Is it me or is Reddit mostly bots now?
A lot of the comments I am seeing under posts seem just a bit off.
I am considering whether being on Reddit is worth it anymore? It doesn't have the same human-seeming environment it had 5+ years ago.
Does anyone have any recommendations as to a Reddit alternative?
Lemmy doesn't have the same number of diverse users that Reddit had during its pomp (it's mostly just Linux fans and technical people), and I do quite like the network effects of a diverse audience.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] thread> How I Talk Bitcoin to Friends and Family During Thanksgiving
> Mars colonies are claiming bitcoin independence (short story)
> Nazis are pro-freedom tech? What the hell has happened in the last 70 years?
Fascinating stuff. I hope those people get enough sunlight.
This basically ensures that posts will be worthless engagement bait
Long ago, marketing firms became aware of the "just add 'reddit' to your product search for real human advice" meme. They're also aware of the fact that it's very easy to buy karma, buy accounts, set up upvote/downvote networks, and manage sockpuppets. Now I'm absolutely certain that >80% of all posts in product-related topics are fake. Bots, guerilla marketers, PR firms, reputation management firms, influence operations, you name it.
A lot of the personal stories you see on Reddit are also fake -- posted to farm karma.
The upvote/downvote system there, combined with anonymous accounts that have public post histories, has been a disaster for internet discourse. (Here, at least, it's gated and the community is relatively small. Also, the power of the downvote on HN is very limited, and only accounts with 500 karma can downvote anything. Over there, it's unrestrained and the downvote is too powerful. Reddit has structural problems.)
> Does anyone have any recommendations as to a Reddit alternative?
Forums still exist for most interests. They're usually much better than Reddit.
Maybe a website, that links people to the forum equivalents of whichever subreddit they want to find an alternative to, would prove helpful?
Might as well go all the way and be maximally ambitious: A modernized internet directory that functions as an alternative to Google would be a very welcome thing, in this day and age. I have some ideas for how that thing could work.
The fact that we have things like those awesome-* lists on GitHub make me believe it would be possible.
There'd be more to it than that, but that's the basic idea.
I'd love to find enough people who would like to work on such a thing.
Blogs and forums could probably apply for free.
I imagine that the still-theoretical company would (hopefully) profit, and that the curators are neutral salaried employees, rather than Wiki-style volunteers.
I would argue that word-of-mouth is the best way at this point, whether in person, or from others you know online.
But is this the case for smaller subs as well?
Open a new restaurant, release a new app, brand some alibaba products, etc.
As for alternatives, it depends on what you are looking for. E.g., if you don't need to comment / post, a feed reader with all your favorite discourse forums can cover a lot of ground.
The rest is either political propaganda bots or karma farming bots (gaining karma to later advertise OF or propaganda).
Reddit is dearly missing a recommendation feed that actually aligns with ones interests (e.g. subreddits similar to those already subscribed to and upvoted content). Oh, and owners who care more about their users than money - but I guess that's been hopeless from the beginning. I've mostly stopped using it and would love to know alternatives
I've also seen entire threads get "replayed". Bots will post highly upvoted comments from the last time a link was posted etc.
Nearly everything that makes it to the front couple pages of /all is posted by people pushing an agenda, or worse, literal Russian accounts fomenting hate. Remember, their goal above all else is to make you angry, tired, and get you to give up on functioning democracy. Lots of people on the left and "democrats" are fighting with talking points straight out of the kremlin. That infighting is the point.
Everything you see on reddit is meant to make you angry. Someone will mine Twitter for the most hateful nazis shit/most objectionable "I hate men" post, and post a screenshot on reddit as if that's a meaningful representation. This is intended to piss you off, because you will "engage" more if you get pissed off.
The internet doesn't want you to be happy or successful or informed because it is literally less profitable.
There are entire popular subreddits that are mostly agenda posts, either literally part of an operation, or outright useful idiot sycophants.
You almost cannot make it to the front page anymore without a bot farm to to get the "momentum" going on your post. Otherwise it just cannot compete with the manipulated posts.
This is so surreal until you realize it is happening. You kinda know you have seen it before but not really since other comments are different.
Ye Reddit is syntethic nowadays. Some niche subs are OK with strict rules on content.
But the loose ones are too much karma farm and bots to bother.
It wouldn't suprise me of there are like 100 people doing most of the posting with alt accounts and semiautomated workflow. Both as commercial shills and political manipulation.
Inauthentic content being some combination of bot posts and coordinated shill/sockpuppet posts. Either for political/social manipulation (enforcing a narrative and allowed ideas), as well as some economic manipulation (paid posts shilling for a product/movie/person/etc).
In the past the inauthentic accounts had patterns that you could more easily find. Names that are all generated the same way, or comment history patterns that all match. It was 100% obvious a few years ago that there was a lot of manipulation going on. After being exposed a few times they've improved, and now with LLM capabilities added in it's much harder for a random person to clearly be able to identify them.
I feel like one day there will be a whistleblower who finally reveals to the world exactly how much manipulation has been going on (especially by governments) and it'll be a pretty shocking revelation. Until then we have little proof, as it seems the owners of such sites either willingly or unwillingly or unknowingly cooperate with it.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
Things built on lies rarely have a good ending, I wonder whether they considered that back then
Social networks should NEVER be run by for-profits (unless, perhaps, if funding derives 100% from the users themselves), we see why again and again, and yet humanity is failing to learn
Years ago you could enter a username and if it was taken you would get a suggested username with added numbers. "Think 'simon' is taken, what about 'simon7889' ?"
Sometime in the last couple of years it autosuggests. word_word_number. For example Interesting_Bus_7217
My suspicion, with zero evidence, is that this was a deliberate choice to enable more botting.
Anything remotely political
any of the meme reposting subreddits
any aita related subreddit
any subreddit that limits replies to subreddit members aka circlejerk and hivemind subs
any user with excessive karma/year that isn't making OC like a comic/ artist or something
any new user that posts anything related to the things above
that cuts out at least 50% of what you see on the front page, still not great but probably better than any other alternative for what you are looking for.
Smaller niche ones for games and series? Eh, it's definitely worse in terms of quality, though my experience is that it still seems mostly human driven. The last subreddit I used was the one for the Mario & Luigi series for example, and it seems pretty legit as far as posts go.
But yeah, my opinion is that the quality has certainly taken a nosedive overall, and the amount of posts per day has fallen in many places, but the quality of more niche subreddits is still decent enough compared to majority of social media sites.