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Reddit going back to it's roots with fake users
by activiation 3y ago
Reddit going back to it's roots with fake users
- 7373737373 3y agoThey gotta read more Dante
- grepfru_it 3y agoIs your username your (old) phone number?
- giantrobot 3y agoCould be the ham radio sign-off "73" which is basically "cheers/best regards".
- joeythedolphin 3y agoAmazing comment and I'm sort of left begging... how does Dante tie into this? (serious comment)
- the_doctah 3y agoJust copying the playbook of every social media platform using monthly active users as a bullshit metric to pump their perceived value.
- pmoriarty 3y agoI'm curious about what a better metric would be. Social media sites are usually valued by how many active users they have, so what's a better measure of that?
- the_doctah 3y agoI'm not sure. But the answer should not be, for example, Instagram doing literally nothing about the sea of bots.
- JohnMakin 3y agoDAU/MAU ratio tells a lot more. It's often called "stickiness." It's a good metric of who continues to come back to your platform.
- vlovich123 3y agoThose numbers would still be juiced in the same way with artificial traffic. Revenue / user or revenue / request is less easily gamed as the more artificial traffic you add the larger that drops. Of course that's a lagging indicator but at least that forces Reddit into a position where they'd have to be defrauding their advertisers (or overcharging them on impressions which they'll push back on).
- activiation 3y agoShould be illegal for the purpose of pumping your value for becoming a public company
- ganoushoreilly 3y agoFunny enough i've been getting multiple daily notifications of people following me on reddit.. Never used that feature.. nor does anyone I know use it. All the names are clearly generated too. Is it a 3rd party? Is it Reddit trying to create user metrics as a social platform? It's all suspect at this point.
- danudey 3y agoIn my experience it's all OnlyFans porn spam, which I doubt are bots created by Reddit.
- devsegal 3y agoMaybe for you. Those girls were genuinely interested in my thoughts on philosophy.
- x0x0 3y agoJust share your credit card and they'll share even more... thoughts.
- wing-_-nuts 3y agocareful you're putting descartes before the wh... nevermind
- d0gsg0w00f 3y agoThanks. This made my day.
- anadem 3y agoWonderful!
- w0m 3y agoI assumed this is simply spammers as they accounts are ~always deleted quickly.
- 3y ago
- vlovich123 3y agoDoesn't this potentially open them to serious securities fraud? They're making financial statements about the revenue they receive per user. By flooding with fake users, their trying to make their top-line numbers seem high while pretending like the revenue / user is staying constant. It's one thing if it's the initial seed to a two-sided marketplace, but if this gambit doesn't pan out that seems like a problem. The SEC failing to enforce securities fraud like this is a separate matter.
- johannes1234321 3y agoThe don't have to include those fake users in the active users count. They could exclude them.
- miroljub 3y agoSince those users are their own, it's easy to just write "select count(*) from usres where fake = 1" and report it. It's not like they need first to detect those users are bots.
- kjeetgill 3y agoI assume you meant "fake != 1"?
- hluska 3y agoI think both would be correct, though your interpretation is more likely. They could use “fake = 1” to report the number of fake users. Or “fake != 1” to report the number of real users. I can’t imagine the gymnastics they would have to do to make a fake user count palatable in a road show so again, I think your interpretation is most likely. Then again, I’m about a billion dollars short of my opinion mattering…
- froggit 3y agoIt would make me so happy if they have an SQL table or whatever they use that's actually called "fake." That'd really be cutting the bullshit while also creating bullshit. It's more likely to be some kind of prettified name like "internal public accounts for assuring control of external applications," some sort of technical name that doesn't really make sense by itself but is complicated enough that it looks like someone knew what they're doing when they came up with it. Management would flip if they stumbled on anything titled "fake." It's way easier to just hide red flags behind technical sounding terms than it is to try to explain why a "problem" isn't a problem and shifting the blame to someone you won't miss.
- baby 3y agoand it's hard to blame them no? As much as I hate Reddit and their ways to force me to login or use their app, if they want to get more users from some countries why not fake it til you make it?
- Semaphor 3y agoUh, yes? It looks dumb and low quality. And it’s not as if Germans are a tiny minority, the German sub has over 1 millions subs, and at least on samplesize, they are the largest group after the 3 big English countries (US, UK, CA)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]