So I checked out reddit after a long time and was going through the top of r/videogames subreddit and I could clearly see a pattern in most of the posts there. Posts were mostly like “what game ______ for you?” or “what game _____ like this?” Now I could be wrong but it doesn’t feel ‘organic’ (if that’s correct way to put it). It’s like these are put up intentionally. Thoughts?
Its probably buzzfred trying to scam a story out of someone
None of those even reference current games, they could all be repost bots reposting stuff from years ago.
The “Which era did you start playing video games” is missing the last 4 years of consoles.
It’s all bots, reposts, and corps trying to use the system to drive engagement towards their shit products/websites/services. The comments are worse. jokes, memes, SJWs, and random proselytizations on the most banal shit you’ve ever ignored. Every time I’m on Reddit it just feels like dead internet.
Why are you using r/videogames as an example to make this claim?
There are at least two more subs that are wildly more popular and have much more activity and substantial posts and commenting.
- videogames - 293k subscribers
- Games - 3.3m subscribers
- gaming - 40m subscribers
I am subbed to both of those last two and didn’t even know the first one existed because it’s offshoot trash.
The GenX sub is the same now. It’s just a bunch of questions now like “what’s your favorite song from the 80’s?”. It used to be a sub with substance and now it’s lame.
from the '80s*
Has that not always been how it goes? There was a time where the joke was “what can you say at both _____ and _____” because it was posted to absolute death. I know there’s been loads of stuff like that so is that not the same as to what’s going on? Is it not just a meme?
Dead Internet Theory at work.
The internet has a grim future and it doesn’t involve you and I interacting if they get their way.
That part of the Internet can die and rot…
Fluent-in-finance sub has the same problem. Every day, it’s a twitter screenshot of some politician statement and the title is always an engagement question like “Is punitive wealth tax gay?” that makes it to /all
One more thing to notice here is that despite it being top of all time, none of the posts are even a year old
Reddit’s site traffic has just gone up that much. Especially if you include bots posting constantly in their SEO subreddits that admins are aware of and indifferent to.
Karma bots making low effort shitposts because our dumb monkey brains will upvote it. it happened before but you ignored it because you cared enough about the organic engagement on the community and mods did enough to try to stop that behavior
Now that Reddit removed mods that actually did their jobs and you’re one of us, it’s all you can think about
You can blame bots, but having also worked as a soul crushing social media manager for a few months, you make shit like this to get karma (or on other media, interactions.) Humans deserve some blame!
That said the greatest irony is a toooon of the votes and comments are also bots and/or shills. The weirdest thing I found success on with Twitter, for instance, was wishing people a good morning, using a company account. Weirdly drove profile traffic and follows. >.>
Yeah, there’s a reason why Youtube thumbnails have all that weird shit. It works.
You are not the only one noticing it. Probably trying to maximize the user provided content they can sell to language model creators
Looks like they got 60m from google for that:
https://fortune.com/2024/02/23/reddit-60m-deal-google-search-giant-train-ai-models-on-posts/
Indeed, thanks for the link!
NP! I didnt know about it until recently too. It was eye opening on why im seeing so many “safe” posts make it to the top and why so many google search results now include reddit posts recently.
Recently? Reddit was always the answer to questions in google searches…
Nope, I have projects that used to pull top x on Google searches based on some seo work I did back in 2016-2017. It’s significantly more. Granted the dataset is super old by now and you would have to trust a random on the internet (aka me) in order to believe, but it hasn’t been always been reddit.
Telegram is just lousy with crap posts and comments now as well.
My guess is with the protests that some of the top content creators moved away and never came back.
I remember sorting by hot once gave a wide variety of things and now it seems to be more drama posts like AITA posts.
Although it feels like I’m still following an ex, There was one place over there I used to visit a lot and I believe if you took a snapshot of the top ten posts of a random day few years ago and today, they’d be very different. Today’s seems to be a group picking up a trend and running with it and before it was more original content. I remember going there because I knew there’d be something new I’d likely laugh at or be amused by and now it feels heavily recycled.
The subscriber count is still way up, but I’d you look at the online/active user count, it feels like its around 10% it was off recent highs.
It felt like the sub had a ship of thecleus moment where it seemed to just be growing, but was also losing people until the group changed but the name was the same.
Someone else said the new reddit gold allows people to receive real money* if people gild their posts (by spending real money) * receiver must be in certain countries.
I saw a post recently on a wholesome memes page where someone tagged repost sleuth bot and someone else commented that todays post was literally a copy of the third top voted post of all time. It was.
I also remember that bot support got affected and this led to a spam detector bot being moved from active development to sunset mode where it was still supported but not actively enhanced.
The subscriber count is still way up, but I’d you look at the online/active user count, it feels like its around 10% it was off recent highs.
Same here. Subs with hundred of thousands of subscribers, but barely any activity.
Been like that for a while.
For example, /r/videos supposedly has 30 million subscribers, but you can sometimes hit the front page of that sub with 50 upvotes.
Subs like that have been decimated by tiktok, so it’s safe to assume most of the subscribers have left. It simply doesn’t make sense.
bots are fucking atrocious for generating just miles and miles of trash content on Reddit.
As a mod for many years, the real moding work was finding ways to keep the bots at bay.
It got real bad since around 2020ish…
They can train their AI’s all they want on Reddit, it’s a complete waste of time.
That data is corrupt as shit. It’s already littered with garbage old AI posts and comments, and it’s gonna poison their models real bad.
