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> Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of

> Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in. Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal. The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect" has grown significantly within the past few years, though has been a problem for a number of years prior. Reddit won't come back from this stage of may-as-well-be-bots-posting.

greenpresident 3y ago
There is already a large population of bots reposting formerly popular content, including the comments from the original thread. It’s eerie once you notice it.
- transcriptase 3y ago
  I’ve seen entire (dozen reply long) comment chains on a repost (or similar content) that were re-created verbatim from an older post. Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process. Eerie was an understatement.
  - evouga 3y ago
    What’s the endgame here? Who is buying ripened accounts with lots of karma and why?
    - joshstrange 3y ago
      People who want to astroturf, from everything from products to politics (though honestly probably more for "products"). Reddit is well known for being one of the few places you can "trust" product reviews (that hasn't been fully true for a while now but it's still valuable). If a near-0 karma and/or new account says "I love X product" then they can sometimes be downvoted/called a shill but an account that's a couple years old and has decent karma? Looks like a real person. That's at least the explanation I've heard many times.
      - MostlyStable 3y ago
        Once you cross the extremely small karma barrier needed to get your comments allowed/not be rate limited...whats the point? I use reddit for a lot of recommendations/research and I have _never_ checked the karma of a user after reading their comment.
        TylerE 3y ago
        To appear trustworthy. Account says buy bitcoin - user checks history and sees 7 year old account with thousands of posts, many highly upvoted, so assumes source is sane and not astroturf.
        MostlyStable 3y ago
        That's my point though: how often do people do that check? I don't think I personally ever have. Maybe I'm just weird though? I tend to not just go with a single user/comment/thread, but rather try to find multiple different answers and gestalt from there, so individual trustworthiness is less important.
        TylerE 3y ago
        Obviously it's higher than zero, else the market for accounts wouldn't exist.
        andybak 3y ago
        Isn’t this begging the question though? I.e., the thing you have just stated is exactly the thing we’re trying to figure out.
        TylerE 3y ago
        No, because we're talking about a phenomenon that indisputably exists.
        3y ago
    - mejutoco 3y ago
      Did you see all those "where can I buy this flavor of snack in $location", or some weird anecdote involving a flavor of chips or similar. Tons of astroturfing on reddit. I notice a lot of talking past each other in only tangentially related comments. Lately also here on hn.
    - waboremo 3y ago
      Outside of buying accounts, some people literally just want control. For the same reason that people will spend countless hours moderating large subs for free. They want to push certain narratives on subs, so you'll see large accounts where all they post are generic filler distractions or inciteful links. It's not all super nefarious or political, often it's things like mindless fanboy wars, where they only post things that make their favorite companies look good. For others, they do it because getting upvotes and reddit awards makes them feel good. They see themselves as community pillars. I suppose this kind of feeds into the above reason in some ways. If you check /r/games today, you'll see one user is responsible for over half of the submissions. Such accounts are what I mean, where unless they have fine tuned a bot to such a degree, they're really just someone with a little bit too much time on their hands.
  - z3c0 3y ago
    > Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original What's sad is how many of those aren't bots. It's not uncommon for karma farmers to have their bots upvote each other, but it isn't cost effective to have hundreds (a 1 year old reddit account can run you approx $10 for 1000 post karma). The sad reality is that of those hundreds of upvotes, almost all represent a person who fell for it. As the saying goes "a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on".
    - aryan14 3y ago
      > (a 1 year old reddit account can run you approx $10 for 1000 post karma). Someone who bought a reddit account here, I bought a 2 year old aged account with around 3000 post karma for $10. The karma has lost its value.
      - transcriptase 3y ago
        Without judging and out of pure curiosity, can I ask why?
  - flomo 3y ago
    > I’ve seen entire comment chains on a repost that were re-created verbatim from an older post. I have seen this happen on one of those (former) small niche cozy subs, where it is small enough that people notice their content being recycled. No idea what the goal might be, so I wonder if it is a platform feature to pump-up engagement by automatically reposting content.
  - monnok 3y ago
    Lately, I’ve seen comments copied verbatim from lower in the very same comment section. They’ll find a comment with upvotes rising above its thread neighbors, but with the entire thread neighborhood buried at the bottom of the comment section. Then they’ll just staple that low comment as a response to some visible comment in a thread much higher up the comment section.
- ilyt 3y ago
  I wanted to make one for a joke and see how long it takes for people to notice but I guess people did that already for nefarious purposes. That was after I noticed that cat delivering bot I wrote for internal chat appears to have "infinity supply of cats" according to the users, while all it has is a ~200 long list of imgur links that never changes.
mvdtnz 3y ago
> The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect" This is what gets me about all the people lately claiming that the only way to get good Google results is to append site:reddit.com - I have spent enough time looking at Reddit threads to know I would never trust them for important information. People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness becomes a meme (in the original sense of the word) that propagates through the site for literally years. New users read the confidently wrong information, take it as gospel and spread it to other new users.
- inquirerGeneral 3y ago
  [dead]
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  1) Compared to what? It's really important to compare those reddit results to elsewhere and not the hypothetical "best" answer. Yeah, reddit answers are often not great, but in my experience, the rest of google search has, over the past 10 years, gone to complete and utter shit. If I don't already know where to look (and just want google to get me there faster), 99% of my results are going to be useless blogspam. 2) It's even more important to have an understanding of the _kinds_ of things reddit is good at answering, and which communities provide good answers to those questions. Reddit is so big that there are good and bad versions of almost everything.
  - sieabahlpark 3y ago
    [dead]
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    1) As always it depends on the query. For categories like cars/engines, gardening/landscaping and DIY stuff I've found that a Bing search often outperforms Google because it returns a dedicated section for internet discussions that isn't focused completely on Reddit. Here's an example of that section from a search about manifolds for an old engine[0]. There is a TON of (actually good) community discussion on such topics on "the old internet" as long as it doesn't need to be timely. For topics that need more timeliness, I don't have a good answer. The internet in general is so enshittified that maybe Reddit is the only good answer when the alternative is AI-generated garbage. 2) In my experience, for factual information, it's just too much of a minefield. Try finding actually accurate information on Reddit about Roundup/glyphosate, for example. Compare what you find to the actual published research on the topic. It is very hard to find correct information on this topic on Reddit, and where you do see it, it will be downvoted to invisibility. [0] https://imgur.com/a/8NNcwTJ https://imgur.com/a/8NNcwTJ
tmaly 3y ago
People are going to go somewhere. I just can't see Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastadon gaining much traction. For those old enough to remember Napster, it worked because it was centralized.
- soperj 3y ago
  Napster worked because it was free and easy and that didn't exist before (FTP servers were not easy). If it were because it was centralized then bit-torrent would have never taken off.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Hm. FTP servers are pretty easy. "ls" to see files. "get" to get them. What wasn't easy was finding them, and then preventing them falling over when too many people tried to access them at the same time. Napster solved that with distributed file serving and consolidated listings of what was available.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Even easier if you used a nice client to access ftp. The notion that Napster was easier than FTP doesn't ring true to me, either.
      - soperj 3y ago
        napster was fire up the program and search. You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from, often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything. Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster? Because I did, and it was vastly more difficult.
        JohnFen 3y ago
        > You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from True, but that was easy. It was a bit less convenient than file-sharing systems because you had to search as a separate step, using a different program, but it wasn't hard. > often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything I saw that sort of thing with BBSes, but never with FTP sites. I didn't know that was a thing with them. > Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster? Those aren't ftp clients. I was questioning the premise that ftp was hard to use.
castlecrasher2 3y ago
I agree with you. /r/legaladvice is the peak example of this; as someone who enjoys reading threads there and generally avoids commenting as I'm no lawyer nor legal expert they've become practically unbearable as more and more ignorant people comment freely and without restraint.
somethingreen 3y ago
Which is why I don't think that moderator strike will have much effect. All these popular trash filled subreddits are moderated. Moderators just don't do that good of a job. Managing a community is hard and I sympathize with people doing it for free and failing. But as result, the number of subreddits that will actually be destroyed by their mods leaving is too small to affect company balance sheet. Vast majority of Reddit is already pretty low quality and its users are fine with it.
- tacocataco 3y ago
  I don't think the strike will have much of an effect because there is a end date.

greenpresident 3y ago

There is already a large population of bots reposting formerly popular content, including the comments from the original thread. It’s eerie once you notice it.

transcriptase 3y ago
I’ve seen entire (dozen reply long) comment chains on a repost (or similar content) that were re-created verbatim from an older post. Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process. Eerie was an understatement.
- evouga 3y ago
  What’s the endgame here? Who is buying ripened accounts with lots of karma and why?
  - joshstrange 3y ago
    People who want to astroturf, from everything from products to politics (though honestly probably more for "products"). Reddit is well known for being one of the few places you can "trust" product reviews (that hasn't been fully true for a while now but it's still valuable). If a near-0 karma and/or new account says "I love X product" then they can sometimes be downvoted/called a shill but an account that's a couple years old and has decent karma? Looks like a real person. That's at least the explanation I've heard many times.
    - MostlyStable 3y ago
      Once you cross the extremely small karma barrier needed to get your comments allowed/not be rate limited...whats the point? I use reddit for a lot of recommendations/research and I have _never_ checked the karma of a user after reading their comment.
      - TylerE 3y ago
        To appear trustworthy. Account says buy bitcoin - user checks history and sees 7 year old account with thousands of posts, many highly upvoted, so assumes source is sane and not astroturf.
        MostlyStable 3y ago
        That's my point though: how often do people do that check? I don't think I personally ever have. Maybe I'm just weird though? I tend to not just go with a single user/comment/thread, but rather try to find multiple different answers and gestalt from there, so individual trustworthiness is less important.
        TylerE 3y ago
        Obviously it's higher than zero, else the market for accounts wouldn't exist.
        andybak 3y ago
        Isn’t this begging the question though? I.e., the thing you have just stated is exactly the thing we’re trying to figure out.
        TylerE 3y ago
        No, because we're talking about a phenomenon that indisputably exists.
        3y ago
  - mejutoco 3y ago
    Did you see all those "where can I buy this flavor of snack in $location", or some weird anecdote involving a flavor of chips or similar. Tons of astroturfing on reddit. I notice a lot of talking past each other in only tangentially related comments. Lately also here on hn.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    Outside of buying accounts, some people literally just want control. For the same reason that people will spend countless hours moderating large subs for free. They want to push certain narratives on subs, so you'll see large accounts where all they post are generic filler distractions or inciteful links. It's not all super nefarious or political, often it's things like mindless fanboy wars, where they only post things that make their favorite companies look good. For others, they do it because getting upvotes and reddit awards makes them feel good. They see themselves as community pillars. I suppose this kind of feeds into the above reason in some ways. If you check /r/games today, you'll see one user is responsible for over half of the submissions. Such accounts are what I mean, where unless they have fine tuned a bot to such a degree, they're really just someone with a little bit too much time on their hands.
- z3c0 3y ago
  > Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original What's sad is how many of those aren't bots. It's not uncommon for karma farmers to have their bots upvote each other, but it isn't cost effective to have hundreds (a 1 year old reddit account can run you approx $10 for 1000 post karma). The sad reality is that of those hundreds of upvotes, almost all represent a person who fell for it. As the saying goes "a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on".
  - aryan14 3y ago
    > (a 1 year old reddit account can run you approx $10 for 1000 post karma). Someone who bought a reddit account here, I bought a 2 year old aged account with around 3000 post karma for $10. The karma has lost its value.
    - transcriptase 3y ago
      Without judging and out of pure curiosity, can I ask why?
- flomo 3y ago
  > I’ve seen entire comment chains on a repost that were re-created verbatim from an older post. I have seen this happen on one of those (former) small niche cozy subs, where it is small enough that people notice their content being recycled. No idea what the goal might be, so I wonder if it is a platform feature to pump-up engagement by automatically reposting content.
- monnok 3y ago
  Lately, I’ve seen comments copied verbatim from lower in the very same comment section. They’ll find a comment with upvotes rising above its thread neighbors, but with the entire thread neighborhood buried at the bottom of the comment section. Then they’ll just staple that low comment as a response to some visible comment in a thread much higher up the comment section.
ilyt 3y ago
I wanted to make one for a joke and see how long it takes for people to notice but I guess people did that already for nefarious purposes. That was after I noticed that cat delivering bot I wrote for internal chat appears to have "infinity supply of cats" according to the users, while all it has is a ~200 long list of imgur links that never changes.

mvdtnz 3y ago

> The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect" This is what gets me about all the people lately claiming that the only way to get good Google results is to append site:reddit.com - I have spent enough time looking at Reddit threads to know I would never trust them for important information. People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness becomes a meme (in the original sense of the word) that propagates through the site for literally years. New users read the confidently wrong information, take it as gospel and spread it to other new users.

inquirerGeneral 3y ago
[dead]
MostlyStable 3y ago
1) Compared to what? It's really important to compare those reddit results to elsewhere and not the hypothetical "best" answer. Yeah, reddit answers are often not great, but in my experience, the rest of google search has, over the past 10 years, gone to complete and utter shit. If I don't already know where to look (and just want google to get me there faster), 99% of my results are going to be useless blogspam. 2) It's even more important to have an understanding of the _kinds_ of things reddit is good at answering, and which communities provide good answers to those questions. Reddit is so big that there are good and bad versions of almost everything.
- sieabahlpark 3y ago
  [dead]
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  1) As always it depends on the query. For categories like cars/engines, gardening/landscaping and DIY stuff I've found that a Bing search often outperforms Google because it returns a dedicated section for internet discussions that isn't focused completely on Reddit. Here's an example of that section from a search about manifolds for an old engine[0]. There is a TON of (actually good) community discussion on such topics on "the old internet" as long as it doesn't need to be timely. For topics that need more timeliness, I don't have a good answer. The internet in general is so enshittified that maybe Reddit is the only good answer when the alternative is AI-generated garbage. 2) In my experience, for factual information, it's just too much of a minefield. Try finding actually accurate information on Reddit about Roundup/glyphosate, for example. Compare what you find to the actual published research on the topic. It is very hard to find correct information on this topic on Reddit, and where you do see it, it will be downvoted to invisibility. [0] https://imgur.com/a/8NNcwTJ https://imgur.com/a/8NNcwTJ

tmaly 3y ago

People are going to go somewhere. I just can't see Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastadon gaining much traction. For those old enough to remember Napster, it worked because it was centralized.

soperj 3y ago
Napster worked because it was free and easy and that didn't exist before (FTP servers were not easy). If it were because it was centralized then bit-torrent would have never taken off.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Hm. FTP servers are pretty easy. "ls" to see files. "get" to get them. What wasn't easy was finding them, and then preventing them falling over when too many people tried to access them at the same time. Napster solved that with distributed file serving and consolidated listings of what was available.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Even easier if you used a nice client to access ftp. The notion that Napster was easier than FTP doesn't ring true to me, either.
    - soperj 3y ago
      napster was fire up the program and search. You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from, often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything. Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster? Because I did, and it was vastly more difficult.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        > You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from True, but that was easy. It was a bit less convenient than file-sharing systems because you had to search as a separate step, using a different program, but it wasn't hard. > often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything I saw that sort of thing with BBSes, but never with FTP sites. I didn't know that was a thing with them. > Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster? Those aren't ftp clients. I was questioning the premise that ftp was hard to use.

castlecrasher2 3y ago

I agree with you. /r/legaladvice is the peak example of this; as someone who enjoys reading threads there and generally avoids commenting as I'm no lawyer nor legal expert they've become practically unbearable as more and more ignorant people comment freely and without restraint.

somethingreen 3y ago

Which is why I don't think that moderator strike will have much effect. All these popular trash filled subreddits are moderated. Moderators just don't do that good of a job. Managing a community is hard and I sympathize with people doing it for free and failing. But as result, the number of subreddits that will actually be destroyed by their mods leaving is too small to affect company balance sheet. Vast majority of Reddit is already pretty low quality and its users are fine with it.

tacocataco 3y ago
I don't think the strike will have much of an effect because there is a end date.