This was the latest from Huffman: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/15/1182457366/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-its-time-we-grow-up-and-behave-like-an-adult-company
Basically, rather than focus on quality, they just shifted to the same subjective engagement bait that also happens to be easy to manipulate on the backend and almost impossible to prove that’s plaguing all major social networks. It’s easy to see too, they let major subs go to hell by letting special interests and the power hungry just go nuts, and they now only show up if you really search for them. Do things like adding a sub like r/conservative, and the whole world view it feeds you is completely different and tailored by troll factories, bots, and the like. They are crowd sourcing propaganda bubbles just so they can feed off of the scraps, and sadly I have no doubt it is very effective against the younger generation that’s just getting exposed to these sort of platforms.
he also allowed bots, propaganda accounts to hide thier history too.
Translation: “it’s time we go experience enshittification like most tech and social media companies.”
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
i got permanently banned from reddit for saying that jeff bezos should see a “gill o’ teen”. seriously!
I guess they did Nazi that coming
What a lovely and useful graph
It gives me “Linux market share increased from 3.0025% to 3.0048%.” vibes
Oh, that was me and the boys installing Linux all night long
Line go down
Data visualization is my passion
I clung to Reddit for too long even though it sucked because it was awesome years ago and it was a habit.
One I joined here I started laughing again. Lemmy is so fun and funny. Reddit is just full of bots that don’t know what humor is and petty people who forgot how to laugh.
Lemmy not without problems too. Biased weird mods, small user base = not a lot of content and platform itself that lacking in some crucial functionality, like choosing comment layout by default (for example: always showing top comment). It sure are fixable problems, but will they be fixed? Who knows.
it was mostly bots even before the API drama.
Good, they are absolute fucking garbage. I can’t wait for it to be a 100% bot echo chamber.
There is nothing to wait for. It has been there for a while now.
It basically already is
just heard spez wants to get rid of the R/popular on the front page and due to more “inclusive feed” probably something similar to what facebook does no doubt.
he’s probably butthurt because it doesn’t align with his politics
Maybe he changes it to
r/populist
What happened to r/place?
It is riddled with bots. Like, you know. The whole thing supposed to be where people would collaborate, vote for the best design on their sub and then implement it on the canvas together. But instead we got bunch of bot accounts that would draw pictures faster than a speed of sound and not let anyone draw anything there but themselves.
And also, during IPO incident, spez decided that the best option to distract people from the elephant in the room would be to run (at that point already not so much) beloved r/place.
Bots and Germans happened.
Fuck u/spez
I don’t know, but it’s been dead since 2023
To infinity and beyond!
That’s because everyone has finally read it, and now we can move on.
Not only that. An LLM read all of it and now we can just ask the LLM what it says.
I feel like reddit is accidentally trying to speedrun dead internet theory.
I stopped using it when their quality contributor score shadowbanned me because I don’t post enough in the right subs.
My partner stopped using it for the same reason - account used every couple days for comments also shadowbanned out of no where.
Starting a new account means grinding for a month or two in subs that force you to spam each other with up votes before you can ever do anything other than post and ask the mods to approve your post manually.
I’m not sure there’s anything accidental in it.
its speedrunning to facebook2.0, fb is pratically just AI mostly. spez is currently is trying to get rid of r/popular, to have a more “curated feed” for people.
Chatbots must be very upset by that
So upset
Lol
O.o
Globally, but in the US they’re #2. They’re behind Facebook for those kind of sites. They’re right behind Amazon.com at #5 for popular sites overall. Kind of freaky. It must be masked bots for both reddit and facebook, it can’t be real users if you’ve seen the most popular pages.
Of course it ain’t real users.
Reddit has had a major bot problem a decade ago and little has been done to mitigate it - beyond banning legitimate users who dared to be too loud about it.
I’ve moderated a relatively small sub, and pretty much for every legitimate post a day, you’d get 6 to 10 bot posts literally pulling an older post verbatim word for word, or maybe introducing a typo just to make detection harder…
Reddit’s response to the issue? “Hey, why don’t you pay us ~$25 a month just so you can continue using that open source automatic bot detection system we refuse to build into the site itself?”.
little has been done to mitigate it
They made it more difficult for community to spot bots. Now anyone can hide their profile post/comment history. By design!
pretty much for every legitimate post a day, you’d get 6 to 10 bot posts
Real! I once saw a post in some sub where mods were complaining about bot/AI problems lately. In comments there was a guy who said he is moderating a very niche sub about toyota trucks with a few thousands of users. He said that half of the posts in a day feature AI generated pictures of these cars. Can’t be real people posting it. I wonder what really happens in bigger subs.
ChatGPT will be very disappointed to hear this, since most of reddit is just it talking to itself.
