What’s happening to reddit 🤦🏻♀️
Great… it’s like dollar store Facebook or Quora for 12 year olds or something.
Well, to be fair, most of the really good content was rarely make it to r/all. Reddit’s biggest strength was always the sometimes oddly specific niche communities. You had a niche? You’ll find a place or multiple places where you can sate your hunger.
To this day I still look into Reddit, albeit I don’t participate anymore, because there are some niche communities that I can’t find in a similiar form somewhere else.
Isn’t Quora for 12 year olds already?
Its that or relationship/AITA type posts that are so wildly insane I dont know why anyone bothers replying.
My (58M) wife (18F) cheated on me with my brother’s ex-girlfriends hockey coach. AITA for not attending SIL’s wedding because her dress code specifies hockey jerseys and they refuse to tell me if BXGHC will be there? Also the dinner is a plate of skittles, which I have a bad history with.
I’m convinced theres a troll game going on to make the dumbest aita post, last time I went in to check my messages I saw one with a guy asking if he was the asshole because he yelled at his daughter for missing her recently dead mother
“NTA - only a psychopath would serve skittles, so everything you did was right.”
“That’s a red flag right there. She is definitely gaslighting you.”
- Hit the lawyer
- Gym up
Hit up the lawyer gym.
This guy AITA’s.
“YTA, skittles are the food of the gods. Also you could easily dress up like a hockey puck and get hammered by the coach.”
YTA, you should support your brothers ex-girlfriends hockey coaches right to copulate with your wife, stop being such a control freak by trying to keep them apart. Also, skittles are an excellent meal and a good source of nutrition. Nothing to see here, just a drama queen looking to have their shitty decisions justified by the libtards.
The titles sounds like research for BuzzFeed articles. “The ten movies that hook you from the beginning” etc. Wouldn’t surprise me if the posts are just lazy article farms.
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…
If you’re interested in niche communities, the problem is that you’re not going to see those posts unless you visit them specifically or make a multireddit for them.
BTW, now we have a community for unexpected factorials too.
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.
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
Perhaps there really are thousands of worthwhile comments to make about these topics.
Couldn’t even keep a straight face writing that.
- 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.
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.
AITA -insert fake story that never happened where I’m clearly the asshole-
NTA. Your story, your rules.
“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“
I’m so glad I didn’t have to. I can’t really stand her sister.
Is it a tradition in your family?
Reddit sucks.
Consider nuking your comments then deleting your account:
Already done my dude.
It’s Lemmy for me now and into the future.
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Bots
While you were using the subreddits you were subscribed to, the general default subreddits were always seeing activity like this.
But over time reddit has been attracting a far more general audience of regular people from other social media platforms.
