organizing and rising up will get you the permaban stick. He is yet another complicit billionaire hell bent on killing the American work force and our democracy. He, too, will wear a blindfold when his sentence is read aloud.
I got a permaban just for saying I didn’t care that Trump said Liz Cheney should be shot, because she’s called for the deaths of millions as a warmonger. Didn’t encourage anything. Just said I didn’t care.
deleted by creator
A billion dollars doesn’t make 15 year olds legal, spez.
How many dollars does that?
Feels good knowing you aren’t on a burning ship.
tbh, not for me. I just feel disappointed
it used to be a great place with tons of information and a functional interface. nothing has really replaced it in terms of content and accessibility to the masses
its popularity has exploded in the past couple of years. Daily active users have approximately doubled since the summer of 2023. Google searches increasingly surface links to Reddit: Organic search to the platform is up over 560% from two years ago, per data from digital marketing firm Semrush.
So depressing, I sure hope these stats are bullshit.
I’m willing to bet the new daily active users are largely bots. I remember Facebook pulling this shit last year: bots will count as active users, presumably so they can just keep adding bots and tell shareholders their active user base is growing. It’s all such a scam.
they are.
I’d take it with a big grain of salt — it’s Forbes, they lube up people with money with pretty weak arguments. He is a billionaire, but mostly through overvaluation of the company he’s ultimately gutting for profit. (Although if it died, he is still rich, unfortunately, just not a billionaire).
Some of the arguments being made in the article though, like it being an “authentic place” and having more traffic is a little misleading. For AI, we already know 50% of the Internet is AI made now, in a remarkably short amount of time and a hefty amount of that is going to be on Reddit. If the 90% by 2026 prediction holds true, he’s basically an owner of a gold mine that’s already tapped out. Users won’t necessarily catch on, but they will be drowned out as a source of LLM data.
Admittedly, the traffic increase isn’t all bots but to classify it as organic is misleading too- iirc, they have a deal with Google to push reddit in exchange for Gemini training. Even unrelated searches are propping up Reddit as the first result; it’s like using SEO cheats. As with the poisoning of his data with artificial data, that deal may not last (and if the AI bubble bursts, that’s certainly gone).
Frankly, we need the bubble to burst but we also need heavy regulation on these industries. I’m not too hopeful of the latter and the former isn’t going to be pretty— it’s not like the .com bubble made the 90s a better era, for instance.
