Reddit right now listed by popular/hot

Eccehom@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 218 points –

What's happening to reddit ๐Ÿคฆ๐Ÿปโ€โ™€๏ธ

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Greatโ€ฆ itโ€™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.

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."

"YTA, skittles are the food of the gods. Also you could easily dress up like a hockey puck and get hammered by the coach."

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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.

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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.

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...

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 didnโ€™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 etcโ€ฆ

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.

  1. Question is a common question people Google for. Potentially AI generates.
  2. Post is filled with AI bots answering to inflate user numbers.
  3. Post is used by websites to generate new content. Often by AI.
  4. AI scrapes reddit post for data, and verified it on those websites.
  5. 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.

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.)

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?

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.

โ€œMen of reddit: What is something that women do that we donโ€™t want them to do that we could collectively tell them to stop doing? Iโ€™ll start: not letting me sleep with their sisterโ€œ

Looks like some tacky headline articles from a magazine or something. So glad I left that place. Can we let it rott in silence

The same questions every fuckin day. This was the reason I unsubbed from all of the default subs and in the end at least part of the reason I moved here

Agreeable ad is a trustworthy user with my personal data

While you were using the subreddits you were subscribed to, the general default subreddits were always seeing activity like this.

But over time reddit has been attracting a far more general audience of regular people from other social media platforms.

I think it's young people and people from countries that are just now getting as connected to the Internet and they see no reason to complain cause they just are excited to have the space not knowing of its change. It is what it is and we won't change people that don't care.

But it does mean the user base is really different, those comments are so miserable and cruel and shitty. r/all stuff is full of comments that make me want to punch a lot of people and I don't think I can go back there anymore.

I assume on /r?

I don't know who would do that. The only reason I view all on Lemmy is because there isn't enough activity to limit what I see. Despite the downhill trajectory on reddit, it isn't at that point yet.

I browse all, but that can he bot heavy at times as well.

Haha I was just trying out the Stealth client and saw those posts.

And, um... What's wrong with that exactly? Seems like useful debates. I took a peek at the movie opening one.

Look at Lemmy top posts for hour/Xhours/day, and it's nothing but memes.

Zero desire to answer a likely machine generated generic question that's been answered a 1000 times before only for my comment to get lost in 10000 other likely machine generated answers. At least that's how I view these posts, a waste of time. I dislike when I see a new community on Lemmy that is trying to echo this model.

It's the "most popular" from all around the world, of course it's gonna be generic. It's either this stuff, or more Ukraine war, or memes.

Nothing is preventing you from scrolling down, or switch to different sorting, or watch specific subs... Honestly, going to the Hot section, and expecting something suited to your specific tastes, and being upset that it's too generic - that's pretty ironic.

I think the point is that it would have been far less generic roughly 2 months ago.

Yea it was more typically a cesspit of insults and weird porn. This is an improvement.

But again I don't see why it matters. If you browse /all, you get what you get. The cheap garbage on YouTube's Hot is much worse.

c/WatchRedditDie when oh wait we have Snoocalypse alr lol

And yet we keep tabs on it.

and it remains unscathed

Edit: Bad source was bad. Iโ€™ll take my L.

I'm confused; the link says it was updated in 2023 but none of the data is from later than 2022. Am I missing something?

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March 2023 is prior to the blackouts and exodus. This tells us nothing.

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