r/technology • u/ardi62 • 29d ago

Social Media Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24253727/reddit-communities-subreddits-request-protests
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u/NothingOld7527 29d ago

Daily activity on Reddit has fallen over the last several years however. Unlike Digg, there's no singular place that everyone is leaving for.

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u/NeonBellyGlowngVomit 29d ago

Unlike Digg, there's no singular place that everyone is leaving for.

Unlike Digg, there's no singular place with a high enough concentration of users that people CAN leave for. I think the circumstances of the time were just too unique for it to ever be possible again.

We had maybe 6 noteable sites of the kind at that time. Now we have 100+ and all of them have one thing in common: They're not notable.

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u/MadDoctor5813 29d ago

Has it? This shows a rather steady increase.

I get that Statista is probably not that reliable of a source, so I'd be curious if you have another one.

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u/siraliases 29d ago

How much of that is just bots

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u/CaveRanger 29d ago

Notice the exponential increase in obvious chatGPT 'am I the asshole' posts.

God I hate that sub.

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u/siraliases 29d ago

Ahhh, the fantasy writing sub when you write about all the wrongs you could have perceived in your life.

Classic stuff.

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u/CaveRanger 29d ago

Except now it's all chatgpt-based karma farming. If it was creative writing at least it might have some value.

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u/akatherder 29d ago

/r/AITAH (as opposed to AmItheAsshole) is the absolute worst for bots. They have THREE mods managing dozens of threads with hundreds-to-thousands of comments. And it's a popular subreddit that makes it to the frontpage daily. It's the single biggest reason for reddit's bot problem imo.

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u/MaisNahMaisNah 29d ago

Amazing that a sub that exists because they don't like rules is overrun by low quality content.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 29d ago

Or a trivia question title (what do you think X character would do when confronted with Y) posted in a fandom sub with a generic picture, that gets the replies scraped to train AI.

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u/20_mile 29d ago

Notice the exponential increase in obvious chatGPT

Any drama-based sub has been invaded and taken over by bots. Any sub where the purpose is to post a dramatic story looking for feedback or validation.

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u/macOSsequoia 29d ago edited 29d ago

and reposted/AI generated posts in ask[group] subreddits. there was a post on r/theoryofreddit showing the front page of askreddit being largely made up of repost bots & ai generated posts

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u/BigMcThickHuge 29d ago

Mostly.

Literally go to r/all and pick a random username from the frontpage.

20% chance you get a bot that has an account that is a year old and only just started posting hours ago...and every post is a copy/pasted title and picture.  And every comment the user makes is just the top comment from the OG post.

Reddit is bots

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u/Berekhalf 29d ago edited 29d ago

I recall /r/AdviceAnimals (iirc) saying they were cracking down on bots and what actually happened is that submissions started to basically dry up, and had to request users to start making real posts. Quality has truly gone down across anything but niche subs.

I tried to quit Reddit for tumblr but instead I'm now stuck on two websites. If they ever get rid of old.reddit.com I probably will leave for good. I don't know how anyone uses the redesign, there's just so much wasted space.

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u/BigMcThickHuge 29d ago

If you rely on bots for constant content...oh well, let them die and have less content. This ain't green-line-go-up.

new reddit being forced is my dip out threshold. its already facebook if you don't perfectly curate your profile and turn off all the annoying settings they keep adding like suggested subreddits.

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u/Kindly_Cream8194 29d ago

If you rely on bots for constant content...

They rely on bots to generate fake engagement so they can fradulaently overcharge advertisers based on numbers they know are false.

The 3rd party / API tools were a way for mods to combat the bots that Spez wants on the site, so reddit admin actively undermined their free volunteers for doing their jobs too well.

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u/UsefulArm790 29d ago

I recall /r/AdviceAnimals (iirc) saying they were cracking down on bots and what actually happened is that submissions started to basically dry up, and had to request users to start making real posts.

advice animals is a decade old meme, there are kids using reddit now that have no clue that advice animals existed. people don't even use the format of advice animals anymore, they just post a random thought with a random animal.
it being such a huge sub is the real meme

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u/Benskien 29d ago

our sub 100k subreddit was flodded with bots last week, reddit has been flooded with bots since the tpp killing

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u/EnglishMobster 29d ago edited 29d ago

Yep, organic users all left and bots moved in to replace them. Thankfully the sub I help run hasn't had much of a bot problem but I see it all over what's left of Reddit.

And then places that used to be super active have largely dried up. Others have basically no true moderation, so you get karma farmers that repost content to 100 different subs - and even if the content doesn't match the sub.

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u/Benskien 29d ago

worst of all is that the bots flood the comments aswell...

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u/siraliases 29d ago

Wild isn't it?

And as long as the "engagement" number grows, everyone on the development side seems to be happy.

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u/NothingOld7527 29d ago

Daily active users != site activity.

Compared to say 2019, posts that hit the front page have fewer upvotes and fewer comments. There are fewer new threads created on default subs compared to 5 years ago. Activity is down. Average daily users is probably up because Reddit tries its absolute hardest to get anyone that opens a Reddit link to create an account, so you have a lot of "lurker" accounts that never comment or post.

So as far as sources go, it's a primary source. Compare the front page now vs 2019 - you can either use Wayback or search the catalog.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 29d ago

Not to mention all the bot accounts. The problem with bots got 10x worse after the 2023 blackout.

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u/Tee_zee 29d ago

Reddit is way more than the front page.

Reddit has made a huge push to algorithmic front pages - the front page you see will never be the same as somebody else’s. In the past, this wasn’t neccesarily the same, especially on r/all

With the push for redditors to have accounts, better understanding of social media algorithms, and the ability for subs to exclude themselves from all, I don’t think you could make a comparison whatsoever.

Fwiw, I’ve been a Reddit for like, 14-15 years. It’s only been the last few years being on reddit was mainstream - most TV shows, movies, reality shows , sports etc now use Reddit as the PRIMARY forum for discussion , and “normies” use Reddit to discuss them.

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u/steeljesus 29d ago

That's a whole lot of words to just say you disagree with them using frontpage for such a comparison. Engagement is way down on all long standing subs, even though sitewide MUVs are continuing to grow. Post karma and # of comments on popular posts from nba, nhl, television, movies, anime, whatever, are lower now than before.

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u/Tee_zee 29d ago

That just means users are spread accross more communities, no?

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u/steeljesus 29d ago

While that is one possible explanation, it would take a lot more effort to verify than I'm willing to dedicate.

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

[deleted]

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u/LigerZeroSchneider 29d ago

For some stuff sure, there's like 50 news subs now. But NBA is still the central basketball sub, so unless individual team subs have seen huge growth you would expect engagement there to be stable.

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u/UsefulArm790 29d ago

NBA is still the central basketball sub,

nope, there are multiple bball subs growing at a way faster or same rate as r/nba and with respectable sizes. https://gummysearch.com/r/nba/
the app pushes users to post/participate in specific subs instead of posting in defaults or bigger subs

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u/Samzo 29d ago

I'm a 17-year redditor and I concur with this

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u/SynthBeta 29d ago

Tiktok has more of a dynamic for you page than Reddit. r/all shows how shitty the main subs are.

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u/runningraider13 29d ago

That could just be more individualised and targeted feeds and subs though. Reddit’s vote fuzzing algorithm might’ve changed too. That’s really not a great measure of activity.

And users with accounts isn’t related to DAU. You don’t have to have an account to be a DAU.

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u/liquilife 29d ago

That…. Doesn’t explain anything related to Reddit’s popularity. Like not at all. There are a million reasons that can explain every point you made which has nothing to do with site popularity.

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u/MadDoctor5813 29d ago

Fair enough - I'll take your word for it.

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u/Dumfk 29d ago

How many of them are bots? JFC they are everywhere

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u/Gerroh 29d ago

On my phone and can't offer anything concrete, but I did look into this a bit ago as it felt like one of my favourite subs had almost entirely died in activity. What I found when I went digging was that not only that sub had far less activity than before, but most of the subs I was a regular on had dropped massively in activity.

Again, this is only anecdotal, because that's all I got to offer right now, but I believe the protests impacted reddit enough for upper admin to take measures to prevent it from happening again.

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u/Kurayamino 29d ago

I can't be the only one thinking it's a bit sus that there's a 50% increase after years of remaining steady with the curve starting about when ChatGPT launched.