So I checked out reddit after a long time and was going through the top of r/videogames subreddit and I could clearly see a pattern in most of the posts there. Posts were mostly like “what game ______ for you?” or “what game _____ like this?” Now I could be wrong but it doesn’t feel ‘organic’ (if that’s correct way to put it). It’s like these are put up intentionally. Thoughts?
bots are fucking atrocious for generating just miles and miles of trash content on Reddit.
As a mod for many years, the real moding work was finding ways to keep the bots at bay.
It got real bad since around 2020ish…
They can train their AI’s all they want on Reddit, it’s a complete waste of time.
That data is corrupt as shit. It’s already littered with garbage old AI posts and comments, and it’s gonna poison their models real bad.
Hey, it might not be bots. Could be junior high kids.
I didn’t expect it to reach this level…it doesn’t feel appealing.
Do they have some AI chatting in comment ? :)
Its probably buzzfred trying to scam a story out of someone
I’ve tried to give Reddit another chance and the majority of posts just seem artificial, AI or bots, I’m not sure but it has definitely lost its organic nature.
The couple of times I snooped in on Reddit to see how it was going, Top Day felt like going through some TikTok/Instagram Story clone.
The GenX sub is the same now. It’s just a bunch of questions now like “what’s your favorite song from the 80’s?”. It used to be a sub with substance and now it’s lame.
from the '80s*
I mean I’d argue that’s how any even moderately sized social media system feels. It’s because it drives clicks. Influencers, Youtubers, sites, they all crave to do more of this because it gets the cash rolling in, and it’s a business after all.
Karma bots making low effort shitposts because our dumb monkey brains will upvote it. it happened before but you ignored it because you cared enough about the organic engagement on the community and mods did enough to try to stop that behavior
Now that Reddit removed mods that actually did their jobs and you’re one of us, it’s all you can think about
My guess is with the protests that some of the top content creators moved away and never came back.
I remember sorting by hot once gave a wide variety of things and now it seems to be more drama posts like AITA posts.
Although it feels like I’m still following an ex, There was one place over there I used to visit a lot and I believe if you took a snapshot of the top ten posts of a random day few years ago and today, they’d be very different. Today’s seems to be a group picking up a trend and running with it and before it was more original content. I remember going there because I knew there’d be something new I’d likely laugh at or be amused by and now it feels heavily recycled.
The subscriber count is still way up, but I’d you look at the online/active user count, it feels like its around 10% it was off recent highs.
It felt like the sub had a ship of thecleus moment where it seemed to just be growing, but was also losing people until the group changed but the name was the same.
Someone else said the new reddit gold allows people to receive real money* if people gild their posts (by spending real money) * receiver must be in certain countries.
I saw a post recently on a wholesome memes page where someone tagged repost sleuth bot and someone else commented that todays post was literally a copy of the third top voted post of all time. It was.
I also remember that bot support got affected and this led to a spam detector bot being moved from active development to sunset mode where it was still supported but not actively enhanced.
The subscriber count is still way up, but I’d you look at the online/active user count, it feels like its around 10% it was off recent highs.
Same here. Subs with hundred of thousands of subscribers, but barely any activity.
Been like that for a while.
For example, /r/videos supposedly has 30 million subscribers, but you can sometimes hit the front page of that sub with 50 upvotes.
Subs like that have been decimated by tiktok, so it’s safe to assume most of the subscribers have left. It simply doesn’t make sense.
Telegram is just lousy with crap posts and comments now as well.
I still use reddit for some of the niche and sports communities that just aren’t really present on Lemmy (or not yet at least). I only use old reddit, and I only use my front page or the multis I curated myself. One thing I’ve noticed a lot lately is posts with zero upvotes and usually zero comments appearing in hot, top, and best filters. Most of these are absolute trash posts that were clearly posted by a bot.
I do not understand what benefit they’re seeking by shoving bad posts with no positive feedback into these sorting options but it’s fuckin weird.
They don’t care what the users see, they want to push metrics on their investors and hope they’re not going to do a deep dive into their traffic.
What metric do posts with no user engagement push though? From an analytics standpoint I don’t see the value prop
It could just be to push “X unique contributors to y number of subreddits”
Just using this comment to advertise for our college football community, definitely one of the small niche sports communities you mentioned: !cfb@fanaticus.social.
Why are you using r/videogames as an example to make this claim?
There are at least two more subs that are wildly more popular and have much more activity and substantial posts and commenting.
- videogames - 293k subscribers
- Games - 3.3m subscribers
- gaming - 40m subscribers
I am subbed to both of those last two and didn’t even know the first one existed because it’s offshoot trash.
These are engagement farming posts. Both reddit and Twitter are full of them, because both sites are now offering money to accounts whose posts get lots of upvotes/comments.
It feels gross and inauthentic.
I don’t even know how much of a role the monetary aspect has. I feel like a lot of Reddit is naturally gross and inauthentic but also soulless and elitist in a way. People still post content because they want the Reddit karma and rehash the same prompts that gives the same predictable answers that seem to appease the crowd. Other times when things are reposted comments will act harshly and and redirect them to a post or wiki from years ago.
Reddit, to me, seems to lack genuine human interactions.
Something similar happened to Quora when they started offering to pay people just to produce questions, not good questions, not answers, just questions. Quora was already kinda tenuous and growing its tolerance for fascists, but that move dropped a cinder block on the enshittification gas pedal. Quota’s basically been completely unusable since then and it’s only gotten worse.
Edit: wrote Quota instead of Quora, but I like the typo’s energy, so I’m leaving it.
Some of them read like content farming posts-get a bunch of people to talk about a given topic with a specific direction, then “write” an article that is basically “video games are crazy, aren’t they? Here’s some really crazy video game stories!
[five word intro] [full text of a Reddit comment] [repeat ad nauseam]”
Weren’t there at least rumors during the protests that reddit is actively looking for engagement posters? Ever since then discussions seem partly artificial (or maybe it just coincides with the rise of AI garbage).
My thoughts exactly. Kinda like how some tiktoks/reels/shorts are specifically crafted to make you watch them over and over again to drive up viewing time.
Hmm that makes sense.
You WILL consume the slop
Reddit green is made of bots?
When I first joined lemmy, there were bean posts everywhere. People kept posting shitty puns about beans with pictures of beans, and people kept upvoting them. But it eventually died down.
Could these kinds of posts just be a fad on reddit right now?
The life cycle of a meme seems broken. They font just go to Facebook to die any more. Reddit reached a size where a meme can’t die. There’s enough people where a meme can get reposted a few days later and still hit the front page multiple times. Its new to enough people it gets a second or third round. We seen it naturally with Hosts and beans, but it died off once everyone got sick of the joke.
Bots copy and repost what gets upvotes. Seems something gets big a few times over untill enough people see it, then the bots add it to the good meme list and could hit make “new” at any time. The dead meme comes back at just the right moment to be new to some and retro to others, the cycle repeats.
The beans were great. As incoherent as they got it felt like someone was trying to post content so they got my upvotes. It can get pretty dead around here and I was glad for the change of pace. For a while there was nothing but AI prompt Sailor Moon art that was pretty entertaining too
