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Comment by jonathanstrange | Hacker News Reader

Searching with "Reddit" at the end of every query helps but I suppose it's only a matter of time when most content on Reddit is also AI-generated.

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Reddit is already lost. I was talking to the mods in a large political subreddit and they said after Reddit started charging for API access, all the tools they used to keep on top of the trolls and bots stopped working, and the quality of the whole subreddit declined visibly and dramatically.

> Reddit is already lost. I was talking to the mods in a large political subreddit and they said after Reddit started charging for API access, all the tools they used to keep on top of the trolls and bots stopped working, and the quality of the whole subreddit declined visibly and dramatically.

The whole point of the API access change was to charge AI model-makers. I'd be ironic if the API change made destroyed their product and made their data unsellable.

Yes, everyone warned Spez about that at the time. He didn’t care, he wanted that IPO.

Recently, they came around looking to recruit me. I told them fire Spez or fuck off. (17 year Reddit user here)

I used to moderate a fairly large subreddit, used to, I decided to leave and never come back after the API debacle, it was a long time coming though.

I think if the business model had been thought in the sense of the communities and involving mods and users in, it would have been genius, a lot of smaller companies would kill to have people genuinely recommending their products/tools that are hidden behind the biggest wall of them all...

Alas they completely ignored this as a viable avenue and went for the quick buck.

But this won't last and at some point people are going to move on from mass scraping, either because they already got what they want or because garbage goes in garbage comes out or because most of the content will be bot generated and require too much filtering to be useful.

Of course this is the opinion and rambling of a moderately educated individual and I might be totally wrong.

Change can often be for the best, pretty sure it wasn't in this case...

It's not just the mods, it's also the culture of the website that changed.

Agreed. There still are resistant subs, but the main culture moved in a worse direction. That is subjective of course, but it isn't just reddit trying to "clean house" that makes everything a little more sterile and boring. It also become even more intolerant of "wrong" opinions. That has always been the case to a degree, but it got seriously worse.

Some subreddit got purged over the years, some for the best, some for the worse, I couldn't find where in the new UI you could find moderator names.

Aaron is probably turning once again in his grave...

If you know anyone who works in marketing/PR, ask them how they use Reddit. That has been gamified as much as SEO since about 2020. I’m assuming, anything except “why is there a fire in this street?” kind of posts are just ads at this point.

The "top n" subreddits are surely gamified but smaller, highly-focused subreddits seem ok.

Fair. Exceptions definitely exist, but unless it's location based subreddit, I, personally, wouldn't trust it. There are fun methods that I've been told about. Like marketing companies maintain multiple very real life looking accounts, participating in discussions for months/years with no product affiliations, and very casually throwing in plugs which eventually generate revenues. Or giving a list of 10 items, and inserting their product in between, as a sale is better than no sale. Or marketing a competing product in a very obvious way, then replying from another account telling how it's an ad to eventually lead sales to themselves.

I have no idea how intensive these are, as I most of these over bar drinks when I was traveling. Could've just been someone making stuff up as well. But my marketing friends have confirmed that they use Reddit very heavily, as it's a great sales funnel if you play it right.

I wonder at what point it'll be replaced with "site:4chan.net".

It's also not much use to anyone who doesn't use Google ever since Reddit started blocking all crawlers besides Googlebot. Old cached results might still show up in Bing/DDG/Kagi but they can't index any of the newer stuff.

What makes you say this? I just tried a few Reddit searches about events from the last few days and they work as expected (tested in Kagi)

https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-tha...

https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt

Reddit serves a different robots.txt to Googlebot, you can see a snippet of it in Googles summary. If Kagi is getting recent Reddit results then they must be either ignoring robots.txt, using Google as a backend, or also paying Reddit for access like Google.

Bing and DuckDuckGo are certainly still locked out, I just tried searching for "reddit hurricane milton" on both and none of the results are actually from Reddit.

Kagi didn't make it explicit, but based on what they wrote I think they API call Google and other search engines to show as part of their results.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

Most of the Reddit content is now[0] fake.

[0] Gradually for several years already.

The niche subreddit's I follow seem to be ok. I stay away from the big ones. All the default ones are garbage from what I can see.

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