Congrats for the moderator of /r/Jailbait for becoming a billionaire! /s
Is reddit dead yet?
Its spirit is dead, but its corpse lingers on.
Idk people used my reddit post trails to be creepy little bitches back in the day.
But then how would you check if someone is a disingenuous troll, or a hypocrite, etc, it’s the usual privacy vs open information trade off
The only thing on the UX manager’s mind, when considering this decision, was “engagement.”
Nothing else is even in their same universe.
Bots only upvote their own bot circle or content which makes their owners $$$$.
Real human concerns will only be heard if they align with $$$$.
We are remaking the whole world for bots.
I see it a lot with AskReddit, surveying (or possibly influencing) how people feel when something happened in the news. Those posts get bumped to the front page.
Most of Reddit was bots interacting with bots a while ago already.
The site makes most of its money selling ads. The value of that ad space is based on user metrics.
Many users are now fake. They are actively hiding this fact.
Apropos of nothing, the company has a $34 billion market cap.
Why is anyone paying for adverts that no one will see though? Surely adverts only have value if it brings in sales.
Would be amusing to see the entire advertising market crash tbh.
You think that in 2025 companies with large media budgets are buying digital ads and just saying “well fuck it maybe we’ll make money on it”?
They track EVERYTHING. From the impression to the click tot he purchase, and there are trackers and attribution platforms by the hundreds out there to help them understand what the ROI they’re receiving on those ads are.
Companies are buying ads because people are buying products.
Even if the site is 90% bots there are enough real people using the site to make buying ads profitable.
Yeah.
To misquote a paper, “attention is all you need.” It’s like the motto of the 2020s.
From your lips to god’s ears
If you then train new bots on the generated content, the models will degrade yes?
If you look a lot of new posts, they are actually highly upvoted old posts. So bots probably stay the same.
The bots know what is bot content and what is not.
Actual users don’t.The bots know what is bot content and what is not.
Probably not. It’s way easier to generate bot content than to detect it. Unless they’re coming from the same group, but I find this unlikely.
Absolutely horrid feature. Supposedly it’s to protect vulnerable people’s privacy if they post in certain communities, but if they truly wanted that to be how it’s used, they’d have limited the ability to apply the feature only to subreddits where mods have specifically coordinated with the admins to get approved as places where vulnerable people are posting. Or, and here’s a shocker, they could just rely on the tried-and-tested method of using alt accounts. Instead, bots and trolls just hide their entire post history from people.
Now, supposedly, mods can see the full, unhidden history of any user who has recently posted in their subreddits. Which is good. But the number of other good-faith users being obstructed by this change is huge. It’s overall a massive failure from Reddit.
only to subreddits where mods have specifically coordinated with the admins to get approved as places where vulnerable people are posting
I don’t believe subreddits like r/otherkin or r/NPD would be able to get that approval, despite being support spaces for vulnerable people who wouldn’t necessarily want to be outed.
Besides, you can still see their post history simply by searching
"u/username" site:reddit.comIt gives people a false sense of security
Yeah, but it’s an extra step many won’t take.
Mfw putting “author:username” into the Reddit search bypasses this
for now
Which is the worst of two worlds, because now most people will still not be able to verify other account’s credibility, however people with bad intentions - who are usually more prepared - will still be able to continue their activities.
Now imagine you’re a fragile person who’s really paranoid about their internet activity. This is obviously a good change for them, so they click it. One day, someone decides to use this backdoor to bully that person by insulting them under multiple posts and comments that were meant not to be traceable. I can only imagine the consequences.
If you want to be anonymous on the internet you can’t rely on some website to protect you.I get your point but people need to really start learning the reality of the internet again.
This is an example of social darwinism. That doesn’t mean I don’t agree with this idea, it’s just that I don’t agree that it is viable to expect it from everyone.
Companies must be forced to care about peoples’ security and privacy. Actively fighting against bots infestation would be a part of that.
Wait, hold on, slow down. Are you telling me there are bots on Reddit?
Jfc
Reddit did WHAT?
huge number of people who make controversial statements (particularly those who are pro-russia) have their profiles set to hidden so you can’t see what else they have posted
That is very much the first people I would expect making use of that feature, yes.
Huh. How hard is it to make a browser extension that automatically down votes posts by any such person? Asking for people who might still be on there.
Probably easy. However, anyone using such extension would be banned for voting manipulation. YMMV on how justified the later is.
Never been more glad to have left that sinking ship early
Oh, don’t worry, they’ll come here soon enough.
There used to be a site called Reddit, where you were your post history. Now that site is dead - the URL still works, I guess, but it links to some weird Twitter with an alien logo.
“be me, Reddit sheep”
FTFY
Transcription
4chan greentext post with a photo of a robot with its mouth open wide in surprise, wearing glasses and an orange singlet with the Reddit logo on it:
>be me bored redditor
>click on obvious bot account using ChatGPT
>want to check post history for confirmation
>“this user has no posts”
>wtf.jpg
>realize reddit added an option to make post history invisible
>bots now basically untraceable
>reddit “accidentally” made it harder to tell real users from bots
>engagement numbers go up nobody questions it
