DisOneHas Reddit’s traffic really quadrupled in 6 months?
RBGSimplest explanation is that the general public doesn’t give a shit and while Facebook is on the downturn (not sure if numbers can back that up) people need to go somewhere else. Maybe that is reddit right now, they got the marketing and content to get people on it.
I’d like to hear that crapbook is going downhill, but its share price says otherwise
Enron’s share price was very high right up until the end, too. Share price is not necessarily a good indicator of underlying fundamentals
Its share price doesn’t matter in this context, since Meta also owns Instagram, which is absolutely not going downhill at the moment.
Facebook however is losing active users, especially in the younger age ranges and even more pronounced in Europe and the US.
Sir_KevinThey also own WhatsApp which has a massive user base outside of the US.
But it’s not really a cash cow. At least I don’t know of any widespread attempts at monetization (yet).
WhatsApp is monetized by selling your private data, same as.FB
Stock price isn’t a representation of the current value of a company, it’s the projected value of a company down the line.
Bots have quadrupled.
They are probably paying clickfarms.
Reddit probably isn’t, as that would be cooking their metrics and Huffman would get fucked by the long arm of the SEC. They might still be, Huffman loves Elon and Elon got away with tons of shit.
Advertisers are probably paying more content farms to astroturf it though.
Plus without the API, do you really think people just stopped scraping Reddit? They just run a headless Chrome instance now and I bet Reddit doesn’t look the gift horse of traffic in the mouth.
OpenStarsThe SEC got its funding slashed by Trump - are they like the IRS now where they don’t have the resources to truly do the job anymore?
HypxExcept I can totally see them committing securities fraud in order to pump up the numbers. It seems very much like something they would do.
I think that’s what this part of the comment was about:
They might still be, Huffman loves Elon and Elon got away with tons of shit.
OtterAdvertisers are probably paying more content farms to astroturf it though.
Yup, in fact we just banned ~13 accounts tonight from a subreddit I’m still involved with. That’s just the ones we identified, and it’s only a medium sized subreddit
A user noticed that the responses to a post sounded a little off and reported it. Turns out there was a network of bots using generative AI to mix real academic advice (ex. “Go talk to the advising office”) with occasional subtle advertisements (ex. “I recommend using grammarly and (advertised service)”.
Once we caught on, we looked through the history of those accounts and gathered as many as we could identify and banned them all.
I don’t think this is Reddit’s doing, and they’re usually good about banning spam bots site wide once a mod report is made. Still, they benefit from increased activity and they have an incentive to do less of that. It was also much harder to notice the problem because of the AI generation. If a user didn’t explicitly report it, I probably wouldn’t have noticed
This is going to be the Idiocratizing of the internet. AI is going to be training in itself with these unidentified posts and get dumber and dumber.
Let’s hope no one lets it have access to anything important…
It feels a little like how steel from before above ground nuclear testing, called low-background (or pre-war) steel because it isn’t contaminated is prized for building some sensors.
Pre AI information need to be preserved, otherwise we might not really know if the info we’re seeking is fact based in any way.
BuelldozerThis is going to be the Idiocratizing of the internet.
93/94 was when I first got AOL on a 14.4k modem. I’m one of those shitty users!
We used to use gopher and college FTP sites to download warez as a freshman in HS, and then moved on to Hotline trackers.
PronellI know, because I was there!
I was too. The internet was never for normies or businesses and between the two of them they’ve managed to turn it into a complete dumpster fire.
I highly suggest you ban what the were advertising and not just the account.
If advertiser’s realize the shady bot farms they deal with are causing any comment that mentions their product to be automatically deleted, they will stop.
thomcatThe API is not gone, and is still free for both “for non-commercial researchers and academics under our published usage threshold” and “for moderator tools and bots”
www.redditinc.com/blog/apifacts
There are several ways to add your personal API key to (modified) final versions of Sync, Relay, Infinity, and even Apollo on iOS to be able to continue to use those clients, however Reddit has changed how Reddit links work, so those methods are becoming more and more broken.
Did you guys read the article? It’s all about how since google and Reddit penned a deal to use Reddit to train google AI models, google is now massively pushing Reddit links in search results.
And their answer, ironically, is to avoid “Gen-AI garbage.”
But you should really read the article. It pissed me the fuck off. Because that sounds…massively illegal.
You scratch my back, I scratch yours
I wonder if Reddit user activity has noticeably increased. Probably not.
Like, this will help Reddit in the short term, and honestly is a good idea from a search perspective (how many queries have I manually appended “Reddit” to?), but it doesn’t necessarily help with the fundamentals of the platform.
The article seems to suggest a change on the Google search algo and how Reddit pumps the SEO is to blame as it’s showing up in search rankings above other more relevant results.
This would be my guess- Reddit is more reliable for random queries than much of the internet, as AI propagates.
I see more and more suggested "my search Reddit" on Google even as I visit Redfit way less now
Semi-Hemi-DemigodSo Reddit is turning into Quora.
Painfully accurate.
In that it will soon to shit? Yes.
ɯᴉuoʇuɐI do believe reddit pops up in my search results more frequently these days than it did a year ago… (just based on my impression, though)
Sabata11792I honesty can't search a damn thing and not have Reddit be the first result. I basically been using AI over search to fix things... probably as intended.
AzzuThere are search addons able to filter out specific sites, if you’d like it.
A lot of AI LLMs have been trained on reddit…
Not saying its bad info sometimes. There's a reason most of us used reddit. It just seems like its the new SEO optimized background noise now. It's not what I'm looking for, and I rather avoid the site now.
LucidlethargyYes and no. No, it’s not Reddit doing it. Yes, Google is strongly favoring reddit results. They are combating AI content in this manner.
Google searches are becoming worthless more and more. This may be the beginning of the end for them unless users quickly adopt their generative search approach when they release it.
Bappityseems sus to me
SorteKaninThe growth trend according to Google Trends indicates that it is still growing, but definitely not a quadrupling over 6 months.
Part of it is either Reddit manipulating search positioning or Google (most people's default search) prioritizing Reddit results. Searching for answers to questions often results in a half page of Reddit links. They may not be relevant, but that doesn't become apparent until you're there.
strawberryewh google
If you read the linked article it’s the latter. The explicitly say Google changed their algorithm and reddit consistently ranks at the top now. Even over the articles which the reddit thread is about.
I cannot wait for reddit going public, it’s going to generate so much drama, that’s going to be soooo good.
Lemmy instances brace yourself
Im just sad my bank won’t let me but puts
Election is coming up, all Russian bots
It’s all kinds of bots; Russian, Chinese, Liberal, Conservative, Reddits own to inflate traffic stats ahead of the IPO.
So what you’re saying is we should short the stock to make it big
Could even open a lawsuit and force reddit to investigate how much of their traffic is bots, immediately after the IPO
This is not financial advice… typically these things balloon fast, and maybe stay up a week or two before anyone buying is done buying and the price collapses to the point informed investors want in. You can also have people doing price support early (“a squid on the bid”) to avoid a depressing price collapse in the opening phase, but that’s something you have to feel from experience.
Mfers still believe in Russiagate despite everything that’s come out.
They’re not Russian trolls, you guys are just a bunch of fascists.
Did something come out that disproves the existence of russian bots in social media?
Uh, actually yeah it did. Turns out they were just normal pro-russia conservatives. I thought the Cucker interview would have made that obvious.
SmokeInFogThese things are not mutually exclusive. The fact that Russian propaganda bots swayed a large percentage of American republican fascists in no way debunks the bots.
I’m sorry I was hoping what I was asking would be more clear:
Did something specific, that you can link to disprove the existence of Russian bots in social media?
Sure but first you have to get me a link to an instance of evidence ever swaying someone’s opinion on the internet.
This. Everything wrong in US is some bot army peddling propaganda at labor camps. Might even add the Atlantians to the list of foreign influencers before claiming US has more than a significant amount of fascists, racists, xenophobic assholes that already elected criminal as a president, and others war criminals without a shred of repercussions.
but whatever makes you sleep better at night.
davel- Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
- Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
- Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
- Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal
- MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
- Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away
Liberals will cry for impossibly indisputable evidence then go silent when you actually provide it.
williams_482From the Washington Post piece:
But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.
- It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
- Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
- Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.
And
“Despite these consistent findings, it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity,” the report states.
The overwhelmingly more significant threat is that US corporate social media are integrated with the propaganda machinery of the US government and the capitalist class. The purpose of things like Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 68 and the Disinformation Governance Board is not to protect us from foreign influence but for the “intelligence community” to inject its own influence.
- Facebook Partners With Hawkish Atlantic Council, a NATO Lobby Group, to “Protect Democracy”
- Jessica Ashooh: The taming of Reddit and the National Security State Plant tabbed to do it
- A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
- r/neoliberal was created by a neoliberal think tank » BPR Interviews: The Neoliberal Project
.
They have their eye on the fediverse now as well: Atlantic Council » Collective Security in a Federated World
This is all an extension of how traditional corporate media works, which has been understood for decades:
- Michael Parenti, 1986: Inventing Reality: The Politics Of The Mass Media
- Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky, 1988: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
A five minute primer: Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
If I remember correctly the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence quietly released a bipartisan report some years back conforming the existence of Russian trolls in the 2016 election. I haven’t seen any evidence or reports released that they have ceased their attempts at manipulating social media since then.
I do agree though, a lot of the posts are just real people who know that hate gets more engagement and crazy people.
They did, but they determined the huge russian disinformation campaign was the work of like 5 accounts and 200k in ad-spend on facebook. In other words a wet fart.