Is it me or is Reddit mostly bots now? | Hacker News Reader

Is it me or is Reddit mostly bots now?

37 pointsrizs1242 comments

A lot of the comments I am seeing under posts seem just a bit off.

I am considering whether being on Reddit is worth it anymore? It doesn't have the same human-seeming environment it had 5+ years ago.

Does anyone have any recommendations as to a Reddit alternative?

Lemmy doesn't have the same number of diverse users that Reddit had during its pomp (it's mostly just Linux fans and technical people), and I do quite like the network effects of a diverse audience.

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After using Reddit for many, many years, at this point I personally am fairly convinced that the majority of posts and submissions on many of the high-value subs is inauthentic content.

Inauthentic content being some combination of bot posts and coordinated shill/sockpuppet posts. Either for political/social manipulation (enforcing a narrative and allowed ideas), as well as some economic manipulation (paid posts shilling for a product/movie/person/etc).

In the past the inauthentic accounts had patterns that you could more easily find. Names that are all generated the same way, or comment history patterns that all match. It was 100% obvious a few years ago that there was a lot of manipulation going on. After being exposed a few times they've improved, and now with LLM capabilities added in it's much harder for a random person to clearly be able to identify them.

I feel like one day there will be a whistleblower who finally reveals to the world exactly how much manipulation has been going on (especially by governments) and it'll be a pretty shocking revelation. Until then we have little proof, as it seems the owners of such sites either willingly or unwillingly or unknowingly cooperate with it.

Even the founders confessed - no, bragged with the fact that they started the site with hundreds of fake profiles. If that wasn't of any concern to them then, why would it be one now?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

Things built on lies rarely have a good ending, I wonder whether they considered that back then

Social networks should NEVER be run by for-profits (unless, perhaps, if funding derives 100% from the users themselves), we see why again and again, and yet humanity is failing to learn

> Names that are all generated the same way

Years ago you could enter a username and if it was taken you would get a suggested username with added numbers. "Think 'simon' is taken, what about 'simon7889' ?"

Sometime in the last couple of years it autosuggests. word_word_number. For example Interesting_Bus_7217

My suspicion, with zero evidence, is that this was a deliberate choice to enable more botting.

You basically have to moderate it yourself if you ever want to browse /all or whatever the front page is. You have to filter a bunch of different criteria, basically anything that looks like its meant to farm engagement or outrage.

Anything remotely political

any of the meme reposting subreddits

any aita related subreddit

any subreddit that limits replies to subreddit members aka circlejerk and hivemind subs

any user with excessive karma/year that isn't making OC like a comic/ artist or something

any new user that posts anything related to the things above

that cuts out at least 50% of what you see on the front page, still not great but probably better than any other alternative for what you are looking for.

I am moderating a niche technical sub on reddit and don't see that much of bots. They are probably targeting "high value" subs.

As for alternatives, it depends on what you are looking for. E.g., if you don't need to comment / post, a feed reader with all your favorite discourse forums can cover a lot of ground.

All the niche technical subs are still wonderful. r/printedcircuitboard has taught me so much!

The front page is full of OF ads masquerading as genuine women posting innocent selfies.

The rest is either political propaganda bots or karma farming bots (gaining karma to later advertise OF or propaganda).

That is not my front page…

If Reddit actually cared about their users they'd have a feature to blanket-block various topics, like politics, meme, sports or anime subreddits. There is this big map of Reddit and if it were for me I'd never see any content of many if not most of these regions: https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/

Reddit is dearly missing a recommendation feed that actually aligns with ones interests (e.g. subreddits similar to those already subscribed to and upvoted content). Oh, and owners who care more about their users than money - but I guess that's been hopeless from the beginning. I've mostly stopped using it and would love to know alternatives

> Is Reddit mostly bots now?

Long ago, marketing firms became aware of the "just add 'reddit' to your product search for real human advice" meme. They're also aware of the fact that it's very easy to buy karma, buy accounts, set up upvote/downvote networks, and manage sockpuppets. Now I'm absolutely certain that >80% of all posts in product-related topics are fake. Bots, guerilla marketers, PR firms, reputation management firms, influence operations, you name it.

A lot of the personal stories you see on Reddit are also fake -- posted to farm karma.

The upvote/downvote system there, combined with anonymous accounts that have public post histories, has been a disaster for internet discourse. (Here, at least, it's gated and the community is relatively small. Also, the power of the downvote on HN is very limited, and only accounts with 500 karma can downvote anything. Over there, it's unrestrained and the downvote is too powerful. Reddit has structural problems.)

> Does anyone have any recommendations as to a Reddit alternative?

Forums still exist for most interests. They're usually much better than Reddit.

I'd love to return to forum internet. I just don't know how to find them anymore because Google search is so crap.

Maybe a website, that links people to the forum equivalents of whichever subreddit they want to find an alternative to, would prove helpful?

That would be very helpful, but it would be a lot of work.

Might as well go all the way and be maximally ambitious: A modernized internet directory that functions as an alternative to Google would be a very welcome thing, in this day and age. I have some ideas for how that thing could work.

You mean a big list curated by actual humans instead of an algorithm? Tons of work, but I also think the payoff would be worth it.

The fact that we have things like those awesome-* lists on GitHub make me believe it would be possible.

A human-reviewed and curated list that's comprehensive, searchable (everything on the list is indexed, nothing off the list is indexed,) and ad-free. Businesses who aren't on the directory, but would like to be, pay an application fee. The huge secondary industry that sprung up around DMOZ indicates that this business model would work.

There'd be more to it than that, but that's the basic idea.

I'd love to find enough people who would like to work on such a thing.

Let's chat. I am curious and want to hear more.

Sure. I've added my email address to my account page here.

You've already set yourself up for poor incentives, if someone is profiting off letting people in. It is not curated content if people are buying their way in. And if people are not buying their way in, you are setting up an elite class of users - the curators.

I don't think that's necessarily the case. It's impossible for human curators to catch everything, as crawlers do. Lots of companies are inevitably going to be left off the list because their website is #2,000,000 in the world & they occupy some industrial niche. Those companies, should they want in, would not be buying entry, but applying for entry, and their application would be reviewed in accordance with certain rules and other criteria.

Blogs and forums could probably apply for free.

I imagine that the still-theoretical company would (hopefully) profit, and that the curators are neutral salaried employees, rather than Wiki-style volunteers.

Salaried employees have a bias to make their employer money in order to keep those jobs. For-profit companies likewise have a bias for money. That is where all the problems started with - bias for money. There is quite a bit of social nuance to this, and coming at it wanting to make a better internet while also wanting to profit from it are difficult goals to achieve together.

Yo Squirrelz, R U aware of https://curlie.org/docs/en/about.html ?

I consider forums being hard to find a feature, not a bug. They aren't all exactly like they were in they heyday of forums and not immune to bots and shilling but being j-u-s-t that bit more effort keeps out a lot of the trash.

I feel like there is threshold of size when things start to go downhill. Too small is bad, too big bad too. In sense organic growth is the best for communities.

Other people have pointed out that a big directory will just encourage an influx of bots.

I would argue that word-of-mouth is the best way at this point, whether in person, or from others you know online.

Get Reddit Enhancement Suite and start tagging posters. Fully ten percent of /all is literally one account posting karma bait.

I've also seen entire threads get "replayed". Bots will post highly upvoted comments from the last time a link was posted etc.

Nearly everything that makes it to the front couple pages of /all is posted by people pushing an agenda, or worse, literal Russian accounts fomenting hate. Remember, their goal above all else is to make you angry, tired, and get you to give up on functioning democracy. Lots of people on the left and "democrats" are fighting with talking points straight out of the kremlin. That infighting is the point.

Everything you see on reddit is meant to make you angry. Someone will mine Twitter for the most hateful nazis shit/most objectionable "I hate men" post, and post a screenshot on reddit as if that's a meaningful representation. This is intended to piss you off, because you will "engage" more if you get pissed off.

The internet doesn't want you to be happy or successful or informed because it is literally less profitable.

There are entire popular subreddits that are mostly agenda posts, either literally part of an operation, or outright useful idiot sycophants.

You almost cannot make it to the front page anymore without a bot farm to to get the "momentum" going on your post. Otherwise it just cannot compete with the manipulated posts.

> I've also seen entire threads get "replayed". Bots will post highly upvoted comments from the last time a link was posted etc.

This is so surreal until you realize it is happening. You kinda know you have seen it before but not really since other comments are different.

Ye Reddit is syntethic nowadays. Some niche subs are OK with strict rules on content.

But the loose ones are too much karma farm and bots to bother.

It wouldn't suprise me of there are like 100 people doing most of the posting with alt accounts and semiautomated workflow. Both as commercial shills and political manipulation.

Most posts on r/all seems to be fake for purpose of engagement harvesting.

But is this the case for smaller subs as well?

Yes, marketing by posting about a business or product on Reddit has long been a cheap and easy way to get the word out.

Open a new restaurant, release a new app, brand some alibaba products, etc.

I use an adblocker and also Reddit Enhancement Suite and have subbed to probably 40 subreddits. Except a very few of those (like /r/politics), they're all niche enough to mostly avoid the bot plague. As long as I'm logged in, my experience is pretty dang good, relatively speaking (compared to the default view).

It's not mostly you. It's unbearable and even seeps into niche subreddits. The bots are also lean so far left they fell off the wagon. I barely use the site anymore.

Reddit in large part is very left leaning with a big echochamber, but the individual specific communities are generally really good, especially for search.

My experience with Reddit is that it still mostly depends on the subreddit. Big subreddits like Ask Reddit or Politics or Technology? Probably a lot of bots and shills, with an equally large amount of low quality content from people that didn't bother to read the article or anything related to it.

Smaller niche ones for games and series? Eh, it's definitely worse in terms of quality, though my experience is that it still seems mostly human driven. The last subreddit I used was the one for the Mario & Luigi series for example, and it seems pretty legit as far as posts go.

But yeah, my opinion is that the quality has certainly taken a nosedive overall, and the amount of posts per day has fallen in many places, but the quality of more niche subreddits is still decent enough compared to majority of social media sites.

Same in Facebook and X. Fake name accounts brigading certain topics and comments.

i like stacker.news but its mostly bitcoin peeps

Featuring barnburner frontpage posts like:

> How I Talk Bitcoin to Friends and Family During Thanksgiving

> Mars colonies are claiming bitcoin independence (short story)

> Nazis are pro-freedom tech? What the hell has happened in the last 70 years?

Fascinating stuff. I hope those people get enough sunlight.

they have other categories too, but its a different take. you get paid when people zap your posts.

>you get paid when people zap your posts.

This basically ensures that posts will be worthless engagement bait

Bingo. The negative effects of karma farming are already outspoken on platforms like Hacker News and Reddit, and these are both platforms where karma itself is relatively worthless. Adding real money to the equation ruins it for good - look at what happened to Steemit, BAT and Coil.

Wondered right there whether I misread or not. It should be the other way round: Pester the community and you're buying a round (90% joking here).

yes

Nope. Even if you aren’t a bot you get banned or suspended for being a bot.

You are downvoted (probably for saying "nope"), but my account was recently banned for being a bot. I used it almost exclusively for lurking, rarely for commenting or upvothing something. I guess I'm too botlike.

X.com

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