I think at this point I'm ready to give up on Reddit, most of my questions are already answered by LLM.
And the discussions quality on Reddit are abysmal, its filled with bots.
And the discussions quality on Reddit are abysmal, its filled with bots.
That's a bizarre and self-sabotaging path to take. Almost all LLMs get a substantial portion of their knowledge from Reddit. In order to evaluate the quality of those LLM responses, you'll have to click through to the Reddit threads and critically evaluate the quality of the underlying discussions.
If you just blindly accept LLM responses without evaluating the sources, you'll be accepting a lot of garbage, and it'll show.
> And the discussions quality on Reddit are abysmal, its filled with bots.
I spend quite a lot of time reading and writing on Reddit, and while I encounter plenty of low-quality posts and comments, I'd say that essentially none of them are written by bots.
Reddit is a good source of new happenings and discussions, but I’m willing to spend some tech company’s compute to clean it up for me. For example, I often want to branch out from a particular musical artist. Reddit has many good recommendations. LLM is perfectly capable of gathering these.
If bots bury the signal in noise then an LLM is only going go back and give you the summary of the noise.
Worst case I get some pre-digested garbage and I waste less time, best case the LLM pulled out a few good nuggets of info. It’s not a perfect system yet. There’s a lot to tune with how deep to go, what constitutes garbage vs signal, and so on. At least it’s fun :)
Something that would make things far easier for mods would be if the posters hashed IP was shown/made available to mods. Thats mostly for more localized bad actors/astroturfers and not large spam/scam rings with proxy networks.
Things we've done that have made a difference with the tools we've got from Reddit:
1) we don't allow new accounts or ones with negative accounts to post in our subreddit
2) any posts that match criteria or hit the front page are automatically put in a mode where you must have a positive subreddit karma over a threshold to post. This helps filter out brigading and low effort shit posting from front page plebs
3) we're using a reddit app that allows us to remove posts from people that have posted in identified subreddits. Right now we're just experimenting with this and we're in a data collection mode, but we can see that the people its catching (while some of our most prolific posters) are also some of our most problematic posters, so I think we're going to go from data collection to just straight up having the bot remove comments from people that post in those troublesome subreddits.
I will tell you that it's mostly the ones you expect if you're heavily engaged with Reddit and moderation. But there are several new gathering places that I didn't know about until we started spelunking on the most annoying posters histories.
This is one of the places where a tool that scrapes reddit and lets you see deleted comments is absolutely clutch--these people are very good about removing the worst of their vile spewing on reddit, or changing their comments to look innocuous after people have gotten worked up. It's all about making people they disagree with look like bullies and idiots.
So you're actually censoring opinions, not fighting spam, just like every other reddit mod.
There is room for people on any side of an argument to come in and discuss. They can do so in a civilized, adult manner, or they can fuck right off. Call it censorship if you like.
Obviously not, when you ban them immediately just for participating in another subreddit, regardless of what they wrote there.
Err... I spend quite a lot of time on Reddit as well (including moderating a medium size subreddit) and I can assure you that there are tons of bot posts and comments all over the site right now. If you think this, you're probably not very good at identifying this kind of content.
I spend most of my time on subreddits related to the city where I live, and tax+financial planning forums.
I've read new, valuable-to-me human-written information on Reddit since 2023, so I very much doubt this is true.
Revanced.
It is nowhere near as good as the third party apps that were made by a single individual developer.
It goes to show how a presumably large budget and sizable team is outdone by a single talented individual outside of the constraints of an enterprise environment.
Or maybe Reddit is particularly incompetent. I occasionally use their website on mobile, and if anything it has been getting worse.
That Reddit sells our content and does a terrible job at moderation, which they largely outsource to us as unpaid labor, is just the cherry on top.
I doubt Reddit killed the third-party apps to improve its mobile experience. They were probably just trying to cash in on the AI hype.
old.reddit didnt but now you have to login to use it.
I just want to read. I dont want the app and I dont want to login.
Also, funny enough that this pissed me off so much, that I started asking LLM to search for something on reddit. I don’t care about the answer since due to it being reddit, LLM is not helpful, but what we get access to; is the citation/links exactly to the post you want and never had trouble in the ios webview within the apps. Use it as a billion dollar scraper and you won’t be disappointed with AI.
Unless it's a niche and technical subreddit such as mathematical topics, bio science subtopic, the discussion is quite shallow and in some cases simply misinformed.
For e.g., a recent question about "is this person racist?", everyone jumped on the bandwagon and said "yes!", "100%", "obviously" without citing any sources. They simply paraphrased a small segment of a video of what that person said.
It turned out the thing they paraphrased it was completely out of context and in fact proved it was opposite of what people were believing.
There were a couple of people who pointed this out but they were downvoted into obvilion: -50 downvotes or something like that.
So these comments were hidden by default.
This is what makes reddit an ecochamber. Now just imagine people coming in and reading this post without any prior knowledge, and taking away the wrong conclusion.
This happens ALL the time.
I used to enjoy reddit back in 2011-2013 when it was all about silly memes and jokes.
EDIT: "They simply paraphrased it" --> "They simply paraphrased a small segment of a video of what that person said."
Reddit is as it's always been. You just got older and don't get the current silly memes and jokes.
I was alluding to the current mix of the content on reddit. It has gotten more political and less entertaining if you look at the default feed whether you create an account or browse anonymously.
And in any political or open ended discussion, unless it is scientific, the discussions are shallow.
I will however concede that non-scientific/technical discussions were always shallow.
This was totally me. Advice Animals was my go to when I needed to decompress from being overworked as a developer. Just funny, silly memes, and cool inside jokes you could share with your friends. If you knew some of the inside jokes, you were considered one of the cool kids in your group.
Reddit almost always was first run to the big stories as well, then a few weeks later it show up on FB. Still remember the one day I was telling my GF something I saw on Reddit and she was like, "That was on FB last week" and I knew it was over.
The final coffin was when the political rubes overran AA and turned into a political echo chamber. Post something that wasn't political? Downvoted into oblivion.
That was it, the fun was over, nothing was cool any more so I checked out.
I think this is also a reflection of the era we live in. In 2011, we weren't facing the same problems we are today.
I get the jokes. They range from some retarded live stream drama, to some basic bitch puns or otherwise barely novel wordplay, to some thinly veiled political attack that can be thrown and doesn’t need defense because it’s “omg, just a joke, lighten up bro!”.
Think about it this way, everyone should be aware that intelligence has gone down in the last two generations. Reading comprehension has gone down. Terminally online addicts have increased.
So… Why would humor even stay the same on some cleverness scale?
Reddit has become the epitome of Idiocracy, but let's not pretend like spam-level shallow commenters sucking each other off hasn't infected this place too.
I honestly think if we took voting away the dynamics of online discussion would reset to normal.
Granted, the voting system was the only thing slashdot did right, but it was good.
Everything else is politics, trolling, ragebait or simple spam. So much spam.
Forget where I saw that one but it’s Reddit now.
It's like, say, talk.politics.theory back in the Usenet days. For a while it was fun, and then it wasn't. Too big, too wide .. it killed itself as a useful place to discuss/debate politics.
lol. No. Every city sub is the EXACT same far left lunatic that needs to make everything about politics. Doesn’t matter if it’s a purple area, red, and reasonable-blue areas far reflected as bizarro versions of themselves if you go off their city reddits.
You may not notice depending on your perspective.
The mid-range views leave. The extremes remain. Often a sub / moderator bias selects for one polar extreme or another.
This is where HN's (generally) political-neutral moderator stance, maddening as it often is to both sides (see dang's many, many, many, many comments on perceived bias), seems to have largely succeeded. Neither side dominates, and the middle isn't excluded.
As I've pointed out repeatedly, the net bias created is less left/right than pro status quo: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>.
Challenges to conventional thinking are more than fair, but they've got to avoid falling foul of one of HN's guidelines, particularly increasing substantiality with time, thoughtful criticism, generic negativism, not fulminating, no personal attacks, not sneering (including at the rest of the community), good faith, responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of your interlocutor, avoiding flamebait / generic tangents / Internet tropes. And most importantly in this vein, not using HN for political or ideological battle (including nationalistic flamewars).
<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>
As to flags: mods do frequently reverse them for both posts and comments: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45353896> <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>.
I don't always agree with mods, but I often do, and even where I disagree, I understand the underlying principles being employed. I've been an active critic / commentator on moderation for much of my time on-site (dating to 2011).
That's a subtle but IMO meaningful distinction: HN's net moderation activity (participants, automated mechanisms, moderators) is not necessarily the same as that which occurs by staff moderators (admins) themselves, and much of the staff moderator activity is actually correcting for participant votes and flags.
This may be an overly fine point, but it seems worth pointing out. Particularly as any moderation system has its biases. But as I'd noted in my earlier reply(<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49021366>), what HN achieves is a reduction in polarized commentary across the political spectrum, to an extent few other platforms have managed to accomplish. People on either side of multiple political divides seem to find bias against their own view, when the reality seems more likely that there's just not a wholehearted embrace of their perspective.
(That's largely my own take as well, though I think I've also become more skilled at presenting my arguments, and that perhaps as a consequence they're better received. I see disagreement, but fairly often support, even when arguing against what seems to be a prevalent or even majority opinion.)
Every sub has its far right trolls and agitators, too. Bots that respond automatically to any post with certain keywords in the title will lure accounts that have never posted there before, celebrating heinous things and trying to get a rise out of people. Pathetic attempts at destroying decency by celebrating murders by the government.
You may not notice depending on your perspective.
I noticed two odd things:
1. Taking a log-log plot of number v. size of Communities, there were far fewer very large communities than a straight power-law relation would suggest ... by a factor of 2--4 or so. This didn't look extreme plotted log-log, but when you looked at the raw values, there was something dampening the count pretty markedly.
2. In terms of activity, posting cadence fell off once a community hit (very roughly) about 10k members. Above that there still might be a lot of activity, but it was a lot less than size alone would suggest.
I've never been able to conclusively answer why either of these behavious should be the case, though I suspect that:
I suspect that the first has to do with the tendency of very large forums to go rogue (be taken over by bots / shills / spammers, or otherwise go off), to be moderated by site admins (excessive and pervasive violation of site policies), and/or simply put real people off participation because there's no genuine reward for doing so (questions aren't answered, or are responded to with incivility and/or spam).
The second (more activity in mid-sized communities) would probably relate to the last factor above: with ~10k members (give or take an order of magnitude), there's probably a core of a few hundred to a few thousand active participants, which is about at the threshold where associations and affinities can form. People still have conversations, at least part of the time.
Keep in mind that G+ (similar to FB) has a flat discussion format, so that the most recent comments are appended to the end of a post. Reddit, like HN, has a threaded discussion. For a long time I criticised G+ for not supporting threads, but I came to feel that this was actually a strength where discussions were well-moderated, as there was a sense of a real discussion occurring, where later respondants would often refer to an earlier comment (usually naming the author and quoting a bit of context) in replying. Conversations could and did last for days, weeks, months, and years. By contrast, on Reddit (and HN), a conversation is effectively dead within a day or so, if not a few hours. Comments are simply howling into the void.
This happens somewhat less on HN than Reddit, largely due to the finite size of HN's front page (infamously: 30 stories, though many might cycle through over a day). Odds are good that a top-5 story actually has some exchanges on it, and I've carried on a few of these for a few days.
But I'd long ago noted that Reddit was where conversation, in the sense of an exchange between multiple parties, goes to die, especially on any of the larger (million-plus follower) subreddits. Smaller (~50 -- a few thousand members) generally does far better.
In a similar sense, HN's quiet days (weekends, holidays, or during The Burn) often see far less activity but far more interaction.
Depends on what you mean by good. If you want to make a bot that seems like a person, then yes. If you want accurate information, not so good.
I use old.reddit.com all the time.
If old.reddit.com goes, I'm done with reddit.
I might try out some kind of alternative front end from https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends#reddit though.
But if that's not good enough, I'm done.
Welp. I guess most people who are/were using it also had accounts.
I assume this is because their largely drooling, double-digit IQ community would revolt if they rolled it out overnight.
Ever seen what a riot in a maximum security prison looks like? Well it would be nothing like that. But there would be lots of complaining and boxed macaroni and cheese involved.
at least if you go to reddit, you know the answer came from reddit, and can be accordingly cautious.