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That data seems wrong. I don't use Reddit much, but I checked the data aginast some smaller subs I sometimes check, and according to those charts they have just

by arp242 3y ago

That data seems wrong. I don't use Reddit much, but I checked the data aginast some smaller subs I sometimes check, and according to those charts they have just a few comments per day, but I know for a fact that's wrong. It's wrong for all subs I checked. For example: https://subredditstats.com/r/thethickofit https://subredditstats.com/r/thethickofit Just 3 comments for Nov 22, 8 for Nov 23. But how does that square with the existence of this thread from Nob 22 with 84 comments? https://old.reddit.com/r/thethickofit/comments/181d68u/ben_swain/ https://old.reddit.com/r/thethickofit/comments/181d68u/ben_s... And there's a bunch of other threads too! It's not just "a little bit wrong" it's completely wrong. That site seems about on the ball as a dead seal.

swores 3y ago
Maybe 81 of the 84 comments were either third party bot comments, or a Reddit-run LLM designed to make the sub look more active than it really is (the 2023, fewer people hours, version of what they did to launch the site), and subredditstats.com has detected that? I doubt that's the case, but just as there are sites that analyse an Amazon product's reviews to judge real vs. fake, it's not impossible that a Reddit comment counting serving could do the same.
- yorwba 3y ago
  It seems more likely that subredditstats.com detected that "This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah." given that that's what it says in the big wall of red text at the top.
- valianteffort 3y ago
  One of my favorite conspiracies is that reddit is mostly just LLM's and paid agents talking to eachother. Employed by various intel agencies, governments, and reddit themselves trying to astroturf and sway conversation in one direction or another.
  - irrational 3y ago
    This is why I say that anonymous sites like Reddit are not Social Media. If I am on there, there is zero proof that anyone else commenting is a human. They all could be bots and I have no way to prove otherwise.
    - adr1an 3y ago
      What would be a non anonymous social network, Facebook? This very much applies to them too, iiuc..
      - irrational 3y ago
        On Facebook, there are connections to my family, friends, acquaintances. I know they are real because I’ve interacted with all of them in real life.
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      On some of the niche travel-related subs like r/bikepacking, it’s actually quite common to run into one’s fellow redditors in real life on some popular route around the world. You definitely know the high-value posts are coming from real people. Some posters aren’t anonymous at all, because they also have linked YouTube or Instagram accounts that use their real name and face. And from e.g. the person’s gear, the past travels they describe, or the internet drama they have witnessed, it’s easy to identity a person you run into as a fellow member of the sub.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    While this is absurdly conspiratorial, there is a grain of truth to it: early on in Reddit's history, the admins created fake accounts and posted on them to boost engagement[0]. More recently, after the blackout and user exodus, /r/de noticed a bunch of new German-language copies of popular English-language subs being created with a bunch of autotranslated comments[1]. So Reddit's administration is not above creating fake accounts and content to juice numbers. How much of Reddit's engagement is faked is up for debate - I suspect it's less than we think. However, it'd be really funny if, say, when Reddit IPOs, someone at /r/WSB catches onto this and triggers a bunch of people shorting the stock. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeDzx4SUME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeDzx4SUME via https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/ https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/reddit_admins_were_just_caught_using_bots_or_fake/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red...
- arp242 3y ago
  Yeah, that's a load of bollocks. 90% of that sub is just people quoting applicable insults from that TV show at each other, most of which probably won't make sense if you haven't seen the show. This isn't something that's easy to mindlessly spam LLM-spam at. Actually, many probably won't pass ChatGPT's profanity filter; ChatGPT says: > The insults in the show are often colorful and inventive, but they can be quite explicit. Due to their explicit nature, I won't provide a verbatim quote here You can ask it to not filter profanity, but it seems I need to do it every other message. In general ChatGPT is about as useful as a marzipan dildo here. I'm willing to bet that exactly 0% of the content of that sub is LLM generated, and the same for most of those smaller subs. Who even cares about these tiny subs? Certainly not Reddit.
- kmlevitt 3y ago
  >Maybe 81 of the 84 comments were either third party bot comments, or a Reddit-run LLM designed to make the sub look more active than it really is Even if this was true (which I seriously doubt), how can you prove that, and what makes you think the subredditstats website cited above would be able to tell the difference? The operator freely admits his/her stats probably underestimate real traffic due to the expense of collecting data, and they make no claim to having software to detect real commentors from fake. Meanwhile the real internal reddit stats available to mods show numbers that are both much higher and much closer to the live traffic we can see for ourselves as readers.
thaumaturgy 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425415 You should probably also point out the big red text on the subredditstats pages. I didn't see it when I posted the links, since I'm colorblind and hues of red are entirely invisible to me. Also I have trouble counting past the number of fingers on my hands, so I didn't notice that the numbers were a bit off. If I had noticed that, I still would've needed one of the very clever people here to explain the significance.
- arp242 3y ago
  I didn't see that text either. I just did a quick "let's verify this data" check because it just doesn't match my experience. > If I had noticed that, I still would've needed one of the very clever people here to explain the significance. I don't know if that's sarcastic or serious or if that's some dig at me? What an odd comment.
  - thaumaturgy 3y ago
    A little bit of snark, not directed at you specifically. Several people now have pointed out either the red text at top, or that the numbers aren't an exact match, or both, without themselves bothering to read through this thread to see if those had already been discussed.
    - arp242 3y ago
      IIRC there was just one comment when I posted that (but others may have been posted in the 10 or 15 minutes it took me to write that), and I still feel my comment adds value, because "likely to be wrong" in the warning seems like a rather weak phrasing (can also mean it's correct!), as are some of the other "I think this may be wrong" comments I see here. I also suspect that smaller subs are a more useful measure than these huge subs, because I'd expect them to die off much quicker than the huge ones with a lot of inertia. That said, I understand it can be annoying having 16 people tell you you're wrong all in slightly different ways. It's the price of posting on the internet I'm afraid. But it was (and still is!) the top post on this thread, even though it's not just factually wrong, but spectacularly factually wrong – which is fine, everyone is wrong sometimes – but people do have the tendency to point that out. As long as it's not a pedantic point I don't think that's wrong even if there's a comment already, if you think you can make that point better.
kmlevitt 3y ago
I still have mod status on a large-ish (70k+) subreddit so I can view reddit's internal traffic statistics for it, and these estimates are definitely wrong. These stats claim the sub has had 10-20 comments per day in just the past month, so maybe 300-600 tops. In reality it's had 1200+ comments just in the past week alone and probably closer to 5000 for the month. And you can see the activity with your own eyes in every thread, so I definitely trust reddit's own stats more.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- srcreigh 3y ago
  is your sub growing?
  - kmlevitt 3y ago
    Yes, still. I’m a mod on a few other decent sized subs (30k-ish) actually and most of them are still growing, unless the topic at hand is clearly outdated.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Reddit throttled its API usage a month before the great 3rd party purge, so I'm guessing whatever collection method that site was using simply doesn't work correctly anymore. Or worse yet, the remnants of the API spits out completely incorrect data itself. Sounds like Reddit itself has recovered in terms of raw numbers, but I (and others) have noticed yet another downtick in quality. Lot more bots (AI craze doesn't help. And despite the API narrative being used to counter them, they probably suferent the least), comments seem to be as hostile as early pandemic. But these are hard to measure objectively.
      - vGPU 3y ago
        Bots seem to be more prevalent everywhere. For example, I’d say roughly 3/4ths of the followers on my twitter are obvious bot accounts with names like battery48462628 and that have either no comments at all or random Chinese foods and city pictures with captions like “flowers are the spice of life”.
lawgimenez 3y ago
My sub has around ~2K subscribers and still growing, ~200-300 new subscribers every month.
- rglullis 3y ago
  Why are you there, though? Can't you grow your community in any platform that is less user hostile?
  - lawgimenez 3y ago
    I am from a Facebook obsessed country, I think Reddit is a good alternative. The discussions are healthy though I’m surprised.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      I don't think there is a fundamental problem with reddit's userbase for smaller communities. But I think that we should avoid centralized platforms at all costs. Sooner or later, you will realize that "your" sub is not really yours and that you just gave a lot of your time and work for someone to exploit the data mine. Put aside peer pressure for a moment, couldn't you create your community on Lemmy to make sure that you are always in control of your social media presence?
      - lawgimenez 3y ago
        I wish I could give you a great answer. But my country is not really tech savy in a sense, that it even takes convincing to have them sign up over to Reddit from Facebook. Yeah not sure how it works over there with new platforms and everything but that won’t just fly here.
      - timwaagh 3y ago
        If you're obsessed with ensuring others can't make money running something like Reddit then sure
mschuster91 3y ago
For what it's worth: many of the NSFW subreddits are dead. Even r/gonewild, one of the OGs - either they've gotten closed due to being unmoderated or they've been overrun by onlyfxns spam, or they've been hit by some weird downranking like GW. Particularly the nsfw loss hits hard for those interested in niche communities. We've lost tumblr, never had any of the Meta (FB, Instagram) views, Reddit is holding on on threads, Pornhub went down in flames following their outright incompetence, and Twitter has gotten a hellscape from EM's hopeless attempts to keep the spammers away (and his other antics).
- arp242 3y ago
  > overrun by onlyfxns spam I suspect this is the bigger issue to be honest. I certainly stopped because of this. Not that I begrudge people having OF or advertising that, but please, for fuck's sake, stay on-topic, and don't spam the fuck out of things with content barely related to the sub's topic. I also really hate the shift in language to be more personal; e.g. "would you like to [..]" / "I would like YOU to [..]" and stuff like that. It's just creepy and manipulative. Sell your pr0n pics, fine, but don't pretend we have some sort of personal relationship, because we don't. Also imgur's NSFW purge probably didn't help.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    It works though. There's millions of horny, lonely suckers out there - if you're an OF creator, all you need to do is to catch a few good whales, just like with free-to-play games. Particularly where "weird" fetishes are involved, the rates for custom content can be pretty exorbitant, but still a drop in the bucket for the clientele.
  - nicbou 3y ago
    This is the internet at large. The porn subreddits must have become part of the dark forest. https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest
- wkat4242 3y ago
  The thing is, that was the desired outcome anyway. Reddit wants to get rid of the NSFW because the big money they want to attract doesn't like anything remotely fringey. I wonder where those posters went to though. Lemmynsfw is nice but very sparse. Ps OnlyFans spam was killing it for longer already

by arp242 3y ago

swores 3y ago

Maybe 81 of the 84 comments were either third party bot comments, or a Reddit-run LLM designed to make the sub look more active than it really is (the 2023, fewer people hours, version of what they did to launch the site), and subredditstats.com has detected that? I doubt that's the case, but just as there are sites that analyse an Amazon product's reviews to judge real vs. fake, it's not impossible that a Reddit comment counting serving could do the same.

yorwba 3y ago
It seems more likely that subredditstats.com detected that "This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah." given that that's what it says in the big wall of red text at the top.
valianteffort 3y ago
One of my favorite conspiracies is that reddit is mostly just LLM's and paid agents talking to eachother. Employed by various intel agencies, governments, and reddit themselves trying to astroturf and sway conversation in one direction or another.
- irrational 3y ago
  This is why I say that anonymous sites like Reddit are not Social Media. If I am on there, there is zero proof that anyone else commenting is a human. They all could be bots and I have no way to prove otherwise.
  - adr1an 3y ago
    What would be a non anonymous social network, Facebook? This very much applies to them too, iiuc..
    - irrational 3y ago
      On Facebook, there are connections to my family, friends, acquaintances. I know they are real because I’ve interacted with all of them in real life.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    On some of the niche travel-related subs like r/bikepacking, it’s actually quite common to run into one’s fellow redditors in real life on some popular route around the world. You definitely know the high-value posts are coming from real people. Some posters aren’t anonymous at all, because they also have linked YouTube or Instagram accounts that use their real name and face. And from e.g. the person’s gear, the past travels they describe, or the internet drama they have witnessed, it’s easy to identity a person you run into as a fellow member of the sub.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  While this is absurdly conspiratorial, there is a grain of truth to it: early on in Reddit's history, the admins created fake accounts and posted on them to boost engagement[0]. More recently, after the blackout and user exodus, /r/de noticed a bunch of new German-language copies of popular English-language subs being created with a bunch of autotranslated comments[1]. So Reddit's administration is not above creating fake accounts and content to juice numbers. How much of Reddit's engagement is faked is up for debate - I suspect it's less than we think. However, it'd be really funny if, say, when Reddit IPOs, someone at /r/WSB catches onto this and triggers a bunch of people shorting the stock. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeDzx4SUME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeDzx4SUME via https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/ https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/reddit_admins_were_just_caught_using_bots_or_fake/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red...
arp242 3y ago
Yeah, that's a load of bollocks. 90% of that sub is just people quoting applicable insults from that TV show at each other, most of which probably won't make sense if you haven't seen the show. This isn't something that's easy to mindlessly spam LLM-spam at. Actually, many probably won't pass ChatGPT's profanity filter; ChatGPT says: > The insults in the show are often colorful and inventive, but they can be quite explicit. Due to their explicit nature, I won't provide a verbatim quote here You can ask it to not filter profanity, but it seems I need to do it every other message. In general ChatGPT is about as useful as a marzipan dildo here. I'm willing to bet that exactly 0% of the content of that sub is LLM generated, and the same for most of those smaller subs. Who even cares about these tiny subs? Certainly not Reddit.
kmlevitt 3y ago
>Maybe 81 of the 84 comments were either third party bot comments, or a Reddit-run LLM designed to make the sub look more active than it really is Even if this was true (which I seriously doubt), how can you prove that, and what makes you think the subredditstats website cited above would be able to tell the difference? The operator freely admits his/her stats probably underestimate real traffic due to the expense of collecting data, and they make no claim to having software to detect real commentors from fake. Meanwhile the real internal reddit stats available to mods show numbers that are both much higher and much closer to the live traffic we can see for ourselves as readers.

thaumaturgy 3y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425415 You should probably also point out the big red text on the subredditstats pages. I didn't see it when I posted the links, since I'm colorblind and hues of red are entirely invisible to me. Also I have trouble counting past the number of fingers on my hands, so I didn't notice that the numbers were a bit off. If I had noticed that, I still would've needed one of the very clever people here to explain the significance.

arp242 3y ago
I didn't see that text either. I just did a quick "let's verify this data" check because it just doesn't match my experience. > If I had noticed that, I still would've needed one of the very clever people here to explain the significance. I don't know if that's sarcastic or serious or if that's some dig at me? What an odd comment.
- thaumaturgy 3y ago
  A little bit of snark, not directed at you specifically. Several people now have pointed out either the red text at top, or that the numbers aren't an exact match, or both, without themselves bothering to read through this thread to see if those had already been discussed.
  - arp242 3y ago
    IIRC there was just one comment when I posted that (but others may have been posted in the 10 or 15 minutes it took me to write that), and I still feel my comment adds value, because "likely to be wrong" in the warning seems like a rather weak phrasing (can also mean it's correct!), as are some of the other "I think this may be wrong" comments I see here. I also suspect that smaller subs are a more useful measure than these huge subs, because I'd expect them to die off much quicker than the huge ones with a lot of inertia. That said, I understand it can be annoying having 16 people tell you you're wrong all in slightly different ways. It's the price of posting on the internet I'm afraid. But it was (and still is!) the top post on this thread, even though it's not just factually wrong, but spectacularly factually wrong – which is fine, everyone is wrong sometimes – but people do have the tendency to point that out. As long as it's not a pedantic point I don't think that's wrong even if there's a comment already, if you think you can make that point better.

kmlevitt 3y ago

I still have mod status on a large-ish (70k+) subreddit so I can view reddit's internal traffic statistics for it, and these estimates are definitely wrong. These stats claim the sub has had 10-20 comments per day in just the past month, so maybe 300-600 tops. In reality it's had 1200+ comments just in the past week alone and probably closer to 5000 for the month. And you can see the activity with your own eyes in every thread, so I definitely trust reddit's own stats more.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
srcreigh 3y ago
is your sub growing?
- kmlevitt 3y ago
  Yes, still. I’m a mod on a few other decent sized subs (30k-ish) actually and most of them are still growing, unless the topic at hand is clearly outdated.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Reddit throttled its API usage a month before the great 3rd party purge, so I'm guessing whatever collection method that site was using simply doesn't work correctly anymore. Or worse yet, the remnants of the API spits out completely incorrect data itself. Sounds like Reddit itself has recovered in terms of raw numbers, but I (and others) have noticed yet another downtick in quality. Lot more bots (AI craze doesn't help. And despite the API narrative being used to counter them, they probably suferent the least), comments seem to be as hostile as early pandemic. But these are hard to measure objectively.
    - vGPU 3y ago
      Bots seem to be more prevalent everywhere. For example, I’d say roughly 3/4ths of the followers on my twitter are obvious bot accounts with names like battery48462628 and that have either no comments at all or random Chinese foods and city pictures with captions like “flowers are the spice of life”.

lawgimenez 3y ago

My sub has around ~2K subscribers and still growing, ~200-300 new subscribers every month.

rglullis 3y ago
Why are you there, though? Can't you grow your community in any platform that is less user hostile?
- lawgimenez 3y ago
  I am from a Facebook obsessed country, I think Reddit is a good alternative. The discussions are healthy though I’m surprised.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    I don't think there is a fundamental problem with reddit's userbase for smaller communities. But I think that we should avoid centralized platforms at all costs. Sooner or later, you will realize that "your" sub is not really yours and that you just gave a lot of your time and work for someone to exploit the data mine. Put aside peer pressure for a moment, couldn't you create your community on Lemmy to make sure that you are always in control of your social media presence?
    - lawgimenez 3y ago
      I wish I could give you a great answer. But my country is not really tech savy in a sense, that it even takes convincing to have them sign up over to Reddit from Facebook. Yeah not sure how it works over there with new platforms and everything but that won’t just fly here.
    - timwaagh 3y ago
      If you're obsessed with ensuring others can't make money running something like Reddit then sure

mschuster91 3y ago

For what it's worth: many of the NSFW subreddits are dead. Even r/gonewild, one of the OGs - either they've gotten closed due to being unmoderated or they've been overrun by onlyfxns spam, or they've been hit by some weird downranking like GW. Particularly the nsfw loss hits hard for those interested in niche communities. We've lost tumblr, never had any of the Meta (FB, Instagram) views, Reddit is holding on on threads, Pornhub went down in flames following their outright incompetence, and Twitter has gotten a hellscape from EM's hopeless attempts to keep the spammers away (and his other antics).

arp242 3y ago
> overrun by onlyfxns spam I suspect this is the bigger issue to be honest. I certainly stopped because of this. Not that I begrudge people having OF or advertising that, but please, for fuck's sake, stay on-topic, and don't spam the fuck out of things with content barely related to the sub's topic. I also really hate the shift in language to be more personal; e.g. "would you like to [..]" / "I would like YOU to [..]" and stuff like that. It's just creepy and manipulative. Sell your pr0n pics, fine, but don't pretend we have some sort of personal relationship, because we don't. Also imgur's NSFW purge probably didn't help.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  It works though. There's millions of horny, lonely suckers out there - if you're an OF creator, all you need to do is to catch a few good whales, just like with free-to-play games. Particularly where "weird" fetishes are involved, the rates for custom content can be pretty exorbitant, but still a drop in the bucket for the clientele.
- nicbou 3y ago
  This is the internet at large. The porn subreddits must have become part of the dark forest. https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest
wkat4242 3y ago
The thing is, that was the desired outcome anyway. Reddit wants to get rid of the NSFW because the big money they want to attract doesn't like anything remotely fringey. I wonder where those posters went to though. Lemmynsfw is nice but very sparse. Ps OnlyFans spam was killing it for longer already