Election is coming up, all Russian bots
It's all kinds of bots; Russian, Chinese, Liberal, Conservative, but most of all its Reddits own bots meant to inflate traffic stats ahead of the IPO.
So what you're saying is we should short the stock to make it big
Could even open a lawsuit and force reddit to investigate how much of their traffic is bots, immediately after the IPO
Judging by the trending posts, its mostly us liberal bots :).
They are probably paying clickfarms.
Reddit probably isn’t, as that would be cooking their metrics and Huffman would get fucked by the long arm of the SEC. They might still be, Huffman loves Elon and Elon got away with tons of shit.
Advertisers are probably paying more content farms to astroturf it though.
Plus without the API, do you really think people just stopped scraping Reddit? They just run a headless Chrome instance now and I bet Reddit doesn’t look the gift horse of traffic in the mouth.
Advertisers are probably paying more content farms to astroturf it though.
Yup, in fact we just banned ~13 accounts tonight from a subreddit I'm still involved with. That's just the ones we identified, and it's only a medium sized subreddit
A user noticed that the responses to a post sounded a little off and reported it. Turns out there was a network of bots using generative AI to mix real academic advice (ex. "Go talk to the advising office") with occasional subtle advertisements (ex. "I recommend using grammarly and (advertised service)".
Once we caught on, we looked through the history of those accounts and gathered as many as we could identify and banned them all.
I don't think this is Reddit's doing, and they're usually good about banning spam bots site wide once a mod report is made. Still, they benefit from increased activity and they have an incentive to do less of that. It was also much harder to notice the problem because of the AI generation. If a user didn't explicitly report it, I probably wouldn't have noticed
I highly suggest you ban what the were advertising and not just the account.
If advertiser's realize the shady bot farms they deal with are causing any comment that mentions their product to be automatically deleted, they will stop.
This is going to be the Idiocratizing of the internet. AI is going to be training in itself with these unidentified posts and get dumber and dumber.
Let’s hope no one lets it have access to anything important…
It feels a little like how steel from before above ground nuclear testing, called low-background (or pre-war) steel because it isn’t contaminated is prized for building some sensors.
Pre AI information need to be preserved, otherwise we might not really know if the info we’re seeking is fact based in any way.
Except I can totally see them committing securities fraud in order to pump up the numbers. It seems very much like something they would do.
I think that’s what this part of the comment was about:
They might still be, Huffman loves Elon and Elon got away with tons of shit.
The SEC got its funding slashed by Trump - are they like the IRS now where they don't have the resources to truly do the job anymore?
Did you guys read the article? It’s all about how since google and Reddit penned a deal to use Reddit to train google AI models, google is now massively pushing Reddit links in search results.
And their answer, ironically, is to avoid “Gen-AI garbage.”
But you should really read the article. It pissed me the fuck off. Because that sounds…massively illegal.
I think I've comment this before but over the pandemic years I did a little experiment. Every day I bookmarked the obvious content reposting bot accounts on the first few pages of r/all. After a while I checked back on the accounts. The majority of them become cryptocurrency spam bots. A very small percentage spam random things. There was an extremely high success rate of picking out the bot accounts. Pretty much all them were except for maybe a handful.
spez is basically exit scamming with reddit. Whoever is buying the dataset is getting robbed blind. That's if reddit inc isn't being upfront behind closed doors. Maybe they are. After all reddit does have well over a decade of mostly organic activity. The recent data has to be absolute trash though.
As someone who still semi-frequents reddit, it's mostly bots, more and more of which are clearly using some form of ChatGPT or another LLM. It's actually kinda absurd, I've seen many a comment chains where it's just different bots replying to each other, both pretending to be real people.
If bots actually do start frequenting Reddit, and they get hard to detect, the AI content generation will start poisoning itself. Isn't that cool?
For me, the cool part is that the vast majority of people can't tell anything has changed.
Also, we can be rather poisonous ourselves.
I must say I've seen in increase of conversations on Reddit that seem like everyone involved has severe lead poisoning.
Only if you count bots lol
Yeah this isn't Reddit but more than 80% (>4/5) of Twitter is bots. It's to the point where you can find any blue checkmark account, reply to them with a prompt, and more likely than not they'll have a wacky and clearly autogenerated response. Sometimes they just reply things like "sorry, I can't generate content that depicts violence" to random posts too.
Dead internet theory is almost a reality and I hate it. It's already happened to Google search results / blogs.
I had my Reddit very heavily curated, my subs were mostly smaller subreddits. I was incredibly active and had my settings so that anything I voted on would not appear on my homepage. I got to see a ton of posts because of that.
Around 2021, I started noticing that reposts weren't just people coming in and posting things we've seen a dozen times because they had no way to know it was a repost. It was bot networks that would take top posts and then other bot accounts would recreate the original post's comment section. The accounts followed patterns and became really obvious to spot after a while.
The original tells were the bots taking really specific posts that only made sense in that context. Popular post from last Christmas? The bot doesn't know what Christmas is, sees a popular post from a few months ago and reposts someone happy about their gifts in August. Look at this beautiful picture I took of the summer Alaskan wilderness this morning but it's February. The photography subreddits were obvious because the bots would rotate the picture a few degrees which would sometimes ruin the picture's aesthetic.
I'm not sure if it was just me spotting them easier or if they were really ramping up into 2022 but by the time they killed API access and I stopped using it, I think over 80% of posts were bots. Made leaving the site way easier.
It's sort of become a bit of a meme to end every google question with 'reddit' to trick it into showing you an actual human response. I'm sure that's been good for traffic
I’ve had to start limiting the date to pre-2023 to keep ai bs out of the results
I wonder if there was some kind of technological revolution that made it exponentially easier to generate text that happened recently.
Subs picked to be "mainstream" get botted to death and every other sub is half dead, so not really. Quality fell off a cliff.
Simplest explanation is that the general public doesn't give a shit and while Facebook is on the downturn (not sure if numbers can back that up) people need to go somewhere else. Maybe that is reddit right now, they got the marketing and content to get people on it.
I cannot wait for reddit going public, it's going to generate so much drama, that's going to be soooo good.
Lemmy instances brace yourself
The article seems to suggest a change on the Google search algo and how Reddit pumps the SEO is to blame as it's showing up in search rankings above other more relevant results.
I'm assuming "traffic" here is individual page visits, which would shoot up if people are just pulling up one page from a "how do I do X" type of search. I doubt this boost is coming from people sticking around, but I'm sure that's not how Reddit will spin it.
This would be my guess- Reddit is more reliable for random queries than much of the internet, as AI propagates.
I see more and more suggested "my search Reddit" on Google even as I visit Redfit way less now
Yes. Google is strongly favoring both in search results in their feeble, and failing, attempt to combat AI.
Google has massive swing; there's a whole industry around getting Google to prefer your low quality crap nobody wants to see over others' low quality crap nobody wants to see.
If Google has finally figured out a metric to measure "helpfulness" of a website and punishes unhelpful websites, a bunch of dogshit that would have otherwise gotten top spots may have been banished to page 2.
Reddit results would naturally creep up because of that (and therefore get a lot more clicks), even if they didn't change at all.
Didn't Reddit signpost that they'd signed a deal with Google over AI? Is Google driving visitors to Reddit in exchange and to their benefit?
Not even close if we're talking about current users or active contributers. After they shut down third party apps and sided with advertisers over mods there was a huge migration off platform to several other platforms. Many smaller subreddits are ghost towns and the biggest ones that are still active have a smaller participating community, less total votes, and changing norms.
It's not just eternal September, it's the same thing that happened when digg died in reverse where communities grew and changed because people were joining. Users are adding site:reddit.com or whatever to Google searches because of SEO general searches are an advertising dumpster fire, but those search results are going to degrade over time along with the site's quality if they continue to make such shitty decisions for communities and users or people move to other ai based search tools.
Where did everyone go? I thought Lemmy was the new hangout but it still seems so small, even popular posts are only getting a handful of comments?
Well, the federation kinda spreads users out. Like I can’t login to kbin on my Lemmy apps but I can see kbin posts, but the vast majority of my time is on lemmy. IOW it’s harder to participate across instances so less people.
There are other platforms that are probably suffering some form of the same fate, they got an influx of ex-redditors, but not a high enough volume to really take off and get high participation rates.
I dunno, I prefer Lemmy/fediverse. The churn isn’t there so you can actually interact with people instead of competing with inane reddit quips and top comment retreads.
Taking a cursory look I feel like posts still aren't being engaged with like they used to. I remember seeing posts with 100,000 upvotes very regularly on the front page, but you really don't see that anymore. Yeah maybe they tweaked their calculations but why make your site look like it's not as engaging as before right before a major IPO offer?
Fuck me, I'm not even using Google directly, I'm currently on MetaGer which is a meta search engine, and even there, I got annoyed today already that half the top links were shitty Reddit links.
I hate this shit so much. I work as a Software Engineer, so using web search was half our work day a few years back.
Personally, I'm thankfully already at a point where I can figure out most things by fucking around. But we have an intern who's new to the job and she regularly tells me that she struggles to find anything useful on the rather mainstream technologies that we're using.
To some degree, LLMs are still a workaround for that, but they won't be able to update to newer information without pulling in LLM spam, so either we're stuck with the current technologies for the foreseeable future or we won't have a way of finding anything in a few years.
And the worst part is that I can't think of a real solution. Maybe we could use a search engine, which only queries official documentation directly. That could be an improvement, as often not even that shows up in the normal search results. But really, what our intern needs is tutorials and those are virtually indistinguishable from LLM spam...
Official documentation can, sadly, only contain so much information. Lots of tools are community driven and there are some niche uses of libraries that official docs don't know about, or including them would just take up space.
IPO padding for the CEOs golden parachute.
Part of it is either Reddit manipulating search positioning or Google (most people's default search) prioritizing Reddit results. Searching for answers to questions often results in a half page of Reddit links. They may not be relevant, but that doesn't become apparent until you're there.
The growth trend according to Google Trends indicates that it is still growing, but definitely not a quadrupling over 6 months.
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