Hacker News Reader

Comment by hubraumhugo | Hacker News Reader

Since the blackouts last year and the recent IPO, it feels like astroturfing and spam have increased, while quality contributions have decreased. All usage metrics are up according to Reddit's IPO filings, but it feels like engagement is actually down, or at least lower quality. Many niche subs feel like ghost towns now.

Is this just my subjective impression or do you feel the same?

View on HN

Spam increased exponentially after the 3rd party kill switch. There was profound options for bots to add to your mod list to help combat spam, repost accounts, and more.

They existed before the whole 3rd party fallout, but it does not even come close to how bad it is now.

IME the niche subs are still doing fine, it's the popular ones that are getting astroturfed and Eternal September'ed into oblivion. I do expect the LLM bots to eventually render the platform unusable, they would need to implement a very aggressive personhood verification policy to prevent that.

I sense that real world people are a more serious problem when it comes to Reddit's manipulation. It seems relatively easy for a coordinated group of moderators and power-users to sway a subreddit's tone.

I browse with a plugin that keeps track of a user's cumulative upvote/downvote score based on my votes of their content. I quickly noticed that the most downvoted users crosspost the same low effort content on a regular basis.

It's partly because Google started preferring more Reddit content.

It's more valuable to astroturf and spam in reddit than never before.

Browsing /r/all is a cesspool now. It feels like the same 30 topics with random OnlyFans wannabes and seemingly outrageous relationship stories/advice. It used to be such a great way to find and explore new topics.

Niche sub-reddits largely seem to either (1) be growing so large they become bland (2) dying and moving to other platforms.

I basically only enjoy the live sporting game threads now. Even then, it's a pretty shallow level of enjoyment.

I use /r/all but filter out about 100 subreddits to make it work. Unfortunately a lot of them were once great but get now exploited with fake stories or low effort karma farmers.

If I were still invested in Reddit, I'd do that.

I've started getting in the habit of deleting my account every few months.

When Apollo used to work (before the 3rd party apps purge), it would let you block any amount of subreddits - the first 100 it would block using the reddit api (which has that as a limit) and everything after, it would filter out on device. I think by the time it stopped working, I was blocking a couple of hundred subreddits.

Twitter feels the same way, they are claiming to have more active users then ever but that probably includes the horde of LLM bots and MY PUSSY IN BIO spam.

I have to believe that with LLM's improving, and posts from Reddit used for training data, that a large number of current 'new' posts are bots.

I just read article about marketing companies using bots that post 'pretty good comments, that slightly agree with you but mention the product'.

Subjectively, I feel the same. That said I don't use it much any more -- when Apollo closed I stopped participating on the site.

I saw lots of comments shortly after the blackouts that 'felt' AI-generated, and when I rarely go there now from search results, using the awful new site, I see little content of value.

The incentive to contribute is based on the potential return of social currency (prestige, togetherness, etc). If it's evident that you won't generate enough currency to outweigh enriching Reddit, why bother?

The API rugpull was a real setback for content and if they had followed through with claims at the time to allow charged access that could have worked but they never rolled anything out it was just a ruse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com