I see it a lot with AskReddit, surveying (or possibly influencing) how people feel when something happened in the news. Those posts get bumped to the front page.
Is reddit dead yet?
Not even close. It simply has too much critical mass.
Twitter was taken over by a white south african nazi and grifter with delicate sensibilities and people are still using it like nothing has happened.
Reddit would have to enshitify even more, and believe me they are trying.
Didn’t people leave it for BlueSky? I can’t figure out how to use BlueSky… could never get Twitter to work either, maybe it’s too Gen Z for my Millenial ass?
deleted by creator
Didn’t people leave it for BlueSky?
A small number of people yes, but most influencers remain on Twitter or use both.
I should also point out that BlueSky is backed by crypto bros and they’ve never had any intentions of improving anything the way the people who want to move moved things.
They ran on the idea of decentralization but ultimately BlueSky is, in practice, completely centralized and its not possible to decentralize it. You can run your own instance, but that would just be a separate centralized instance as opposed to any sort of meaningful federation.
I can’t figure out how to use BlueSky… could never get Twitter to work either, maybe it’s too Gen Z for my Millenial ass?
I hate to say it but… that has nothing to do with age, because there are old people on either. Its just a microblog platform like any other microblog platform.
The problem is I can’t find any worthwhile content. Feels like it’s completely random what shows up on my feed
Well, until you start following people you like the content of, of course no algorithm will have good suggestions for you, so youll get a generic one hoping that you like something eventually and thus it can fine tune.
I’m not seeing any proof the Twitter is doing well as a company.
It doesn’t need to. This is about the relevance of the platform, and it remains highly relevant.
Social media companies exist to control what the public thinks the public thinks (generally). They don’t care nearly as much about profitability, and its obvious that musk more than others felt this way, especially with getting exactly what he wanted politically.
It’s why they want to ban NSFW content, with “Oh btw LGBT, ESPECIALLY T content counts as NSFW” stipulations
that and i don’t think its ever been profitable
to add to your point the biggest community on sh.itjust.works:
https://sh.itjust.works/communities
people love twitter so much they subscribe to it on other social media platforms!
No. It’s definitely not what is was, for sure. But while search engines (especially Google) are so fucking bad, adding ‘reddit’ to your search is still the best way to get answers to your actual question and not just irrelevant sponsors and paid plugs.
Ofc that’s probably a big reason why reddit has swarms of bots for grass roots advertising… it’s a vicious slippery circle of slop
I haven’t found a useful Reddit result that is less than two years old. Bot answers don’t provide the same value as actual human expertise. Go figure.
Being on reddit makes me sad, because I got my account permabanned. I do miss being able to use the last actually active forum on the net.
Sadly, but no. From good news we only have increased amounts of bad reviews online and in app stores like Play Market.
Its spirit is dead, but its corpse lingers on.
Tbf bots have as much a sense and substance as most people on Reddit
Yeah but they are 100% regurgitating, people on Reddit add random novelty information. Without the people the bots would just spin in the mud.
I like to think that somewhere out there, an LLM is slowly digesting my reddit history, lurking in the cloud, waiting to one day puke one of those stinky brown nuggets into some executive’s quarterly sales report.
I rather read a comment from the thorn user than some fucking bot lol
Idk people used my reddit post trails to be creepy little bitches back in the day.
Eh. If a webcrawer took a snapshot, they could just be indexed anyways. Its false sense of security.
Just like upvote/downvotes on Lemmy. Btw its all public lemvotes.org
But then how would you check if someone is a disingenuous troll, or a hypocrite, etc, it’s the usual privacy vs open information trade off
The only thing on the UX manager’s mind, when considering this decision, was “engagement.”
Nothing else is even in their same universe.
A post made on a public forum is public information. I’ve used post history to figure out if someone was serious vs telling a joke that fell flat or for weird patterns.
So what? These are public comments. If you don’t want your comments to haunt you for a prior bad take, maybe don’t have bad takes or alternatively, explain them.
If you’re saying you put personal information there, one layer of obfuscation wouldn’t stop someone motivated from finding information. This only stops people using profiles as intended.
I’ve got a take for you, drop dead cunt.
It’s not necessarily bad takes it can be someone with an obsession trawling your history for oblique personal details or whatever. may only be a deterrent to tech illiterate stalkers but better than nothing imo
may only be a deterrent to tech illiterate stalkers but better than nothing imo
This sounds an awful lot like “think of the [irrelevant group used for leverage such as terrorists or babies]” arguments.
This largely has not been a problem, and so to loose something much more important for it seems absurd to me.
I mean it’s also opt-in. If you’re feeling civic minded you can just leave it on
Opt in or out makes no difference for its affects on being able to discern where someones opinions are coming from. “Just evaluate the arguments themselves” means trolls insta-win.
Public stalking-enabling was always the worst aspect of reddit. That it helps bots is incidental to how good it is for user privacy.
As others highlighted:
This only helps the bots. It’s useless against stalking, since you can still find a list of the person’s post/comments by searching their username in Google or even Reddit itself. And a stalker, unlike someone trying to denounce bots, will do it.
If anything this harms users. A false sense of security is worse than accurately feeling unsafe.
And the motivation for that is clearly to hide the bots. Bots give you metrics. Metrics give you ad views. Ad views give you money.
Public stalking-enabling was always the worst aspect of reddit.
Are mods of one subreddit still able to stalk your history of another subreddit in order to permaban you for joining a subreddit that they don’t like? It seems counterproductive for advertisers but that’s exactly what the r_bitcoin subreddit does. It’s a well-known echo chamber and those mods want to keep it that way.
Wait, hold on, slow down. Are you telling me there are bots on Reddit?
Reddit did WHAT?
huge number of people who make controversial statements (particularly those who are pro-russia) have their profiles set to hidden so you can’t see what else they have posted
Huh. How hard is it to make a browser extension that automatically down votes posts by any such person? Asking for people who might still be on there.
Probably easy. However, anyone using such extension would be banned for voting manipulation. YMMV on how justified the later is.
honestly people just need to stop using the site.
Yeah, but what constitutes vote manipulation is an issue that pops up here, too. I bet most instances would ban someone acting like this, too.
That is very much the first people I would expect making use of that feature, yes.
I use it, just because some people’s first reaction in an argument is to look you up. While if you hide it then googling you takes longer and is not ordered properly. Hell a while back I replied to someone about my opinion on something and the first thing he said is “a guy who’s into x hobby can’t seriously have valid opinions”. So yes, since then, my profile is private.
Then you’re not one of the bad actors I’m concerned about. The problem with this change is that there’s no way for other people to tell the difference. If I have suspicions about the motivations of the person (assuming they are a person) I’m interacting with, and I cannot disprove those suspicious to my own satisfaction, that leaves me with two rational options: 1) Blind faith, which in an anonymous Internet context is particularly unjustifiable, or 2) To assume bad faith and act accordingly.
This has some really unfortunate consequences.
There used to be a site called Reddit, where you were your post history. Now that site is dead - the URL still works, I guess, but it links to some weird Twitter with an alien logo.
That’s the best description of reddit I’ve ever seen both past and present, and you’ve completely bypassed all of the usual sayings about reddit in the process. I applaud you! Now where’s that Lemmy gold thing…
On a side note, an actual financial implementation of Lemmy gold would probably be a really good feature to drive donations to hosts. I’d imagine the implementation as the user donates to their host and receives a configurable amount of gold to give as a reward for donating. That gold is entirely tracked by the instance their account is on, then when they gift gold to a user the receiving instance just receives notice that gold was given, similar to an upvote. Then to filter for bad actors instance admins can whitelist/blacklist instances from giving gold to their instance, and probably also make it possible to see which instances a user’s gifted gold came from as a layer of transparency to help spot bad faith instances that give free gold or too much gold or whatever.
I could also see an extension where a portion of the gold’s value is transmitted to the recipient via cryptocurrency (about the only thing cryptocurrency is actually good at, peer to peer online transactions) but that has way too much opportunity for abuse. Maybe that can be done manually by admins to help ensure a fair dispersal of gold funds? Still overcomplicating and introduces a ton of opportunity for abuse though
I would just add a regular donate function that takes crypto, Paypal, etc but adds a small fee configurable by the instance owner on top.
But to stop it from becoming like YouTube with clickbait everywhere, you would need limits on how much can be given and received.
I’m not sure if gold would be a good fit for the Fediverse forums. As problematic as the voting system is, tying visibility to popularity is less worse than tying it to money spent.
Instead I think the current approach (donations) should be improved. I expect the same type of people who’d buy gold to finance their instances to be OK with donations, as long as they know it’ll be well used.
People able to pay money, to have their voice louder than the rest, is one of the many current plagues throughout our societies right now. I don’t think gold or awards would be good at all for the fediverse. Please dear satan, no
Yeah, caption misses the fact that you can be easily banned for simply interacting with such bot in comments in any way against the bot.
Transcription
4chan greentext post with a photo of a robot with its mouth open wide in surprise, wearing glasses and an orange singlet with the Reddit logo on it:
>be me bored redditor
>click on obvious bot account using ChatGPT
>want to check post history for confirmation
>“this user has no posts”
>wtf.jpg
>realize reddit added an option to make post history invisible
>bots now basically untraceable
>reddit “accidentally” made it harder to tell real users from bots
>engagement numbers go up nobody questions itReddit was interesting before politics became interesting
Maybe you need to read a history book
Most of Reddit was bots interacting with bots a while ago already.
The site makes most of its money selling ads. The value of that ad space is based on user metrics.
Many users are now fake. They are actively hiding this fact.
Apropos of nothing, the company has a $34 billion market cap.
Why is anyone paying for adverts that no one will see though? Surely adverts only have value if it brings in sales.
Would be amusing to see the entire advertising market crash tbh.
It’s extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of online ads and most companies have an incentive to inflate their numbers since they’re sold as a certain number of views/impressions.
Advertising is a scam for both those who buy it and the intended audience.
At the end of the day views/impressions don’t matter, people actually buying the thing is what matters. If no one is buying you can have a billion views and impressions but it wouldn’t even be worth £5. So then advertising companies would struggle to find buyers if buyers quickly see it isn’t worth it.
The point being made is that the big corps advertising have an exceedingly hard time measuring whether ad buys resulted in sales, and especially which ad buys resulted in sales.
Buyers don’t see that it isn’t worth it, they can only guess.
You think that in 2025 companies with large media budgets are buying digital ads and just saying “well fuck it maybe we’ll make money on it”?
They track EVERYTHING. From the impression to the click tot he purchase, and there are trackers and attribution platforms by the hundreds out there to help them understand what the ROI they’re receiving on those ads are.
Companies are buying ads because people are buying products.
Even if the site is 90% bots there are enough real people using the site to make buying ads profitable.
The amount of money bot views bring in shows that yes, they are just yoloing buying ad space.
Yeah.
To misquote a paper, “attention is all you need.” It’s like the motto of the 2020s.
I suspect part of the reason for bots is to keep people on the platform. But if people start to realise which is probably going to become more likely as the number of bots rises and quality drops, then real people would start to leave or lose interest.
Could be short term engagement at the risk of long term platform health?
I’d imagine that’s exactly what’s happening.
Whether it plays out with people leaving remains to be seen. It’s become such a busted out shell of its former self, I can’t stand it anymore, but plenty of people almost certainly feel differently.
From your lips to god’s ears
This timeline had been more “from God’s ass to our mouths.”
From your foot to god’s dick
If you then train new bots on the generated content, the models will degrade yes?
The bots know what is bot content and what is not.
Actual users don’t.The bots know what is bot content and what is not.
Probably not. It’s way easier to generate bot content than to detect it. Unless they’re coming from the same group, but I find this unlikely.
If you look a lot of new posts, they are actually highly upvoted old posts. So bots probably stay the same.
bots on fedi have been probing for an algorithm to exploit. not getting far, just annoying.
Care to elaborate on what you’ve found to watch out for?
blank profiles, ‘johnny truth’@ multi instances, high follows near zero followers, spam post then delete acct, usual jump bait spam for page views, porn spam. admins(thanks) mostly stay on top of it. botters might figure out how to make a profile but all their tools are geared toward average platform idiots. def above average idiots around here. here on lemmy just look at their profile posts, you’ll know. same post over dozens of communities. report/permaban/mute/block next.
Thanks - good to know
Jfc
It seems to me that the combination of AI + engagement stats + advertising rates is probably enabling historically massive fraud.
But if the perpetrators of the fraud are tech giants worth trillions, and the companies selling the ads are the same tech giants worth trillions, how are individuals and small companies supposed to make good decisions about their ad budgets or do anything about the fraud?
I’m not going to shed any tears for the advertising industry, but I’m not looking forward to the side effects if the AI bubble pops and vaporizes $10 trillion of tech market cap. (all the big players would still be worth a trillion dollars but people would lose their shit)
