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no ; reddit is ruining reddit for everyone.
I beg to differ: spez has ruined reddit for everyone.
That’s when things started going off the rails yes. Remember Victoria and the good ol days?
⭐
{lemmysilver}
nah reddit is fine for loads of things
better than lemmy in fact but then it has FOUR orders of magnitude more active users
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.
Bro you can’t just say that and not mention the name. What was it?
Here you go
Different book, but try We are legion (we are Bob)
That’s a good book, not terribly deep but very much fun to read. I’m sure bots thinking they are human has been done several times. First show that comes to mind is Westworld, which is kind of centered around that idea.
Bob only thinks hes human for about half a page?
I wish I could remember. It was definitely on YT. I think it was in German with subtitles. It wasn’t long. Possibly was someone’s film school project.
Dutch actually
Beep boop fellow clanker.
Wait, was that reply to me with a “Can you elaborate on that” comment a bot?
Digg 2.0 jumper in 2009. I always thought there would be a new Reddit after 2014. But it took 10 years for Lemmy to show up.
Now, it’s all just bots talking to bots to learn how to sound human.
No, there’s a lot of human bigotry too.
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Maybe in 2012. Once it started to be a right wing information warfare battlefield it got pretty insufferable. Like a lot of the niche content was still there, but the broader culture changed immensely.
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.
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Every sub I was active in has become one of two things:
- Bot spam
- Dead
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.
Are you me? Because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I set my default browse experience to Top 6 hour and then scroll All.
I do miss the community aspect of Reddit. There were other users who I ran into regularly in the comments. And usually not in a hostile way.
Hell, there was one sub where I was invited to the mod team because of those interactions. I did that for a couple years and continued to be active in the sub until Reddit start pissing off mods. That and my main “friend” on the mod team had his account nuked by Reddit after he fell for a troll.
Reddit removed every comment he had ever made, including wonderful and well cited rebuttals of the right-wing bigotry of the day.
So yeah, I logged out of that reddit account and have never logged back in, instead I use a burner account and try not comment on anything.
Reddit removed every comment he had ever made, including wonderful and well cited rebuttals of the right-wing bigotry of the day.
Probably more of the motivation than the listed offense.
Could have been. Reddit never actually told us anything. One of the other mods got a private message on another channel (discord maybe?) from the missing mod about it. But details were light, and the missing mod never even tried to return to Reddit. Said the ban was good for his mental health.
Then there was some Subreddit specific drama, and Reddit admins actually did the good thing. Then the API change, the blackout, and a couple other things that specifically fucked over mods. So I too, mostly left.
Remember r/reddit ?
I do indeed. I didn’t actually have an account back then, because I was mostly browsing from work… I also mostly frequented Digg until the 4.0 fiasco.
Yeah if there was a niche Lemmy sub for everything I would no longer visit Reddit at all but I can’t get my Nightreign fix here sadly
Redlib FTW
Edit: current fork
Someone should write a Reddit client that automatically hides the top two comments and all their children, because they’re inevitably stupid jokes that add nothing.
Oh right. No one can make new Reddit clients anymore.
No, Reddit ruined Reddit for everyone. The AI slops are simply what replace the people who left.
The day they got rid of reddit gold and started cash grabbing hard was the day the writing was on the wall.
They got rid of gold?? When?? I left reddot and came to Lemmy in the third-party apps exodus and haven’t even looked back
Oh, I’ve looked back. It’s hard not to rubberneck at such a horrendous train wreck. Especially when I was just a passenger on that very train.
I left reddit during the great API massacre as well, then I went back to only be taken out by the great Trump massacre of '24 where they banned a huge chuck of the community that had any anti-trump sentiments in their profile history…because Trump threatened them.
Now I have been banned 6 more times, just by AI detecting language it doesn’t like and its catalogue of dislike only continues to grow.
They pretend that humans are reviewing ban appeals, it is clear that they are not. The AI is banning more people than they could possibly keep up with. Now, more often than not, there is no reply to ban appeals whatsoever.
Spez is a spineless coward who threw the reddit community overboard a long time ago and continues to do so whenever it suits him. Reddit exists only to shit money for him now.
It has been left twisted and corrupted in favor of the conquest for money and controlling public opinion
I’ll be back to fight the good fight just as soon as I can create a new account and switch VPNs
Wasn’t spez the pedo sub moderator?
Ages ago - they tried to make it all these flairs and sparkles and whatever. Maybe it’s back lately?
It was when they fired Victoria for me
Yeah, also the people. The comment sections are cancer. Lame jokes from dickheads that don’t add anything.
This is key.
If there weren’t bots…Reddit would make its own bots. Reddit dances a fine line of allowing the population to be a certain proportion of bots because they increase real engagement by picking fights with its real users, as well as creating never-ending “content” for people to read and vote on. They only ban bots when real users notice they are bots - which is less and less frequently - even though Reddit has the tools and information to ban them long before that point.
Reddit could easy eliminate almost all of them, but that would be expensive and they’d lose real users as a result.
Exactly. This is like blaming rats and cockroaches for dirty town.
No, they won’t be there (as much) in a cleaner town.
Yeah, after reading the article, it was like, oh, so the same fake stories but actually grammar corrected?
Also, most people who sre like “i have this tells tl detect AI” would not know at all whether something is AI or not lol
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.
a subreddit called r/CrabBucket heavily abused it to force folks to stay.
That’s absolutely hilarious.
spez implicitly supported the jailbait subreddit when he left it up for several years
spez did not work at reddit between 2009 and 2015.
On one hand yeah in that timeframe, on the other hand it’s not like his homies weren’t there. Further, subreddits came to exist in 2006, and people could make their own in 2008, so he had a year’ish of r/jailbait existing to do anything about it, and chose not to.
I don’t especially want to be in the position of defending either spez or r/jailbait, but I was on Reddit at the time and I do think I should explain how 2008 was a different time on the web.
There had been a number of attempts to censor and age-gate the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s. People involved in creating internet tech and building its culture were almost universally against anything that even smelled like censorship. Much of the early userbase migrated from Digg in response to Digg censoring a leaked DRM key. The only sitewide rule on Reddit was “don’t break Reddit”.
When r/jailbait finally did get banned in 2011 and Reddit’s first content policy was imposed, that decision was unpopular among Redditors even though most thought sexualizing young teenagers was disgusting. It signaled a change to what Reddit was, and people rightly feared that it would lead to significantly more restrictions. Now I have to enforce a rule on r/flashlight that people can’t sell flashlights designed to be attached to guns, and I don’t want to make or enforce such a rule.
Creepy little shit.
reddit already ruined reddit for everyone long before AI was a concern.
I mean that’s why we’re here…
People still use reddit, thought it was a bots only network
And yet it still had room to get worse, and it’s still not even in its shittiest form.
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.
Yeah. I help mod the Washington Capitals hockey team sub, and recently I looked through every other NHL team’s sub, and we’re the ONLY ones that post game day threads. And even with us, it’s basically only one or two of us commenting on the games. Compare that to dozens or even hundreds of people commenting on every game in every team’s reddit sub.
I tried to revitalize the sens community last year during the playoffs. I haven’t been able to watch this season much because of crazy timezone differences enduring my vacation…
Yeah. Maybe I’ll see if I can get the gdt bot working again…
They did exist before reddit as forums, however they where fragmented across different languages and websites. At some point Google started to show reddit more often, because it was more search engine optimized and mobile friendly. This means new users found reddit first, and old users where slowly pulled away from their forums into reddit.
r/kitchenconfidential
Yeah. I’m not saying I like it or that it’s how it should be. It’s just how it is. I basically go to reddit last these days.
Can’t lie I miss r/sneakers. As an avid collector I miss the engagement
There’s also fun bullshit communities that refuse to migrate too. I listen to some of them on YouTube as they read the stories from there while I work on other things or drive.
I tried creating a community here but never got others to post their show too.
Right now I don’t have a reddit account and I just lurk there, but if I really wanted to talk about, say, a specific TV show I like, or a Movie, or Anime, or a Book… that would not exist on the fediverse. It’s either just Reddit or maybe Discord.
If I wanna talk about stuff from a non-white perspective, the best place I’d really find my people outside the great firewall is Reddit.
I mean I the amount of Cantonese-speakers on Lemmy is like… single-digits
I use redlib to lurk.
I find the drama subs like /r/AITAH entertaining. I know its all fake, but the groupthink responses are intriguing.
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).
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.
Repost bots should be built in to Reddit tbh
Just take whatever was the top 5 a year ago and repost it at the same time
Karma guaranteed
We can absolutely blame AI for everything. The reason AI took over Reddit is because Reddit fired their human moderators in favour of AI moderation. It’s basically a vicious circle of bots learning how to avoid being banned, and auto moderation learning how they’re avoiding being banned…repeat.
…the obvious problem being that bots are valuable to Reddit because they increase real engagement…if there weren’t bots, Reddit would make its own bots to do basically the same thing. Reddit only wants to restrict bots to a certain proportion of the population, rather than eliminate them.
While I agree being shitty is a human problem, shitty people are using AI to be shitty faster.
Reddit is already ruined and has been for a while. And it’s been ruined by the greedy Reddit CEO.
Yeah AI had nothing to do with it. Ruined waaay before AI took hold. That’s why I left.
The UI was becoming unusable, the policies were unreasonable, the greed got to them, etc, etc.
Yep. It was headed downhill with the bots, reposts, karma farmers, hive-mind, troll farms, and of course the reddit c-suite “purging” the site of things like WPD, morbid reality, spacedicks (yeah, not subs for everyone, but noetheless…not hurting anyone), getting rid of Victoria, getting rid of mods and leaving petty power mongers and sycophants in place, and allowing shit like The_Donald and similar subs to run unchecked. The forced commercialization, crushing of protest and reddit app was the final straw.
Reddit’s founder and investors killed reddit, the method they used is immaterial.
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.
Don’t need ai for that. Before AI, bots would simply copy top post from a year ago to farm up votes, and then sell the account to marketers.
The AI slop is just extra piss in a lake full of piss.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
And fuck his weird teeth.
Reddit already ruined Reddit. The AI slop is just the broken glass in the turd.
