Is it me or does reddit feel, weird?
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?
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.
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]”
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.
This would check out. Perhaps significantly more users left because of their bullshit than they want the public knowing. Could explain a lot actually.
Next question is whether they actually care or are just happy that the bots can now produce clicks without all that pesky moderation and interaction with actual humans.
Brother, I vote the latter. Reddit has time and time again proved they hate their users and only want engagement. The rampant mod abuse, the admins that shrug it off, the way they killed 3rd parties, hell, how spez the ped talked about the people protesting, he doesn't give a fuck at all, and neither does anyone else in a position of power.
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.
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).
Yup, I remember this. It wasn't a rumor. Spez wanted to "drive more engagement" shortly after the exodus. He then downplayed it like it wasn't a big deal but he clearly felt the sting. I don't think anyone even put two and two together about that at the time. I sure as hell didn't at first. Looking back, though....
Hmm that makes sense.
Dead Internet Theory at work.
The internet has a grim future and it doesn't involve you and I interacting if they get their way.
That part of the Internet can die and rot...
Ah, I think "this" part is also included in ded internet theory
I hadn't heard of this before, interesting. Here's the link to wiki if anyone else is interested in learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
In a way we've already had our first war with bots. We got our asses kicked so bad we didn't even realise we were fighting.
You can blame bots, but having also worked as a soul crushing social media manager for a few months, you make shit like this to get karma (or on other media, interactions.) Humans deserve some blame!
That said the greatest irony is a toooon of the votes and comments are also bots and/or shills. The weirdest thing I found success on with Twitter, for instance, was wishing people a good morning, using a company account. Weirdly drove profile traffic and follows. >.>
Yeah, there's a reason why Youtube thumbnails have all that weird shit. It works.
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
You are not the only one noticing it. Probably trying to maximize the user provided content they can sell to language model creators
Looks like they got 60m from google for that:
https://fortune.com/2024/02/23/reddit-60m-deal-google-search-giant-train-ai-models-on-posts/
Indeed, thanks for the link!
NP! I didnt know about it until recently too. It was eye opening on why im seeing so many "safe" posts make it to the top and why so many google search results now include reddit posts recently.
Recently? Reddit was always the answer to questions in google searches…
Nope, I have projects that used to pull top x on Google searches based on some seo work I did back in 2016-2017. It's significantly more. Granted the dataset is super old by now and you would have to trust a random on the internet (aka me) in order to believe, but it hasn't been always been reddit.
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.
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.
I am subbed to both of those last two and didn't even know the first one existed because it's offshoot trash.
/r/SteamDeck
/r/Funny
/r/Videos
Are other solid examples. There's a ton like these over there, subs of various topics. It's not just related to gaming stuff.
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.
It's because of bots, in the past there was enough moderation to deal with them plus a larger amount of natural engagement.
Now after the exodus there is significantly less real engagement and much poorer moderation. Those combined allow bots and low effort posting to thrive.
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.
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.
On that note, anyone feel like YouTube comments have recently turned "too nice"? Like if you go to any yt let's play, usually the first 10 top comments won't be talking about the video contents, just "I love that we're getting regular videos 🤗!" Endlessly. It feels so weird to me compared to the actual discourse that could happen there, and obviously yt comments are infamous for being a cesspool so that's even more of a jarring change
Might be bots, might be youtube pushing these more to make everything feel more friendly.. and then bots jump onto that again for ads and scams..
I wouldn't be surprised. A lot of YouTubers I follow have talked about how you can get a thousand positive comments but the one negative one will make you second guess everything. Maybe it's their way of fighting that encouraging more content to be produced
It is working!!!
http://xkcd.com/810/
I feel like a lot of comments are just for easy likes :/
"Who still listening to this in 2024"
"I also used to build PCs with my poor father.. ;_; "
Thank you for your comment.
(Sorry)
Please don't apologize! I love that we're having an open dialog. Isn't that just like this website, though, fostering communication!? 🤗
Who's watching this in Year of The Linux Desktop?
You WILL consume the slop
Reddit green is made of bots?
I didn't expect it to reach this level...it doesn't feel appealing.
Do they have some AI chatting in comment ? :)
One more thing to notice here is that despite it being top of all time, none of the posts are even a year old
Reddit’s site traffic has just gone up that much. Especially if you include bots posting constantly in their SEO subreddits that admins are aware of and indifferent to.
the Facebookification of Reddit. bots are raking in engagement so they can astroturf as "legitimate" accounts later.
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 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
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.
It's been going on for a long time before I left the place. I think it's more survival of the fittest in action. Posts are not sorted just by upvotes but the number of comments is taken into account as well. Most sane subs have a rule against begging for for upvotes, so people pivoted to encouraging comments with this kind of posts. Easy way to get to the top of the sub.
I used to report the more blatant ones wiht "comment baiting is a form of vote manipulation". Not that I was expecting mod action, but I felt a bit better afterwards.
It's all bots, reposts, and corps trying to use the system to drive engagement towards their shit products/websites/services. The comments are worse. jokes, memes, SJWs, and random proselytizations on the most banal shit you've ever ignored. Every time I'm on Reddit it just feels like dead internet.
None of those even reference current games, they could all be repost bots reposting stuff from years ago.
The "Which era did you start playing video games" is missing the last 4 years of consoles.
Because this isn't even close to the main sub discussing video games.
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.
Fluent-in-finance sub has the same problem. Every day, it's a twitter screenshot of some politician statement and the title is always an engagement question like "Is punitive wealth tax gay?" that makes it to /all
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.
Honestly I think you just fell out the meme train and now you're looking at it as an outsider.
There's a subtle difference between somebody (as in, an actual human poster) posting a meme and an army of accounts named John13452958 or the like posting basically the same question with a different meme in each post a thousand times nonstop.
Yeah, it feels very repetitive.
Only some niche subs like r/sysadmin are somewhat normal. But even those niche subs are becoming this weird version.
i think the problem is you went back to reddit, giving them additional traffic and supporting their removedry.
Be proud of me lol (jk) But yeah, I went out fighting. I wear my ban as a badge of honor knowing I struck a nerve.
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.
Telegram is just lousy with crap posts and comments now as well.
You are right to feel weird. It's gotten progressively worse over the years, but it's essentially just a website full of bots and karmafarming accounts. They contribute absolutely nothing except gaining reddit clicks and comments.
Its probably buzzfred trying to scam a story out of someone
Has that not always been how it goes? There was a time where the joke was "what can you say at both _____ and _____" because it was posted to absolute death. I know there's been loads of stuff like that so is that not the same as to what's going on? Is it not just a meme?
Its been weird for a few years now ever since they started shutting down the more triggery subs and those folks were left to spread out into the general population