Reddit is post human now. Just need bots to keep it alive.
And then they’re using that data to create AI bots, so bots creating bots?
But then who will bot the botmen?!
Literally every upvoted post is some stupid reference humor.
I expect lemmy to go the same way, but for now we’re not there yet.
Sidenote, but you know what has been incredibly fucking annoying? And I guess this is a combination of reddit having kind of always been shitty and oh we only find out more recently, or sort of, on aaron schwartz’s death, for early signs, and, people choosing to use it in the first place. I kind of hate the mass removal scripts that people have used to delete all their comments, especially since you can’t use unddit to see what it used to be because of the API business. I haven’t had to break out the wayback machine quite yet, it hasn’t gotten to that level of dire straits (not that I think the wayback machine would necessarily help for a lot of it), but there’s a shocking amount of really good technical information and advice that has been deleted off of the internet as a result of people protesting reddit. Especially because the tech-literate are more often going to be the ones who use those scripts and end up leaving.
I kind of hate the mass removal scripts that people have used to delete all their comments
after the whole scandal in the summer, i deleted all my comments on my 15 year old account. i realized that i was creating content (aka providing free work to reddit) and they couldn’t care less about the older users. from now on all my comments get overwritten after a few weeks
Same.
While I wasn’t some power user, I did have many comments with 1k or more votes.
Reddits decision to first destroy the UX of Reddit and then destroy the best Reddit apps made my decision to delete everything very easy.
Well thats a consequence of reddit monetizing off of the userbase’s knowledge.
Visit the tech forms. They’re just as good if not better.
This is annoying, there are some obscure tech questions that have possibly been answered but I’ll never know because a spam deleted script was run.
I wouldn’t mind if they just added it to the comment that they left the site it’s just that they remove it entirely.
Don’t be mad at us for deleting our comments, be mad at Reddit employees, admins, and Spez for turning the website to what it is right now.
Fuck I feel you, it sucks but was the whole point of why they did it, cause it made Reddit less useful and more annoying. People who’ve spent years answering questions that would be referenced from the thousands to the millions were deleted. They didn’t want Reddit to continue to benefit even if it hurts everyone else to.
You can usually find archived versions of the pages on internet Archive and Archive.today.
The point of a protest is that you do mind it
I hand deleted my technical comments all off Reddit before attempting to mass delete my account. I don’t really care about people being able to find answers to engineering and physics questions on Reddit. They don’t deserve traffic from my answers.
Honestly, it’s the users that are killing it now. What started as a funny place to chill, throw some funny memes and talk about some niche stuff turned into a toxic Tumblr tire fire. Reddit as it is now makes 4chan look like the normal people.
Dead? Maybe not. Dead inside? Definitely.
Kinda feel post API killing, frontpage post comments have jumped dramatically.
Unfortunately, it’s extremely bot-like. Like AI talking to AI and chains and chains of memes/jokes. No real discussion.
Repost bots (and repost top comment bots) are pretty rampant. A lot of subs have changed pretty significantly because their entire mod team left. In general I get the sense it’s a lot more people now who consider reddit “social media” compared to before. Site isn’t dead for sure but it’s gone down in quality significantly.
Unfortunately I think this is exactly what Reddit wants. They want to be social media like Instagram or TikTok style. A lot more ad money from that crowd.
I know Reddit (and Lemmy) was always technically social media but I consider it more like Internet forums than the Facebook/Insta/TikTok style social media.
I’m sure it’s nothing and everything is fine. Now, who wants to buy some of this Reddit stock? I’ll cut you a special deal so you don’t miss out! … Anyone?
Free shorts?
A special deal? Doesn’t the message basically say “give us your data so you maybe have a chance at buying stock at full price, and be thankful we’re not marking it up”?
Well, at IPO price. A couple of decades ago, that used to mean it was discounted. Nowadays, it doesn’t, but not everybody knows that.
Probably part of some side grift to sell more information to data brokers
The whole idea is a grift. They are directly appealing to people who largely should not be buying shares due to their financial situation and are a lot less critical of the pretty poor numbers they published than professional
exploitersinvestors will be.Obviously this is done in hopes of selling more shares and binding users long term, though that will probably just accelerate the enshittification because suddenly the last remaining power users are turned into shareholders instead
Right but the whole “give us all your info and MAYBE you can buy stock” is the part that sounds like a secondary grift. If they wanted to pump they could just have some set amount and do a first come first serve right off the bat.
They actually tweaked the upbote/down vote stuff back then to stop actually showing the true amount of upvotes and down votes, directly. They started fuzzing votes to supposedly help prevent manipulation.
“We have never made a profit and may never make a profit. Please buy our stock.”
I got a Message offering me to buy too. In the Message it says i need to be a permanent Resident of the US.
Buddy, you had me enter my Country when i created the Account. You know full-well I’m from the EU. Why not just sort me out of the Mailing-list?
Why not just sort me out of the Mailing-list?
Because that would cost their time instead of yours
Perhaps you moved from Europe to the States in the interim like I did.
Edit to add: sorry if this came off as snarky, was not my intention. Just wanted to point out that it’s not always so clear-cut. I created my Reddit account in 2008 when I lived in the Netherlands. Then I moved to the US in 2016 and became a citizen in 2019.
I was interested in buying a share just to be in for the ride, but then they asked for my real name to be associated with my handle. It’s like they never understood what reddit was about at all.
Reddit has never been about privacy or anominity. Think of all the celebrity AMAs.
Who were the specific individuals asking questions in those?
AMAs weren’t celebrities on Reddit originally my friend, they were real people with interesting jobs or in unusual situations at first.
the time I broke both my hands…
also the time I used a coconutGood god that broken arm kid. He played it completely straight too if i remembered right, sloowly getting worse and worse with each answer. Legend
The vacuum cleaner guy was one of the all time greats. I miss that era.
Some great posts back in the day, and definitely some not so great posts haha. I had to unsub after it turned into celebrities hocking their products.
Can we please keep this about Rampart.
You can post on 4chan as anon and prove your identity too
Reddit is (or at least was) psuedo-anonymous. You can easily get identities, and they’re not linked to you
For a lot of people, I’d say most in the early years (at least in my experience), you didn’t share usernames with your friends on the platform… Irl Redditors loved to identify themselves as a Redditor, we shared communities and memes, but only two of my closest friends ever knew my main account
I kept a second account that could potentially be tied to me (more work related stuff), because on my main account I always had the freedom to discard it if I embarrassed myself enough. That knowledge makes me far more likely to hit post instead of discard
Can I borrow some stock?
that would be called “shorting” and it totally is a thing.
Look, I’m not trying to short okay? I’m sure Reddit will do great. Just let me borrow your stock and I’ll make sure you have it back in like 6 months or so
Yeah, the big short is even a movie! One positive i got from hanging around stonks, amc and gme subs was how much i learned about how fucked the stock market is.
Waaaaay more fucked, gamified, and straight up broken than even the most cynical citizen thinks.
The timing DOES seem Auspicious…
Smaller subreddits usually supported by a few power users are dying off. I remember it taking me a couple hours to read through the top posts at end of day. Now you’re lucky to see a week’s worth of genuine top posts.
Posts getting roasted in the comments for being too boomery, capitalist bootlicking or hive-mindish happens less and less.
It was already empty since bots took over! I’m not surprised for what it’s happening, the way Reddit treated their users, and what happened afterwards.
Bots and governments, lul.
Who would have thought that driving away the power users that posted and interacted with the content the most would ruin Reddit ? 🙄
One thing I’ve noticed is that a ton of posts from the top 0.1% subs will get about three to four hours of thousands of updoots and comments and then get nuked by the mods with no reason given, pointing to it being bots. Like a few years ago it seemed like the repost bots were sneaking in and getting posts at the top to then be able to sell the account for someone else to bypass spam filters. Now it feels like the majority of top posts are that, and that anyone engaging in the top content is also grinding out the accounts that will be used to spam them at a lower level.
subs will get about three to four hours of thousands of updoots and comments and then get nuked by the mods
This was a tactic made common by Gallowboob. He would do this on every major sub he moderated, but with even more nastiness.
He’s post, wait to see if it got enough upvotes, if it did not he’d delete and repost. Constantly. Until his posts got to the top.
He did this across many of the largest subredddits and turned it into a paid job where he’d advertise for others using this same patterns.
Even worse, he’d delete others posts if they were doing too well too quickly and repost as his own.
Dude is one of the pillars of what destroyed Reddit.
Mods on Reddit giving a crap about bots?
In my experience they are more likely to shadow ban those who complain about bots than to do anything about obvious bots.
I got permanently banned for reporting spam (“abusing the report button”) after I reported 8 Vice articles posted in /r/politics by the Vice self-promotion account in one day.
Meanwhile, the spam guidelines page says - if you create an account primarily to promote your own content, you may be a spammer. And as a redditor, you should report spam.
They lost a 12 year long user who primarily engaged in niche technical subjects who went out of their way to answer newcomers’ questions.
I noticed this before I left Reddit last summer. Except for a few smaller niche subreddits that had decent discussions, everything else seemed like bots. I also noticed a lot of my comments and replies were deleted for no apparent reason so I quit participating. I do miss Reddit from the time period mentioned but nothing stays the same and it’s time to move on.
I think the bot uptick is a direct result of the mod strike and API changes. A lot of mods left, and a lot of the auto-mod tools they were using from third-party developers got nuked, so there are less people moderating with worse tools.
Also wouldn’t surprise me if some of the mods took a cut to even let bots post on their sub.
Small niche subs are the only reason I’m still using reddit. Not the main subs, again bots are the problem, but small niches are unfortunately slow to migrate to an entirely new platform because it’s not guaranteed that the community comes with it (unlike large generic subs like memes, which has a very general audience)
late to the party. Q: What is it that corporations will not tolerate about online commmunity, crowdsourced news and info?? Digg, Delicious, Slashdot, Reddit… all eaten and changed?
Silly thoughts…
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the life in a discussion site is the exchange of ideas/thoughts. For that to happen users need to actually listen, process, and discuss. Reddit’s structure has discouraged that for years.
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signal to noise ratio - in order for the discussion board site to be useful, there’s some magic signal to noise ratio that has to be maintained. Otherwise, its some style of chaos.
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Why I left - in a technical subreddit, someone asked a technical question ‘Who still uses XYZ, and why?, I never quite understood it’, I gave a short primer on how it worked, with a couple analogies. The OP replied testily ’ I don’t need anyone to explain to me how it works.'. And then testily to other helpful responses, and then deleted their acct.
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The experts left most of the technical subs I am in 5-10 years ago. My guess is that discussions are mostly noise: things I could have learned if I read the instructions, or how can I do this without understanding anything about it.
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somewhere I read that the upvote/downvote counts on the front page are made up… modified by reddit… so that people don’t know what they need to do to get to the front. By adding this, they gave themselves full editorial control of the front page. It’s downhill from there.
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Reddit became openly hostile to the people and content that made it great. It’s not exactly surprising that the good users eventually went elsewhere. You could really tell shit went downhill after they killed the third party apps.
Huh, now that you mention it. Yeah I guess so. I wonder what happened?
Considering im one of the top 35,000 most active users on reddit yet havent used the site since July last year, I cant see why
How did you determine that? I can’t remember.
I did just look up my profile and chuckled at the 800k karma, trophy case, and completely empty comment history.
I’m also confused as to why my profile is tagged as 18+.
