Is reddit getting more bot heavy?

Or am I more sensitive to the degradation of social media in light of recent events? Obviously Twitter and Meta have been engulfed in political controversy. Tik tok has been snip snap snip snap.

Reddit has avoided being in the news but I feel like every time I scroll through threads I'm not actually interacting with human beings. Everyone makes the same jokes, the same comments. The same threads keep popping up on the same subs. For instance, the star wars subreddit has had a dozen of these 'i just watched skeleton crew... It's actually good!' posts just in the past couple days.

I know it's always been like that to an extent but it seems worse than ever. Makes me honestly miss the heyday of specialized message boards like this one. As much as several people on here were hated, And rightfully so in many instances, at least they were individual human beings.

I can't honestly tell the difference between humans and robots on reddit.

^ this.

I suspect this too. I was just on a thread where 75% of the comments were saying video game publishers need to charge more for games. They justify it by saying NES, SNES games were the equivalent of $100-$120 each if adjusted for inflation.

I'm more convinced the real problem is that more and more people are slowly turning into NPCs whose posts are becoming indistinguishable from AI because brain rot has robbed them of the capacity for rational thought.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'm more convinced the real problem is that more and more people are slowly turning into NPCs whose posts are becoming indistinguishable from AI because brain rot has robbed them of the capacity for rational thought.

Sadly I suspect that this is the case. They've been conditioned to know what generates positive or negative responses and have since molded together into an indistinguishable mash of non humans. Much like a rat king.

Although I do think that corporate bot accounts are engaging in guerilla marketing in addition to that other aspect.

Thats the price of upvoting and karma. I guess I get it. The community is pretty large so it would be pretty hard to navigate threads for someone just jumping in and there's 1000+ posts.

there's LOTS of astroturfing on some subreddits these days, yeah

dedbus posted...

Thats the price of upvoting and karma. I guess I get it. The community is pretty large so it would be pretty hard to navigate threads for someone just jumping in and there's 1000+ posts.

I had to scroll way too far to find this.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'm more convinced the real problem is that more and more people are slowly turning into NPCs whose posts are becoming indistinguishable from AI because brain rot has robbed them of the capacity for rational thought.

A non-trivial amount of which is spurred along by bot posts making it seem like there's already a consensus on the issue and that any dissenting voice will be drowned out. A lot of misinformation/propaganda campaigns rely on trying to make people feel like they're somehow unusual or wrong to disagree with the campaign, and it's very easy to make people feel isolated in their opinions on the Internet when you can just fabricate people that disagree with them out of whole cloth.

dedbus posted...

Thats the price of upvoting and karma.

Yep. I get the value in having threads automatically sorted by what the community thinks is most useful and the visibility reduced for things that the community agrees are objectionable, since that saves a lot on moderation resources and can often be more convenient for readers, but it also makes it very easy to manipulate a narrative.

Don't spend too much time on Reddit, but every single sub I've seen is now banning Twiiter links, so that's good. De facto blanket ban of one of the largest websites of another.

I stopped using reddit. They got some fucked up subreddits on there. And I'm not talking about the "gone wild" nsfw shit. I'm talking some dark shit that nobody should see.