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Comment by lizknope | Hacker News Reader

Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted.

The API protest in 2023 took away tools from moderators. I noticed increased bot activity after that.

The IPO in 2024 means that they need to increase revenue to justify the stock price. So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue. I think they purposely make the search engine bad to encourage people to make more posts which increases page views and ad revenue. If it was easy to find an answer then they would get less money.

At this point I think reddit themselves are creating the bots. The posts and questions are so repetitive. I've unsubscribed to a bunch of subs because of this.

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It's been really sad to see reddit go like this because it was pretty much the last bastion of the human internet. I hated reddit back in the day but later got into it for that reason. It's why all our web searches turned into "cake recipe reddit." But boy did they throw it in the garbage fast. One of their new features is you can read AI generated questions with AI generated answers. What could the purpose of that possibly be? We still have the old posts... for the most part (a lot of answers were purged during the protest) but what's left of it is also slipping away fast for various reasons. Maybe I'll try to get back into gemini protocol or something.

I see a retreat to the boutique internet. I recently went back to a gaming-focused website, founded in the late 90s, after a decade. No bots there, as most people have a reputation of some kind

I really want to see people who ruin functional services made into pariahs

I don't care how aggressive this sounds; name and shame.

Huffman should never be allowed to work in the industry again after what he and others did to Reddit (as you say, last bastion of the internet)

Zuckerberg should never be allowed after trapping people in his service and then selectively hiding posts (just for starters. He's never been a particularly nice guy)

Youtube and also Google - because I suspect they might share a censorship architecture... oh, boy. (But we have to remove + from searches! Our social network is called Google+! What do you mean "ruining the internet"?)

> But we have to remove + from searches

Wasn't that functionality just replaced? Parts of a query that are in quotation marks, are required to appear in any returned result.

Yeah, but quotes aren't as convenient and I think I've heard they're less accurate than + used to be

> Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted.

Adding the option to hide profile comments/posts was also a terrible move for several reasons.

given the timing, it has definitely been done to obscure bot activity, but the side effect of denying the usual suspects the opportunity to comb through ten years of your comments to find a wrongthink they can use to dismiss everything you've just said, regardless of how irrelevant it is, is unironically a good thing. I've seen many instances of their impotent rage about it since it's been implemented, and each time it brings a smile to my face.

The wrongthink issue was always secondary, and generally easy to avoid by not mixing certain topics with your account (don't comment on political threads with your furry porn gooner account, etc). At a certain point, the person calling out a mostly benign profile is the one who will look ridiculous, and if not, the sub is probably not worth participating in anyway.

But recently it seems everything is more overrun than usual with bot activity, and half of the accounts are hidden which isn't helping matters. Utterly useless, and other platforms don't seem any better in this regard.

You can still see them in search. The bots don’t seem to bother hiding posts though.

> allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue

Isn't that just fraud?

It is. Reddit is probably 99% fraud/bots at this point.

Yes registering fake views is fraud against ad networks. Ad networks love it though because they need those fake clicks to defraud advertisers in turn. Paying to have ads viewed by bots is just paying to have electricity and compute resources burned for no reason. Eventually the wrong person will find out about this and I think that's why Google's been acting like there's no tomorrow.

I doubt it's true though. Everyone has something they can track besides total ad views. A reddit bot had no reason to click ads and do things on the destination website. It's there to make posts.

> So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue

When are people who buy ads going to realize that the majority of their online ad spend is going towards bots rather than human eye balls who will actually buy their product? I'm very surprised there hasn't been a massive lawsuite against Google, Facebook, Reddit, etc. for misleading and essentially scamming ad buyers

Is this really true though? Don't they have ways of tracking the returns on advertising investment? I would have thought that after a certain amount of time these ad buys would show themselves as worthless if they actually were.

No, it's not really true. Media companies have a whole host of KPI's and tracking methods to evaluate the success/failure of their campaigns/single ads: here's a small summary of some of the KPI's and methods https://www.themediaant.com/blog/methods-of-measuring-advert...

Steve Huffman is an awful CEO. With that being said I've always been curious how the rest of the industry (for example, the web-wide practice of autoplaying videos) was constructed to catch up with Facebook's fraudulent metrics. Their IPO (and Zuckerberg is certainly known to lie about things) was possibly fraud and we know that they lied about their own video metrics (to the point it's suspected CollegeHumor shut down because of it)

The biggest change reddit made was ignoring subscriptions and just showing anything the algorithm thinks you will like. Resulting in complete no name subreddits showing on your front page. Meaning moderators no longer control content for quality, which is both a good and bad thing, but it means more garbage makes it to your front page.

I can't remember the last time I was on the Reddit front page and I use the site pretty much daily. I only look at specific subreddit pages (barely a fraction of what I'm subscribed to).

These are some pretty niche communities with only a few dozen comments per day at most. If Reddit becomes inhospitable to them then I'll abandon the site entirely.

This is my current Reddit use case. I unsubscribed from everything other than a dozen or so niche communities. I’ve turned off all outside recommendations so my homepage is just that content (though there is feed algorithm there). It’s quick enough to sign in every day or two and view almost all the content and move on.

why would you look at the "front page" if you only wanted to see things you subscribed to? that's what the "latest" and whatever the other one is for.

they have definitely made reddit far worse in lots of ways, but not this one.

> why would you look at the "front page" if you only wanted to see things you subscribed to?

"Latest" ignores score and only sorts by submission time, which means you see a lot of junk if you follow any large subreddits.

The default home-page algorithm used to sort by a composite of score, recency, and a modifier for subreddit size, so that posts from smaller subreddits don't get drowned out. It worked pretty well, and users could manage what showed up by following/unfollowing subreddits.

The front page when I used reddit only contained posts from your subscribed subreddits, sorted by the upvote ranking algorithm.

Wouldn’t taking the API away hurt the bots?

the bots just scrape

I’m think you are overestimating humanity.

At the moment I am on a personal finance kick. Once in awhile I find myself in the bogleheads Reddit. If you don’t know bogleheads have a cult-like worship of the founder of vanguard, whose advice, shockingly, is to buy index funds and never sell.

Most of it is people arguing about VOO vs VTI vs VT. (lol) But people come in with their crazy scenarios, which are all varied too much to be a bot, although the answer could easily be given by one!

Isn't showing ads to bots...pointless?

If the advertisers don't know the difference between a human and a bot then they will still pay money to display the ad.

You’d think they would eventually notice their ROI is terrible…?

There were some dedicated submissions about ad fraud on HN. In long term companies tend to reach equilibrium, where both reducing and increasing ad budget decreases profit. It is a classic prisoners dilemma, giving up on ads with poor ROI would be obvious decision if it wasn't for competitors who will benefit both from some actual conversions and lower bids for domain specific keywords.

the alternative - not buying ads - is worse though. No one knows about you, and you sell nothing. so it ends up being seen as a cost of doing business. that is passed on to paying customers.

I'm really starting to wonder how much of the "ground level" inflation is actually caused by "passing on" the cost of anti-social behaviors to paying customers, as opposed to monetary policy shenanigans.

I hope so but I don't know.

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