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.
LOL, that’s how Reddit’s traffic is “back to normal”.
Bots upvoting bots replying to bots commenting on bot reposts.
Reddit 2023.
Apparently they learned a lot from r/subredditsimulator
Holy shit I completely forgot about that. So much irony.
Now that this is the whole site, there should be a version of that sub where humans post.
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.
Sounds like a song…
Bots who like posts who like posts who like bots who write posts from the bots who like bots who like posts…
Like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grWgQChzDqQ
I like you and you like him and he likes somebody else
The three of us, so full of votes
And yet, we’re all on the shelf
‘Round and ‘round we keep on clickin’
There’s only bots left in this frickin’
Subreddit that’s slowly come unglued
A circle of snooI wish that we could take a break
‘Cause even bots get bored
But redditors keep fucking off
To the Fediverse or Discord
So on and on we keep on postin’
To hide that users have been ghostin’
Who wants spam that isn’t even new?
A circle of snooA circle of snoo
That’s filled with so much glurge
A circle of snoo
Can’t someone do a purge?But on and on we keep on postin’
To hide that users have been ghostin’
Who wants spam that isn’t even new?
A circle of snoo(edited to finish the song because if you’re going to set something to an Archies tune, why not go for maximum suffering?)
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?
It’s all very dystopian and sad.
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
Have you heard of the Dead Internet Theory? When I heard that it put a name to how Reddit has felt for a while. Mostly I’m on the “avoid main subreddits” camp and a I’m in a few small communities. Wierdo communities but the wierdo feels genuine.
A long time ago Reddit used to have a rule against self-promotion. It got tricky though to get definitions. Selfposts were fine if the didn’t link out with obvious “buy my shit” type things. With selftext it sort of made sense. But then you had artists showing something they had painted… Is that self-promotion? And then there were the wars over whether theoatmeal should be banned and admin took theoatmeal’s side and pissed everyone off. So then people started to aggressively promote their content and only feared moderators. Nowadays a lot of it is “I wrote this” and “I made this video” etc. And it’s a really difficult hair to split. Some people I don’t mind doing that. But other times it’s just missing the filter of any third-party evaluating it as interesting enough to be submitted. Dunno. Lately reddit just feels like a room full of salesmen and bots a lot of places on Reddit. Even the smaller subreddits are full of people pushing YouTubers or other celebrities.
.
But everyone is a bot, except…
BEEP BOOP I DISAGREE WE SHOULD PROTECT THEM WHAT ARE YOU ANTI ROBOT OR SOMETHING? BEEP BOOP
As an AI language program, I am not qualifiée 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
A little searching with DuckDuckGo reveals that this tweet was made in January 2023. Not sure whether it’s also bot-vomited from a previous instance of the same remark. It’s telling that the r/all post doesn’t link to the tweet or give a date.
ETA a link to the tweet in question: https://twitter.com/briantylercohen/status/1617333819660718081
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.
I’m thinking AI-generated based on similar past topics.
I’ve definitely seen this exact tweet long before 2023.
It’s bots all the way down.
Are we bots?
Beep boop
Fuck, I mean no
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?
https://twitter.com/briantylercohen/status/1617333819660718081
The tweet was from Jan 22, 2023
But this article is from 2021, along with all the other ones I found about the vaccine causing “shaking”.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/jan/20/shaking-covid-vaccine-side-effect-videos-and-what-/
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.
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.
wefwef.app is also showing something like karma, I was happy that I left concept of fake internet points on reddit, but turns out that it’s still there
Only started posting a day ago, even though the account is 4 years old:
They didn’t even bother to do an email for the trophy case. /facepalm
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 hated how every subreddit was focused around US politics (leopardatemyface, facepalm, etc)
Reddit been feeling dead since they went to mass ban spree about a month ago.
Conversations that do feel organic are hard to find.
Oh that’s sad! You only got to experience reddit for a month before they pulled the API bullshit.
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.
Lol
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.
Part of me feels like it’s the subreddits fault. There should’ve been rules against articles/tweets that aren’t timestamped. Specifically for reason of ensuring relevance
This was definitely a thing long before the blackout
Yeah bot posts have been growing steadily for years but I always assumed the mods were in on it
I swear I saw this exact post and all the same top comments like a year ago… Like the Nicki minaj cousins balls comment is so oddly Deja vu familiar, and who would even remember that shit at this point
Reddit’s heating tool bot broke.
Maybe one of the reasons they are shutting down the API. They just don’t have an answer to LLM powered bots
Reddit UI is great!
