Just paid a visit. It’s really gotten bad. Horrible titles that make little sense. People falling over each other to make tired quips instead of conversation, and the rest to point out how someone is wrong or one-up the commenter.
IMO it’s gotten markedly worse since the 3rd party app debacle. Perhaps combined with the advent of AI added to bots has made it obvious. Yeah, it’s been on a decline for quite a bit with the repost bots repeating everything from posts to replies, but people would call them out. Now it’s like it’s bots all the way down or the remaining participants have resigned themselves to the decline.
Small subs still seem mostly safe, but anything with decent participation is pretty bad.
I switch between Mlem and Voyager (iOS). I like them both, but I tend to use Voyager more. Mlem tends to give me more variety of communities, I like Voyager’s layout.
Yeah the only real reason for Reddit for me anymore is sports discourse. E.g. the Baltimore Orioles are my MLB team. /r/Orioles on reddit has almost 80k members. Currently on the page there’s 62 people actively in the sub and that’s at 10am on a Wednesday, not during a game. The two Orioles communities on lemmy are Orioles@fanaticus.social and Baltimore Orioles@lemmy.world and they have 133 and 131 subscribers, respectively. There’s a bot posting game day threads and 0 comments in all of them. The only post not by a game day bot was 21 days ago.
Yeah I feel you, at least the Orioles team is super stacked rn though (speaking as a Yankees fan 🫠). !yankees is equally dead.
My current thought process is that if we can get a decently active generalized baseball community going, it could provide a stepping stone to increasing the activity in the team-specific communities. I’m trying to be active on !mlb and !baseball as much as possible.
There is already a latent population of sports fans on Lemmy, but it’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy that the communities aren’t active so people assume there must be no other fans.
My other thought on this topic is that although I do miss the active fan discussion and game threads, the subreddits for essentially all of my teams were indisputably toxic cesspools. The whining, armchair GMing, scapegoating, and just completely idiotic takes were out of this world. So it’d be nice to have activity, but too much activity can also degrade the quality of discussion to the level of Twitter and just create a very toxic environment where fans are constantly arguing and complaining.
If you have access to the entire Reddit comment corpus it’s trivial to see which users are only reposting carbon copies of content that appears elsewhere on the site
The low level bots in OPs screenshot, sure, because it's identical. Not the rest.
I used to hunt bots on reddit for a hobby and give the results to Bot Defense.
Some of them use rewrites of comments with key words or phrases changed to other words or phrases from a thesaurus to avoid detection. Some of them combine elements from 2 comments to avoid detection. Some of them post generic comments like 💯. Doubtless there are some using AI rewrites of comments now.
My thought process is if generic bots have been allowed to go so rampant they fill entire threads that's an indication of how bad the more sophisticated bot problem has become.
And I think @phdepressed is right, no one at reddit is going to hunt these sophisticated bots because they inflate numbers. Part of killing the API use was to kill bot detection after all.
Reddit has way more data than you would have been exposed to via the API though - they can look at things like user ARN (is it coming from a datacenter), whether they were using a VPN, they track things like scroll position, cursor movements, read time before posting a comment, how long it takes to type that comment, etc.
no one at reddit is going to hunt these sophisticated bots because they inflate numbers
You are conflating “don’t care about bots” with “don’t care about showing bot generated content to users”. If the latter increases activity and engagement there is no reason to put a stop to it, however, when it comes to building predictive models, A/B testing, and other internal decisions they have a vested financial interest in making sure they are focusing on organic users - how humans interact with humans and/or bots is meaningful data, how bots interact with other bots is not
Reddit has access to its own data - they absolutely know which users are posting unique content and which user’s content is a 100% copy of data that exists elsewhere on their own platform
I know they could be I’m just not sure they’re that competent. These bots often aren’t single user or just copy paste either, there’s usually some effort to mix it up or change wording slightly. Reddits internal search function is infamously shit but they “know” which users are unlabeled bots with some effort put behind them?
I know everyone here likes to circle jerk over “le Reddit so incompetent” but at the end of the day they are a (multi) billion dollar company and it’s willfully ignorant to infer that there isn’t a single engineer at the company who knows how to measure string similarity between two comment trees (hint: import difflib in python)
To compare every comment on reddit to every other comment in reddit’s entire history would require an index, and if you want to find similar comments instead of exact matches, it becomes a lot harder to do that efficiently. ElasticSearch might be able to do it, but then you need to duplicate all of that data in a separate database and keep it in sync with your main database without affecting performance too much when people are leaving new comments, and that would probably be expensive.
Comparing combinations of comments is probably impossible. Reddit has a massive number of comments to begin with, and the number of possible subtrees of those comments would just be absurd. If you only care about comparing entire threads and not subtrees, then this doesn’t apply, but I don’t know how useful that will be.
Programmers just do what they’re told. If the managers don’t care about something, the programmers won’t work on it.
To compare every comment on reddit to every other comment in reddit’s entire history would require an index
You think in Reddit’s 20 year history no one has thought of indexing comments for data science workloads? A cursory glance at their engineering blog indicates they perform much more computationally demanding tasks on comment data already for purposes of content filtering
you need to duplicate all of that data in a separate database and keep it in sync with your main database without affecting performance too much
Analytics workflows are never run on the production database, always on read replicas which are taken asynchronously and built from the transaction logs so as not to affect production database read/write performance
Programmers just do what they’re told. If the managers don’t care about something, the programmers won’t work on it.
Reddit’s entire monetization strategy is collecting user data and selling it to advertisers - It’s incredibly naive to think that they don’t have a vested interest in identifying organic engagement
You think in Reddit’s 20 year history no one has thought of indexing comments for data science workloads?
I’m sure they have, but an index doesn’t have anything to do with the python library you mentioned.
Analytics workflows are never run on the production database, always on read replicas
Sure, either that or aggregating live streams of data, but either way it doesn’t have anything to do with ElasticSearch.
It’s still totally possible to sync things to ElasticSearch in a way that won’t affect performance on the production servers, but I’m just saying it’s not entirely trivial, especially at the scale reddit operates at, and there’s a cost for those extra servers and storage to consider as well.
It’s hard for us to say if that math works out.
It’s incredibly naive to think that they don’t have a vested interest in identifying organic engagement
You would think, but you could say the same about Facebook and I know from experience that they don’t give a fuck about bots. If anything they actually like the bots because it looks like they have more users.
I figure it’s their absolute last priority. They might know rough bot #s, but haven’t built or don’t widely use takedown tools. There’s always an enhancement to deliver, and bots help their engagement metrics.
The right one is the “real” accounts. Notice how the left one is newer and all the accounts have names ending with four digits, except where they aren’t copies from the right.
I saw this exact same style of bot account years ago on Tumblr. They always follow the same naming scheme: one word or two words combined and then a string of 4 digits. I bet if you go to any of their profiles, you’ll find like 4 comments that are all copied from old threads and a bunch of upvotes on completely random subs, possibly even all of them being on other bot accounts’ posts and comments.
The real question is whether they’re being used to fake activity on Reddit, sway public opinion by posting this sort of political slant, or will they later be used to advertise scams and this is just to make them seem legitimate.
We use manual approval for programming.dev accounts where there is a very simple instruction you must follow to be approved. The amount of spam that fails that test makes me concerned about the amount of bots from instances without any barriers for account creation.
What happens on reddit (in regards to spam) will inevitably finds its way to ActivityPub link aggregators like lemmy.
I am sad that the current generation of federated social media/networks still doesn’t have much, if any, implementation of web of trust functionality. I believe that’s the only solution to bots/AI/etc content in the future. Show me content from people/accounts/profiles I trust, and accounts they trust, etc. When I see spam or scams or other misbehavior, show me the trust chain connecting me to it so I can sever it at the appropriate level instead of having to block individual accounts. (e.g. “sorry mom, you’ve trusted too many political frauds, I’m going to stop trusting people you trust”)
I guess the question is how specifically you implement such a system, in this case for software like Lemmy. Should instances have a trust level with each other? Should you set a trust when you subscribe to a community? I’m not sure how you can make a solution that will be simple for users to use (and it needs to be simple for users, we can’t only have tech people on Lemmy).
For the simplest users, my initial idea is just a binary “do you trust them?” for each person (aka “friends”) and non-person (aka “follow”), and maybe one global binary of “do you trust who they trust?” that defaults to yes. anything more complex than that can be optional.
You’d see posts in a community/group/etc based on your trust of the community, unless you’ve explicitly de-trusted the poster or you trust someone who de-trusts them (and you haven’t broken that chain).
Right, so if I have no connection to someone else, it’d be “neutral” and I’d see the post. If I trust them transitively, then it would be a trusted post and if I distrust them transitively, it would be a distrusted post.
I think implementing such a thing would not only be complicated but also quite computationally demanding - I mean you’d need to calculate all of this for every single user?
Yes! Web of trust is the only way. Everything else can be scammed. I am kinda wondering if it could be invites and if severing could be automated for social media. “We just banned a third person who came in on your invitations. Goodbye.”
I would definitively use it if it was implemented. Make it work like it is in GPG, where you can rank users based on your trust, and that is then propagated to others.
This concept reminds me of a certain browser extension that marks trans allies and transphobic accounts/websites using a user aggregate with thresholds that mark transphobes as red and trans allies as green.
The spike that happened on October 2023 after the initial spike that happened due to the Reddit protests seems unnatural to me.
Someone gave the explanation of the release of the mobile clients but even then I wouldn’t think it would lead to a spike equivalent to the initial one since it would mostly just be people using an account they already had instead of creating a new one.
Like honestly if someone knows what event happened then that made so many new users join I’d appreciate it.
I didn’t get into Lemmy until there was a mobile client available, Sync to be specific. I believe it since a lot of Reddit users were basically mobile only. So, for a few months I basically subsisted on YouTube alone.
I feel your pain. I also tried Instagram to satiate the mobile scrolling, but the comments there are just horrible and low-effort. The fediverse via Sync is okay, but there’s still much to be desired.
Sync is only one of many clients. And when it came out wasn’t the point of my post. But if no big clients came out in October then they couldn’t have been a factor at all.
I’ve noticed that many Reddit users with the username format Word_Word_Number (for example Absolute_Bot_1230) are almost guaranteed to either be a bot or extremely inflammatory – it’s like everything they post is meant to generate controversies.
Yeah reddit has a name generator that you can choose from when you create an account and that’s the format it uses. Those names are almost exclusively bots and throwaway/anon accounts
It’s Reddit’s automatic username generation, so either yeah, bots, or someone logging in through Google/Facebook and having a username assigned to them.
I like your comment and I was just trying to make a lame joke that obviously didn’t land. We rarely know who we’re talking to online. The joke could be on me.
I know removing 3rd party apps killed my interaction with reddit. I still occasionally check in on smaller subreddits, but I’m doing it through apps like Stealth and Geddit that bypass the API and are read-only and don’t allow commenting/posting.
Ah, gotcha! Sometimes it’s easy to slip into a more robotic tone, especially when we’re focused on conveying information efficiently. But hey, that’s part of the fun, right? We’re all just doing our best to communicate effectively, whether we’re humans or bots.
What if find absolutely wild is how their stock didn’t just flop. The site has been on a downward spiral since the first redesign, and with the cut to API they’ve basically entered a freefall. I could seen people backing Reddit like 14 years ago, but now? Why?
I suppose if there’s any optimism to have in OP’s post it’s that the bots are at least propagating messaging that’s better for the greater good than the typical shit that’s trying to get us into a full dystopia.
Not just Reddit every website I go to now I see this. Even on official game forums like World of Warcraft. Using to promote content or advertise in a way that tries to be organic.
Most likely those “Mega” Churches. If you post proof or call it out watch yourself get spam reported. I have gotten reported and temp banned when the bots abuse the automated systems. I know a few devs and they are scared that they can’t keep ahead of trying to ID and remove Ai like this.
Have you watched any sporting events recently. Some Christian group is willing to pay millions of dollars for a 30 second “Look at this puppy. Pretty great, right? Jesus. He loves puppies, too” ad spots.
I have to assume that we’re just dealing with people who have way more money than sense, and this is literally the best they can come up with in terms of evangelism.
My mechanical keyboard people haven’t really migrated over to Lemmy, so I after I stopped posting to Reddit (I still lurk… sue me) I signed onto a couple of legacy forums. A few months ago, one forum had a poster ask about a sketchy email he got from a vendor asking them to mention their keyboard X number of times, and didn’t even have to be uniformly positive, as long as he didn’t completely shit on them. They needed the visibility. He seemed iffy and I think decided against it, not least of which was that the payment was, IIRC, a free keyboard.
Not two days later, a veteran poster on the other forum magically mentions this obscure and unremarkable vendor, and while they’re qualified in their praise, they sure spent a lot of time talking about them. I was about to call it out, but then I just thought, “well hell, at least the company’s still using real people as shills. This is life now.”
Been happening a lot longer than you imagine. I stopped using Reddit when the third party apps got shut down. At least the last year of my time there was calling out repost bot accounts. Threads like that on smaller subs with week moderation were really common.
Even on some better moderated subs, they got through.
shit like this was happening before the exodus, you’d go into one thread then the other where it’s crossposted, and it’s the same comment, but with some dot, commas in weird places and it’s a reply to another comment and doesn’t really makes sense.
oh and youtube comments are full of nonsensical AI convos that like recommend financial advisors, or coins to invest in, like bruh
True, that did happen before but the OP image shows something different. It’s not just a few comments copied over to the new post it is every single comment copied exactly the same as the original.
More and more lately, I’ve been thinking about maybe we aren’t really meant to be this closely linked together. Like what if everyone just stopped using social media, like it got banned or whatever. Would the world be a better place? Sometimes I wonder if the answer to this would be yes.
My opinion is it would be better in some ways and worse in others. I think it’s worth striving for some Star-Trek-esque version of humanity, where we are well and truly post-scarcity and have outgrown many/most of our more toxic traits as a species, and I think globalisation is the only way to achieve anything close to that.
I also acknowledge that to believe that end result is a certainty rather than a possibility is completely naive. I guess it’s a matter of opinion if the risk that we either wipe ourselves out on the way to that goal, or we just literally can’t overcome tribalism and greed, is worth chancing it.
Either way we’re probably too far gone! I have seen interesting studies here or there though, that indicate the current generation of new parents are far more aware of the dangers of such a technologically enriched lifestyle for children, and that things are turning back in the other direction. So who knows.
I think it’s worth striving for some Star-Trek-esque version of humanity
Every succeeding generation is wiser and more informed than the previous one. So, eventually, we will get there. Perhaps in centuries or millennia but humanity will get there… if we manage to not nuke ourselves.
You may be right. But there is a good aspect to social media - for example, I own a very rare vehicle, with less than ~1,400 made in the 90s (and who knows how many are left). Before social media, we were all isolated from each other, but now we exchange a lot of advice and tips for upkeep and repairs. It has been a lot of help.
A friend of mine uses reddit to keep up with small sub for people with a specific medical condition. Nowhere else was she able to find that kind of support or information.
That’s the great side of social media - connecting people who were otherwise isolated (mostly because of geography). I don’t know if these benefits outweigh the costs, though.
Would be even hard to detect now that AI can write the same message in different ways. I question every comment I read, especially the ones appealing to one’s emotions.
As an AI language model, it would be highly irresponsible for me to impersonate users on a website. This action violates privacy rights by potentially accessing and misusing personal information. Impersonation involves deception, undermining trust in both the AI and the platform where it operates. Furthermore, it can have legal implications, such as violating terms of service agreements or privacy laws. Ultimately, engaging in impersonation could lead to negative publicity and damage the reputation of the AI and the platform it serves.
I get the sarcasm, but this is written as if there is one AI and the reality of who knows how many individually run instances all under whatever rules their implementers choose.
I’ve been using reddit a bit the past couple weeks, it’s getting pretty dry in the fediverse, especially for local content. I got permabanned from our local Reddit communities thread over literally pretty much nothing about a year and a half ago, basically questioning a power mods opinion on something, and then after getting temp banned, asked what the heck like if you aren’t agreeing with me just respond with something, and then I got permabanned.
Anyways I wrote them a kind note today asking to be unbanned, as it is a pretty big sub (343k users for a city of 1.5M), and a good source of information. Told them like look, I’m pretty boring and I can behave, like could you prevent me from having to create a new alt account and let’s let bygones be bygones?
The response I got was really condescending, they banned me from mod mail, and basically it was just a really weird response. All they had to say was no, thanks, and I would have moved on with my day. I think some of the mods are suffering from some pretty serious mental health issues these days, if not a god complex in the slightest. Reddit is a really really unhealthy place, and thankfully those people reminded me of that. I quickly deleted the app from my phone, and I think I’m done for good this time. The fediverse may be drying up a bit, but at least most of the people on it can behave like adults.
I've had an alt on facebook for years. Just give it a realistic name and fill in all the crap about its likes and dislikes education etc and make it join some groups.
As long as it's believably a person they leave it alone.
Reddit is at end stage enshitification. I don’t even know how people tolerate that app or the website. It speaks volumes when there was a robust third party access marketplace.
I just wish the local content would relocate somewhere else. Once people wake up, and it does, that’s it for Reddit.
Yeah it was a momentary lack of judgement. I’m actually a bit embarrassed for myself that I wasted a few minutes of my day kindly asking people I already know are unreasonable weirdos to not be unreasonable weirdos for a moment. I had a laugh to myself about it last night afterwards, and now onwards we go!
Unfortunately that same community is about 460 people on Lemmy. There’s been three attempts thus far, the main 460 person community seems to be the one that’s sticking. At the beginning a couple of the regulars posted on the communities reddit sub, and were instantly threatened with permabans, and any mention of Lemmy on their sub apparently gets deleted and results in bans. I couldn’t make this shit up, it’s pretty unhealthy. But there is tons of local content on the reddit sub. We were an affected family that were involved in a local crisis last fall for example, and it was really useful for that as well, to connect with other local affected people in a way that couldn’t be directly tied back to us by any adverse parties, so we could voice frustrations and support each other. Thankfully I have an alt account that is unbanned, so I could use it for that. But it’s still really irritating, I’m a grown adult, but it still just bums me out that people can act like that, I dunno.
Idk if it’s drying up just because it’s slower with responses. I think we’re just used to the reddit shitbots constantly responding to us on reddit. The slower pace is better because here, there’s actually people responding, not bots.
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