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"For communicators, Reddit's value is in the real conversations that people are having about your brand today, not where it surfaces tomorrow," said Adam Collins, Reddit's chief communications officer.
Reddit defining its platform as a place for consumers to discuss brands speaks volumes about its motives.
Compounded by it being mostly bots doing that.
Reddit is astroturfed from day 1. By that I mean they literally faked it until they made it as in the early days Reddit was 100% consisted of sock puppets, whose activity convinced outside people to join.
It's long forgotten how reddit was open source. Not only that but people hosted their own instances of reddit as test beds for botting and who knows what else.
The quickmeme incident got memoryholed real fast. That era of image macro memes was basically entirely fabricated.
I disagree, I met people from reddit at meets IRL and we played darts and drank beer.
Crisis actors. Spez is going for the long con.
Nothing to disagree with. It’s a fact about how they got Reddit going.
"I bought a brand today!"
"Woah! So did I!"
"I'm so happy this brand has made my life!"
"Yeah! So it has mine!"
Fucking riveting stuff there.
remember the silence brand crab? pepperidge farms remembers...
remember they had a reddit layout for mobile but they killed it for the app. i think it was called ireddit.
I mean, you're talking about Reddit, which is a brand, in this comment.
Like, people talk about things, and a lot of things have brands.
It's just a bit two-faced and dishonest for Reddit to be marketing itself to users as a platform for genuine discussion while in actuality being a marketing platform for brands.
If more Redditors realized what Reddit has become, they might be more willing to join a platform without the centralized control that enables manipulation.
With enough users on the Fediverse, the astroturfing will come. It's not really inherently resistant to brand placements etc. It's just not big enough to get corporate attention.
Astroturfing will come, but the platform itself can't as easily be designed to enable it with preferential algorithms and tracking. If an instance injects ads into its frontend, users can easily switch instances or use an alternative frontend or app; if a specific instance is known to host promotional posts, it can be easily defederated or otherwise blocked.
The same cannot be said for blocking ads or tracking on Reddit, particularly for mobile users.
I mean, it kinda is.
Lemmy is setup in a way that it totally crumbles at around 100-200k active users. The "every instance replicates almost everything while being legally liable if it doesn't correctly moderate everything" means that it's close to impossible to run a Lemmy instance if there's too many people on the platform.
Reddit has more than one billion accounts and hundreds of millions of active users.
Lemmy physically cannot sustain anything near those numbers. Thus it's kinda hard-coded to prevent it from getting serious astroturfing, for better and for worse.
For comparison: Both the LTT forum and the crackberry forum have more total and more active users than all of Lemmy combined.
If it ever grew that much instances could go private for signups, require referrals, only federate to select communities (it would be necessary at that point to avoid bad actors) Like a whitelist instead of or in addition to the blocklist.
The content has taken a nosedive in the last three months - just take a look at /r/all and you'll see duplicate postings appearing on the feed within the first 100 posts.
The quality of the conversation has plummeted as well. Most comments are one or two sentences, and usually just reaction posts. You can see where the AI bots have taken over - entire comment chains where old reddit tropes are just passed back and forth without any real context, critique, humor, or understanding.
It's no longer a discussion forum. It's a reaction machine, pushing a narrative that has been stripped of anything original that could be disruptive to the status quo... in other words, stripped of the very humanity that made it valuable for ChatGPT in the first place.
I’ve noticed the same thing. I was a long time user of Reddit. Practically obsessed over it at times. But after noticing how toxic and just plain stupid it’s gotten lately, I’ve almost completely left it. I don’t even have an account anymore. I think the final straw for me was a video of a kid allegedly being a little shit towards an older woman, so this woman’s husband started hitting the kid. And then another guy came and slapped the kid. And the majority of commenters were on the side of the adults hitting a child clearly under 12 years old. No use being on it anymore when it’s clearly just a rage machine now.
I remember my most downvoted comment was on a video of someone driving down a residential street with cars parked on both sides of the road and no visibility. They were going exactly the speed limit, and they collide with a kid that pops out between cars, as kids are wont to do, and the dad comes out and punches the car in anger and yells at the driver.
I commented that maybe you should slow down a bit when you're in a dangerous situation like that where you can't see pedestrians. Multiple people replied that the kid deserves to die for… being a kid? I think it was at worse than -100 votes when I checked before deleting my account. This was before A.I., but after it started becoming a toxic rage-bait machine. Everyone was in full justice boner mode for the dad and the kid being evil and stupid, and that drivers are completely within their rights to go full speed and hit any kids if they happen to appear.
It's really a good case study on the way the average Redditor thinks / acts.
or those comments were bots themselves. if the sub is on the main page, you bet there will be mostly bots commenting to engage.
If you've been at Reddit for a while, you recognize all those blantant bot-driven reposts. It's really something. The same old screenshot of some tweet being reposted hundreds of times. The same questions in /r/askreddit with the same old answers. Memes that are repeating on a fixed schedule. The same ragebait content enraging the second generation of a family.
You can see where the AI bots have taken over - entire comment chains where old reddit tropes are just passed back and forth without any real context, critique, humor, or understanding.
That just sounds like the typical askreddit comment section for the past decade, ngl
Considering askreddit was the first sub I personally noticed go from feeling like anywhere else online to become blatantly overrun with bots and astroturfing, feels like a chicken-or-the-egg situation.
Yeah, I thought the same thing as well. I've got no doubt it's gotten worse, but the place was never known for originality.
Nah, they used to mostly fit the context. Over the last few years when looking for some thing technical and got reddit memes in newer posts were just tossed in randomly like a five year old who just learned a slang term. Older posts had memes that fit the post and comments.
they also lost a ton of traffic i believe too, AI slop posting and reposting, prop bots, and your spammers have mostly taken over most subs.
im betting those brief comments you mentioned are just the spammers "warming up thier accounts"as to not get banned by reddit filters, they dont contribute anymore than that. im in another forum where they discuss how to warm up thier accounts this way. also propaganda bots do it too.
i to noticed multiple post of the same thing on the front page, if its political or a news worthy, it would be up to 4-5 times on the front page alone, also likely by the same poster. and then alot of the"interesting type subs" are also double/triple posting some clearly AI generated videos.
I don’t understand what the plan is. Becoming irrelevant and making it hard for users to access your site sounds like a losing play.
In the long term. In the short term, spez makes a lot of money.
And we're about to watch Anthropic go through the same thing with their IPO. Late-stage capitalism sucks.
I think they got all they needed from us. It doesn't matter what they do now. They sold years of conversations and information.
Their moat is people not being arsed to make an account on a service that's not actively hostile to its users.
Been a part of reddit since 2006 and as much as it pains to see something that I visited for 2 decades to go away, it needs to be put to pasture because of spez.
Same. Ditched my account during the API nonsense, but I still lurked occasionally on old.reddit. When they made that require a login, stopped going to reddit entirely. Which leaves this place as the last social media I interact with. I'm expecting some kinda ban on the fediverse in my country, just cause that seems par for this course. Then I dunno, give up on the internet? It's half bots now anyway.
Same here. I occasionally follow a link to normal reddit it and it lets me see the tread for about ten seconds then tosses up a login popup. Looks like they are locking down the whole site.
At least the bots are pretending to be intelligent. A lot of idiots on reddit that are really degrading the site.
At this point I am just running a RSS feed aggregator on my home server, and using that to keep up on news and information. If I really want to go nuts, I just feed it into my local LLM and have it summarize the days news for me.
Meh. I started on usenet. Reddit had some fun little cultural things, but I just like yakking online in forums; not gonna particularly miss it.
"ChatGPT chooses not to eat where it already shat"
or eat where the communal toilet is.
Something I noticed for the past year are topics following the format: "Now that AI has replaced X skill ... and Y ... what is your opinion". Or "I've been doing all my programming with AI and it works perfectly, and is stressing me out. What is your opinion"
I did some digging and almost all those accounts are from a certain country or two famous for hosting clickfarms some years ago. So.. I guess AI companies are following the same strategy
I'm glad I did my part and tainted the water supply by shit posting and shit commenting for years.
Fuck em!
GEO gurus spent months telling brands to get on Reddit because ChatGPT loves it. Now citations drop 86% and suddenly the strategy is diversify. Amazing how quickly a growth hack becomes timeless marketing wisdom once the algorithm stops cooperating. Maybe building useful, credible information was the strategy all along. 🤷
Advertising on reddit was always a dumb move from the get go. They had to disable comments on ads because they didn't want people actually discussing products openly and freely. It was such a farce.
not from googles gemini summaries.
Reddit SEO was completely overpowered, it was so easy to get top 1 by just creating a post with your exact terms as title. Didn't matter if you got 0 upvotes, you would just suck up all traffic. We will remember those good old days
Remember when we used to write "redit" after a web search to ensure we got some authentic conversation related to the query?
The fediverse will never have SEO like that, but I am gradually finding increasingly niche topics discussed here, or else I start a discussion with them.
I don't know if it's a good a bad thing but I have seen such very good SEO with AI agents using engines more respectful of the fediverse. Some of my posts here on Lemmy are driving traffic to my websites because they rank well in Bing and DuckDuckGo and get thrown in AI responses
