this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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[–] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 236 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (10 children)

As bots and sponsored content crowd the internet, Reddit is often seen as a more reliable source of information, and its popularity has exploded in the past couple of years.

Lmfao reading articles like this makes me feel like I'm living in the upside down. The entire site is bots posting content for bots to updoot and comment. Yet here they are getting glazed as "the last site for authentic connection". Give me a fucking break.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 97 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They're about a decade and a half out of date.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I mean, before LLMs there were people trying to do the mass influence thing... but the only entities that could be effective were the ones that could hire a few hundred people to shitpost in the same direction.

Now any nerd with a graphics card and a python interpreter can operate hundreds of accounts. Large operations are probably creating multiple synthetic high 'subscriber' subreddits or buying mod accounts on large subreddits.

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[–] SushiRain@lemmy.world 34 points 2 days ago (5 children)

In the same article posted on Reddit one of the top posts is "BuT WhEn ReDdiT aLtErNaTiVe"? Who gonna tell them?

Anyway Reddit was cool up to 5 years ago. Now it's either bots, AI slop, Trump stuff or furries/hentai stuff.

Reddit's dead.

[–] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 42 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (6 children)

I'd go even further back, with hindsight. During the us elections 2016 it became basically transparent the platform was being manipulated, and it wasn't very sophisticated at that time. It's really only evolved since then - but there used to be real people to call out the BS.

All before we even get to the corporate fiefdom spez has decided he'd like reddit to be.

[–] chunes@lemmy.world 28 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Remember in 2013 when reddit made a blog post about reddit meetup day with some statistics and they accidentally left in Eglin Air Force Base as the "most addicted city?"

Of course, can't have the plebs knowing that the site is manipulated by the US military, so they hid the truth, but archive.org remembers.

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[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (6 children)

I noticed that r/technology bans some keywords, like if your comment says "PieFed" and you try to open it Incognito/Private then it won't show up, I have to say "Pie-Fed (without the hyphen)"

I think they also ban some mentions of Lemmy instances but I forget which ones, maybe lemmy.world

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[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 21 points 2 days ago (3 children)

It’s INSANE. The bot flooding started to become notably - and noticeably - bad around the time the API exodus happened. And it’s only accelerated. And most people seem to just be pretending it’s not even happening.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago (4 children)

The most prolific posters left and/or came here.

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[–] sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Maybe the article was written by a bot.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Almost certainly. The future is a line of megaphones screaming "It's never been better!" on autopilot while the world burns

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[–] Wilmo@lemmy.world 105 points 2 days ago (6 children)

Just a reminder if someone gave you $10,000 a day, youd be very rich and happy. Most certainly set for life.

And with that money alone it'd take 274 years to become a billionaire.

Nobody needs that.

[–] J92@lemmy.world 33 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Christ! This is a better description than the 'million seconds vs. billion seconds' one.

[–] Wilmo@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Even if you got $100,000 a day, every day, it'd take you 27 years to hit a billion with just that money. That's a working days of an 8 hour, hourly wage of 12,500 an hour. 27 years.

Billionaires need to stop being billionaires.

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[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 20 points 2 days ago (2 children)

And you will still never catch up to the billionaires of today because they use that money to make more money even faster than that.

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[–] Marshezezz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 73 points 2 days ago

The former mod of r/jailbait must be proud of himself

[–] Kyrgizion@lemmy.world 61 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There is no justice. Aaron Schwarz is six feet underground while this pestilent boil of a man becomes a billionaire on the back of his achievements.

[–] sudopersona@lemmy.world 25 points 2 days ago (1 children)
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[–] etherphon@midwest.social 47 points 2 days ago

He took a great place, where there were tons of flourishing communities, that people spent an amazing amount of their free time building and caring for, and took a giant shit all over it to bundle it all up and sell it to the AI garbage lords. Hope it was worth it buddy. Fuck you.

[–] SpankyDoodle@eviltoast.org 39 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Just left Reddit. Ain’t going back.

[–] khannie@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)
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[–] Boozilla@lemmy.world 34 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I speculate it's mostly Ouroboros style funding and phony metrics. Bots selling "engagement" to other bots is pretty profitable, I guess. At least for now. The only person I know who still openly uses reddit is an obnoxious drunk white woman in her 60s.

[–] Fandangalo@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago (8 children)

I wish more people converted over, but the user experience for the fediverse is very strange for many people, tech inclined folks I know included.

[–] Boozilla@lemmy.world 15 points 2 days ago (7 children)

The lack of active niche communities is frustrating.

[–] Fandangalo@lemmy.world 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] Boozilla@lemmy.world 13 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Fair, but I did try for a while. Lemmy has a lot of "snipers" who don't contribute anything more than condescending AKSHUALLY "corrections" or pure snark. You go into their history and that is 90% of what you see. I have blocked several. I think it's leftover baggage and trauma from reddit. (I don't consider your meme reply to be a snipe, hopefully that was not implied.)

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[–] BrilliantantTurd4361@sh.itjust.works 34 points 1 day ago (2 children)
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[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 33 points 2 days ago (1 children)

it's all false growth. it's the same reason why the economy is tanking yet the exchange is "strong".

bubble economics.

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[–] RustyShackleford@lemmy.zip 31 points 2 days ago (3 children)
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[–] leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 points 2 days ago (6 children)

Still a greedy little pigboy, though.

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[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 29 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Daily active users have approximately doubled since the summer of 2023.

Surely some of this is bots but... I have a hard time believing it is all of them. So much for the API protests in 2023... 😞

[–] fonix232@fedia.io 10 points 1 day ago

It most likely is.

Not ALL bots are Reddit-made. Sure, many are, but there's a growing interest by many states to increase their influence of social media.

Tons of Russian/Chinese bots pushing the tankie agenda for example, tons of bots pushing right-wing psy-ops and lies, lots of companies trying to push their own angles as well... and given the number of people who've left Reddit since, and who've been kicked off the platform, I'd say a majority ARE bots.

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[–] brax@sh.itjust.works 25 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

What an absolute disgrace. I'm pissed that Aaron Swartz was the one who died, and that they fired Victoria. Steve Huffman can go choke on a bag of sweaty dicks.

[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 22 points 2 days ago

Firing Victoria was really the end of the Old Reddit. It felt like the loss of that side of reddit - the un-guided AMA’s by famous people - just led to reddit descending further into bots and reposts. The site had nothing to talk about other than itself anymore.

[–] Embargo@lemmy.zip 24 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Are people still saying fuck spez? Because... fuck spez.

[–] RustyShackleford@lemmy.zip 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Last I checked, yes. Along with the image of him getting drilled by busty Garfield.

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[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Feels good knowing you aren't on a burning ship.

[–] mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 16 points 2 days ago

tbh, not for me. I just feel disappointed

it used to be a great place with tons of information and a functional interface. nothing has really replaced it in terms of content and accessibility to the masses

[–] Nyxias@fedia.io 20 points 1 day ago

"DADDY DADDY!" Spez screams excitedly to Musk "I BECOME LIKE U NOW! AND SOMEDAY, I HOPE TO GAIN AS MUCH AS U DADDY!"

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 2 days ago (3 children)

its popularity has exploded in the past couple of years. Daily active users have approximately doubled since the summer of 2023. Google searches increasingly surface links to Reddit: Organic search to the platform is up over 560% from two years ago, per data from digital marketing firm Semrush.

So depressing, I sure hope these stats are bullshit.

[–] dellish@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm willing to bet the new daily active users are largely bots. I remember Facebook pulling this shit last year: bots will count as active users, presumably so they can just keep adding bots and tell shareholders their active user base is growing. It's all such a scam.

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[–] DeICEAmerica@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I get banned from that platform a couple of times a day when over 5 years ago my million karma original account got banned for "threatening violence" Any talk of organizing and rising up will get you the permaban stick. He is yet another complicit billionaire hell bent on killing the American work force and our democracy. He, too, will wear a blindfold when his sentence is read aloud.

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[–] 1984@lemmy.today 13 points 1 day ago

He fits in with the other scumbag billionaries...

[–] taiyang@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago

I'd take it with a big grain of salt


it's Forbes, they lube up people with money with pretty weak arguments. He is a billionaire, but mostly through overvaluation of the company he's ultimately gutting for profit. (Although if it died, he is still rich, unfortunately, just not a billionaire).

Some of the arguments being made in the article though, like it being an "authentic place" and having more traffic is a little misleading. For AI, we already know 50% of the Internet is AI made now, in a remarkably short amount of time and a hefty amount of that is going to be on Reddit. If the 90% by 2026 prediction holds true, he's basically an owner of a gold mine that's already tapped out. Users won't necessarily catch on, but they will be drowned out as a source of LLM data.

Admittedly, the traffic increase isn't all bots but to classify it as organic is misleading too- iirc, they have a deal with Google to push reddit in exchange for Gemini training. Even unrelated searches are propping up Reddit as the first result; it's like using SEO cheats. As with the poisoning of his data with artificial data, that deal may not last (and if the AI bubble bursts, that's certainly gone).

Frankly, we need the bubble to burst but we also need heavy regulation on these industries. I'm not too hopeful of the latter and the former isn't going to be pretty--- it's not like the .com bubble made the 90s a better era, for instance.

[–] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

shit that reminds me to donate to the admin of my local instance

[–] foggy@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A billion dollars doesn't make 15 year olds legal, spez.

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[–] dumbass@aussie.zone 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There's too many billionaires now, I think it's dinner time.

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[–] dhork@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago

He'll always be a greedy little pigboy

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