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.”
deleted by creator
- 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.
Ding ding ding
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.
Yep I also miss some of the reddits, eg icecreamery, and fitness. Weird thing is, fitness reddit is super popular and there’s nothing active here as far as I can tell.
That is exactly my thought. I don’t think Lemmy is better. I want there to be something that makes this place feel like a true future platform but really it just feels like a bunch of people making websites that share comment sections and almost all of them being shitty or dead.
For now I think if we all try to keep an engagement quota soon enough the snowball will start pushing itself
I mean right? What’s cool if not what enough people are doing?
But I do still think this whole concept needs to get easier. Honestly integration with mastodon to make it simple to use both with 1 account would probably do it.
And indexing is gonna be a big hurdle. Reddits search was pretty abismal but there have been posts here I was telling people about and since I didn’t upvote them or comment they just are basically gone forever.
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.
My first time saving a post because, yeah exactly.
For me it was always very obvious, but also clear they were trying to be subtle.
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
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.
- 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.
Perhaps there really are thousands of worthwhile comments to make about these topics.
Couldn’t even keep a straight face writing that.
I’m not sure what’s so weird about this
It’s all “engagement-bait” from bot accounts.
It always was. Astronaut.meme
I remember a time when Reddit was the answer to big brother controlling the information. Democratized ideololgy, where ideas would stand before the masses and be judged on merit alone.
But the hive mind is easily manipulated, and the profits must flow.
Ah didn’t notice that
Can’t say I blame you. Its purpose is to blend in.
What’s their endgame here? These parts won’t even collect karma since they’re self posts.
That rule about self posts not giving you karma was changed way back in 2016.
Karma isn’t the goal - clicks are. The more people (or bots) interact with the site, the more traffic is generated, and the less it looks as if reddit is dying. Spez is trying to forge engagement with/on reddit.
Even if a post gets half a million downvotes and dozens of reports, does that only mean that it generated more than half a million clicks.
(That’s also the reason most clickbait is such a huge heap of bullshit. An outrageously dumb/wrong statement right in the title and lots of bullshit in the article = people get angry, leave comments, argue, share the article with likeminded people to show them how dumb/wrong it is … and the author gets paid per click in ad revenue. The writers know they’re wrong, but a factually correct article doesn’t generate nearly as much traffic.)
Text posts get karma. They changed that a few years ago.
Prolly bots doing bots thing.
What profession is willing to pay for social media recruitment?
What prejudice do you want to have confirmed?
What product do you wish to advertise?
What media product do you wish to advertise?
Can you believe this obvious lie?
I am on Lemmy to not have to see it.
Maybe block [email protected]
Sure, done
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.
Wow, Margot! Such a beautiful input. No wonder how you sold Barbie for the producers.
That’s “Esteemed character actress Margot Robbie of Hollywoo” to you, Mr. Adultman.
Also, how did your business go at the stock market today?
I carry a briefcase and do all the adulthood stuff, things. Some guys at the office wanted to exchange real money for bitcoins, but holding coins is a children thing (and I am not a children). I like paper money.
Sorry for the disrespect ma’am. Next time I will call you as you deserve, Esteemed character actress Margot Robbie of Hollywoo.
Reddit has devolved into a Taboola chum feed.
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“
Followed the next day by, “Women of Reddit, what’s something guys do…”
Followed again the next day by, “Men of Reddit…” by people who didn’t see the original post.
“Men of reddit, what’s your favorite way to receive fellatio?” by ARealWomanIRL
I’m so glad I didn’t have to. I can’t really stand her sister.
Is it a tradition in your family?
