no ; reddit is ruining reddit for everyone.
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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I beg to differ: spez has ruined reddit for everyone.
Not for himself, as he just joined the billionaire club. I would probably have ruined it for a billion as well, if I'm being completely honest.
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Reddit was one of the most human places on the Internet, until King Steven the Turd decided that it's human interactions were a valuable resource that he could sell.
Now, it's all just bots talking to bots to learn how to sound human.
The engagement bots constantly peppering my comments with inane remarks to draw a reaction is what drove me to Lemmy. I was there early on, and it was awesome. As its popularity grew, it became less nice, but I still enjoyed going there. In the end, I didn't feel like commenting because I knew that I'd just get hit with stupid responses calculated to draw a response. It just felt harassing.
peppering my comments with inane remarks to draw a reaction
They're here, too.
I occasionally see comments to the effect of, "Oh, really? Can you tell me more about that?" That seem pretty likely to just be bots trying to generate data on certain topics for AI training. Thankfully, most people seem to ignore them.
I occasionally see comments to the effect of, "Oh, really? Can you tell me more about that?"
Fuck. Am I a bot?
I saw a pretty good short sci-fi film a year or so ago about a woman accidentally finding out that she's a bot.
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Reddit was ruined for me a couple of years ago and AI wasn't involved. I no longer interact there but I do still read Reddit occasionally. Personally I find it difficult to wade through hundreds of one-liners without forgetting what the post was about.
I mean, yeah, I left during the first wave of API changes and before the company went public, but the AI has definitely made it completely unusable.
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I find the usefulness of a subreddit is inversely proportional to its size (popularity). There are still some good ones but they are quite small.
I had hoped Lemmy would fill this void for me but it’s still too small overall such that the smallest communities are barely active at all. Thus I tend to just scroll the feed of everything and see what catches my eye, admittedly a much less useful way to spend my time since I get sucked into ragebait instead of discussing cool hobbies.
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spez ruined reddit for everyone
What? What did the moderator of r/jailbait do now?
That one always rung a big hollow to me because of the timeframe of it. At the time he was made a mod there, invites didn't exist. Folks could just be added to subs- it was actually a method for trolling. At the time, I could add Steve to r/SteveLovesDiddlingKids, for example, and he'd have no say in it. They changed it to an invite system after a subreddit called r/CrabBucket heavily abused it to force folks to stay.
That said, one can quite readily say that spez implicitly supported the jailbait subreddit when he left it up for several years knowingly (Including it being a subheader for reddit on google searches, and it getting nominated for subreddit of the year along with several votes for it.) and only got rid of it when Anderson Cooper did a report on CNN about it.
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reddit already ruined reddit for everyone long before AI was a concern.
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Reddit was ruined long ago, this just accelerates the decline.
Letting gallowboob "moderate" the basically the whole front page was an insane decision. Some of those guys were selling product placement.
The centralization of power to few mods was always a problem, but smaller communities got by.
The huge quality drop came when Spez felt he missed the IPO wave around 2018 and decided to growth hack the site. Then they finally killed most of them too with the API drama.
Popular and moving away from hot to best was also bad. They horribly failed to discipline abuse from the_donald for years...
New reddit is still not even usable from a phone. It crashes frequently and i swaer to God it only shows like 8 posts and just fucking loops through them (how have thry not noticed this, I only check 4 subreddits and its unbearable).
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No, Reddit ruined Reddit for everyone. The AI slops are simply what replace the people who left.
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Niche communities that simply don't exist on Lemmy. If your only hobbies are tech, lemmy probably covers all of your bases, but there are nearly no niche non-tech communities here.
but there are nearly no niche non-tech communities here.
And if they do exist, there are 4 subscribers and zero posts in the last 6 months.
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Let's not blame AI for everything: Reddit had a lot of problems before AI became big. Repost bots are so common that you'll see the same posts over and over again. Some of those twitter screenshots must have been posted hundreds or thousands of times. OnlyFans spam also works without AI. And we have had those bots spamming the same stupid comments before people were even thinking about GPTs.
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What, did /u/spez change his name to /u/AI_Slop?
Yeah, that happened way before the current AI slop bubble.
Yes it did. Making up variation of the same story in order to farm upvotes used to be done by humans.
But the strategy of throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks has now been industrialized with AI, because the machine can produce tons of cheaper, faster, smellier shit.
Reddit and generally socials are basically the perfect application for AI. Unreliable results are not a bug but a feature. You have thousands of humans helpfully training it for free by up or downvoting the result. And the AI companies get a machine trained to persuade large groups of people of any made-up story.
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Reddit already ruined Reddit. The AI slop is just the broken glass in the turd.
Reddit's founder and investors killed reddit, the method they used is immaterial.
Reddit was the good place after the fall of Digg 2.0. Now Reddit has become the bad place.
Yes. But, to perhaps a lower extent, this headline is also true if you change 'Reddit' to 'the internet'.
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oh no
Anyway.
AI slop is ruining everything *
It's ruining far more than reddit.
I'm reading AI content there, and when I post, I'm getting accused of being a bot / using an LLM. Fantastic.
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Reddit was ruined long before AI came into the picture. that place hasn't been good for a decade.
Fuck reddit
one of the most human spaces left on the internet
Journalism once again demonstrating they are about 10-15 years behind on the times. Did they forget reddit completely broke back in 2016 when the_donald left the place in a permanent troll state.
I'm not going to read the article on account of time right now but I'm guessing it's written as if reddit was invented yesterday and the prior 20 years of reddit history is didn't happen.
It hasn't been human since the early 2010s. Reddit was botted to death long before LLMs.
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Reddit was the playground for ai slop long before commercial LLMs existed. Subredditsimulator was like 2014 or 2015 and people were fucking with markov chains and other shit that dated back to like the 90s or even 70s but that also had some people experimenting with rudimentary neural networks, though obviously none with the computing power of shit like chatgpt or gemini. And obviously that whole experiment was inspired in part by the fact that botted comments were becoming increasingly common and obvious on reddit in the years leading to it, so why not make a subreddit where everyone participating is a bot?
There’s no proof but openai researchers may have been fucking around on that sub. There was a fairly drastic increase in quality of posts in that sub around the time openai would’ve been making gpt1 (2018ish) and then they began aggressively scraping the entirety of reddit, quora, etc for content. Could just be a coincidence though and they’ll never confirm it even if it’s true bc redditors will flip shit
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You mean those pictures all over the front page of kittens with a caption like "I found this guy in a shoebox, in the basement, hungry. I fed him and named him Mortimer." are not real?!?!
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Good...GOOD
imagine ruining reddit
Not for me! I left that place years ago…
reddit was ruined by reddit
it's just evidence that the site went the way of social media and is saturated with people who circulate such things
Here's the thing though, Reddit provided a lot of AI training data. Now AI content is ruining Reddit. This is like a large corporation making millions off cider and then destroying the orchard.
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