reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).

the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.

another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait ("Am I The Asshole?") because company shareholders want to see "engagement numbers" go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that's "engagement". but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the "Asshole", so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.

size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.

we should probably get rid of the "don't make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow" idea.

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[–] Stolas@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Even if you block the ads and ignore them the site is so heavily botted with these bots pushing all sorts of products.

One of the most useful aspects of reddit used to be getting other perspectives on products you were interested in. This is no longer useful because of the massive networks of bot farms. You simply can no longer tell what's real on that site and what isn't.

[–] Saarth@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The accounts posting fake product reviews to promote products are usually not bots. They are either actual people from ad agencies/brands, posting as a part of the campaign and other people from the agency upvoting (sometime also using engagement farms).

I don't know how much activity on reddit is bot driven, but logically it makes little sense to me to run bot campaigns there. Until 2020, reddit was quite small and insignificant in terms of how many people you could reach. And now, reddit has made their API increasingly more expensive, making it prohibitive for large scale bot posting. Even scraping data is hard and very expensive, let alone posting at scale.

There might be engagement farms and content farms mass posting, but that is manual, not bots, and happens on all social media platforms.

[–] dehyzer@piefed.social 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I don't buy it. Reddit is a prime target, and has been for a very long time.

Reddit allegedly had 400 million unique monthly users back in 2012 already: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reddits-visitors-skyrocket-in-2012-with-37-billion-page-views/

Even if those numbers are inflated (which they almost certainly are), Reddit has had a very large audience for a very long time, even if it wasn't fully recognized as mainstream.

And now, the price of pushing fake reviews has done nothing but drop. API calls to Reddit and LLM providers are surely cheaper than an engagement or content farm of real people.

There's no way that the platform isn't riddled with bots these days.

[–] Saarth@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Hi, The article mentions 400M unique visitors for all of 2012, putting MAU at 400/12= ~33-34M MAUs?

Facebook it seems was doing a billion MAUs at this time, so 1000/33 = ~ 30. So reddit was approximately 30 times smaller than Facebook.

Now Facebook as far as I remember has always been a logged in experience. Back in the early days of reddit a lot of visitors did not sign up (because it was a link sharing website like digg), and I am not sure how good cookies and user attribution was back then but surely a lot of those 400M unique views weren't unique people. But this is just my guess. Ignoring this stil makes reddit much smaller than fb.

Marketers btw, still consider reddit to be a niche social media. Look at this post here - https://www.reddit.com/r/redditstock/comments/1vj4i4i/just_learned_reddits_ad_revenue_is_lower_than/

Reddit get less money from advertisers than Bing and Yahoo in 2026. You might tell me that marketers are not paying for ads and instead using bots to pay for free and even that is the case, it's much much smaller than other mainstrem social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok)

[–] dehyzer@piefed.social 1 points 1 hour ago

Good catch on MAU, my bad. I knew that seemed a bit high.

That being said, point still stands. Reddit was a big deal well before 2020 even if it was not at the top of the social media food chain.

Certainly large enough to target back then, and even more so now when such a campaign is cheaper and easier than ever.

[–] LadyButterfly@reddthat.com 2 points 1 day ago

Yep it used to be you could hop on and get great guidance on products. Now you never know what's real

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 points 1 day ago

apparently indian bot farms of BJP (modi) is very heavy in indian subs, maybe thats why we are seeing alot of indian content.

[–] blubasaur@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago

That and their banhappy atitude towards real users.

[–] wazoobonkerbrain@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I agree and it boils my blood. I have to calm myself by puffing on a smooth and mellow Marlboro Extra Deluxe Cigarette.

[–] TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

that's an internet wide problem though.