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So I checked out reddit after a long time and was going through the top of r/videogames subreddit and I could clearly see a pattern in most of the posts there. Posts were mostly like "what game ______ for you?" or "what game _____ like this?" Now I could be wrong but it doesn't feel 'organic' (if that's correct way to put it). It's like these are put up intentionally. Thoughts?
These are engagement farming posts. Both reddit and Twitter are full of them, because both sites are now offering money to accounts whose posts get lots of upvotes/comments.
It feels gross and inauthentic.
Something similar happened to Quora when they started offering to pay people just to produce questions, not good questions, not answers, just questions. Quora was already kinda tenuous and growing its tolerance for fascists, but that move dropped a cinder block on the enshittification gas pedal. Quota's basically been completely unusable since then and it's only gotten worse.
Edit: wrote Quota instead of Quora, but I like the typo's energy, so I'm leaving it.
Some of them read like content farming posts-get a bunch of people to talk about a given topic with a specific direction, then “write” an article that is basically “video games are crazy, aren’t they? Here’s some really crazy video game stories!
[five word intro] [full text of a Reddit comment] [repeat ad nauseam]”
I don't even know how much of a role the monetary aspect has. I feel like a lot of Reddit is naturally gross and inauthentic but also soulless and elitist in a way. People still post content because they want the Reddit karma and rehash the same prompts that gives the same predictable answers that seem to appease the crowd. Other times when things are reposted comments will act harshly and and redirect them to a post or wiki from years ago.
Reddit, to me, seems to lack genuine human interactions.
My thoughts exactly. Kinda like how some tiktoks/reels/shorts are specifically crafted to make you watch them over and over again to drive up viewing time.
Reddit isn't the only place this is happening.
Nice to know there are other monkeys on this planet that can open their fucking eyes.
Anyone notice the amount of memes used as free advertising? Disney has been doing it for a while, and crushed it with the mini Yoda in that shit TV show.
Fuck Disney.
I'm 100% sure Baby Yoda was specifically created to sell merchandise.
The original Star Wars would never have specifically created a character just to sell merchandise...
Space balls the lunch box!
For sure that's the case. This has been a strategy since at least the 70s
I really liked mini Yoda. I don't get why you hate Disney so much.
So much great content. Really is the golden age of television now that the companies like Disney and Netflix are all trying to compete with each other.
I always enjoying pirating their shows and movies.
I don't know, I feel like advertisements CAN be entertaining content, much like how people for decades have only wanted to watch the Super Bowl for the commercials. The problem, and the reason I have ad blockers all over the place, is that they don't design the commercials to be entertaining. They want to drill it in to you with endless repetition, or banner ads every 2 paragraphs on a news article.
It is these problems that cause me to want to block ads, not ads in general.
Im of the opinion we should reject all advertising and change the dynamic
If someone wants to sell me something they have to pay for my time.
Instead of paying Jake Paul $10,000,000 to sell me something. They just have to pay me the bandwidth or time their commercial just ate up of my free time.
I work all fucking day and barely get 6 hours before bed. 3 of those hours is running into ads fuck that.
I drive home and have to look at fifteen rusted ass giant metal billboards barely holding together instead of cool ass trees and birds.
I turn on the radio to get a song, 3 minute DJ giving me gossip about celebrities I should purchase from, 2 minute commercials and another song.
I turn on Spotify i pay for and get ad reads all podcast long along with the host sneakily promoting their new chewing tobacco or liquor.
I get home and kids are watching prime, with commercials. Shit doesn't stop. It keeps encroaching into our free time. Its like an Edgar Alan Poe story but written by Edward Louis Bernays
I hate advertisements
I think there is a distinction of PUSH advertising where you see billboards everywhere, ads stuck into youtube videos, spam emails, whatever that is just sent out to the general public and see what sticks. Compare that with PULL advertising where a consumer goes out and looks for something. When I am shopping for a new TV or something that needs a bit of research, I have no problem being sold to.
It's kinda like going out of your way to watch movie trailers. Or watching a lets's play of a video game you are interested in. It can be a fun way to spend some time and they can be entertaining in their own right.
Dead Internet Theory at work.
The internet has a grim future and it doesn't involve you and I interacting if they get their way.
You can blame bots, but having also worked as a soul crushing social media manager for a few months, you make shit like this to get karma (or on other media, interactions.) Humans deserve some blame!
That said the greatest irony is a toooon of the votes and comments are also bots and/or shills. The weirdest thing I found success on with Twitter, for instance, was wishing people a good morning, using a company account. Weirdly drove profile traffic and follows. >.>
Yeah, there's a reason why Youtube thumbnails have all that weird shit. It works.
Karma bots making low effort shitposts because our dumb monkey brains will upvote it. it happened before but you ignored it because you cared enough about the organic engagement on the community and mods did enough to try to stop that behavior
Now that Reddit removed mods that actually did their jobs and you’re one of us, it’s all you can think about
You are not the only one noticing it. Probably trying to maximize the user provided content they can sell to language model creators
Looks like they got 60m from google for that:
https://fortune.com/2024/02/23/reddit-60m-deal-google-search-giant-train-ai-models-on-posts/
Indeed, thanks for the link!
NP! I didnt know about it until recently too. It was eye opening on why im seeing so many "safe" posts make it to the top and why so many google search results now include reddit posts recently.
Why are you using r/videogames as an example to make this claim?
There are at least two more subs that are wildly more popular and have much more activity and substantial posts and commenting.
I am subbed to both of those last two and didn't even know the first one existed because it's offshoot trash.
I still use reddit for some of the niche and sports communities that just aren't really present on Lemmy (or not yet at least). I only use old reddit, and I only use my front page or the multis I curated myself. One thing I've noticed a lot lately is posts with zero upvotes and usually zero comments appearing in hot, top, and best filters. Most of these are absolute trash posts that were clearly posted by a bot.
I do not understand what benefit they're seeking by shoving bad posts with no positive feedback into these sorting options but it's fuckin weird.
They don't care what the users see, they want to push metrics on their investors and hope they're not going to do a deep dive into their traffic.
The GenX sub is the same now. It's just a bunch of questions now like "what's your favorite song from the 80's?". It used to be a sub with substance and now it's lame.
from the '80s*
It's because of bots, in the past there was enough moderation to deal with them plus a larger amount of natural engagement.
Now after the exodus there is significantly less real engagement and much poorer moderation. Those combined allow bots and low effort posting to thrive.
My guess is with the protests that some of the top content creators moved away and never came back.
I remember sorting by hot once gave a wide variety of things and now it seems to be more drama posts like AITA posts.
Although it feels like I'm still following an ex, There was one place over there I used to visit a lot and I believe if you took a snapshot of the top ten posts of a random day few years ago and today, they'd be very different. Today's seems to be a group picking up a trend and running with it and before it was more original content. I remember going there because I knew there'd be something new I'd likely laugh at or be amused by and now it feels heavily recycled.
The subscriber count is still way up, but I'd you look at the online/active user count, it feels like its around 10% it was off recent highs.
It felt like the sub had a ship of thecleus moment where it seemed to just be growing, but was also losing people until the group changed but the name was the same.
Someone else said the new reddit gold allows people to receive real money* if people gild their posts (by spending real money) * receiver must be in certain countries.
I saw a post recently on a wholesome memes page where someone tagged repost sleuth bot and someone else commented that todays post was literally a copy of the third top voted post of all time. It was.
I also remember that bot support got affected and this led to a spam detector bot being moved from active development to sunset mode where it was still supported but not actively enhanced.
The subscriber count is still way up, but I’d you look at the online/active user count, it feels like its around 10% it was off recent highs.
Same here. Subs with hundred of thousands of subscribers, but barely any activity.
On that note, anyone feel like YouTube comments have recently turned "too nice"? Like if you go to any yt let's play, usually the first 10 top comments won't be talking about the video contents, just "I love that we're getting regular videos 🤗!" Endlessly. It feels so weird to me compared to the actual discourse that could happen there, and obviously yt comments are infamous for being a cesspool so that's even more of a jarring change
Might be bots, might be youtube pushing these more to make everything feel more friendly.. and then bots jump onto that again for ads and scams..
I didn't expect it to reach this level...it doesn't feel appealing.
Do they have some AI chatting in comment ? :)
One more thing to notice here is that despite it being top of all time, none of the posts are even a year old
Reddit’s site traffic has just gone up that much. Especially if you include bots posting constantly in their SEO subreddits that admins are aware of and indifferent to.
When I first joined lemmy, there were bean posts everywhere. People kept posting shitty puns about beans with pictures of beans, and people kept upvoting them. But it eventually died down.
Could these kinds of posts just be a fad on reddit right now?
The life cycle of a meme seems broken. They font just go to Facebook to die any more. Reddit reached a size where a meme can't die. There's enough people where a meme can get reposted a few days later and still hit the front page multiple times. Its new to enough people it gets a second or third round. We seen it naturally with Hosts and beans, but it died off once everyone got sick of the joke.
Bots copy and repost what gets upvotes. Seems something gets big a few times over untill enough people see it, then the bots add it to the good meme list and could hit make "new" at any time. The dead meme comes back at just the right moment to be new to some and retro to others, the cycle repeats.
The beans were great. As incoherent as they got it felt like someone was trying to post content so they got my upvotes. It can get pretty dead around here and I was glad for the change of pace. For a while there was nothing but AI prompt Sailor Moon art that was pretty entertaining too
the Facebookification of Reddit. bots are raking in engagement so they can astroturf as "legitimate" accounts later.
I've tried to give Reddit another chance and the majority of posts just seem artificial, AI or bots, I'm not sure but it has definitely lost its organic nature.
It's all bots, reposts, and corps trying to use the system to drive engagement towards their shit products/websites/services. The comments are worse. jokes, memes, SJWs, and random proselytizations on the most banal shit you've ever ignored. Every time I'm on Reddit it just feels like dead internet.
bots are fucking atrocious for generating just miles and miles of trash content on Reddit.
As a mod for many years, the real moding work was finding ways to keep the bots at bay.
It got real bad since around 2020ish...
They can train their AI's all they want on Reddit, it's a complete waste of time.
That data is corrupt as shit. It's already littered with garbage old AI posts and comments, and it's gonna poison their models real bad.
None of those even reference current games, they could all be repost bots reposting stuff from years ago.
The "Which era did you start playing video games" is missing the last 4 years of consoles.
Fluent-in-finance sub has the same problem. Every day, it's a twitter screenshot of some politician statement and the title is always an engagement question like "Is punitive wealth tax gay?" that makes it to /all
The couple of times I snooped in on Reddit to see how it was going, Top Day felt like going through some TikTok/Instagram Story clone.
Honestly I think you just fell out the meme train and now you're looking at it as an outsider.