So I checked out reddit after a long time and was going through the top of r/videogames subreddit and I could clearly see a pattern in most of the posts there. Posts were mostly like “what game ______ for you?” or “what game _____ like this?” Now I could be wrong but it doesn’t feel ‘organic’ (if that’s correct way to put it). It’s like these are put up intentionally. Thoughts?
These are engagement farming posts. Both reddit and Twitter are full of them, because both sites are now offering money to accounts whose posts get lots of upvotes/comments.
It feels gross and inauthentic.
Something similar happened to Quora when they started offering to pay people just to produce questions, not good questions, not answers, just questions. Quora was already kinda tenuous and growing its tolerance for fascists, but that move dropped a cinder block on the enshittification gas pedal. Quota’s basically been completely unusable since then and it’s only gotten worse.
Edit: wrote Quota instead of Quora, but I like the typo’s energy, so I’m leaving it.
My thoughts exactly. Kinda like how some tiktoks/reels/shorts are specifically crafted to make you watch them over and over again to drive up viewing time.
I don’t even know how much of a role the monetary aspect has. I feel like a lot of Reddit is naturally gross and inauthentic but also soulless and elitist in a way. People still post content because they want the Reddit karma and rehash the same prompts that gives the same predictable answers that seem to appease the crowd. Other times when things are reposted comments will act harshly and and redirect them to a post or wiki from years ago.
Reddit, to me, seems to lack genuine human interactions.
This would check out. Perhaps significantly more users left because of their bullshit than they want the public knowing. Could explain a lot actually.
Next question is whether they actually care or are just happy that the bots can now produce clicks without all that pesky moderation and interaction with actual humans.
Brother, I vote the latter. Reddit has time and time again proved they hate their users and only want engagement. The rampant mod abuse, the admins that shrug it off, the way they killed 3rd parties, hell, how spez the ped talked about the people protesting, he doesn’t give a fuck at all, and neither does anyone else in a position of power.
Hmm that makes sense.
Some of them read like content farming posts-get a bunch of people to talk about a given topic with a specific direction, then “write” an article that is basically “video games are crazy, aren’t they? Here’s some really crazy video game stories!
[five word intro] [full text of a Reddit comment] [repeat ad nauseam]”
Reddit isn’t the only place this is happening.
Nice to know there are other monkeys on this planet that can open their fucking eyes.
Anyone notice the amount of memes used as free advertising? Disney has been doing it for a while, and crushed it with the mini Yoda in that shit TV show.
Fuck Disney.
I’m 100% sure Baby Yoda was specifically created to sell merchandise.
The original Star Wars would never have specifically created a character just to sell merchandise…
Space balls the lunch box!
The Ewoks say hi.
I think they were missing an /s
anyone who types /s lacks courage
The … is good enough tbh
For sure that’s the case. This has been a strategy since at least the 70s
I don’t know, I feel like advertisements CAN be entertaining content, much like how people for decades have only wanted to watch the Super Bowl for the commercials. The problem, and the reason I have ad blockers all over the place, is that they don’t design the commercials to be entertaining. They want to drill it in to you with endless repetition, or banner ads every 2 paragraphs on a news article.
It is these problems that cause me to want to block ads, not ads in general.
Im of the opinion we should reject all advertising and change the dynamic
If someone wants to sell me something they have to pay for my time.
Instead of paying Jake Paul $10,000,000 to sell me something. They just have to pay me the bandwidth or time their commercial just ate up of my free time.
I work all fucking day and barely get 6 hours before bed. 3 of those hours is running into ads fuck that.
I drive home and have to look at fifteen rusted ass giant metal billboards barely holding together instead of cool ass trees and birds.
I turn on the radio to get a song, 3 minute DJ giving me gossip about celebrities I should purchase from, 2 minute commercials and another song.
I turn on Spotify i pay for and get ad reads all podcast long along with the host sneakily promoting their new chewing tobacco or liquor.
I get home and kids are watching prime, with commercials. Shit doesn’t stop. It keeps encroaching into our free time. Its like an Edgar Alan Poe story but written by Edward Louis Bernays
I hate advertisements
I think there is a distinction of PUSH advertising where you see billboards everywhere, ads stuck into youtube videos, spam emails, whatever that is just sent out to the general public and see what sticks. Compare that with PULL advertising where a consumer goes out and looks for something. When I am shopping for a new TV or something that needs a bit of research, I have no problem being sold to.
It’s kinda like going out of your way to watch movie trailers. Or watching a lets’s play of a video game you are interested in. It can be a fun way to spend some time and they can be entertaining in their own right.
That’s pretty insightful and puts some things into better perspective for me. I like the way you described it.
Yep that’s why I’ve always thought it was weird people dislike targeted ads. I prefer watching a well made gaming or weeb ad vs feminine hygiene or car ads.
I don’t mind the targeted ads but I do hate the pushy ads that are unavoidable and that’s why I use unblock etc. Banner ads didn’t bother me much, the tiny strip of ad at the bottom of my lemmy app doesn’t bother me cause it supports the creator. The unskipable video ads and pop ups when I’m browsing do annoy me.
When it’s obvious its so funny and then depressing. Hanging out in r/marvel is a good example.
Then there is other subs and online places like those r/AITHA and relationship advice places where mods or someone is generating content multiple times a day that people will call out as being made up but still engage with.
Its too bad culture jamming fizzled out because we could all really fuck with this stuff if we organized a bit. Its why I lover sub reddits like r/fighterandthekid and r/joerogan or r/opieandanthony because how they turned on the product they were trying to sell. It took a handful of random people producing legit funny content to steam roll the advertisers. A couple guys with free time can super fuck these companies if they organized. They have to get paid we don’t.
/r/AITA doesn’t even hide their karma farming bullshit. 95% of that dogshit is like “Hey guys, I kissed my boyfriend and made him a five course meal. Then I rubbed his feet and bought him 5 ps5s to let him know I love him. Today, he ruthlessly beat the shit out of me, hit me with his car, punched me in the throat and then shit on my face. I refused to be treated like this, so I left him. He’s now begging for me to come back, and I feel bad. AITA for leaving him over this?” And then karma flows like gold in El dorado.
My favorite are the YouTube videos with the voice overs that go will narrate a guy skiing off like 3 jumps and the narration will be like
“Watch what happens when this guy goes off of this ramp, but then you’ll never believe what happens when he turns quickly and launches off of another jump again. That’s not all though, watch closely as he goes up in the air, flips around twice and rides away.”
Like, impressive that it is describing the video and all but the comment section is full of seemingly organic traffic that seems oblivious
Eat shit
Yeah baby Yoda was shit, but I think the first season of that show was very good. (After that I think they realized and cut budget and pushed baby Yoda though)
You are not the only one noticing it. Probably trying to maximize the user provided content they can sell to language model creators
Looks like they got 60m from google for that:
https://fortune.com/2024/02/23/reddit-60m-deal-google-search-giant-train-ai-models-on-posts/
Indeed, thanks for the link!
NP! I didnt know about it until recently too. It was eye opening on why im seeing so many “safe” posts make it to the top and why so many google search results now include reddit posts recently.
Recently? Reddit was always the answer to questions in google searches…
Nope, I have projects that used to pull top x on Google searches based on some seo work I did back in 2016-2017. It’s significantly more. Granted the dataset is super old by now and you would have to trust a random on the internet (aka me) in order to believe, but it hasn’t been always been reddit.
I still use reddit for some of the niche and sports communities that just aren’t really present on Lemmy (or not yet at least). I only use old reddit, and I only use my front page or the multis I curated myself. One thing I’ve noticed a lot lately is posts with zero upvotes and usually zero comments appearing in hot, top, and best filters. Most of these are absolute trash posts that were clearly posted by a bot.
I do not understand what benefit they’re seeking by shoving bad posts with no positive feedback into these sorting options but it’s fuckin weird.
They don’t care what the users see, they want to push metrics on their investors and hope they’re not going to do a deep dive into their traffic.
What metric do posts with no user engagement push though? From an analytics standpoint I don’t see the value prop
It could just be to push “X unique contributors to y number of subreddits”
Just using this comment to advertise for our college football community, definitely one of the small niche sports communities you mentioned: [email protected].
You WILL consume the slop
Reddit green is made of bots?
On that note, anyone feel like YouTube comments have recently turned “too nice”? Like if you go to any yt let’s play, usually the first 10 top comments won’t be talking about the video contents, just “I love that we’re getting regular videos 🤗!” Endlessly. It feels so weird to me compared to the actual discourse that could happen there, and obviously yt comments are infamous for being a cesspool so that’s even more of a jarring change
Thank you for your comment.
(Sorry)
Who’s watching this in Year of The Linux Desktop?
One more thing to notice here is that despite it being top of all time, none of the posts are even a year old
Reddit’s site traffic has just gone up that much. Especially if you include bots posting constantly in their SEO subreddits that admins are aware of and indifferent to.
When I first joined lemmy, there were bean posts everywhere. People kept posting shitty puns about beans with pictures of beans, and people kept upvoting them. But it eventually died down.
Could these kinds of posts just be a fad on reddit right now?
The beans were great. As incoherent as they got it felt like someone was trying to post content so they got my upvotes. It can get pretty dead around here and I was glad for the change of pace. For a while there was nothing but AI prompt Sailor Moon art that was pretty entertaining too
None of those even reference current games, they could all be repost bots reposting stuff from years ago.
The “Which era did you start playing video games” is missing the last 4 years of consoles.
My guess is with the protests that some of the top content creators moved away and never came back.
I remember sorting by hot once gave a wide variety of things and now it seems to be more drama posts like AITA posts.
Although it feels like I’m still following an ex, There was one place over there I used to visit a lot and I believe if you took a snapshot of the top ten posts of a random day few years ago and today, they’d be very different. Today’s seems to be a group picking up a trend and running with it and before it was more original content. I remember going there because I knew there’d be something new I’d likely laugh at or be amused by and now it feels heavily recycled.
The subscriber count is still way up, but I’d you look at the online/active user count, it feels like its around 10% it was off recent highs.
It felt like the sub had a ship of thecleus moment where it seemed to just be growing, but was also losing people until the group changed but the name was the same.
Someone else said the new reddit gold allows people to receive real money* if people gild their posts (by spending real money) * receiver must be in certain countries.
I saw a post recently on a wholesome memes page where someone tagged repost sleuth bot and someone else commented that todays post was literally a copy of the third top voted post of all time. It was.
I also remember that bot support got affected and this led to a spam detector bot being moved from active development to sunset mode where it was still supported but not actively enhanced.
The subscriber count is still way up, but I’d you look at the online/active user count, it feels like its around 10% it was off recent highs.
Same here. Subs with hundred of thousands of subscribers, but barely any activity.
bots are fucking atrocious for generating just miles and miles of trash content on Reddit.
As a mod for many years, the real moding work was finding ways to keep the bots at bay.
It got real bad since around 2020ish…
They can train their AI’s all they want on Reddit, it’s a complete waste of time.
That data is corrupt as shit. It’s already littered with garbage old AI posts and comments, and it’s gonna poison their models real bad.
I’ve tried to give Reddit another chance and the majority of posts just seem artificial, AI or bots, I’m not sure but it has definitely lost its organic nature.
Telegram is just lousy with crap posts and comments now as well.
The couple of times I snooped in on Reddit to see how it was going, Top Day felt like going through some TikTok/Instagram Story clone.
Its probably buzzfred trying to scam a story out of someone
