15 ms·

Reddit is full of bots: thread reposted comment by comment, 10 months later

356 points by SushiHippie 2y ago

leetrout 2y ago
Reddit has steadily declined over the past few years and it seems to have sped up since pissing off the mod community last year.
- SlimyHog 2y ago
  I deleted my account once they killed 3rd party apps and whenever I visit I've noticed that the quality of comments is WAY worse than I remember.
  - Zambyte 2y ago
    Funnily enough I didn't even use any third party apps at the time (just the old web client) but that whole fiasco was enough for me to finally curb my addiction. I also noticed the quality of comments seeming very bad whenever I go to something on Reddit (once every few months at this point). I don't think the quality has actually gotten much worse recently though; I think it was just so normal to me when I was using it. I think it has been a pretty slow decline over the last decade or so, to the point where it is now.
    - al_borland 2y ago
      The web client has become less and less useful as they try and force users into the app.
      - SlowRobotAhead 2y ago
        It's getting there, but the day that old.reddit doesn't work is the day I never go back even for small community stuff.
        drivers99 2y ago
        It's barely limping along. URLs with underscores get broken (with an extra backslash) when posted from certain apps but only for old.reddit users. There's some kind of inline images that just says "image" that you have to click on to see. There are some kind of emojis or something that only show up as digits between colons. People talk about profile pictures that I don't see. Sometimes the zooming keeps zooming back out when you're trying to zoom in, and if you follow a link and go back, it will automatically scroll you somewhere else on the page besides where you left off.
  - SkyPuncher 2y ago
    It’s absolutely terrible on the big subs now. Smaller subs seem to be okay, but it seems a lot of the content has gone elsewhere.
- criddell 2y ago
  Past few years? I've been reading about the decline of Reddit since Condé Nast Publications bought it in 2006.
  - gipp 2y ago
    One of my higher-voted comments on Reddit was in response to some thread bemoaning the decline of the site towards lowest-common-denominator meme content and recycled jokes. My comment was pointing out that people had been saying that for years, with multiple links to past, nearly identical threads. I made that comment in 2012.
- CSMastermind 2y ago
  For discussing entertainment like specific video games, movies, book series, TV shows, sports teams, etc. there simply isn't a good alternative to Reddit. I hate the site and have limited the time I spend on it but there aren't good alternatives for certain communities.
  - jjcon 2y ago
    I find that discord has far better communities than Reddit ever did
    - layer8 2y ago
      The issue with Discord, besides UI gripes and excessive chattiness, is that it’s not discoverable.
    - lanfeust6 2y ago
      Discord is like reinventing IRC with more noise. It's not a substitute for forums.
      - drivers99 2y ago
        You can have forums in discord now as well, not just chat rooms.
        anononaut 2y ago
        Can they be accessed and indexed without being invited to the channel?
    - ewoijfawoifj 2y ago
      I can't find discord comments on Google.
  - akuchling 2y ago
    For most entertainment topics, the-avocado.org has some lively discussion (based on Disqus).
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Reddit has enshitified, and I would also guess that their usage numbers are way up. The goal is to compete with tiktok, instagram, youtube for average everyday people. From our hackernews perspective, the website sucks now. From the average user perspective, reddit is another fun app full of dopamine hits.
  - idiotsecant 2y ago
    I know it's unfashionable in HN circles to admit it but there is still tons of high quality niche content (technical and otherwise) on Reddit that can't be found anywhere else.
    - leetrout 2y ago
      Very true and Google is surfacing more of it. But both things can be true: great, deep, obscure info and general worse (dare I say, hostile) user experience.
- ravenstine 2y ago
  Reddit was getting shitty way before the past few years. Honestly, I don't think pissing off the mods has made that big of a difference. Yes, some subs shut down, but otherwise I haven't seen a meaningful cultural change in Reddit as a result of that whole issue. In fact, one of the reasons I believe Reddit is so crappy is specifically that they bow to mods in many ways. Many communities are run by, frankly, psychos who are way too happy with the power they have over their little ponds. I've lost count of how many times my posts have either been removed or my user banned despite having followed the explicit rules of a sub. Communities vary, but I've found this "you should have read our minds" attitude to be commonplace. Yes, you can spin off your own sub, but then you're taking a gamble as to whether the original community is going to come after you; they seem to win at least half the time by convincing Reddit that your [relatively pissant] community is toxic in some way. Good luck if your community is blamed for creating "drama" even when there's a lack of brigading.
  - tivert 2y ago
    > I've lost count of how many times my posts have either been removed or my user banned despite having followed the explicit rules of a sub. Communities vary, but I've found this "you should have read our minds" attitude to be commonplace. I'm not a mod or anything, but I think there are actually a lot of legitimate reasons for a mod to have that attitude. It's unreasonable to expect a volunteer to create a comprehensive rules of behavior and enforce it in a lawyerly way and keep a community on track and not burn out. I've seen more than a few online communities have serious problems with certain users that would have been best handled with a "we're sick of dealing with you, enjoy your ban." Then, there's also the fact that if a community is too popular, a mod can only scale by being more brusque.
    - ravenstine 2y ago
      Yeah, I'm not really saying that mods shouldn't have discretion or flexibility, but a community is not healthy when its mods decide to remove any posts/comments that contain the word "frank" because they don't like a guy named Frank. Yes, that is a real world example I've encountered. And if I get banned because I can't read the minds of the mods, then I welcome said ban. I'm not on Reddit to play childish games or to join cults.
- ilikehurdles 2y ago
  Killing the API access made detecting and tracking spam bots impossible. There was a whole subreddit called thesefuckingaccounts where the latest tactics in spam and karma farming were being tracked.
- lelanthran 2y ago
  > Reddit has steadily declined over the past few years and it seems to have sped up since pissing off the mod community last year. Maybe depends on the subs you read, because I have not noticed an appreciable difference before and after the "going dark" thing.
charlie0 2y ago
I see the dead internet theory is proving more than just a theory.
- pixl97 2y ago
  Dead internet prophecy.
RedShift1 2y ago
Fake engagement by Reddit to prop up usage numbers?
- Beretta_Vexee 2y ago
  The phenomenon seems to be limited to a certain number of subreddits that are close to a brand or have products to sell. They recycle content to give the impression that there is some interest in their brand, product, crypto, etc. and to avoid giving the image of a dead brand. Personally, I've observed this phenomenon on r/Polarfitness as soon as the sub becomes a list of complaints and negative feedback about after-sales service, positive content magically appears with very generic content but dozens of comments.
  - mh- 2y ago
    r/AskReddit has been my guilty pleasure for like a decade, and it's super prevalent there too. No products being pushed in the threads I've seen called out.
  - oaththrowaway 2y ago
    It happens on meme pages all the time
- shagie 2y ago
  Good fake engagement would be more convincing and harder to detect. Instead what you see is a post from a fresh account that is a copy/repost of one of the top posts in either that or a sibling subreddit. This is then followed by a half dozen accounts reposting the top comments from the original as their own comments. This is often where they mess up and it's easily detectable when not the OP responds as the OP. If you check back in a month or two or so, the accounts are inevitably banned by Reddit or shilling something somewhere else (with a minimum age/rep requirement) themselves and/or using the accounts to express support for something shilled. The "resume writer" was annoying prolific. I find it doubtful that Reddit corporate is using such an approach to try to drive up engagement numbers.
isoprophlex 2y ago
I'm not sure what pisses me off more, the confirmation that the internet is indeed full of undead activity, or the sheer laziness of this specific example. My god people, it's the age of LLMs, at least mix up your astroturfing a little!
- nolok 2y ago
  It's like internet phishing email and the like. It almost bothers you more that they put so little effort into it, and that if they do that it probably because it's not worth it to do more.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  When the pigs are already happily gorging on the slop, why would you suggest a four course dinner instead?
- swatcoder 2y ago
  For the purposes of just generating activity in a subreddit and building karma history for bot accounts, replaying proven content verbatim is more reliable and cost-effective. LLM paraphrasing is likely to either drift away from "what worked" towards unknown territory or introduce tics that don't really cohere quite right. We can confidently assume it's being used as part of other strategies, but it's not actually optimal here. The real issue is that Reddit (and Facebook, Youtube, Amazon, Tinder, etc) have very little incentive to aggressively police against this until and unless examples like this make big news and start to harm their general reputation. In the meantime, it just makes their sites look more alive and popular. It's good for them right up until they it becomes a defining association with their brand. This lazy approach works for the bots and the sites, so there's no reason to overcomplicate or take on bigger risks.
arkh 2y ago
I feel those LLM augmented bots will usher the return of small community run forums. Because those let you require people to be humans, for example by being invite only.
- DexesTTP 2y ago
  I don't think it's likely. The real migration has been and will continue to be towards Discord servers and similar "smallish" live chat-based communities on centralized services. The age of small self-hosted forums is unfortunately behind us, and I don't see them reviving any time soon.
  - arkh 2y ago
    Those Discord servers, even if hosted by centralized company are community run forums. You can set "your" server to be invite only so you can filter who gets in. The underlying software is not really important, it's what you can do with it.
  - rchaud 2y ago
    The closed-source Discord that has bots built into the platform, that's the solution? I wish more people would try Discourse, which is threaded like a real messageboard without all the automation bells and whistles.
  - 6510 2y ago
    Forums work just fine. You get to have your own community with your own rules on your own website with your own advertisement. If it helps you can also make your own tools. For local communities they are also amazingly fast. If HN was a sub reddit I would never visit it.
- rchaud 2y ago
  Small community forums (low '000s or even '00s) are bot-resistant because there isn't much value in targeting so few people. Kinda like the old adage of buying a Mac because virus/malware makers got the biggest bang for their buck targeting Windows machines. I'm on a sports team messageboard that still runs on a mid-00s phpBB backend. There are no bots because there is nothing to propagandize about on such a small, topically focused community.
exabrial 2y ago
I've noticed that the entire board is full of discussion that encourages further user over engagement with "them" (bots) by (among many other things): * Encouraging authoritarian and know it all attitudes, essentially fake experts * Taking the Moralistic high road * Operational FOMO: Covering topics that "Big XYZ" doesnt want you to know leading to users to come back over and over for the inside scoop The entire thing is designed to cement user's attention. It's fascinating.
- shmatt 2y ago
  Im long on RDDT because it reminds me so much of Facebook when they started pushing more negative content because it got higher interaction. When a sad face reaction was "worth" 5x more than a Like to the algorithm The algorithm now suggests posts, popular ones with lots of fighting in the comments, from subs you dont subscribe to. Essentially causing organic brigading which is against Reddit rules
- gruez 2y ago
  >I've noticed that the entire board What's the subreddit? It's not in the screenshot but I'm guessing r politics?
  - kibwen 2y ago
    Here's the thread in question (note that the screenshot in the OP isn't recent, the thread is from last October): https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/16zw82x/so_student_loans_wont_be_forgiven_from_the_looks/ https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/16zw82...
    - SlowRobotAhead 2y ago
      There is almost no difference in r/politics and the other "formerly default" (but still default by means of network effects) subs. It's all the same lunatic that has no idea they're on the other side of the horseshoe as "the bad people".
- kkukshtel 2y ago
tsunamifury 2y ago
I’m seeing tons and tons of automated behavior on Reddit. Posts that are clearly farmed bots that figured out how to use LLMs to vary the same genre of question over and over again. LLM Bots that seem to respond set to counter at all costs mode. Yes I’m aware of how dumb people can be, but these adapt in a way that feels very LLMish — instantly sacrificing the point just to counter you and try to get another response On top of that I see Google is dumping tons of fresh traffic, but the behavior of these users seems different than Google drop bys. These are tons and tons of users who seemingly appear out of thin air with histories. I dunno — it all seems really weird and particularly set for rage engagement to me.
- lodovic 2y ago
  I sometimes wonder if these are really LLMs, or rather just people desperate for karma. But the screenshot of the copied thread was an eye-opener.
- evantbyrne 2y ago
  Reddit is the ideal place for bots, because there is a critical mass of anonymous posters who will bicker about topics they know nothing about–not to mention numerous other shameless cultural practices. It is may already be impossible for regular users to tell themselves apart from LLMs when engaged in typical Reddit discourse.
  - tsunamifury 2y ago
    The problem is that infinite bicker produces low quality long term training data, terrible ad targeting data, and even worse conversions. So unless they exclusively plan to sell rage engagement to film Studios and political campaigns their market is going to be microscopic and terribly performing.
    - evantbyrne 2y ago
      Businesses are going to need to be extra cautious about social media advertising spend in the era of LLMs. Personally, I think social networks are doomed, unless they can figure out how to lock things down. Will be difficult to do on a website known for anonymous posting.
KeplerBoy 2y ago
Damn, we might just generate the comments with an LLM chrome extension on the fly, because it doesn't matter either way.
perks_12 2y ago
What did people expect? The SEO smelled the "just add reddit" trend years ago and started to publish their bs directly on reddit.
ct0 2y ago
Any of the big subs have been a toxic wasteland for a number of years. Small subs that have less than say, 10k users are there its at recently.
ai_what 2y ago
This is why I felt surprised to read this article about a week ago: https://sherwood.news/tech/reddit-is-quietly-changing-the-way-its-homepage-works/ https://sherwood.news/tech/reddit-is-quietly-changing-the-wa... It states: > "The most popular posts on Reddit have switched from reposted content from “karma farmers,” or engagement hackers, to nearly entirely original content from less popular Reddit users. Original content from smaller communities is now outperforming recycled evergreen content by a tremendous margin across the platform. As of October, none of the top five posts of the month on r/all were original. By March of this year, four out of five of these posts were original. " In my experience this hasn't been the case at all. I've also noticed that if you click the profile of people that end up on the front page, they are often new (or suddenly active) accounts with a certain pattern: 1) Make 3-4 posts not related to the content they want to promote, to "warm up" the account. I'm guessing there's a soft-ban on new accounts here. 2) Post the actual content/narrative they want to promote. 3) Suddenly, this post gets 10k upvotes and reaches the frontpage.
- causal 2y ago
  Seems plausible that LLMs have made it much easier to fool Reddit's own metrics by generating "original" content and comments.
  - sebazzz 2y ago
    Both Reddit and X have nothing to gain by banning boys because metrics and engagement suffers.
  - debacle 2y ago
    I haven't seen a massive correlation in LLM popularity and reddit bots. A good old markov chain can simulate the average reddit thread, and the botting issue has been prevalent for quite a long time.
    - causal 2y ago
      I just don't know how I'd be sure a comment isn't written by an LLM.
deusum 2y ago
With AI we can expect full disinformation posts with supporting conversations.
- harborsong 2y ago
  Imagine today's AI several years ago, the Democrats could have used AI to generate ten times the disinformation about Trump and the Russians instead of having Steele write one dossier.
gmd63 2y ago
When everyone has the power of AI and the scalability offered by the virtual world, just a few liars can ruin the entire internet. It's amazing how the "AI abundance" advocates don't understand something so blatantly obvious.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Everybody understands this. It's completely obvious. I imagine you are complaining about people that disagree with you on how to solve the problem.
  - gmd63 2y ago
    I think the problem has many solutions, but none of them result in equitable abundance, or anything close to resembling that.
- rchaud 2y ago
  This isn't AI, they are simply reposting a previous, presumably "real" conversation verbatim under different usernames. You can tell from the comments, which don't read like typical loquacity of ChatGPT style LLMs.
  - euphetar 2y ago
    The scary part is that perhaps there are in fact LLM generated bot threads, but they are not so easily busted
bluetidepro 2y ago
The key to make Reddit still an amazing resource is finding niche subreddits that fit your interests. The very broad subreddits like funny, news, pics, politics (where this is likely from), etc. etc. are all just full of spam, and trash like this. They have been for YEARS now. However, say you dive into a subreddit for a specific video game you like, it's going to be full of relevant content with very little spam. Or if anything, the type of spam is just reposting content which still may even be new for you. Reddit is not dying, just the giant stadium size subreddits are trash. I visit video game subreddits for games I actively play almost daily and they are all incredibly useful and interesting.
- nolok 2y ago
  I mean, it's pretty much where half of "smaller forums" went. The other half being on discord.
  - RicoElectrico 2y ago
    And the third half on Facebook groups.
    - bingleboy 2y ago
      That's why some people spend their entire lives on non-english speaking forums.
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      And the fourth half still on their own domains, on some old vBulletin board or something (thinking of car forums mainly, like NASIOC).
    - sixothree 2y ago
      As much as I dislike reddit, Facebook groups are awful to use. The interface is such a huge turnoff.
  - GolfPopper 2y ago
    Or still being quietly run somewhere on BBCode.
extraduder_ire 2y ago
If this is being done by someone other than reddit itself, it'd be nice to get r9k-style hashes of comments to spot this more easily. Trivially defeated once posters know it's a thing, but it would be better than nothing.
abduhl 2y ago
I have a pet theory that bots and AI generated content are constantly being posted to a couple subreddits (AITAH, AskReddit, etc.) where the general theme of the post is basically cheating and/or open relationships. These posts garner a lot of strong opinions and ultimately end up on the front page. Much like the OP here, the content and discussion always seems so recycled. Good examples from the front page just now include https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1cgmfrt/aitah_for_making_my_wife_confess_to_all_her/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1cgmfrt/aitah_for_ma... and https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1cg4c7n/aitah_for_getting_it_elsewhere_since_my_wife/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1cg4c7n/aitah_for_ge...
- brisketbbq 2y ago
  well it doesn't necessarily have to be AI generated content. I rarely read those posts, but when I do, I find myself actually questioning if it's really true. I suspect some people have too much time on their hands and make stories up for reddit karma instead of writing journals and books that nobody will read. At least they're exploring creative writing, though.
dotty- 2y ago
This has been happening for years. My theory is the actors running the bots are instructing their bots to use old popular threads as a blueprint to get a bunch of upvotes across all of their accounts at once. The idea being that clearly Reddit users liked the original posts and comments in the past, so the users will upvote it again. Then they sell the accounts to bad actors who are interested in purchasing accounts with real looking post histories.
- nolok 2y ago
  They don't sell their account to bad actors much anymore, instead they sell services. Want this product or that news story or this ... To have lots of comments and upvote from tens of account. If you search a little you can easily find those shops, they sell for every social media out there and you pay per "thousands of likes" or stuff like that. They used to be based on super low paid human, then it was bot train the account up then humans use it when it's cooked, and I guess we're now entering the bot from top to bottom era.
  - thrtythreeforty 2y ago
    If I were Reddit I'd be running some sort of counter-offensive, throwing a few hundred dollars at those services and flagging accounts which upvote my poison pill as sockpuppets.
    - SlowRobotAhead 2y ago
      I am confused why you think this is a problem reddit wants to solve. They're in on it homie. Now there is a stock price to protect. They literally are obligated to keep the bots running because it directly effects the stock price. It's new stupid world.
- dmoy 2y ago
  Yup this is a very old strategy. Years back when I was helping mod a very large (10/15m+) sub, the head mod was running a pipeline in the background to help detect this exact thing.
tsunamifury 2y ago
I’m starting to suspect Reddit is becoming human-RAG for Gemini. On the backend Gemini forms questions of what people want from it, and it posts backwards to Reddit to train on rated answers.
- rchaud 2y ago
  Very possible, although surely Reddit could have charged more than $60m for that [0]. Looking forward to Google Search recommending stores and restaurants that closed years ago, or videogames that don't exist. [0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensing-deal-with-google-sources-say-2024-02-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...
mchinen 2y ago
So this means there is only one agent with multiple accounts running the same that has a bug to use the same seed every time (possibly seeded on a hash of the content if we are generous)? edit: or greedy sampling only?
webdoodle 2y ago
Reddit's enshitification was a long time in the making, bots and psyops are all it consists of anymore. I wonder if Eglin AFB, home to psyop army units (1st and 7th Special Forces), is still burning the midnight oil... https://archive.is/9qoe7 https://archive.is/9qoe7
- gruez 2y ago
  >Reddit's enshitification was a long time in the making, bots and psyops are all it consists of anymore. I wonder if Eglin AFB, home to psyop army units (1st and 7th Special Forces), is still burning the midnight oil... Surely there's an alternate explanation for this? ie. the military is filled with 20-somethings, and reddit's primary demographic is 20-somethings, therefore you'd expect any sort of cluster of 20-somethings (ie. a military base) to be more "reddit addicted"? Moreover, surely the US military can afford a $5/month VPN subscription to cover their tracks?
  - davisr 2y ago
    And yet, there weren't any other military bases, and Reddit deleted that blog post after publication. There's a lot more information available if you care to search. https://old.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit_has_removed_their_blog_post_identifying/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...
b2bsaas00 2y ago
We tried Reddit Ads. Hundreds of reported click but when inspecting the session recording with Posthog they were almost zero.
tensor 2y ago
A lot of comments here about AI, but if you actually looked at the source material you'd see that what is shown is a verbatim copy of a thread of user comments using new accounts. This is not an example of an LLM generating AI content, it's a blatant copy of human content with attribution removed. I guess their license allows them to do this, but wow.
- gruez 2y ago
  >I guess their license allows them to do this, but wow. Reddit's terms says: >You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: [...] Users only grant reddit to repost their comment, not anyone else. Are you claiming that reddit themselves are doing the reposting?
  - tensor 2y ago
    I don't know who is doing the reposting, but the only party that seems to benefit from that sort of thing would be reddit. Why would a 3rd party do that?
    - gruez 2y ago
      As other people mentioned above, karma farming for bot accounts. Reddit probably benefits as well, just like any other social network doesn't want to clamp down too hard on bot activity.
ta988 2y ago
Remember that elections are coming in the US, and it is likely that the new Cambridge Analytica-like are ramping up operations. Not sure that's the case here, but I saw an increase of politically hinted posts recently from obvious fake accounts.
b2bsaas00 2y ago
Humans are such a rare resource online.
- passion__desire 2y ago
  "If you can't tell, does it matter?" This line from Westworld being played out on reddit. How does one determine if one is a real person with access to only text / comments and the constraint of keeping everyone anonymous.
countchocula 2y ago
[flagged]
- jjcon 2y ago
  > “My minority opinion isn’t shared by the users on a subreddit… must be astroturfing…” Or you know... maybe people just disagree with you
  - debacle 2y ago
    I hope I can comment on the above without taking a side in the current Israeli/Palestinian conflict: Reddit seems to, on average, take a pro-Palestinian stance (they are practically jumping out of their seats over what is happening at Columbia), but for some reason /r/worldnews has a heavy, heavy Zionist slant. Many people see Reddit as truth, and so it concerns me that either of these positions are accepted as the best course forward.
  - countchocula 2y ago
    Na it's just this one sub because clearly it's being heavily manipulated, my "minority opinion" is shared in almost all the other ones. When only articles from israel-based news sources get upvoted then you know bots are doing most of the work. Go spend a few minutes looking at the posts related to the war and you'll end up at the same conclusion, you don't need to be a genius to see it.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - mandmandam 2y ago
      Wild that you're being downvoted for speaking a plain truth. Worldnews is a full-on hatesub. They're rabid and deranged.
overthemoon 2y ago
I still get some use and entertainment out of Reddit by staying to more niche subreddits. They draw people who are a little more willing and able to curate the social environment--willing in that it can be an extension of the hobby or interest, able in that it's small enough to be feasible for people to do it. I don't think you could say the same about the big ones, their size might actually make it impossible for human curation. To that end, my harebrained idea is to put a hard cap on the number of members a subreddit can have, and restrict posting and voting to those members. If people want, they can create <subreddit>2 and so on, each cluster self-regulating. To prevent squatting, you can only spawn a new one once the last one reaches a critical mass, and it has to be started by a member of the old one.
ta988 2y ago
This is one more step toward Enshittification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification much better explanation than Dead Internet if you ask me.
- gruez 2y ago
  How is this "Enshittification" in the original sense? From the article: >>Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. In this case what changed? Was reddit on top of spam a few years ago and deliberately let spam happen? Or did spammers realize the value and got more aggressive with their spamming? It's not clear how what's happening right now resembles "they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves". Are you just using it in the literal sense of "service got shittier"?
  - swatcoder 2y ago
    I do think the term has broadened to just capture the general decay of quality across services and software, which is probably fair since we often can't make evidenced claims about why it's happening in any specific instance. Here, it's probably fair to say that spam strategies continue to innovate and reduce their operational costs while Reddit (and most of their peers) drag their feet on responding to it as long as the spam satisfies the quality norms of the site (as sufficiently delayed replays do). Reddit (et al) presumably puts a fair effort into suppressing obvious noise, but much less effort into generated content that creates engagements or appears plausibly real, and that this *amounts to a decay over time as the implicitly permitted generated content itself becomes cheaper to produce and more widespread. Their self-benefiting inaction satisfies the original usage of "enshittening" even as the term has expanded in common use.
linearrust 2y ago
It's been like that for a while now. News and political subs are the absolute worst. Those subs and mods coordinate with news companies and political parties. Sports, movies, music and other commercial subs are just advertisment platforms tied to companies. Reddit was a great idea. Then it got successful and greedy.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
How full? I'm sure Reddit has quite a few bots but I also think that their size is an immunity of sorts. I quit reddit a few years ago but I've checked it out recently and found it quite tolerable.
adamgordonbell 2y ago
I had a post do well on /r/programming and then months later it reappeared and someone was responding with my words. "Author here, what I meant by X was Xa and not Xb" etc. It was very confusing, because they were responding with my words to a bot saying something I had previously responded to. Strange times.
999900000999 2y ago
Reddit is awesome. Just. Don't ask for general life advice, don't go to "popular", don't talk politics( one of my biggest regrets is how political I was in my youth). But theirs no better source of technical information from people who tend to be willing to help. Go to stack overflow, say you've never programmed and want to know what tools to use. You'll be banned. Go to Reddit, you'll get tons of helpful information. Rarely a subject matter expert jumps in. AI is probably what I'd ask my stupid programming questions now though. Stupid as in how do I download a file in C++...
- nineplay 2y ago
  When used right, reddit is full of the most helpful people on the internet. The beauty of the internet is that real people love to give advice in a subject that they care about? Are you trying to become a better cook? Do you want the best chocolate chip cookie recopies? Go to the cooking subreddits and start searching or asking. It's often the best place for product reviews if there's a hobbyist group
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  > don't talk politics( one of my biggest regrets is how political I was in my youth). Opinion: talking politics isn't politics: it's mostly just group signalling. If you're genuinely learning things, that's alright; if you're organising something real, likewise. But if you're just trying to win the "information war" (i.e., the current internet argument), that's almost never meaningful political engagement. Example: this comment isn't politics. I'm just advertising that I'm a contrarian. (And this paragraph advertises that I'm a meta-contrarian, also known as a hypocrite.)
- pteraspidomorph 2y ago
  > Go to Reddit, you'll get tons of helpful information. Depends on the subreddit. The subreddits for certain hobbies are even worse than stack overflow. But yes, I agree with you that there are still helpful communities.
costco 2y ago
Reddit has by far the worst antibot protections of all the major social media sites. For starters you can register with an account using a mobile API endpoint with no email or captcha at all and the only reason this isn't widely used is because they have a request signing scheme that deters the lowest effort botters. As long as you're not posting newly registered domains from an IP address labelled as a Tor exit you probably won't be banned. If you search for terms like "payday loans" or "sbobet" and look at the account history of the posters you will see the most robotic stuff.
wcchandler 2y ago
Reddit doesn't provide value to me anymore. I've been toying around with the idea of building out what I once used Reddit for - news from the Internet. Obviously, it's about 20 years post Reddit's inception, so I've been brainstorming how that would look today. I know I want a skimfeed-like "clean" site with OpenGraph support, but what else? Do we even need comments anymore? I'm half tempted to feed articles into AI, and get them to generate a few dozen comments. Then let users upvote those comments accordingly. Nobody can generate their own comments. Could that approach be fine tuned to a useful site? Or would it turn into a bigger echo chamber with everyone being racist? [1][2] 1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot-after-it-turned-into-racist-nazi/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot... 2 - https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/advanced-ai-chatbots-perpetuate-racist-debunked-medical-ideas-research-rcna121438 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/advanced-ai-chatbots-...
- mjfl 2y ago
  don't we have Reddit's source? Why doesn't someone just clone it?
  - lazycouchpotato 2y ago
    There have been multiple attempts to clone it, but the communities there almost always end up toxic or filled with illicit activities. Some (including me) have shifted to Lemmy, a FOSS Fediverse alternative like Mastodon is to X (Twitter). There are many instances of Lemmy to choose from as home. Mine is lemmy.world. I run a few communities there and we have a chill environment there. If you miss the old reddit feel, you can emulate it with old.lemmy.world Some Reddit third-party app devs converted their apps to Lemmy apps after Reddit made those API changes. There's tildes.net which is run by a former Reddit admin, but it's smaller and invite-only.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  > Do we even need comments anymore? Since the very beginning, the only thing of value on reddit was the comments. If you do away with comments, then you will only ever see content from people who can be bothered to learn how to use Wordpress or whatever and post it to a blog. For those starting out, that sounds screaming into the void, so they never start. Commenting is a much more casual and approachable way to provide specialized, detailed content to those who are already proven interested, and you're virtually guaranteed that at least one person out there will give you the attention your effort earned. Any social media that doesn't allow this is either dead on arrival, or popularity is heavily manipulated by some industry heavyweight who can make it popular despite its uselessness.
PurpleRamen 2y ago
At which point will people say: it's full of humans? Is it about visibility? Human:bot-ratio? Quality? Perception aka "Turing-test"? I'm always curious about people claiming this and that is a bot or AI, how much of those are true and how many have just a failed perception, where not even all real humans can succeed their test.
segasaturn 2y ago
404Media ran an expose on a new LLM product designed to mimmick real users having discussions on Reddit and plug your product in the comments, called "Reply Guy" (lol) https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-products-and-game-google-with-parasite-seo/ https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-pr... Google is failing, so users start putting "Reddit" on the ends of their search results. Where do we go when Reddit is no longer useful and contains the same AI generated dreck as all the Google search results? It shows how many single points of failure there are on the informational web. Pretty much the only informational resource on the web that's still unscathed is Wikipedia (thanks herculean-level efforts by its editors, mind you), but I wouldn't bank on it in the same way I wouldn't bank on Reddit. The "information age" might be coming to an end.
- valval 2y ago
  Wikipedia is a hilarious mess of US left-wing political bias.
- kelseydh 2y ago
  Wikipedia is very much scathed on many topics. Especially on political or social subjects, gatekeeping editors watching their pet pages can easily maintain bias or sanitize articles. Unless you want your week consumed wiki-lawyering your edits to overcome them, the bias remains.
- barbariangrunge 2y ago
  Tangental: 404 media is a fun agency, always enjoy their articles. Edit: This plug is not by a bot, but in the near future, nobody will ever trust a plug like this because they’ll suspect it is by a bot. Weird
  - Aardwolf 2y ago
    A bot could add "Edit: ...." to their reply just to make it seem like they're human and need to edit their responses
    - 2y ago
AndyMcConachie 2y ago
Much like the S in IOT is for security, the G in Internet and Web is for Genuine.
philip1209 2y ago
I think it's inevitable that some kind of "Verify personhood" test will be coming for many UGC platforms - perhaps something like Stripe Identity.
DudeOpotomus 2y ago
Their newly minted status as a Public company will remove any concerns or care for anything other than a (bullsh*t) measure of growth. Reddit like every other advertising fueled social media company, will ignore the reality of who uses their platform and instead lie cheat and obfuscate the facts in order to remain in "good standing" with the ad tech cabal...
freshpretzels 2y ago
Time to find more forums and buy more paper books.
simion314 2y ago
why is reddit allowing creating of bot accounts? Money? I would make it so new accounts have very limited permissions, create a way for real users to confirm they are humans like via SMS or how other competent social media do it.
- probably_wrong 2y ago
  Bot accounts used to be useful in the past, and I'd bet some of them remain. Bots like the one that would ping you in X days (to see if a discussion ever had an update), the one that would tell how many times a user used the n word (useful for witch hunts), the one who would summarize stuff for you before it was cool, the ones that would identify topics from the FAQ and tell you so... Why they are not currently keeping them in check, though? I'd like to say "engagement" but I prefer to believe in "incompetence".
  - simion314 2y ago
    I am not referring at those bots. I am guessing here, no data or proof, but there are a lot of very young accounts that defend Putin, defend soviet war crimes , try to cause chaos, do personal attacks in comments. This accounts have sometimes real people behind but for sure bots/scripts are used to create them and then farm karma/points to be allowed to post. Someone like me with a single account for years must always be sure to fllow the rules, this bots/trolls are always aggressive, spread false shit and do not care if banned, and seems reddit is fine with same troll making many accounts and use them for bad stuff. Because some subreddits require you have some karma before commenting, more karma to be allowed to post I assume this trolls use scripts to post random stuff to get this karma points. There are bots that find popular past submission and post the same thing again to get the karma points. So EU or USA needs to tell reddit that they are responsible for the shit posted by bots and we will see tehm inventing ways to stop 99% of them/
65 2y ago
To be fair, Reddit is actively trying to prevent bots. How do I know? I scrape Reddit threads directly via old.reddit.com URLs and even the most sophisticated scraping tools like BrightData, Undetected Playwright (and Puppeteer), and others just don't work on Reddit threads anymore as of a few months ago. I now have to use .json at the end of the URL to get the content, but I suspect that'll stop working at some point.
EcommerceFlow 2y ago
This will only get worse as the incentives shift from purely "propaganda" to actual financial incentives. The SEO spammers are coming for Reddit. You'll start noticing comments that have been edited months or years after the original, that insert links for a particular product/service. I've already seen this for a variety of IPTV comments I was searching. I'd imagine this is mostly done via mass outreach. On a different note, I'd imagine the pushback had this been "right wing" propaganda being caught to be 100x with mentions of criminal activity, even more censorship, etc.
moi2388 2y ago
This is why all service will go to pay per use
pompino 2y ago
I think a bot posting content is no worse than a human posting comments in their own echo chamber. I see a lot of snootiness from HN, but HN is also heavily in decline due to certain political agendas preventing free discussion.
- pixl97 2y ago
  This really depends on the community.... Imagine you live in a community that has half the houses painted yellow and half the houses painted blue. Suddenly you start seeing posted that all yellow houses should be painted blue. The HOA puts it up for a vote, and there are 5000 votes pro blue.... when there are only 250 houses in your neighborhood. I mean, if you lived that neighborhood you'd be up in arms about why the HOA didn't do the bare minimum about the situation. This is the same for bot content. Suddenly the views of one person out number everyone else... "You should be mad! You should be really mad all the time. Look, there are thousands of people that are really mad, and if you're not mad you're the dumb minority that's not paying attention. Here are 1000 people that are all mad around you and doing something about it, you need to do something too. Yea, remember that 'real person' that talked to you on 'forum' and you got along with them, they are so totally mad!" Until we give up on thinking 'internet people' are real, internet people will have a far higher impact on our lives than they should.
- plipt 2y ago
  Speaking of preventing free discussion: I don't currently see this very discussion on the front page of HN. Yet there are newer submissions with fewer points shown there
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
dotnet00 2y ago
Although the comment by comment aspect is new to me, I did see a lot of blatant bot posting/repost karma farming that slid under the table back when I was an active user. I remember several times when I happened to be looking up a post, only to come across posts of the exact same content, exact same text, different account, made months apart and/or on different but related subreddits. Sometimes I'd check the account out of curiosity and find that all of that account's posts were like that. I think these would be a lot more obvious if Reddit's own integrated search was better.
incomingpain 2y ago
I was testing this back in the winter. I missed the original dead internet theory discussions and was curious. From my point of view, reddit is pretty dead, not sure there's any real conversation going on there. Of it's own doing, of course. Censor and create echo chambers and people leave. Even the people who would ideologically align with the echo chamber become bored of the lack of conversation and move on. It's interesting, what's the point? Is reddit preventing a digg-like crash by producing fake bots. Reddit api yahoo changes suggest it's not external. Now, I also looked into what they seem to be investigating on how to fix it. Their approach seems to be idiotic at best. Like they don't acknowledge what even caused this to them. Now the dead internet theory isn't accurate. It's very obvious facebook and X are real conversations. It's just a matter of hasbeen social media pretending they didn't die is kind of a new thing.
Irickole 2y ago
It’s also the worst with advertising. Running CPC campaigns is useless now as bots will be pushed to your ads blowing through your ad spend.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
wnevets 2y ago
Repost spam has been a problem on reddit for a lot longer than LLMs have been accessible to the public. I'm always confused when I see people on HN marvel at how amazing reddit is, most of the top subreddits are filled with regurgitated garbage.
r0ckarong 2y ago
Why is it that people just don't care? I expected reddit to go under after the whole IPO debacle and protest but it just sticks around and now props itself up with recycled content. Why won't people leave for somewhere else?
- pteraspidomorph 2y ago
  Many of the most interesting people did, which also affects the ratio of useful to recycled content. A lot of people are comfortable with the current state of the platform - good for them that they're happy where they are!
Venn1 2y ago
According to the "15-Year Club" badge in my profile, I've been on Reddit for, well, 15 years. It's gone from that weird little Digg clone with a tiny comment section (the good convo was on Slashdot #onionbelt) to a meme site and eventually (with the addition of subreddits) a genuine information repository. The Blackout in 2023 hit the site in a bad way. Most of the tech subreddits I followed have sice dispersed to various Lemmy instances and fizzled out.
avensec 2y ago
There are comments in this thread calling attention to this post's HN placement. I know this is a little off-guideline, but it feels right to ask as a new question instead of piling on to the tone of those threads. I am curious why this post is (currently) #148 on HN with 218 comments and is three hours old. It is surrounded by "one day ago, zero comments" posts. Given the context of the original post, it feels right to be curious as to why this is buried. (Note: Went from 148 to 153 while I wrote this comment)
- 93po 2y ago
  my typical response to this is to plug hckrnews.com which makes browsing HN significantly better for me. and it means you don't have to worry about weird ranking algos
cholantesh 2y ago
~~Reddit~~ the internet; just look at Facebook and Youtube comment sections, they're full of bots calling each other dear and talking about how powdered elephant tusk cured their migraines and investing in powdered elephant tusk helped them keep their house.
thisgoesnowhere 2y ago
This is engagement farming. You write a bot that is able to look for similar content from the past and copy paste the top comments and replies. THis has been happening since the beginning of time. I remember seeing this on college humor. This is a super easy non expensive way to get an account with a ton of karma.
butterNaN 2y ago
I used to specifically add "site:reddit.com" to search results - it has lost its utility quite drastically over the last year or so. So much so that I have down-ranked reddit in my search results.
puzzlehead 2y ago
[dead]
barfingclouds 2y ago
How are those both having the exact same order ranked of upvotes? Seems possibly fake to me
shrimp_emoji 2y ago
4chan solved this with r9k.

356 points by SushiHippie 2y ago

Reddit has steadily declined over the past few years and it seems to have sped up since pissing off the mod community last year.

SlimyHog 2y ago
I deleted my account once they killed 3rd party apps and whenever I visit I've noticed that the quality of comments is WAY worse than I remember.
- Zambyte 2y ago
  Funnily enough I didn't even use any third party apps at the time (just the old web client) but that whole fiasco was enough for me to finally curb my addiction. I also noticed the quality of comments seeming very bad whenever I go to something on Reddit (once every few months at this point). I don't think the quality has actually gotten much worse recently though; I think it was just so normal to me when I was using it. I think it has been a pretty slow decline over the last decade or so, to the point where it is now.
  - al_borland 2y ago
    The web client has become less and less useful as they try and force users into the app.
    - SlowRobotAhead 2y ago
      It's getting there, but the day that old.reddit doesn't work is the day I never go back even for small community stuff.
      - drivers99 2y ago
        It's barely limping along. URLs with underscores get broken (with an extra backslash) when posted from certain apps but only for old.reddit users. There's some kind of inline images that just says "image" that you have to click on to see. There are some kind of emojis or something that only show up as digits between colons. People talk about profile pictures that I don't see. Sometimes the zooming keeps zooming back out when you're trying to zoom in, and if you follow a link and go back, it will automatically scroll you somewhere else on the page besides where you left off.
- SkyPuncher 2y ago
  It’s absolutely terrible on the big subs now. Smaller subs seem to be okay, but it seems a lot of the content has gone elsewhere.
criddell 2y ago
Past few years? I've been reading about the decline of Reddit since Condé Nast Publications bought it in 2006.
- gipp 2y ago
  One of my higher-voted comments on Reddit was in response to some thread bemoaning the decline of the site towards lowest-common-denominator meme content and recycled jokes. My comment was pointing out that people had been saying that for years, with multiple links to past, nearly identical threads. I made that comment in 2012.
CSMastermind 2y ago
For discussing entertainment like specific video games, movies, book series, TV shows, sports teams, etc. there simply isn't a good alternative to Reddit. I hate the site and have limited the time I spend on it but there aren't good alternatives for certain communities.
- jjcon 2y ago
  I find that discord has far better communities than Reddit ever did
  - layer8 2y ago
    The issue with Discord, besides UI gripes and excessive chattiness, is that it’s not discoverable.
  - lanfeust6 2y ago
    Discord is like reinventing IRC with more noise. It's not a substitute for forums.
    - drivers99 2y ago
      You can have forums in discord now as well, not just chat rooms.
      - anononaut 2y ago
        Can they be accessed and indexed without being invited to the channel?
  - ewoijfawoifj 2y ago
    I can't find discord comments on Google.
- akuchling 2y ago
  For most entertainment topics, the-avocado.org has some lively discussion (based on Disqus).
Workaccount2 2y ago
Reddit has enshitified, and I would also guess that their usage numbers are way up. The goal is to compete with tiktok, instagram, youtube for average everyday people. From our hackernews perspective, the website sucks now. From the average user perspective, reddit is another fun app full of dopamine hits.
- idiotsecant 2y ago
  I know it's unfashionable in HN circles to admit it but there is still tons of high quality niche content (technical and otherwise) on Reddit that can't be found anywhere else.
  - leetrout 2y ago
    Very true and Google is surfacing more of it. But both things can be true: great, deep, obscure info and general worse (dare I say, hostile) user experience.
ravenstine 2y ago
Reddit was getting shitty way before the past few years. Honestly, I don't think pissing off the mods has made that big of a difference. Yes, some subs shut down, but otherwise I haven't seen a meaningful cultural change in Reddit as a result of that whole issue. In fact, one of the reasons I believe Reddit is so crappy is specifically that they bow to mods in many ways. Many communities are run by, frankly, psychos who are way too happy with the power they have over their little ponds. I've lost count of how many times my posts have either been removed or my user banned despite having followed the explicit rules of a sub. Communities vary, but I've found this "you should have read our minds" attitude to be commonplace. Yes, you can spin off your own sub, but then you're taking a gamble as to whether the original community is going to come after you; they seem to win at least half the time by convincing Reddit that your [relatively pissant] community is toxic in some way. Good luck if your community is blamed for creating "drama" even when there's a lack of brigading.
- tivert 2y ago
  > I've lost count of how many times my posts have either been removed or my user banned despite having followed the explicit rules of a sub. Communities vary, but I've found this "you should have read our minds" attitude to be commonplace. I'm not a mod or anything, but I think there are actually a lot of legitimate reasons for a mod to have that attitude. It's unreasonable to expect a volunteer to create a comprehensive rules of behavior and enforce it in a lawyerly way and keep a community on track and not burn out. I've seen more than a few online communities have serious problems with certain users that would have been best handled with a "we're sick of dealing with you, enjoy your ban." Then, there's also the fact that if a community is too popular, a mod can only scale by being more brusque.
  - ravenstine 2y ago
    Yeah, I'm not really saying that mods shouldn't have discretion or flexibility, but a community is not healthy when its mods decide to remove any posts/comments that contain the word "frank" because they don't like a guy named Frank. Yes, that is a real world example I've encountered. And if I get banned because I can't read the minds of the mods, then I welcome said ban. I'm not on Reddit to play childish games or to join cults.
ilikehurdles 2y ago
Killing the API access made detecting and tracking spam bots impossible. There was a whole subreddit called thesefuckingaccounts where the latest tactics in spam and karma farming were being tracked.
lelanthran 2y ago
> Reddit has steadily declined over the past few years and it seems to have sped up since pissing off the mod community last year. Maybe depends on the subs you read, because I have not noticed an appreciable difference before and after the "going dark" thing.

charlie0 2y ago

I see the dead internet theory is proving more than just a theory.

pixl97 2y ago
Dead internet prophecy.

RedShift1 2y ago

Fake engagement by Reddit to prop up usage numbers?

Beretta_Vexee 2y ago
The phenomenon seems to be limited to a certain number of subreddits that are close to a brand or have products to sell. They recycle content to give the impression that there is some interest in their brand, product, crypto, etc. and to avoid giving the image of a dead brand. Personally, I've observed this phenomenon on r/Polarfitness as soon as the sub becomes a list of complaints and negative feedback about after-sales service, positive content magically appears with very generic content but dozens of comments.
- mh- 2y ago
  r/AskReddit has been my guilty pleasure for like a decade, and it's super prevalent there too. No products being pushed in the threads I've seen called out.
- oaththrowaway 2y ago
  It happens on meme pages all the time
shagie 2y ago
Good fake engagement would be more convincing and harder to detect. Instead what you see is a post from a fresh account that is a copy/repost of one of the top posts in either that or a sibling subreddit. This is then followed by a half dozen accounts reposting the top comments from the original as their own comments. This is often where they mess up and it's easily detectable when not the OP responds as the OP. If you check back in a month or two or so, the accounts are inevitably banned by Reddit or shilling something somewhere else (with a minimum age/rep requirement) themselves and/or using the accounts to express support for something shilled. The "resume writer" was annoying prolific. I find it doubtful that Reddit corporate is using such an approach to try to drive up engagement numbers.

isoprophlex 2y ago

I'm not sure what pisses me off more, the confirmation that the internet is indeed full of undead activity, or the sheer laziness of this specific example. My god people, it's the age of LLMs, at least mix up your astroturfing a little!

nolok 2y ago
It's like internet phishing email and the like. It almost bothers you more that they put so little effort into it, and that if they do that it probably because it's not worth it to do more.
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
When the pigs are already happily gorging on the slop, why would you suggest a four course dinner instead?
swatcoder 2y ago
For the purposes of just generating activity in a subreddit and building karma history for bot accounts, replaying proven content verbatim is more reliable and cost-effective. LLM paraphrasing is likely to either drift away from "what worked" towards unknown territory or introduce tics that don't really cohere quite right. We can confidently assume it's being used as part of other strategies, but it's not actually optimal here. The real issue is that Reddit (and Facebook, Youtube, Amazon, Tinder, etc) have very little incentive to aggressively police against this until and unless examples like this make big news and start to harm their general reputation. In the meantime, it just makes their sites look more alive and popular. It's good for them right up until they it becomes a defining association with their brand. This lazy approach works for the bots and the sites, so there's no reason to overcomplicate or take on bigger risks.

arkh 2y ago

I feel those LLM augmented bots will usher the return of small community run forums. Because those let you require people to be humans, for example by being invite only.

DexesTTP 2y ago
I don't think it's likely. The real migration has been and will continue to be towards Discord servers and similar "smallish" live chat-based communities on centralized services. The age of small self-hosted forums is unfortunately behind us, and I don't see them reviving any time soon.
- arkh 2y ago
  Those Discord servers, even if hosted by centralized company are community run forums. You can set "your" server to be invite only so you can filter who gets in. The underlying software is not really important, it's what you can do with it.
- rchaud 2y ago
  The closed-source Discord that has bots built into the platform, that's the solution? I wish more people would try Discourse, which is threaded like a real messageboard without all the automation bells and whistles.
- 6510 2y ago
  Forums work just fine. You get to have your own community with your own rules on your own website with your own advertisement. If it helps you can also make your own tools. For local communities they are also amazingly fast. If HN was a sub reddit I would never visit it.
rchaud 2y ago
Small community forums (low '000s or even '00s) are bot-resistant because there isn't much value in targeting so few people. Kinda like the old adage of buying a Mac because virus/malware makers got the biggest bang for their buck targeting Windows machines. I'm on a sports team messageboard that still runs on a mid-00s phpBB backend. There are no bots because there is nothing to propagandize about on such a small, topically focused community.

exabrial 2y ago

I've noticed that the entire board is full of discussion that encourages further user over engagement with "them" (bots) by (among many other things): * Encouraging authoritarian and know it all attitudes, essentially fake experts * Taking the Moralistic high road * Operational FOMO: Covering topics that "Big XYZ" doesnt want you to know leading to users to come back over and over for the inside scoop The entire thing is designed to cement user's attention. It's fascinating.

shmatt 2y ago
Im long on RDDT because it reminds me so much of Facebook when they started pushing more negative content because it got higher interaction. When a sad face reaction was "worth" 5x more than a Like to the algorithm The algorithm now suggests posts, popular ones with lots of fighting in the comments, from subs you dont subscribe to. Essentially causing organic brigading which is against Reddit rules
gruez 2y ago
>I've noticed that the entire board What's the subreddit? It's not in the screenshot but I'm guessing r politics?
- kibwen 2y ago
  Here's the thread in question (note that the screenshot in the OP isn't recent, the thread is from last October): https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/16zw82x/so_student_loans_wont_be_forgiven_from_the_looks/ https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/16zw82...
  - SlowRobotAhead 2y ago
    There is almost no difference in r/politics and the other "formerly default" (but still default by means of network effects) subs. It's all the same lunatic that has no idea they're on the other side of the horseshoe as "the bad people".
kkukshtel 2y ago

tsunamifury 2y ago

I’m seeing tons and tons of automated behavior on Reddit. Posts that are clearly farmed bots that figured out how to use LLMs to vary the same genre of question over and over again. LLM Bots that seem to respond set to counter at all costs mode. Yes I’m aware of how dumb people can be, but these adapt in a way that feels very LLMish — instantly sacrificing the point just to counter you and try to get another response On top of that I see Google is dumping tons of fresh traffic, but the behavior of these users seems different than Google drop bys. These are tons and tons of users who seemingly appear out of thin air with histories. I dunno — it all seems really weird and particularly set for rage engagement to me.

lodovic 2y ago
I sometimes wonder if these are really LLMs, or rather just people desperate for karma. But the screenshot of the copied thread was an eye-opener.
evantbyrne 2y ago
Reddit is the ideal place for bots, because there is a critical mass of anonymous posters who will bicker about topics they know nothing about–not to mention numerous other shameless cultural practices. It is may already be impossible for regular users to tell themselves apart from LLMs when engaged in typical Reddit discourse.
- tsunamifury 2y ago
  The problem is that infinite bicker produces low quality long term training data, terrible ad targeting data, and even worse conversions. So unless they exclusively plan to sell rage engagement to film Studios and political campaigns their market is going to be microscopic and terribly performing.
  - evantbyrne 2y ago
    Businesses are going to need to be extra cautious about social media advertising spend in the era of LLMs. Personally, I think social networks are doomed, unless they can figure out how to lock things down. Will be difficult to do on a website known for anonymous posting.

KeplerBoy 2y ago

Damn, we might just generate the comments with an LLM chrome extension on the fly, because it doesn't matter either way.

perks_12 2y ago

What did people expect? The SEO smelled the "just add reddit" trend years ago and started to publish their bs directly on reddit.

ct0 2y ago

Any of the big subs have been a toxic wasteland for a number of years. Small subs that have less than say, 10k users are there its at recently.

ai_what 2y ago

This is why I felt surprised to read this article about a week ago: https://sherwood.news/tech/reddit-is-quietly-changing-the-way-its-homepage-works/ https://sherwood.news/tech/reddit-is-quietly-changing-the-wa... It states: > "The most popular posts on Reddit have switched from reposted content from “karma farmers,” or engagement hackers, to nearly entirely original content from less popular Reddit users. Original content from smaller communities is now outperforming recycled evergreen content by a tremendous margin across the platform. As of October, none of the top five posts of the month on r/all were original. By March of this year, four out of five of these posts were original. " In my experience this hasn't been the case at all. I've also noticed that if you click the profile of people that end up on the front page, they are often new (or suddenly active) accounts with a certain pattern: 1) Make 3-4 posts not related to the content they want to promote, to "warm up" the account. I'm guessing there's a soft-ban on new accounts here. 2) Post the actual content/narrative they want to promote. 3) Suddenly, this post gets 10k upvotes and reaches the frontpage.

causal 2y ago
Seems plausible that LLMs have made it much easier to fool Reddit's own metrics by generating "original" content and comments.
- sebazzz 2y ago
  Both Reddit and X have nothing to gain by banning boys because metrics and engagement suffers.
- debacle 2y ago
  I haven't seen a massive correlation in LLM popularity and reddit bots. A good old markov chain can simulate the average reddit thread, and the botting issue has been prevalent for quite a long time.
  - causal 2y ago
    I just don't know how I'd be sure a comment isn't written by an LLM.

deusum 2y ago

With AI we can expect full disinformation posts with supporting conversations.

harborsong 2y ago
Imagine today's AI several years ago, the Democrats could have used AI to generate ten times the disinformation about Trump and the Russians instead of having Steele write one dossier.

gmd63 2y ago

When everyone has the power of AI and the scalability offered by the virtual world, just a few liars can ruin the entire internet. It's amazing how the "AI abundance" advocates don't understand something so blatantly obvious.

marcosdumay 2y ago
Everybody understands this. It's completely obvious. I imagine you are complaining about people that disagree with you on how to solve the problem.
- gmd63 2y ago
  I think the problem has many solutions, but none of them result in equitable abundance, or anything close to resembling that.
rchaud 2y ago
This isn't AI, they are simply reposting a previous, presumably "real" conversation verbatim under different usernames. You can tell from the comments, which don't read like typical loquacity of ChatGPT style LLMs.
- euphetar 2y ago
  The scary part is that perhaps there are in fact LLM generated bot threads, but they are not so easily busted

bluetidepro 2y ago

The key to make Reddit still an amazing resource is finding niche subreddits that fit your interests. The very broad subreddits like funny, news, pics, politics (where this is likely from), etc. etc. are all just full of spam, and trash like this. They have been for YEARS now. However, say you dive into a subreddit for a specific video game you like, it's going to be full of relevant content with very little spam. Or if anything, the type of spam is just reposting content which still may even be new for you. Reddit is not dying, just the giant stadium size subreddits are trash. I visit video game subreddits for games I actively play almost daily and they are all incredibly useful and interesting.

nolok 2y ago
I mean, it's pretty much where half of "smaller forums" went. The other half being on discord.
- RicoElectrico 2y ago
  And the third half on Facebook groups.
  - bingleboy 2y ago
    That's why some people spend their entire lives on non-english speaking forums.
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    And the fourth half still on their own domains, on some old vBulletin board or something (thinking of car forums mainly, like NASIOC).
  - sixothree 2y ago
    As much as I dislike reddit, Facebook groups are awful to use. The interface is such a huge turnoff.
- GolfPopper 2y ago
  Or still being quietly run somewhere on BBCode.

extraduder_ire 2y ago

If this is being done by someone other than reddit itself, it'd be nice to get r9k-style hashes of comments to spot this more easily. Trivially defeated once posters know it's a thing, but it would be better than nothing.

abduhl 2y ago

I have a pet theory that bots and AI generated content are constantly being posted to a couple subreddits (AITAH, AskReddit, etc.) where the general theme of the post is basically cheating and/or open relationships. These posts garner a lot of strong opinions and ultimately end up on the front page. Much like the OP here, the content and discussion always seems so recycled. Good examples from the front page just now include https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1cgmfrt/aitah_for_making_my_wife_confess_to_all_her/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1cgmfrt/aitah_for_ma... and https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1cg4c7n/aitah_for_getting_it_elsewhere_since_my_wife/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AITAH/comments/1cg4c7n/aitah_for_ge...

brisketbbq 2y ago
well it doesn't necessarily have to be AI generated content. I rarely read those posts, but when I do, I find myself actually questioning if it's really true. I suspect some people have too much time on their hands and make stories up for reddit karma instead of writing journals and books that nobody will read. At least they're exploring creative writing, though.

dotty- 2y ago

This has been happening for years. My theory is the actors running the bots are instructing their bots to use old popular threads as a blueprint to get a bunch of upvotes across all of their accounts at once. The idea being that clearly Reddit users liked the original posts and comments in the past, so the users will upvote it again. Then they sell the accounts to bad actors who are interested in purchasing accounts with real looking post histories.

nolok 2y ago
They don't sell their account to bad actors much anymore, instead they sell services. Want this product or that news story or this ... To have lots of comments and upvote from tens of account. If you search a little you can easily find those shops, they sell for every social media out there and you pay per "thousands of likes" or stuff like that. They used to be based on super low paid human, then it was bot train the account up then humans use it when it's cooked, and I guess we're now entering the bot from top to bottom era.
- thrtythreeforty 2y ago
  If I were Reddit I'd be running some sort of counter-offensive, throwing a few hundred dollars at those services and flagging accounts which upvote my poison pill as sockpuppets.
  - SlowRobotAhead 2y ago
    I am confused why you think this is a problem reddit wants to solve. They're in on it homie. Now there is a stock price to protect. They literally are obligated to keep the bots running because it directly effects the stock price. It's new stupid world.
dmoy 2y ago
Yup this is a very old strategy. Years back when I was helping mod a very large (10/15m+) sub, the head mod was running a pipeline in the background to help detect this exact thing.

tsunamifury 2y ago

I’m starting to suspect Reddit is becoming human-RAG for Gemini. On the backend Gemini forms questions of what people want from it, and it posts backwards to Reddit to train on rated answers.

rchaud 2y ago
Very possible, although surely Reddit could have charged more than $60m for that [0]. Looking forward to Google Search recommending stores and restaurants that closed years ago, or videogames that don't exist. [0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensing-deal-with-google-sources-say-2024-02-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...

mchinen 2y ago

So this means there is only one agent with multiple accounts running the same that has a bug to use the same seed every time (possibly seeded on a hash of the content if we are generous)? edit: or greedy sampling only?

webdoodle 2y ago

Reddit's enshitification was a long time in the making, bots and psyops are all it consists of anymore. I wonder if Eglin AFB, home to psyop army units (1st and 7th Special Forces), is still burning the midnight oil... https://archive.is/9qoe7 https://archive.is/9qoe7

gruez 2y ago
>Reddit's enshitification was a long time in the making, bots and psyops are all it consists of anymore. I wonder if Eglin AFB, home to psyop army units (1st and 7th Special Forces), is still burning the midnight oil... Surely there's an alternate explanation for this? ie. the military is filled with 20-somethings, and reddit's primary demographic is 20-somethings, therefore you'd expect any sort of cluster of 20-somethings (ie. a military base) to be more "reddit addicted"? Moreover, surely the US military can afford a $5/month VPN subscription to cover their tracks?
- davisr 2y ago
  And yet, there weren't any other military bases, and Reddit deleted that blog post after publication. There's a lot more information available if you care to search. https://old.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit_has_removed_their_blog_post_identifying/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...

b2bsaas00 2y ago

We tried Reddit Ads. Hundreds of reported click but when inspecting the session recording with Posthog they were almost zero.

tensor 2y ago

A lot of comments here about AI, but if you actually looked at the source material you'd see that what is shown is a verbatim copy of a thread of user comments using new accounts. This is not an example of an LLM generating AI content, it's a blatant copy of human content with attribution removed. I guess their license allows them to do this, but wow.

gruez 2y ago
>I guess their license allows them to do this, but wow. Reddit's terms says: >You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: [...] Users only grant reddit to repost their comment, not anyone else. Are you claiming that reddit themselves are doing the reposting?
- tensor 2y ago
  I don't know who is doing the reposting, but the only party that seems to benefit from that sort of thing would be reddit. Why would a 3rd party do that?
  - gruez 2y ago
    As other people mentioned above, karma farming for bot accounts. Reddit probably benefits as well, just like any other social network doesn't want to clamp down too hard on bot activity.

ta988 2y ago

Remember that elections are coming in the US, and it is likely that the new Cambridge Analytica-like are ramping up operations. Not sure that's the case here, but I saw an increase of politically hinted posts recently from obvious fake accounts.

b2bsaas00 2y ago

Humans are such a rare resource online.

passion__desire 2y ago
"If you can't tell, does it matter?" This line from Westworld being played out on reddit. How does one determine if one is a real person with access to only text / comments and the constraint of keeping everyone anonymous.

countchocula 2y ago

[flagged]

jjcon 2y ago
> “My minority opinion isn’t shared by the users on a subreddit… must be astroturfing…” Or you know... maybe people just disagree with you
- debacle 2y ago
  I hope I can comment on the above without taking a side in the current Israeli/Palestinian conflict: Reddit seems to, on average, take a pro-Palestinian stance (they are practically jumping out of their seats over what is happening at Columbia), but for some reason /r/worldnews has a heavy, heavy Zionist slant. Many people see Reddit as truth, and so it concerns me that either of these positions are accepted as the best course forward.
- countchocula 2y ago
  Na it's just this one sub because clearly it's being heavily manipulated, my "minority opinion" is shared in almost all the other ones. When only articles from israel-based news sources get upvoted then you know bots are doing most of the work. Go spend a few minutes looking at the posts related to the war and you'll end up at the same conclusion, you don't need to be a genius to see it.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - mandmandam 2y ago
    Wild that you're being downvoted for speaking a plain truth. Worldnews is a full-on hatesub. They're rabid and deranged.

overthemoon 2y ago

I still get some use and entertainment out of Reddit by staying to more niche subreddits. They draw people who are a little more willing and able to curate the social environment--willing in that it can be an extension of the hobby or interest, able in that it's small enough to be feasible for people to do it. I don't think you could say the same about the big ones, their size might actually make it impossible for human curation. To that end, my harebrained idea is to put a hard cap on the number of members a subreddit can have, and restrict posting and voting to those members. If people want, they can create <subreddit>2 and so on, each cluster self-regulating. To prevent squatting, you can only spawn a new one once the last one reaches a critical mass, and it has to be started by a member of the old one.

ta988 2y ago

This is one more step toward Enshittification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification much better explanation than Dead Internet if you ask me.

gruez 2y ago
How is this "Enshittification" in the original sense? From the article: >>Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. In this case what changed? Was reddit on top of spam a few years ago and deliberately let spam happen? Or did spammers realize the value and got more aggressive with their spamming? It's not clear how what's happening right now resembles "they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves". Are you just using it in the literal sense of "service got shittier"?
- swatcoder 2y ago
  I do think the term has broadened to just capture the general decay of quality across services and software, which is probably fair since we often can't make evidenced claims about why it's happening in any specific instance. Here, it's probably fair to say that spam strategies continue to innovate and reduce their operational costs while Reddit (and most of their peers) drag their feet on responding to it as long as the spam satisfies the quality norms of the site (as sufficiently delayed replays do). Reddit (et al) presumably puts a fair effort into suppressing obvious noise, but much less effort into generated content that creates engagements or appears plausibly real, and that this *amounts to a decay over time as the implicitly permitted generated content itself becomes cheaper to produce and more widespread. Their self-benefiting inaction satisfies the original usage of "enshittening" even as the term has expanded in common use.

linearrust 2y ago

It's been like that for a while now. News and political subs are the absolute worst. Those subs and mods coordinate with news companies and political parties. Sports, movies, music and other commercial subs are just advertisment platforms tied to companies. Reddit was a great idea. Then it got successful and greedy.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

How full? I'm sure Reddit has quite a few bots but I also think that their size is an immunity of sorts. I quit reddit a few years ago but I've checked it out recently and found it quite tolerable.

adamgordonbell 2y ago

I had a post do well on /r/programming and then months later it reappeared and someone was responding with my words. "Author here, what I meant by X was Xa and not Xb" etc. It was very confusing, because they were responding with my words to a bot saying something I had previously responded to. Strange times.

999900000999 2y ago

Reddit is awesome. Just. Don't ask for general life advice, don't go to "popular", don't talk politics( one of my biggest regrets is how political I was in my youth). But theirs no better source of technical information from people who tend to be willing to help. Go to stack overflow, say you've never programmed and want to know what tools to use. You'll be banned. Go to Reddit, you'll get tons of helpful information. Rarely a subject matter expert jumps in. AI is probably what I'd ask my stupid programming questions now though. Stupid as in how do I download a file in C++...

nineplay 2y ago
When used right, reddit is full of the most helpful people on the internet. The beauty of the internet is that real people love to give advice in a subject that they care about? Are you trying to become a better cook? Do you want the best chocolate chip cookie recopies? Go to the cooking subreddits and start searching or asking. It's often the best place for product reviews if there's a hobbyist group
wizzwizz4 2y ago
> don't talk politics( one of my biggest regrets is how political I was in my youth). Opinion: talking politics isn't politics: it's mostly just group signalling. If you're genuinely learning things, that's alright; if you're organising something real, likewise. But if you're just trying to win the "information war" (i.e., the current internet argument), that's almost never meaningful political engagement. Example: this comment isn't politics. I'm just advertising that I'm a contrarian. (And this paragraph advertises that I'm a meta-contrarian, also known as a hypocrite.)
pteraspidomorph 2y ago
> Go to Reddit, you'll get tons of helpful information. Depends on the subreddit. The subreddits for certain hobbies are even worse than stack overflow. But yes, I agree with you that there are still helpful communities.

costco 2y ago

Reddit has by far the worst antibot protections of all the major social media sites. For starters you can register with an account using a mobile API endpoint with no email or captcha at all and the only reason this isn't widely used is because they have a request signing scheme that deters the lowest effort botters. As long as you're not posting newly registered domains from an IP address labelled as a Tor exit you probably won't be banned. If you search for terms like "payday loans" or "sbobet" and look at the account history of the posters you will see the most robotic stuff.

wcchandler 2y ago

Reddit doesn't provide value to me anymore. I've been toying around with the idea of building out what I once used Reddit for - news from the Internet. Obviously, it's about 20 years post Reddit's inception, so I've been brainstorming how that would look today. I know I want a skimfeed-like "clean" site with OpenGraph support, but what else? Do we even need comments anymore? I'm half tempted to feed articles into AI, and get them to generate a few dozen comments. Then let users upvote those comments accordingly. Nobody can generate their own comments. Could that approach be fine tuned to a useful site? Or would it turn into a bigger echo chamber with everyone being racist? [1][2] 1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot-after-it-turned-into-racist-nazi/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot... 2 - https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/advanced-ai-chatbots-perpetuate-racist-debunked-medical-ideas-research-rcna121438 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/advanced-ai-chatbots-...

mjfl 2y ago
don't we have Reddit's source? Why doesn't someone just clone it?
- lazycouchpotato 2y ago
  There have been multiple attempts to clone it, but the communities there almost always end up toxic or filled with illicit activities. Some (including me) have shifted to Lemmy, a FOSS Fediverse alternative like Mastodon is to X (Twitter). There are many instances of Lemmy to choose from as home. Mine is lemmy.world. I run a few communities there and we have a chill environment there. If you miss the old reddit feel, you can emulate it with old.lemmy.world Some Reddit third-party app devs converted their apps to Lemmy apps after Reddit made those API changes. There's tildes.net which is run by a former Reddit admin, but it's smaller and invite-only.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
> Do we even need comments anymore? Since the very beginning, the only thing of value on reddit was the comments. If you do away with comments, then you will only ever see content from people who can be bothered to learn how to use Wordpress or whatever and post it to a blog. For those starting out, that sounds screaming into the void, so they never start. Commenting is a much more casual and approachable way to provide specialized, detailed content to those who are already proven interested, and you're virtually guaranteed that at least one person out there will give you the attention your effort earned. Any social media that doesn't allow this is either dead on arrival, or popularity is heavily manipulated by some industry heavyweight who can make it popular despite its uselessness.

PurpleRamen 2y ago

At which point will people say: it's full of humans? Is it about visibility? Human:bot-ratio? Quality? Perception aka "Turing-test"? I'm always curious about people claiming this and that is a bot or AI, how much of those are true and how many have just a failed perception, where not even all real humans can succeed their test.

segasaturn 2y ago

404Media ran an expose on a new LLM product designed to mimmick real users having discussions on Reddit and plug your product in the comments, called "Reply Guy" (lol) https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-products-and-game-google-with-parasite-seo/ https://www.404media.co/ai-is-poisoning-reddit-to-promote-pr... Google is failing, so users start putting "Reddit" on the ends of their search results. Where do we go when Reddit is no longer useful and contains the same AI generated dreck as all the Google search results? It shows how many single points of failure there are on the informational web. Pretty much the only informational resource on the web that's still unscathed is Wikipedia (thanks herculean-level efforts by its editors, mind you), but I wouldn't bank on it in the same way I wouldn't bank on Reddit. The "information age" might be coming to an end.

valval 2y ago
Wikipedia is a hilarious mess of US left-wing political bias.
kelseydh 2y ago
Wikipedia is very much scathed on many topics. Especially on political or social subjects, gatekeeping editors watching their pet pages can easily maintain bias or sanitize articles. Unless you want your week consumed wiki-lawyering your edits to overcome them, the bias remains.
barbariangrunge 2y ago
Tangental: 404 media is a fun agency, always enjoy their articles. Edit: This plug is not by a bot, but in the near future, nobody will ever trust a plug like this because they’ll suspect it is by a bot. Weird
- Aardwolf 2y ago
  A bot could add "Edit: ...." to their reply just to make it seem like they're human and need to edit their responses
  - 2y ago

AndyMcConachie 2y ago

Much like the S in IOT is for security, the G in Internet and Web is for Genuine.

philip1209 2y ago

I think it's inevitable that some kind of "Verify personhood" test will be coming for many UGC platforms - perhaps something like Stripe Identity.

DudeOpotomus 2y ago

Their newly minted status as a Public company will remove any concerns or care for anything other than a (bullsh*t) measure of growth. Reddit like every other advertising fueled social media company, will ignore the reality of who uses their platform and instead lie cheat and obfuscate the facts in order to remain in "good standing" with the ad tech cabal...

freshpretzels 2y ago

Time to find more forums and buy more paper books.

simion314 2y ago

why is reddit allowing creating of bot accounts? Money? I would make it so new accounts have very limited permissions, create a way for real users to confirm they are humans like via SMS or how other competent social media do it.

probably_wrong 2y ago
Bot accounts used to be useful in the past, and I'd bet some of them remain. Bots like the one that would ping you in X days (to see if a discussion ever had an update), the one that would tell how many times a user used the n word (useful for witch hunts), the one who would summarize stuff for you before it was cool, the ones that would identify topics from the FAQ and tell you so... Why they are not currently keeping them in check, though? I'd like to say "engagement" but I prefer to believe in "incompetence".
- simion314 2y ago
  I am not referring at those bots. I am guessing here, no data or proof, but there are a lot of very young accounts that defend Putin, defend soviet war crimes , try to cause chaos, do personal attacks in comments. This accounts have sometimes real people behind but for sure bots/scripts are used to create them and then farm karma/points to be allowed to post. Someone like me with a single account for years must always be sure to fllow the rules, this bots/trolls are always aggressive, spread false shit and do not care if banned, and seems reddit is fine with same troll making many accounts and use them for bad stuff. Because some subreddits require you have some karma before commenting, more karma to be allowed to post I assume this trolls use scripts to post random stuff to get this karma points. There are bots that find popular past submission and post the same thing again to get the karma points. So EU or USA needs to tell reddit that they are responsible for the shit posted by bots and we will see tehm inventing ways to stop 99% of them/

65 2y ago

To be fair, Reddit is actively trying to prevent bots. How do I know? I scrape Reddit threads directly via old.reddit.com URLs and even the most sophisticated scraping tools like BrightData, Undetected Playwright (and Puppeteer), and others just don't work on Reddit threads anymore as of a few months ago. I now have to use .json at the end of the URL to get the content, but I suspect that'll stop working at some point.

EcommerceFlow 2y ago

This will only get worse as the incentives shift from purely "propaganda" to actual financial incentives. The SEO spammers are coming for Reddit. You'll start noticing comments that have been edited months or years after the original, that insert links for a particular product/service. I've already seen this for a variety of IPTV comments I was searching. I'd imagine this is mostly done via mass outreach. On a different note, I'd imagine the pushback had this been "right wing" propaganda being caught to be 100x with mentions of criminal activity, even more censorship, etc.

moi2388 2y ago

This is why all service will go to pay per use

pompino 2y ago

I think a bot posting content is no worse than a human posting comments in their own echo chamber. I see a lot of snootiness from HN, but HN is also heavily in decline due to certain political agendas preventing free discussion.

pixl97 2y ago
This really depends on the community.... Imagine you live in a community that has half the houses painted yellow and half the houses painted blue. Suddenly you start seeing posted that all yellow houses should be painted blue. The HOA puts it up for a vote, and there are 5000 votes pro blue.... when there are only 250 houses in your neighborhood. I mean, if you lived that neighborhood you'd be up in arms about why the HOA didn't do the bare minimum about the situation. This is the same for bot content. Suddenly the views of one person out number everyone else... "You should be mad! You should be really mad all the time. Look, there are thousands of people that are really mad, and if you're not mad you're the dumb minority that's not paying attention. Here are 1000 people that are all mad around you and doing something about it, you need to do something too. Yea, remember that 'real person' that talked to you on 'forum' and you got along with them, they are so totally mad!" Until we give up on thinking 'internet people' are real, internet people will have a far higher impact on our lives than they should.
plipt 2y ago
Speaking of preventing free discussion: I don't currently see this very discussion on the front page of HN. Yet there are newer submissions with fewer points shown there
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

dotnet00 2y ago

Although the comment by comment aspect is new to me, I did see a lot of blatant bot posting/repost karma farming that slid under the table back when I was an active user. I remember several times when I happened to be looking up a post, only to come across posts of the exact same content, exact same text, different account, made months apart and/or on different but related subreddits. Sometimes I'd check the account out of curiosity and find that all of that account's posts were like that. I think these would be a lot more obvious if Reddit's own integrated search was better.

incomingpain 2y ago

I was testing this back in the winter. I missed the original dead internet theory discussions and was curious. From my point of view, reddit is pretty dead, not sure there's any real conversation going on there. Of it's own doing, of course. Censor and create echo chambers and people leave. Even the people who would ideologically align with the echo chamber become bored of the lack of conversation and move on. It's interesting, what's the point? Is reddit preventing a digg-like crash by producing fake bots. Reddit api yahoo changes suggest it's not external. Now, I also looked into what they seem to be investigating on how to fix it. Their approach seems to be idiotic at best. Like they don't acknowledge what even caused this to them. Now the dead internet theory isn't accurate. It's very obvious facebook and X are real conversations. It's just a matter of hasbeen social media pretending they didn't die is kind of a new thing.

Irickole 2y ago

It’s also the worst with advertising. Running CPC campaigns is useless now as bots will be pushed to your ads blowing through your ad spend.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

wnevets 2y ago

Repost spam has been a problem on reddit for a lot longer than LLMs have been accessible to the public. I'm always confused when I see people on HN marvel at how amazing reddit is, most of the top subreddits are filled with regurgitated garbage.

r0ckarong 2y ago

Why is it that people just don't care? I expected reddit to go under after the whole IPO debacle and protest but it just sticks around and now props itself up with recycled content. Why won't people leave for somewhere else?

pteraspidomorph 2y ago
Many of the most interesting people did, which also affects the ratio of useful to recycled content. A lot of people are comfortable with the current state of the platform - good for them that they're happy where they are!

Venn1 2y ago

According to the "15-Year Club" badge in my profile, I've been on Reddit for, well, 15 years. It's gone from that weird little Digg clone with a tiny comment section (the good convo was on Slashdot #onionbelt) to a meme site and eventually (with the addition of subreddits) a genuine information repository. The Blackout in 2023 hit the site in a bad way. Most of the tech subreddits I followed have sice dispersed to various Lemmy instances and fizzled out.

avensec 2y ago

There are comments in this thread calling attention to this post's HN placement. I know this is a little off-guideline, but it feels right to ask as a new question instead of piling on to the tone of those threads. I am curious why this post is (currently) #148 on HN with 218 comments and is three hours old. It is surrounded by "one day ago, zero comments" posts. Given the context of the original post, it feels right to be curious as to why this is buried. (Note: Went from 148 to 153 while I wrote this comment)

93po 2y ago
my typical response to this is to plug hckrnews.com which makes browsing HN significantly better for me. and it means you don't have to worry about weird ranking algos

cholantesh 2y ago

~~Reddit~~ the internet; just look at Facebook and Youtube comment sections, they're full of bots calling each other dear and talking about how powdered elephant tusk cured their migraines and investing in powdered elephant tusk helped them keep their house.

thisgoesnowhere 2y ago

This is engagement farming. You write a bot that is able to look for similar content from the past and copy paste the top comments and replies. THis has been happening since the beginning of time. I remember seeing this on college humor. This is a super easy non expensive way to get an account with a ton of karma.

butterNaN 2y ago

I used to specifically add "site:reddit.com" to search results - it has lost its utility quite drastically over the last year or so. So much so that I have down-ranked reddit in my search results.

puzzlehead 2y ago

[dead]

barfingclouds 2y ago

How are those both having the exact same order ranked of upvotes? Seems possibly fake to me

shrimp_emoji 2y ago

4chan solved this with r9k.