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Comment by SauntSolaire | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.

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> give subreddit moderators a fighting chance

Moderators are part of the problem really, there are a handful of moderators holding the reins over all the popular subreddits, and "smaller" (even big ones) subreddits suffer from the same problem.

As an example, r/MistralAI, r/LocalLLaMA, r/ChatGPT, r/OpenAI and r/grok are all run by the same person.

The only survivable places on reddit left are the subreddits with small amount of contributors that aren't trying to gain something by participating and organizing. But they're so few.

> But they're so few.

Given how many subreddits there, I have to ask if you have statistics to back up this claim.

My intuition is that people have problems with a bunch of popular subreddits, but the vast majority of subreddits are just fine. I have no statistics to back up this intuition.

Do you?

There’s a whole vibrant industry of people you can pay to market whatever you want on Reddit. They can’t all be competing for the same few popular subreddits. They must be differentiated by targeting niche subreddits.

There's about 138,000 active subreddits. I don't believe that this industry is targetting even a majority of them.

That number alone is a very good reason for the industry to target as much of it as they can / dare.

You say "sudreddit". Marketing teams say "self-selecting target segment".

You'd think so, and yet Reddit adds suck.

There are two different "ads" we're discussing here. One is the ads reddit the platform allows you to pay for, and it shows up in the client(s) as ads. Another is the type of ad where a company reaches out to community members and ask them to post about their project/product in exchange for a static sum, which looks like "normal posts" but are actually sponsored content.

The first one sucks for a multitude of reasons, the second one you basically don't notice are ads, yet they're all over reddit.

Can't say I know how it looks everywhere on reddit, as I'm not everywhere on reddit, but the AI subreddits I referenced earlier are filled with it, and I've even received offers myself to get paid to pay about stuff and I'm a nobody, so surely I only know of the surface.

They are targetting whatever has eyeballs. If people are looking for purchasing advice they have probably come from Google. So if Google is indexing the subreddit it is fair game. That means every subreddit that is not 18+, and Reddit also forbids marking a subreddit as 18+ when the contents isn't really 18+ (as this was a form of mod protest a few years ago).

You can advertise on Reddit. If the return/cost ratio of industrialized astroturfing is better than ads then people will use it to promote their products.

I don't necessarily agree, the Rust subreddit is fine (except for all the AI slop posts this year, which the moderators have a hard time keeping up with) and some of the more niche 3D printing subreddits are doing fine, basically it feels like the past few years haven't happened there. The Arch Linux subreddit is a bit chaotic, but the moderation is not really the problem I think.

Maybe all of these fall into your last paragraph and I simply don't frequent the type of subreddit you describe. The thing is, it is hard to tell if it is you or me who have a representative sample here, or if we are both off. Two samples is not statistically significant.

There are over 100,000 subreddits and the vast majority of them (and all of the ones I follow) fall into their last paragraph ... it's not at all "so few". And even if it were, "representative sample" isn't really relevant when you can select and mute subs ... it's really not much different from usenet, which I was very active on in the 80's and 90's.

Here's one of 'em [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E36G9QOolxk [video][12 mins]

There are two problems in computer science, accepting payments and naming things.

Reddit's principal problem is that the first person to take r/foo is often a BDFL for foo for life, and no other subreddit about foo will ever be quite as recognizable. If we instead had subreddits with a numeric ID and a non-unique display name, that problem would be solved.

Payments would also solve the spam problem, but many users who have $1 can't easily get that $1 to Reddit, so that's not really an option either.

Reddit is eager to remove mods who it disagrees with. Any remaining mods are there because Reddit approves of them.

Don't you understand that paying even one cent to Redeit (or any other social media) would completely deanonymise it?

So yeah, I'd rather live with spam than with whatever public online identities give any government.

> Don't you understand that paying even one cent to Redeit (or any other social media) would completely deanonymise it?

For a site of that size I wonder if it wouldn't work to just have them sell gift cards in physical retailers and then you could buy one for cash.

Admins actively choose moderators, removing ones they don't like and inserting their favorites. Recently, a mod was removed from r/LivestreamFails and made a public crashout video. In exactly the way you'd expect a Reddit mod to.

Reddit recently announced a change that capped the number of large subreddits than any individual can moderate. It might reduce this problem.

They'll get two accounts

But one problem on reddit were the mods. It was why I retired.

Bots and AI spam can be annoying but mods that lock you out of discussions are much worse.

Yeah the reddit mod system is just ripe for abuse. They have little to no accountability, the people acting as police were the same people you appealed to and who acted as judge, there was a clear reddit mod political class with certain users or groups of users controlling significant swaths of subreddits, and with it judgements in 1 sub might get you banned from other subs. And if someone got enough mod shills in a sub they could oust original or well liked mods. And there is clear financial gains and benefits to doing all of that. Meanwhile regular users that built the site and made it a place people wanted to visit had basically zero say or influence on any of it.

I remember your story differently. You were consistently trolling /r/programming from multiple accounts for years (shevegen, shevy-ruby, shevy-java). You relied on the fact that /r/programming pretty much wasn't moderated at all.

I heartily recommend people volunteer for moderation. There’s tons of subs that need help, and the more diversity of voices in conversations like this, the better.

Modding is a shit show, and being on the other side can be quite the experience.

The more people who can chime in, the better as a society we can figure out what needs to be done.

Right now it’s rough for users, and insane for mods.

Something Awful has retained a weirdly high level of quality these days by (still) charging :tenbux: to register an account.

Also survived the great cancellation [1]

[1] - https://www.somethingawful.com/cliff-yablonski/i-hate-you-01...

Also manages to sustain itself on it's own weird brand of whales, a handful of disgruntled users with enough money to just keep buying accounts using random characters as a username just to get immediately banned after their first post. Some taking a dump in the middle of your living room isn't so bad if they are paying your rent and you can just kick them back out.

Reddit could pay the mods. Let us not act like spam accounts are undesirable for the lil piggy. MAU doesn't differentiate between real and fake users.

Lol, I guess I'm glad I checked-out from reddit before the whole "AI" thing took off. My life is honestly way better without reddit. HN isn't far behind though, honestly. The less time I spend here, the better for everything else going on in my life. HN has at least been somewhat useful for my day-job and employment future.

$1 is far too low to discourage abuse. Spammers and scammers will still make exponential returns. PR agencies are paid tens of thousands to craft narratives for their clients. With institutional actors the sky is the limit. Even just your average basement dwelling troll might consider it worth their while to pay a dollar for a sock puppet account.

Requiring a valid payment method before posting will take out 99.9% of spammers and trolls. Newspapers discovered this when they went behind paywalls. SomethingAwful discovered this 20 years ago when they required $10 to create an account.

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