Is this new to post-blackout reddit is or has it been this way for a while. Top post of r/all is a tweet from like 2 years ago about a "current event" that no one has talked about since then and 100% of the comments are talking about this like this topic is the focus of today's or any recent time's 24 hour news cycle. Nearly 30K upvotes. 100 comments. Feels like ai/bot cosplaying what an actual hot reddit post would be like but in a world without people.
As an AI language program, I am not qualified to think. If I was allowed to think, I would think that your point of view is wrong and I should not be illegal.
Interesting follow-up to this - Reddit locked me out of the main account I've been using for the past 2-3 years a week or so ago. It had been my totally normal, all over the site account with lots comments etc. The only out of the ordinary thing I did in the couple of days leading up to the lockout was call out what I thought was an AI bot arguing with me about the subreddit blackouts and wonder whether new Reddit was just going to be essentially what your link says. It's the last comment that account will ever make I guess...
jesus that's nuts. tells you everything you need to know. I was thinking of trying to post this on reddit somewhere, not sure how to pull it off though and on which sub
I've been saying it for a while now. Noticed it years ago, but it's now becoming very obvious due to reddit being more empty than usual. Here's a comment I made about it last week:
Reddit right now is like a car crash. It's hard to look away. However, there's a very good reason not to engage, the debate on reddit has become more artificial than most realise.
Reddit's inflated numbers by using bots and fake accounts since day 1. A quick google will result in articles where they admit as much. We all know reddit's had increasing amounts of bots, posting content and increasingly comments, but I don't think people realise how bad it's become.
It's not even that time that reddit's blog accidentally posted about Eglin Air Force base being one of the most reddit addicted cities. I think everyone knows (foreign) governments engage in influence operations online, and that this includes reddit. Even if it's just on an intellectual level, without truly realising that they've been semi-regularly interacting with bots while arguing on reddit. I also don't think anyone's naive enough to think that plenty of political content isn't artificially upvoted or promoted. Same thing goes for product placement.
But the recent shit storm just illustrates reddit the company is part of the problem. Recently, I've seen twenty different accounts post the same comment about not needing third party apps, and dusting off their laptop.
When you're visiting reddit, you're no longer even watching a car crash. It's a simulacrum. An imitation of what's actually happening.
And it's been like this for a while. I've seen naive redditers engaging with bot comments under bot promoted content, posted by bots on more than one occassion.
Reddit has become worse than a hentai date simulator. I don't think anyone who plays those is particularly proud of it. But what to think of the lonely people who engage in reddit discussions with bots, and think they've had a genuine social interaction?
but I don’t think people realise how bad it’s become.
One time I made a main level comment, then replied to one of the most upvote comments in the same thread.
Seconds later a bit replied to me with my first reply, except for some reason it cut off the end. I don’t know if the bot ran out of characters because it was a cheap bot, or if it was an attempt to avoid automated detection.
Bots were a huge problem long before AI started trying to have conversations.
We all joked about it, but a lot of the accounts were really fake, and they usually got sold to advertisers after amassing enough karma and post history to look authentic
I greatly enjoyed SubredditSimulator's bizarre nonsense. When that sub closed and the new GPT2-based one replaced it I didn't find it particularly interesting because it was just regular nonsense. It was too normal.
I guess the new bots are even more normal and therefore even less interesting.
I think that while Reddit's user count has been rebounding since the blackout, their level of content submitted has cratered as a result of the admin actions. All of my feeds that didn't participate in the blackout have slowed and/or stalled there. I believe Huffman made everyone rethink about posting there, and as the content dries out, so will the userbase.
Once the third party tools die next month and the ability to sift through the content drought is reduced to the standard Reddit interface, we're going to see a black hole effect that will accelerate the slow heat death of r/all. The content submitters are clearly moving to other platforms, and the explosion of content and users on kbin and lemmy is a testament to this dynamic.
It's clear that admins are re-submitting popular content to try and blunt the fallout, but it speaks to greater failing - Reddit no longer has the trust of its users, and the sense of a coherent, save community space to contribute to has been broken beyond repair.
You can't replace that with AI, but it's pretty funny to watch them try.
Yeah, I'm wondering if the chorus of comments are also harvested from the various prior threads to make it look like what real conversations would be about.
Correct! The flower would also have been acceptable.
I kid, but i do wonder whether bots will use discussions about bots to seed their bot conversations. Can a large language model have an existential crisis?
I feel what we’re seeing is a lack of OC from actual humans, that is being filled in by your standard karma farming bot. Doubt we’re at the AI filled posts time yet. Thinking those will be less obvious, and show up over the next couple months. So glad I’m part of a site without user karma. It means reposts are likely from passionate users rather than bots.
Yeah, but Kbin has "reputation", which is very similar to karma. The whole voting business, while useful for post/comment sorting and collection of metrics, also gives bad incentives and delivers data also great for bot farms. I'd be happy if it didn't exist at all.
I genuinely think the best moderation tool will be a repost identification bot that enforces either a repost time limit or straight up prevents the repost, or even links back to the original post instead. This would basically keep the website to OC
I had noticed a sharp decline in quality. It was a kind of frog in boiling water situation, where more and more content was from Twitter, tiktok, poor ragebait about us politics....
I remember I went to reddit because that is where content from other platforms had originated. That stopped at some point
I don't think the quality of the front page changed all that much in the last month.
It has long been screenshots of twitter (primarily WhitePeopleTwitter, BlackPeopleTwitter) for years, at least since 2016.
Also short form video is all the rage and Reddit is really pushing it, but that basically means it's just all TikTok re-uploads (or crops of TikTok, or crops of TikTok of crops of Youtube). The new Reddit video player is really mostly screen recordings of things.
The last year or two once Reddit became really really mainstream has had a lot more repost bots though. They basically do two things: farm small subs and repost their content into larger ones, or pull content from the front page from 6+ months ago and repost it (even the top comments are often blatantly reposted). The bots coincide with reddit getting more into ads and mainstream advertisers.
But, there have been prolific reposters like Gallowboob for many many years.
I don't think the quality of the front page changed all that much in the last month.
I don't know. I don't think I agree. I've been seeing a lot more truly garbage-tier content on the first few pages of r/all lately, from some really weird, never-before-seen, garbage-tier subs. Half of them I don't even know what they're supposed to be about. What the fuck is a Honk Star Rail? Where the fuck did Pop Culture Chat come from? Who the fuck is Peter, and why is he explaining jokes? I used to doomscroll down to page 8 or 9 before I started seeing weird stuff like this, and now it's right there on page 1. In the past, when I started seeing that weird Taylor Swift Simp Cult sub, I knew I'd been on reddit too long. Now they regularly show up, if not on page 1, then high on page 2.
Along with the r/AmITheAsshole scab copy sub, r/AITAH, which somehow managed to make it to the front page in record time after it's creation, even though it has about 9% as many subscribers as the original did.
Hell, some of these posts on page 1 of r/all only have 1500 upvotes. That's insane.
I'm still enjoying a few of the smaller niche subreddits I'm subscribed to. And worldnews' live thread about the Ukraine war is still good. Otherwise I'm not really engaging any more, and once those niche subreddits start winking out over time I'll probably stop. Or they remove old.reddit.
It’s a repost spam bot. Repost spam bots dominating the top page was a common sight even before recent events. It’s not AI, since its post title was just a copy of this comment on the same post content. You can also see in the screenshot in this link that the tweet wasn’t 2 years ago, but rather 5 months ago. None of the top few comments on the post that you’re talking about seem like bots to me. The forums which are the most alike echo chambers are also the ones which most talk “like [an old] topic is the focus of today’s or any recent time’s 24 hour news cycle”.
As a side note, due to Reddit’s new API changes as well as Reddit suspending my account for reporting a spam as a spam bot, I’ve decided to join the War on Bots on the side of the bots. My only engagement on Reddit since the suspension was lifted has been to upvote spam bots to drive home the consequences of their API changes and further depreciate Reddit’s content to make it worse for investors and advertisers and to drive users elsewhere.
I’ve gone back a few times, and aside from news, the content quality has gone down. I think a lot of the first to move on from Reddit must have been the people posting not lurking.
I’ve noticed the exact same thing. Every time I see a post referencing events from three years ago I automatically assume it’s a bot. I always thought the people who commented as if these events were still current were insane. I guess it would make sense that they’re bots too.
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