The level of engagement on Reddit these days

Comments

• lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  In addition to factors already mentioned by other users, I believe that there are also social/cultural reasons for that lack of engagement.

  Commenting in Reddit is like stepping on a mine field - no matter how innocuous your comments are, you’re bound to have users there assuming words into your mouth to screech at you. Plus all the “ackshyually”, one-upping, “wah TL;DR!” (i.e. “I’m entitled to an abridged version of what you said, even if you likely spent far more time writing your comment than I would reading it”).

  Eventually you say “why bother commenting? Just to get a headache?” and stop commenting altogether.

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  • TachyonTele@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s also filled with repeat comments. Most posts you read a few top comments and their threads. But then it quickly becomes other people just commenting the same exact thing.

    It’s just not worth looking at comments there.

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    • ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Don’t even get me started on that. I made a post that blew up (7k upvotes) and literally the entire comments section was the same responses. Out of the 100s that replied, only 10% or less were novel.

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  • ALostInquirer@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Does it sometimes seem like commenting in high traffic online spaces feels this way too, not just Reddit?

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    • lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Kind off. In most high traffic spaces it feels simply pointless; as in, nobody will read it.

      In Reddit (and Twitter) however it feels like people will read it, misread it, and punish you for what you didn’t say.

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  • drwho@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Don’t forget folks aging bot accounts by downvoting everything they see to generate history.

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    • ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I didn’t even know this was a thing lol

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  • Zworf@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yep this is one of the reasons I kept deleting my account even before the whole spez drama.

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• Corgana@startrek.website ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Reddit has been trying hard for years to move beyond being a discussion forum to another mindless scroling app.

  The reason is because in the time people read one discussion thread they only see one ad, but scrolling memes, etc they will see many more. It makes the ads much more valuable.

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  • Taako_Tuesday@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Never thought of it that way! What a dystopian world we live in where intelligent conversation dies because there’s no good way to profit off of it.

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    • Corgana@startrek.website ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s not hopeless! The Fediverse is AFAIK entirely nonprofit, and smaller instances means more moderator eyes on everything, too.

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    • Tiauguinho@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Products and Services… ad eternum!

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    • ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      And what’s worse is that in a few years, thanks to “AI” learning how to mimic us, there will be full on accounts that look legitimate at every level. Probably even have other social media connected to boost validity. But at the end of the day, it’s just a sophisticated bot trying to sell you McDonald’s.

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  • ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah Ars has already called them out for being basically an ad company that cares only about shoving as many ads and paid content as they can in your face.

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    • Corgana@startrek.website ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Got a link? I’d be curious to read that.

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  • sqgl@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Aren’t ads dispersed throughout the discussions? If not, then why not?

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• remington@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  We can still find engagement in small niche subs on Reddit. We’ve known, for many years, that people were going to move away from large corporate-controlled sites such as Reddit, Twitter etc…

  The Fediverse is addressing this. It isn’t a panacea. However, it is a re-imagining of what we want the Internet to be.

  There are many others, that will come along after us, to address this further.

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  • Dymonika@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    What will stop bots from coming here? Registration filters and user reports?

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    • ringwraithfish@startrek.website ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Bots are already proliferating the fediverse. Kbin is constantly spammed with “buy online drugs here” links. Transparent bots (those that are tagged as bots) try to boost engagement by reposting things from Reddit, but are still perpetuating one of the rest aspects of reddit even if they’re being upfront about it. AI generated articles posted on obvious junk websites are constantly being spammed by the same accounts.

      It’s a difficult problem to solve.

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    • henfredemars@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There will always be bots on the Internet. I do not believe this is a solvable problem. Instead, we focus on mitigation.

      However, Reddit has little incentive to fight the bots because it increases engagement metrics. In fact, it costs money and reduces profits to reduce bot activity. Hence, so many bots.

      Right here on Lemmy, because nobody financially benefits from turning a blind eye to the problem, I think we have a head start. This platform is created by users for users. For that reason, I think we should never have the problem quite to the same extent as they do.

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    • B0rax@feddit.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yes, if it grows large enough, the bots will come.

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• eveninghere@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I think one has to gather more proof before concluding that the gap is due to LLMs. It can also be that the engagement was lost due to third party app drop. We don’t have stats to distinguish them.

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• HeartyBeast@kbin.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  To be honest, it feels much more likely to see posts on the Fediverse with many upvotes, few or no comments

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  • anachronist@midwest.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah the fediverse has lower engagement all around because the community is a lot smaller. This is especially true in “long tail” communities. However, the upside is that there are no bots, dark patterns, or manipulated feeds.

    That being said, while I appreciate the chronological feed I do wish there was some way to “weigh” less active communities so that I can see their activity in my feed without them being drowned out by the busier communities. I’ve noticed that I’ve gone to communities that I’m definitely subscribed to, and seen that there were several posts that I missed because the posts were drowned out by content in busy communities like, for instance, technology@beehaw.org

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    • HeartyBeast@kbin.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      However, the upside is that there are no bots, dark patterns, or manipulated feeds.

      There’s a huge amount of incoming spam, much of it, I suspect posted by bots. I’ve also seen account posting ‘news’ from sites that are clearly AI generated

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    • RobotZap10000@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Is that not what the scaled sort is for?

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  • ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That makes sense tho given how the FV has pretty low engagement and most of it is still good bots doing housekeeping or trying to boost exposure.

    I guess I just didn’t think Reddit would collapse sooooo fast!

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• SkyNTP@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Just wait till the advertisers find out the eyeballs they are paying for are also just AI sock puppets. End justification strikes again.

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  • henfredemars@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m sure the leadership will have cashed out by then.

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  • ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I know there is software that exists that can poison art so LLM can’t use it. I am hoping we make something like that against AI bots and ads. What a brutal future we have coming man.

    Can you imagine once we move to androids and other synthetic like machines? Or brain implants? Your bff that’s telling you to eat more eggs because they read they were really good for might literally be saying that because of chicken farmers or some vested third party who makes bank on eggs. Just wild that we are going to be attacked from all sides by corporate greed.

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• Alice@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Reddit is so useless. I write occasionally, and whenever I hit a wall researching a character’s background, everyone tells me, “ask on Reddit!”

  I stopped asking on Reddit five years ago, because I can’t get any feedback besides a handful teenagers making wild guesses. Thank you for trying, kids. I guess.

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  • ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Been mostly the same for me. If I ask a basic question like how to turn on Find My, I most likely will get a slew of downvotes and then one good samaritan post up the answer. If you ask a more technical question, like why is Find My iPhone using location services indefinitely, literally the entire website is like 🤷‍♂️

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• streetfestival@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’d say in about 2 years, the entire place is going to be bots with AI generated content that try to mimic “real users” using their new Dynamic Product Ads tool

  Yeah, it’s just partially like that now lol. A few weeks ago there was a side-by-side reddit screenshot post on Lemmy. The exact same reddit post, with the exact same tens of comments (all word for word, some in response to each other iirc), from different accounts less than a year apart. I’d never seen such extensive bot-masquerading as people behaviour; it was a realization moment for me

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  • nhgeek@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I think X led the way in robotic hellscape innovation that’s now being adopted by Reddit.

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    • henfredemars@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Dead Internet theory in full effect.

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    • ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Why am I not surprised! Musk is absolute cancer.

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• pineapplelover@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Damn I didn’t realize how artificial it is now. I remember before the protests I can feel the entire platform reposting stuff over and over with the same content. Pretty much the only good subs are the small niche subs, but those large ones are atrocious.

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  • ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Reddit also released a new ad system that imbeds products in a “real life way” so you can get bots replying to users asking question that look 100% genuine but are run by say McDs. So if someone asks hey what do you eat in a given day, the bot can come in, totally organically, and say “oh i usually start my day with eggs and toast then for lunch I get a mcwrap because they’re on special for the month of march”. They “learnt” that people don’t write McWrap so they are trying to plug products basically how we do.

    Which makes recommendations suss af! I feel almost paranoid going there these days like are half the posts and comments I reply to real??

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    • pineapplelover@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Genuine question, are mcwraps a thing? Back when I was younger and used to eat from McDonald’s, that was one of the few things worth getting.

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• Kichae@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I saw some engagement graphs a few weeks ago for a few niche subreddits. Not necessarily niche in the “small” way, but in the “focused interest” way.

  Posts and comments per day completely collapsed during the 3rd party app-pocolypse, and never recovered. Community membership didn’t even show a blip, but actual discussions fell off a cliff.

  The Reddit app is really bad, and the website is worse. The mobile website is somehow the worst of the lot. Doing anything but voting and scrolling is painful. Reddit has successfully ended its usefulness as a community space. Most people there don’t aeem to have noticed this sea change, yet.

  Or at least, they’ve found no compelling reason to go elsewhere yet.

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  • ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I can echo the last part. I refuse to use the app so I use the both the website and mobile version. Both are almost unusable. Comments often fail to load, just showing the Reddit logo animation. It takes 8 reloads to sometimes load a reply to one of my comments. Half the time it never loads just stalls at 30% loading. The post options to attach images or media to a comment doesn’t work on mobile; tapping the buttons literally do nothing. It works on desktop.

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• SteposVenzny@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I think this disparity in votes and comments is also hugely affected by how the UI has been changing over the years as well as the destruction of third party apps. The site is now designed in a way where active participation is less encouraged than ever before unless you’re running old reddit on a traditional computer with an ad blocker.

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  • ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah I think this is spot on. Someone else mentioned that Reddit doesn’t really want you spend lots of time (yet anyway, till they can roll out better their new Dynamic Product Ads) on a single post. It would rather you scroll upvote and move on so they can try to get as much of the feed to your eyeballs as possible.

    arstechnica.com/…/reddit-sneaky-ai-spam-bots-comp…

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• wargreymon2023@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Im not surprised by how quick it dies, base solely on the bad attitude of Spez.

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• mondoman712@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  IIRC they changed the way they calculate the scores a few years ago, which generally increased the numbers you saw.

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  • RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yes, exactly. The upvotes did not reflect actual real engagement for a long time. I don’t remember anymore where I read about it, but allegedly there is also some artificial correction applied. Maybe to combat brigading of upvotes but can of course be used for manipulation.

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  • ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Oh I did not now this. Did this happen before or after Spez’s API freakout?

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    • mondoman712@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah way before. I had a bit of a look through some announcements and couldn’t find it so I can’t say exactly when.

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• xor@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Reddit is a PsyOp

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  • ultratiem@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Holy crap the dude looks Ross Marquand its uncanny lol

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    • xor@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      huh, i don’t really see it…

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  • henfredemars@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Cool username btw.

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    • xor@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      thanks… it’s my favorite bitwise operator….

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• clot27@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Reddit is ded, and for good reasons

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