Reddit updates look after rough 6 months and ahead of reported IPO::“Edit: Obligatory ‘F— Spez’ for karma.”
I dont have any direct experience with reddit any longer.
What I can say, is that I think a verrrrrrry significant portion of comments and commenters are actually reddit run bots. My source for this is my experience in the daily thread of a certain degenerate gambling forum. There were maybe like 12-30 posters who would reply, engage, etc… in the daily and day after threads. However, there was a yyyyyuuuuugggge number of accounts that would just comment with no real further engagement. Like you would respond to them, but they wouldnt respond back.
I truly believe that reddits internal business model is predicted on the use of reddit run bots to create synthetic engagement in certain audiences around marketing targets that a selective group of advertisers (read, not buying reddit ads) are given access to. The basics is that reddit astroturfs synthetic engagement until organic engagement takes over. I have no way of proving this and its pure speculation.
This is why I don’t even worry about considering the user numbers on lemmy. Relying on my anectdotal experience, we’ve got about the usership/ engagement numbers from around the 2009-2011 time period, which is actually pretty amazing. Also, the overall lemmy experience is far superior, for example, just the ability to sort by a couple of different ‘hot’ options is a major improvement. I really think if the devs just keep vibing on their plan, lemmy will be more than strong enough to survive and continue for decades to come.
The fact is that reddit stole from us our faith in a ‘good internet’. The users of reddit built reddit, not the company that owns it (they suck). The users of reddit paid for the server time and made the system work. That good faith was utterly exploited by the leadership of reddit and we should never forget how they stole from and exploited their community.
i still use reddit a lot of comunities havent left and my god the amout of bots now is insane entire threads are coppied with 1 year 6 month old acounts with zero history and what i think is ai spam from simualr acounts its a mess over there now what brainless idiot is letting this happen
what brainless idiot is letting this happen
I can’t begin to imagine, who could it be, there are so many Spezs* to choose from. I guess we will just never know.
*Actually the entire board is rotten. We love to blame Spez (and he’s an incessant liar who deserves every last bit of contempt he gets – all while making comments about “landed gentry” while he profits off free content and moderator labor) but he’s just the public face on the entire board, who ALL just want to push through an IPO and then cash out. They do not care at all that it has destroyed the site, and because bots use API calls, they’ve known about the bots all along, and have openly used bots themselves. Sam Altman was a board member of Reddit for a while, and oh look, Reddit is used for AI training. Or was, until Altman left the board and then decided they wanted cash for that to continue.
The entire board is shit.
