Funnily enough I didn't even use any third party apps at the time (just the old web client) but that whole fiasco was enough for me to finally curb my addiction. I also noticed the quality of comments seeming very bad whenever I go to something on Reddit (once every few months at this point). I don't think the quality has actually gotten much worse recently though; I think it was just so normal to me when I was using it. I think it has been a pretty slow decline over the last decade or so, to the point where it is now.
It's barely limping along. URLs with underscores get broken (with an extra backslash) when posted from certain apps but only for old.reddit users. There's some kind of inline images that just says "image" that you have to click on to see. There are some kind of emojis or something that only show up as digits between colons. People talk about profile pictures that I don't see. Sometimes the zooming keeps zooming back out when you're trying to zoom in, and if you follow a link and go back, it will automatically scroll you somewhere else on the page besides where you left off.
One of my higher-voted comments on Reddit was in response to some thread bemoaning the decline of the site towards lowest-common-denominator meme content and recycled jokes. My comment was pointing out that people had been saying that for years, with multiple links to past, nearly identical threads.
For discussing entertainment like specific video games, movies, book series, TV shows, sports teams, etc. there simply isn't a good alternative to Reddit.
I hate the site and have limited the time I spend on it but there aren't good alternatives for certain communities.
I miss those forums! They were simple and fun, and each board being scoped to a specific movie/show kept all the conversations very focused.
Moviechat.org seems to be a spiritual successor, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of its initial content is archived IMDB forum posts, but it's not nearly as active.
Reddit has enshitified, and I would also guess that their usage numbers are way up. The goal is to compete with tiktok, instagram, youtube for average everyday people.
From our hackernews perspective, the website sucks now. From the average user perspective, reddit is another fun app full of dopamine hits.
I know it's unfashionable in HN circles to admit it but there is still tons of high quality niche content (technical and otherwise) on Reddit that can't be found anywhere else.
Reddit was getting shitty way before the past few years.
Honestly, I don't think pissing off the mods has made that big of a difference. Yes, some subs shut down, but otherwise I haven't seen a meaningful cultural change in Reddit as a result of that whole issue.
In fact, one of the reasons I believe Reddit is so crappy is specifically that they bow to mods in many ways. Many communities are run by, frankly, psychos who are way too happy with the power they have over their little ponds. I've lost count of how many times my posts have either been removed or my user banned despite having followed the explicit rules of a sub. Communities vary, but I've found this "you should have read our minds" attitude to be commonplace.
Yes, you can spin off your own sub, but then you're taking a gamble as to whether the original community is going to come after you; they seem to win at least half the time by convincing Reddit that your [relatively pissant] community is toxic in some way. Good luck if your community is blamed for creating "drama" even when there's a lack of brigading.
> I've lost count of how many times my posts have either been removed or my user banned despite having followed the explicit rules of a sub. Communities vary, but I've found this "you should have read our minds" attitude to be commonplace.
I'm not a mod or anything, but I think there are actually a lot of legitimate reasons for a mod to have that attitude. It's unreasonable to expect a volunteer to create a comprehensive rules of behavior and enforce it in a lawyerly way and keep a community on track and not burn out. I've seen more than a few online communities have serious problems with certain users that would have been best handled with a "we're sick of dealing with you, enjoy your ban." Then, there's also the fact that if a community is too popular, a mod can only scale by being more brusque.
Yeah, I'm not really saying that mods shouldn't have discretion or flexibility, but a community is not healthy when its mods decide to remove any posts/comments that contain the word "frank" because they don't like a guy named Frank. Yes, that is a real world example I've encountered. And if I get banned because I can't read the minds of the mods, then I welcome said ban. I'm not on Reddit to play childish games or to join cults.
Killing the API access made detecting and tracking spam bots impossible. There was a whole subreddit called thesefuckingaccounts where the latest tactics in spam and karma farming were being tracked.
The phenomenon seems to be limited to a certain number of subreddits that are close to a brand or have products to sell. They recycle content to give the impression that there is some interest in their brand, product, crypto, etc. and to avoid giving the image of a dead brand.
Personally, I've observed this phenomenon on r/Polarfitness as soon as the sub becomes a list of complaints and negative feedback about after-sales service, positive content magically appears with very generic content but dozens of comments.
r/AskReddit has been my guilty pleasure for like a decade, and it's super prevalent there too. No products being pushed in the threads I've seen called out.
Good fake engagement would be more convincing and harder to detect.
Instead what you see is a post from a fresh account that is a copy/repost of one of the top posts in either that or a sibling subreddit.
This is then followed by a half dozen accounts reposting the top comments from the original as their own comments. This is often where they mess up and it's easily detectable when not the OP responds as the OP.
If you check back in a month or two or so, the accounts are inevitably banned by Reddit or shilling something somewhere else (with a minimum age/rep requirement) themselves and/or using the accounts to express support for something shilled. The "resume writer" was annoying prolific.
I find it doubtful that Reddit corporate is using such an approach to try to drive up engagement numbers.
I'm not sure what pisses me off more, the confirmation that the internet is indeed full of undead activity, or the sheer laziness of this specific example. My god people, it's the age of LLMs, at least mix up your astroturfing a little!
It's like internet phishing email and the like. It almost bothers you more that they put so little effort into it, and that if they do that it probably because it's not worth it to do more.
For the purposes of just generating activity in a subreddit and building karma history for bot accounts, replaying proven content verbatim is more reliable and cost-effective.
LLM paraphrasing is likely to either drift away from "what worked" towards unknown territory or introduce tics that don't really cohere quite right. We can confidently assume it's being used as part of other strategies, but it's not actually optimal here.
The real issue is that Reddit (and Facebook, Youtube, Amazon, Tinder, etc) have very little incentive to aggressively police against this until and unless examples like this make big news and start to harm their general reputation. In the meantime, it just makes their sites look more alive and popular. It's good for them right up until they it becomes a defining association with their brand. This lazy approach works for the bots and the sites, so there's no reason to overcomplicate or take on bigger risks.
Im long on RDDT because it reminds me so much of Facebook when they started pushing more negative content because it got higher interaction. When a sad face reaction was "worth" 5x more than a Like to the algorithm
The algorithm now suggests posts, popular ones with lots of fighting in the comments, from subs you dont subscribe to. Essentially causing organic brigading which is against Reddit rules
I feel those LLM augmented bots will usher the return of small community run forums. Because those let you require people to be humans, for example by being invite only.
I don't think it's likely. The real migration has been and will continue to be towards Discord servers and similar "smallish" live chat-based communities on centralized services.
The age of small self-hosted forums is unfortunately behind us, and I don't see them reviving any time soon.
Those Discord servers, even if hosted by centralized company are community run forums. You can set "your" server to be invite only so you can filter who gets in.
The underlying software is not really important, it's what you can do with it.
Forums work just fine. You get to have your own community with your own rules on your own website with your own advertisement. If it helps you can also make your own tools. For local communities they are also amazingly fast.
Small community forums (low '000s or even '00s) are bot-resistant because there isn't much value in targeting so few people. Kinda like the old adage of buying a Mac because virus/malware makers got the biggest bang for their buck targeting Windows machines.
I'm on a sports team messageboard that still runs on a mid-00s phpBB backend. There are no bots because there is nothing to propagandize about on such a small, topically focused community.
There have also been (possibly AI-generated) comments that are simply rephrasing prior comments or even comments on the same post and piggybacking onto an already upvoted comment. It's not as common as the straight copy and paste comments but it is obvious by the same limited user history and rephrased comments that don't quite make sense in context.
As other commenters have already said, Discord has more or less replaced the traditional forum. I'd argue that this push towards small Discord communities has been happening for years now, since places like reddit, twitter, or even instagram are unsuitable/hostile to forming connections. The primary focus on those platforms is content consumption, and any sense of community (at least on reddit) completely breaks down after a sub becomes >10k. My theory is that LLM's won't drastically change people's experience with reddit/twitter, because those platforms already make communicating with humans on them as meaningless and impersonal as talking to an LLM.
Also younger people find forums archaic and weird, to the extent that most people my age (early 20's) that I've talked to about this prefer imageboards over forums. As much as I'd love for forums to make a comeback, younger people are the ones who determine the next shape culture will take and there is very little chance small forums will grow. It's such a shame too, it's so difficult to find good Discord servers and so much technical knowledge is unindexable and will most likely be lost forever once Discord stops burning money for growth.
I’m seeing tons and tons of automated behavior on Reddit.
Posts that are clearly farmed bots that figured out how to use LLMs to vary the same genre of question over and over again.
LLM Bots that seem to respond set to counter at all costs mode. Yes I’m aware of how dumb people can be, but these adapt in a way that feels very LLMish — instantly sacrificing the point just to counter you and try to get another response
On top of that I see Google is dumping tons of fresh traffic, but the behavior of these users seems different than Google drop bys. These are tons and tons of users who seemingly appear out of thin air with histories.
I dunno — it all seems really weird and particularly set for rage engagement to me.
Reddit is the ideal place for bots, because there is a critical mass of anonymous posters who will bicker about topics they know nothing about–not to mention numerous other shameless cultural practices. It is may already be impossible for regular users to tell themselves apart from LLMs when engaged in typical Reddit discourse.
The problem is that infinite bicker produces low quality long term training data, terrible ad targeting data, and even worse conversions.
So unless they exclusively plan to sell rage engagement to film
Studios and political campaigns their market is going to be microscopic and terribly performing.
Businesses are going to need to be extra cautious about social media advertising spend in the era of LLMs. Personally, I think social networks are doomed, unless they can figure out how to lock things down. Will be difficult to do on a website known for anonymous posting.
> "The most popular posts on Reddit have switched from reposted content from “karma farmers,” or engagement hackers, to nearly entirely original content from less popular Reddit users. Original content from smaller communities is now outperforming recycled evergreen content by a tremendous margin across the platform. As of October, none of the top five posts of the month on r/all were original. By March of this year, four out of five of these posts were original. "
In my experience this hasn't been the case at all. I've also noticed that if you click the profile of people that end up on the front page, they are often new (or suddenly active) accounts with a certain pattern:
1) Make 3-4 posts not related to the content they want to promote, to "warm up" the account. I'm guessing there's a soft-ban on new accounts here.
2) Post the actual content/narrative they want to promote.
3) Suddenly, this post gets 10k upvotes and reaches the frontpage.
I haven't seen a massive correlation in LLM popularity and reddit bots. A good old markov chain can simulate the average reddit thread, and the botting issue has been prevalent for quite a long time.
Are LLMs not just fancy Markov chains?
They are next token predictors which have some hidden internal state that output probability distributions which lead to further states.
Bots used to just take other popular comments and repost them either in whole copies of threads, as in the example here, or taking a top comment in a new thread and reposting it elsewhere in the same thread. Now they're using LLMs to rephrase comments to try to avoid detection (though they often come across sounding a bit off so they're sometimes easy to spot).
I wish it was that obvious. I think it's like criminals - the obvious ones get caught, and people go "criminals are pretty dumb", but there are plenty of smart ones too.
I posted this example earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208741 of a reddit account shilling Sourcegraph. They flat-out deny that this's a bot, but it's clear to Me.
Can't trust anything or anyone any more. Pretty sad.
It seems to me that the concept of shill is slowly eating the concept of enthusiast or fanboy in the public perception. They are similar and hard to discern from one another. I'm not sure if one is more trustworthy than the other.
Hi, head of community at Sourcegraph here. We don't use bots. u/Prolacticus is a Pro user, we do not pay him/her, and they are not sponsored. In fact, I offered them swag a month ago, and they refused.
We do give free/sponsored accounts to our Discord mods, open source maintainers, and folks who write guest blog posts for us. u/Prolacticus is not one of those accounts.
I fully believe that you aren't paying him directly to do this, but I don't believe that any human would shill so hard (and always mentioning the price and the same gist of 'it's fantastic' etc). Any chance it's a replyguy or similar test, either by someone else in your org without your knowledge or just by the creator themselves as I guess they need to do some 'live testing' before charging real 'customers'.
> In my experience this hasn't been the case at all. I've also noticed that if you click the profile of people that end up on the front page, they are often new (or suddenly active) accounts with a certain pattern:
You make a great point. It's highly unlikely that a newly-created account just so happens to post content that's engaging enough to be featured in Reddit's frontpage. It's far more likely that these "less popular Reddit users" are sock puppet accounts used to post special-purpose content which is then subjected to industrial-grade boosting to force it onto everyone's first page.
Changes of this magnitude are practically impossible without the backing of either Reddit itself or marketing companies intending to control the flow of information.
Exactly - and it's important to make a distinction between the bots that post comments and posts, and the much larger and more influential bot farms that manipulate content (both promoting and demoting).
Personally, I'm fairly certain it's a difficult cat-and-mouse game, but there's no question that some very popular mods also use bot farms to promote the content they want on the subs they mod.
I've noticed something like that. Something I see a lot is a years old account with no account history prior to the past few days, spamming unoriginal content.
Check /r/interestingasfuck, /r/satisfyingasfuck, /r/natureisfuckingcute, hellsomememes, and a lot of other subs.
Qualities of subs particularly susceptible to such spam:
* Subs that don't require OC (not news, not a hobby sub)
* Subs that don't demand proof of identity (/r/selfies, /r/glowups)
So, counter to the quote you cited, I still see a lot of karma farmers on reddit, and like you say, they'll often do what you and I describe and then turn into an Onlyfans account, or something like that.
reddit is just such a goddamned cesspool, and I am so curious as to what nefarious actors are doing on it and why they're doing it.
Different topic, but I'm ranting: The political echo chambers are wild. Places like BadHasbara, Palestine, IsraelExposed, Conservative, Libertarian, antiwork, WorkersStrikeBack, Anticonsumption, all have wild agendas that will instaban anyone who challenges the dreck that gets posted there.
Imagine today's AI several years ago, the Democrats could have used AI to generate ten times the disinformation about Trump and the Russians instead of having Steele write one dossier.
The key to make Reddit still an amazing resource is finding niche subreddits that fit your interests. The very broad subreddits like funny, news, pics, politics (where this is likely from), etc. etc. are all just full of spam, and trash like this. They have been for YEARS now. However, say you dive into a subreddit for a specific video game you like, it's going to be full of relevant content with very little spam. Or if anything, the type of spam is just reposting content which still may even be new for you. Reddit is not dying, just the giant stadium size subreddits are trash. I visit video game subreddits for games I actively play almost daily and they are all incredibly useful and interesting.
I know this is (almost hopelessly) subjective, but can you (or others) recommend a few? (I'm a reddit newb and my feed resembles a mainstream news website).
If you're a college sports fan, /r/cfb, /r/collegebasketball, and /r/collegebaseball are excellent. The first two are large subreddits, but their mods absolutely stay on top of things. Not just clearing out spam and off-topic discussion, but also posting "official" game threads and post-game summaries so you don't have dozens of "Auburn defeats Alabama 34-28" posts clogging up the front page.
I don't use reddit for any real news, I just use it for hobbies/interests. Using reddit for news is a terrible idea for all the content farming and spam trash that this post is talking about. That would be like getting your news from just random people shouting on the side of the street.
So the hobbies/games I'm currently playing are subreddits I subscribe to and actively browse. Games like Anno 1800, Cities Skylines, and Manor Lords. All 3 have very active and passionate community members that are constantly posting high quality content around inspiration for builds, tips and tricks, community update news, patch discussions, mods, etc. etc.
If you want more silly subreddits not related to hobbies, it depends on what your humor is. Here is a wide range of options: r/AnimalsBeingBros, r/ActLikeYouBelong, r/softwaregore, r/raspberry_pi, r/lockpicking, r/FellowKids, r/dogswithjobs, r/BirdsArentReal, r/BreadStapledToTrees - subreddits that are related around hobbies or niche humor will make you love reddit.
Again, tl;dr, reddit is not the place for real life news. If you don't use it for that, you'll find yourself enjoying the website a ton more.
For the reddit and fashion newbs, I'll add r/malefashionadvice too... I mean, even if you never buy any of the expensive stuff on there, it's good just to browse the outfits people put together to get ideas about the types of things you can buy, colors, materials, accessories and how they can go together.
EDIT: Also, the way I make Reddit useful to me is I change the default sorting for subreddits from Hot to Top > Monthly, and also disable content recommendations. It'll shows less content and Reddit will sometimes say "No more content right now", which is great.
Check out DepthHub: https://www.reddit.com/user/Lapper/m/depthhub/
It's a "multireddit", an amalgamation of multiple subreddits, a feature that Reddit as a company no longer seems to care about.
From the description:
"DepthHub gathers the best in-depth submissions and discussion on Reddit. You can use the DepthHub as an alternative front page with high quality discussion and inquiry. "
I used to visit it pretty much every day, back when third-party apps were allowed.
Their intention is good trying to keep out blatant spam and misinformation. Being confidently incorrect is basically a running joke on the rest of Reddit. But they could be about 75 percent as draconian as they are and still be fine.
That said, I'd be careful saying the sub can't be "trusted." It's annoying but when you do get an answer it's generally sourced and credible. As opposed to the unadulterated bullshit I've seen on the rest of the site regarding basically anything I have professional experience and/or formal training in.
Hard disagree. Strict and heavy moderation is the only way to keep any discussion informative. It requires competent moderators, and there will be bad calls by the mods, but overall the alternatives are far worse.
The strictest moderation there is can be found in high quality academic publishing. You are allowed to publish only if what you say has high value, and is said in the proper way. Can't get your Flat Earth Quarterly published in Nature, and we're all better for it.
Don't go to reddit for the sake of going to reddit. If you don't have a specific content area that you want to engage with, just getting involved in the reddit universe is going to be a bad experience.
I know a couple of people who moderate niche-but-active subreddits, and they're still inundated with spam. The only real difference is that they can stay on top of it, for the most part. So yeah, the niche subreddits are still alive, but I think they're struggling.
One of them closed to non-approved submitters, and now they get AI-generated requests for account approval.
This is exactly why I gave up moderation of a sub that was around 100k members. It just was so much spam and noise and poor tooling to deal with it all.
> Reddit is not dying, just the giant stadium size subreddits are trash.
From a user's PoV, this is at worst a good thing and at best completely irrelevant.
I never go to the large subreddits anyway (political, news, pics, etc), so whether or not they are around, or around and filled with LLM trash is completely irrelevant to me.
OTOH, the subreddits I do visit are alive and well and show no signs of being less valuable to me than before.
Why would I dedicate my time to a subreddit that might vanish overnight or might get taken over by the admins? Way back, subreddits were independent forums, and now they're one protest away from being kidnapped.
A bunch of subreddit admins took their ball and went home because they didn’t agree with site changes. This is practically the same thing. There was a whole website to track it.
Right, but they pretty much all came back. I'm not saying some don't do the blackout for protests, but none I have ever subscribed to have gone away 100% forever.
That’s different than your initial statement that none have vanished overnight. Hundreds or thousands vanished overnight. Many returned, but it was very unclear whether they ever would. Thank goodness the Reddit admins stepped in and basically forced lots of them to come back. Even major ones like r/video are still gone.
In fact, the biggest losers were the users of the small, niche subreddits that the admins couldn’t strongarm into returning.
They all came back because the admins allowed anyone to volunteer to overtake them. So, either the existing mods changed their minds to remain at the wheel of a subject they're passionate about, or they were replaced with new mods.
I moderated one subreddit that was loved by users. It wasn't about anything that is illegal or controversial. The controversy came not from the content, but from how we were running the community -- we were breaking a reddit rule that was in place to prevent spam. I understand why they had that rule and I agree that it probably makes sense for most subreddits, but like any blanket rule: it doesn't perfectly fit every scenario. So, we had our own method of preventing spam and it worked.
The admins didn't care that we had a thriving community, no spam, and they banned the subreddit. They also blocked anyone from ever creating a replacement with the same name (still to this day). So, it definitely does happen. I'm keeping it vague here to maintain my anonymity.
Side note, reddit dropped that rule about 2 years ago so I suppose we could start one up again, but I've lost interest in that topic.
/r/boardgames would be good, if they didn't go on rants about politics every so often. I couldn't take it any more after a while. I'm trying to read about board games to enjoy myself, not to be reminded of life's problems.
I moderate a niche subreddit, we were focused on information backed by science. The mod team is doctors, chemists, and devs. However, as we are growing we are noticing a lot of new people are spreading myths and since our average user is becoming dumber wrong opinions often end up at the top.
This is what made me realize that reddit is actually an awful platform for information, while there is a lot of good stuff there the average user is NOT educated, and the average users outnumber the individuals educated in a particular subject.
I have been downvoted to hell many times even though my information was backed by multiple studies and factual.
There's still just so much fucking garbage though. Yesterday I was wondering if I ought to switch to a flipphone so my son doesn't see me playing on my smartphone so much, so I headed over to /r/dumbphones to try and get a feel for what's currently a good option. I figured I'd look through the top posts of the last month to find good discussion. Instead, the top post is some dipshit meme, and all but 1 or 2 of the first 25 posts are "my EDC as an 18/f/cali", just pictures of the contents of their pockets!
Because there's no way to have "the EDC thread" or the "post pics of your phone" thread, this low-effort shit fills the subreddit.
I have a pet theory that bots and AI generated content are constantly being posted to a couple subreddits (AITAH, AskReddit, etc.) where the general theme of the post is basically cheating and/or open relationships. These posts garner a lot of strong opinions and ultimately end up on the front page. Much like the OP here, the content and discussion always seems so recycled.
well it doesn't necessarily have to be AI generated content.
I rarely read those posts, but when I do, I find myself actually questioning if it's really true. I suspect some people have too much time on their hands and make stories up for reddit karma instead of writing journals and books that nobody will read. At least they're exploring creative writing, though.
This has been happening for years. My theory is the actors running the bots are instructing their bots to use old popular threads as a blueprint to get a bunch of upvotes across all of their accounts at once. The idea being that clearly Reddit users liked the original posts and comments in the past, so the users will upvote it again. Then they sell the accounts to bad actors who are interested in purchasing accounts with real looking post histories.
They don't sell their account to bad actors much anymore, instead they sell services. Want this product or that news story or this ... To have lots of comments and upvote from tens of account. If you search a little you can easily find those shops, they sell for every social media out there and you pay per "thousands of likes" or stuff like that.
They used to be based on super low paid human, then it was bot train the account up then humans use it when it's cooked, and I guess we're now entering the bot from top to bottom era.
If I were Reddit I'd be running some sort of counter-offensive, throwing a few hundred dollars at those services and flagging accounts which upvote my poison pill as sockpuppets.
Yup this is a very old strategy. Years back when I was helping mod a very large (10/15m+) sub, the head mod was running a pipeline in the background to help detect this exact thing.
I’m starting to suspect Reddit is becoming human-RAG for Gemini. On the backend Gemini forms questions of what people want from it, and it posts backwards to Reddit to train on rated answers.
So this means there is only one agent with multiple accounts running the same that has a bug to use the same seed every time (possibly seeded on a hash of the content if we are generous)?
Reddit's enshitification was a long time in the making, bots and psyops are all it consists of anymore. I wonder if Eglin AFB, home to psyop army units (1st and 7th Special Forces), is still burning the midnight oil...
>Reddit's enshitification was a long time in the making, bots and psyops are all it consists of anymore. I wonder if Eglin AFB, home to psyop army units (1st and 7th Special Forces), is still burning the midnight oil...
Surely there's an alternate explanation for this? ie. the military is filled with 20-somethings, and reddit's primary demographic is 20-somethings, therefore you'd expect any sort of cluster of 20-somethings (ie. a military base) to be more "reddit addicted"? Moreover, surely the US military can afford a $5/month VPN subscription to cover their tracks?
And yet, there weren't any other military bases, and Reddit deleted that blog post after publication. There's a lot more information available if you care to search.
A lot of comments here about AI, but if you actually looked at the source material you'd see that what is shown is a verbatim copy of a thread of user comments using new accounts. This is not an example of an LLM generating AI content, it's a blatant copy of human content with attribution removed.
I guess their license allows them to do this, but wow.
I don't know who is doing the reposting, but the only party that seems to benefit from that sort of thing would be reddit. Why would a 3rd party do that?
As other people mentioned above, karma farming for bot accounts. Reddit probably benefits as well, just like any other social network doesn't want to clamp down too hard on bot activity.
Remember that elections are coming in the US, and it is likely that the new Cambridge Analytica-like are ramping up operations. Not sure that's the case here, but I saw an increase of politically hinted posts recently from obvious fake accounts.
"If you can't tell, does it matter?" This line from Westworld being played out on reddit. How does one determine if one is a real person with access to only text / comments and the constraint of keeping everyone anonymous.
I hope I can comment on the above without taking a side in the current Israeli/Palestinian conflict:
Reddit seems to, on average, take a pro-Palestinian stance (they are practically jumping out of their seats over what is happening at Columbia), but for some reason /r/worldnews has a heavy, heavy Zionist slant.
Many people see Reddit as truth, and so it concerns me that either of these positions are accepted as the best course forward.
Na it's just this one sub because clearly it's being heavily manipulated, my "minority opinion" is shared in almost all the other ones. When only articles from israel-based news sources get upvoted then you know bots are doing most of the work. Go spend a few minutes looking at the posts related to the war and you'll end up at the same conclusion, you don't need to be a genius to see it.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadI made that comment in 2012.
I hate the site and have limited the time I spend on it but there aren't good alternatives for certain communities.
Moviechat.org seems to be a spiritual successor, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of its initial content is archived IMDB forum posts, but it's not nearly as active.
From our hackernews perspective, the website sucks now. From the average user perspective, reddit is another fun app full of dopamine hits.
But both things can be true: great, deep, obscure info and general worse (dare I say, hostile) user experience.
Honestly, I don't think pissing off the mods has made that big of a difference. Yes, some subs shut down, but otherwise I haven't seen a meaningful cultural change in Reddit as a result of that whole issue.
In fact, one of the reasons I believe Reddit is so crappy is specifically that they bow to mods in many ways. Many communities are run by, frankly, psychos who are way too happy with the power they have over their little ponds. I've lost count of how many times my posts have either been removed or my user banned despite having followed the explicit rules of a sub. Communities vary, but I've found this "you should have read our minds" attitude to be commonplace.
Yes, you can spin off your own sub, but then you're taking a gamble as to whether the original community is going to come after you; they seem to win at least half the time by convincing Reddit that your [relatively pissant] community is toxic in some way. Good luck if your community is blamed for creating "drama" even when there's a lack of brigading.
I'm not a mod or anything, but I think there are actually a lot of legitimate reasons for a mod to have that attitude. It's unreasonable to expect a volunteer to create a comprehensive rules of behavior and enforce it in a lawyerly way and keep a community on track and not burn out. I've seen more than a few online communities have serious problems with certain users that would have been best handled with a "we're sick of dealing with you, enjoy your ban." Then, there's also the fact that if a community is too popular, a mod can only scale by being more brusque.
Maybe depends on the subs you read, because I have not noticed an appreciable difference before and after the "going dark" thing.
Personally, I've observed this phenomenon on r/Polarfitness as soon as the sub becomes a list of complaints and negative feedback about after-sales service, positive content magically appears with very generic content but dozens of comments.
Instead what you see is a post from a fresh account that is a copy/repost of one of the top posts in either that or a sibling subreddit.
This is then followed by a half dozen accounts reposting the top comments from the original as their own comments. This is often where they mess up and it's easily detectable when not the OP responds as the OP.
If you check back in a month or two or so, the accounts are inevitably banned by Reddit or shilling something somewhere else (with a minimum age/rep requirement) themselves and/or using the accounts to express support for something shilled. The "resume writer" was annoying prolific.
I find it doubtful that Reddit corporate is using such an approach to try to drive up engagement numbers.
LLM paraphrasing is likely to either drift away from "what worked" towards unknown territory or introduce tics that don't really cohere quite right. We can confidently assume it's being used as part of other strategies, but it's not actually optimal here.
The real issue is that Reddit (and Facebook, Youtube, Amazon, Tinder, etc) have very little incentive to aggressively police against this until and unless examples like this make big news and start to harm their general reputation. In the meantime, it just makes their sites look more alive and popular. It's good for them right up until they it becomes a defining association with their brand. This lazy approach works for the bots and the sites, so there's no reason to overcomplicate or take on bigger risks.
* Encouraging authoritarian and know it all attitudes, essentially fake experts
* Taking the Moralistic high road
* Operational FOMO: Covering topics that "Big XYZ" doesnt want you to know leading to users to come back over and over for the inside scoop
The entire thing is designed to cement user's attention. It's fascinating.
The algorithm now suggests posts, popular ones with lots of fighting in the comments, from subs you dont subscribe to. Essentially causing organic brigading which is against Reddit rules
What's the subreddit? It's not in the screenshot but I'm guessing r politics?
It's all the same lunatic that has no idea they're on the other side of the horseshoe as "the bad people".
The age of small self-hosted forums is unfortunately behind us, and I don't see them reviving any time soon.
The underlying software is not really important, it's what you can do with it.
I wish more people would try Discourse, which is threaded like a real messageboard without all the automation bells and whistles.
If HN was a sub reddit I would never visit it.
I'm on a sports team messageboard that still runs on a mid-00s phpBB backend. There are no bots because there is nothing to propagandize about on such a small, topically focused community.
Also younger people find forums archaic and weird, to the extent that most people my age (early 20's) that I've talked to about this prefer imageboards over forums. As much as I'd love for forums to make a comeback, younger people are the ones who determine the next shape culture will take and there is very little chance small forums will grow. It's such a shame too, it's so difficult to find good Discord servers and so much technical knowledge is unindexable and will most likely be lost forever once Discord stops burning money for growth.
Posts that are clearly farmed bots that figured out how to use LLMs to vary the same genre of question over and over again.
LLM Bots that seem to respond set to counter at all costs mode. Yes I’m aware of how dumb people can be, but these adapt in a way that feels very LLMish — instantly sacrificing the point just to counter you and try to get another response
On top of that I see Google is dumping tons of fresh traffic, but the behavior of these users seems different than Google drop bys. These are tons and tons of users who seemingly appear out of thin air with histories.
I dunno — it all seems really weird and particularly set for rage engagement to me.
So unless they exclusively plan to sell rage engagement to film Studios and political campaigns their market is going to be microscopic and terribly performing.
I think Reddit could be enjoying a short term boost but once Google drops them it’s a bust.
It states:
> "The most popular posts on Reddit have switched from reposted content from “karma farmers,” or engagement hackers, to nearly entirely original content from less popular Reddit users. Original content from smaller communities is now outperforming recycled evergreen content by a tremendous margin across the platform. As of October, none of the top five posts of the month on r/all were original. By March of this year, four out of five of these posts were original. "
In my experience this hasn't been the case at all. I've also noticed that if you click the profile of people that end up on the front page, they are often new (or suddenly active) accounts with a certain pattern:
1) Make 3-4 posts not related to the content they want to promote, to "warm up" the account. I'm guessing there's a soft-ban on new accounts here.
2) Post the actual content/narrative they want to promote.
3) Suddenly, this post gets 10k upvotes and reaches the frontpage.
Are LLMs not just fancy Markov chains? They are next token predictors which have some hidden internal state that output probability distributions which lead to further states.
Someone did this on Reddit 9 years ago. It was remarkably good.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/comments/3g9ioz/
I posted this example earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208741 of a reddit account shilling Sourcegraph. They flat-out deny that this's a bot, but it's clear to Me.
Can't trust anything or anyone any more. Pretty sad.
Doesn't look like a bot at all, possible shill sure but they're a person.
We do give free/sponsored accounts to our Discord mods, open source maintainers, and folks who write guest blog posts for us. u/Prolacticus is not one of those accounts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208741
I fully believe that you aren't paying him directly to do this, but I don't believe that any human would shill so hard (and always mentioning the price and the same gist of 'it's fantastic' etc). Any chance it's a replyguy or similar test, either by someone else in your org without your knowledge or just by the creator themselves as I guess they need to do some 'live testing' before charging real 'customers'.
You make a great point. It's highly unlikely that a newly-created account just so happens to post content that's engaging enough to be featured in Reddit's frontpage. It's far more likely that these "less popular Reddit users" are sock puppet accounts used to post special-purpose content which is then subjected to industrial-grade boosting to force it onto everyone's first page.
Changes of this magnitude are practically impossible without the backing of either Reddit itself or marketing companies intending to control the flow of information.
Personally, I'm fairly certain it's a difficult cat-and-mouse game, but there's no question that some very popular mods also use bot farms to promote the content they want on the subs they mod.
A lot of subs have low-karma blocks for new accounts, so spammers have to buy aged accounts to be able to post in a lot of places.
Check /r/interestingasfuck, /r/satisfyingasfuck, /r/natureisfuckingcute, hellsomememes, and a lot of other subs.
Qualities of subs particularly susceptible to such spam:
* Subs that don't require OC (not news, not a hobby sub) * Subs that don't demand proof of identity (/r/selfies, /r/glowups)
So, counter to the quote you cited, I still see a lot of karma farmers on reddit, and like you say, they'll often do what you and I describe and then turn into an Onlyfans account, or something like that.
reddit is just such a goddamned cesspool, and I am so curious as to what nefarious actors are doing on it and why they're doing it.
Different topic, but I'm ranting: The political echo chambers are wild. Places like BadHasbara, Palestine, IsraelExposed, Conservative, Libertarian, antiwork, WorkersStrikeBack, Anticonsumption, all have wild agendas that will instaban anyone who challenges the dreck that gets posted there.
It's amazing how the "AI abundance" advocates don't understand something so blatantly obvious.
You can tell from the comments, which don't read like typical loquacity of ChatGPT style LLMs.
I imagine you are complaining about people that disagree with you on how to solve the problem.
Those are the best ones; stop telling everybody about it or they'll get flooded with losers from that orange site I keep hearing about.
https://www.reddit.com/r/longreads
So the hobbies/games I'm currently playing are subreddits I subscribe to and actively browse. Games like Anno 1800, Cities Skylines, and Manor Lords. All 3 have very active and passionate community members that are constantly posting high quality content around inspiration for builds, tips and tricks, community update news, patch discussions, mods, etc. etc.
If you want more silly subreddits not related to hobbies, it depends on what your humor is. Here is a wide range of options: r/AnimalsBeingBros, r/ActLikeYouBelong, r/softwaregore, r/raspberry_pi, r/lockpicking, r/FellowKids, r/dogswithjobs, r/BirdsArentReal, r/BreadStapledToTrees - subreddits that are related around hobbies or niche humor will make you love reddit.
Again, tl;dr, reddit is not the place for real life news. If you don't use it for that, you'll find yourself enjoying the website a ton more.
r/billiards r/boots r/frugalmalefashion (arguably small nowadays) r/hiphopheads r/mtb r/self hosted r/sffpc
EDIT: Also, the way I make Reddit useful to me is I change the default sorting for subreddits from Hot to Top > Monthly, and also disable content recommendations. It'll shows less content and Reddit will sometimes say "No more content right now", which is great.
That said, I'd be careful saying the sub can't be "trusted." It's annoying but when you do get an answer it's generally sourced and credible. As opposed to the unadulterated bullshit I've seen on the rest of the site regarding basically anything I have professional experience and/or formal training in.
The strictest moderation there is can be found in high quality academic publishing. You are allowed to publish only if what you say has high value, and is said in the proper way. Can't get your Flat Earth Quarterly published in Nature, and we're all better for it.
I swear some of the things I've been downvoted for in r/embedded is just out of control nuts.
One of them closed to non-approved submitters, and now they get AI-generated requests for account approval.
From a user's PoV, this is at worst a good thing and at best completely irrelevant.
I never go to the large subreddits anyway (political, news, pics, etc), so whether or not they are around, or around and filled with LLM trash is completely irrelevant to me.
OTOH, the subreddits I do visit are alive and well and show no signs of being less valuable to me than before.
EDIT: "Vanish" forever. Yes, there have been protests and black outs, but everything I have ever subscribed to did come back.
https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
In fact, the biggest losers were the users of the small, niche subreddits that the admins couldn’t strongarm into returning.
Your statements are really baffling to me.
The admins didn't care that we had a thriving community, no spam, and they banned the subreddit. They also blocked anyone from ever creating a replacement with the same name (still to this day). So, it definitely does happen. I'm keeping it vague here to maintain my anonymity.
Side note, reddit dropped that rule about 2 years ago so I suppose we could start one up again, but I've lost interest in that topic.
This is what made me realize that reddit is actually an awful platform for information, while there is a lot of good stuff there the average user is NOT educated, and the average users outnumber the individuals educated in a particular subject.
I have been downvoted to hell many times even though my information was backed by multiple studies and factual.
Because there's no way to have "the EDC thread" or the "post pics of your phone" thread, this low-effort shit fills the subreddit.
Trivially defeated once posters know it's a thing, but it would be better than nothing.
Good examples from the front page just now include https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1cgmfrt/aitah_for_ma... and https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1cg4c7n/aitah_for_ge...
They used to be based on super low paid human, then it was bot train the account up then humans use it when it's cooked, and I guess we're now entering the bot from top to bottom era.
Now there is a stock price to protect. They literally are obligated to keep the bots running because it directly effects the stock price.
It's new stupid world.
Looking forward to Google Search recommending stores and restaurants that closed years ago, or videogames that don't exist.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...
edit: or greedy sampling only?
https://archive.is/9qoe7
Surely there's an alternate explanation for this? ie. the military is filled with 20-somethings, and reddit's primary demographic is 20-somethings, therefore you'd expect any sort of cluster of 20-somethings (ie. a military base) to be more "reddit addicted"? Moreover, surely the US military can afford a $5/month VPN subscription to cover their tracks?
https://old.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...
I guess their license allows them to do this, but wow.
Reddit's terms says:
>You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: [...]
Users only grant reddit to repost their comment, not anyone else. Are you claiming that reddit themselves are doing the reposting?
Or you know... maybe people just disagree with you
Reddit seems to, on average, take a pro-Palestinian stance (they are practically jumping out of their seats over what is happening at Columbia), but for some reason /r/worldnews has a heavy, heavy Zionist slant.
Many people see Reddit as truth, and so it concerns me that either of these positions are accepted as the best course forward.