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AskReddit is over run by bots.FTFY
It’s still okay for niche communities, and that’s probably why people still go there
This for sure. It’s something severely lacking at Lemmy, without the large user base the small communities can’t sustain the way they do on Reddit. Lemmy serves best as a replacement for the biggest subs.
I noticed I’m not even missing the small subs anymore.
4 different meme subs about an obscure Romanian soap opera don’t improve my quality of life.Memes no, but I’ve found a lot of value in things like my hometown has a pretty active sub on Reddit which is useful for local information or subs around specific TV shows or video games bring a lot of interesting discussion or just asking questions on niche topics I’m much more likely to get an answer from a larger user base.
My home town subreddit has seen at least 1 news years eve orgy organised through it, havent seen anything comparable on lemmy!
Hobby subs are the big one. If your hobby is anything other than dicking around with Linux, we probably don’t have much of a community for it, if we have one at all.
Truth. RVs and sailboats are not here. But I feel confident I’d get all the discussion I need if I wanted to install Linux on my sailboat.
Have you considered a Framework sailboat? They’re a little more expensive, but they’re designed with repairability in mind, and come with Linux pre-installed
Framework sailboats are overpriced garbage!!
You would be better off with a thinkboat x61s
In all honesty the lack of super specific and active communities on lemmy has actually improved my quality of life. I spend much, much less time scrolling and reading shit.
It’s a valid point, but it’s kind of like saying it’s great that the restaurant you’ve started going to has such a small menu compared to the old one because you’re not eating as much.
I’m a picky eater so yeah that works for me
People go there because they don’t care about interacting with other human beings. They just want an echo chamber and to occasionally feel like they are an Influencer.
And you can see the same at lemmy. Someone posts something someone doesn’t like? Immediate downvote (and, for the more pathetic people, downvoting on a few alts as well) with no comment or even attempt to refute things other than MAYBE an ad hominem. And plenty of “What is your favorite X” spam-engagement posts that just involve repeating whatever marketing schpiel they heard in the past.
There has been a recent tendency for people to reference social media network sites that are nothing but bots and… it is increasingly obvious that that is what most people want. They want to feel like they are the tastemakers. They want to be moistcritical without needing to focus test the most normy of center-right takes.
Someone posts something someone doesn’t like? Immediate downvote
Well, yeah. That is what the button is for.
It’s supposed to be for bad faith posts/comments not just for disagreement
I downvote comments that promote hateful ideologies, whether or no they were posted in bad faith. I also downvote posts that derail the conversation, whether or not I think they were posted in bad faith because it is impossible to know if someone is posting in good faith from an individual post. By the time a pattern is clear the thread is derailed.
Context also matters, because the same post about grilled mushrooms as a substitute for grilled steaks will be posted in good faith to different posts and be a net positive or negative depending on the post. A post about grilling in general? Positive, because it adds to the topic! A post about the best cut of beef for grilling? Negative, because it derails the thread to be about not eating beef.
Sure, people should not be downvoting non-important topics or views that they could just block instead. But a lot of people also assume bad faith when someone disagrees with them, so that isn’t good criteria either.
Those are also good reasons, i.e. more than just “I disagree”
It’s supposed to be for whatever the fuck you want to use it for. There’s no downvote police on lemmy.
Personally, I upvote every reply I get and nothing else.
Yes, it’s good to realise that lemmy is just as much an echo chamber as reddit is. Same echoes, differnet voice. But don’t you dare actually having a different voice, that will not be appreciate. People want to have discussions, but only with yes men.
stop saying the truth. it hurts their feelings.
Yep I can confirm, I lived in my tiny reddit bubble a lot of time to care about trending shit and bots stuff.
The user volume to support niche communities is the most obvious thing missing in Lemmy. But I have a darker view of the future. Picture LLM bots forging organic-looking conversations that result in a product recommendation. It looks like a genuine human conversation, but it’s actually an advertisement. Maybe it’s mixed with some human comments, but that may only add to the realism of the fraud.
That kind of ”advertising“ could potentially command a lot of money. And it could probably eventually infect just about any text platform. Maybe Lemmy as well someday?
You could deploy it pretty effectively in sufficiently large niche communities.
Picture LLM bots forging organic-looking conversations that result in a product recommendation.
Thanks for the confirmation. Ugh.
Exactly. In specific communities it’s by far the best discussion platform. And I don’t go to a site first discussion second, other way around, so to reddit I go for those.
Using this low of a contrast (dark red on dark background) is criminal. Maybe my eyes are just that bad but good lord those notes are hard to read
This just proves that OP is not a bot, he is a dumb human like us
It’s not even mine, I put the source in the post.
But I agree with the poor colour choice
After this comment I am exactly 27.3% more suspicious of OP being a bot after all.
Not necessarily. Bots can read text equally well on any colour. This might prove he is a bot.
In any case, a crime has been committed. Call the cops.
Yeah it’s awful. My vision is pretty good but this literally hurts to look at
Gather round, children, and let me tell you a story of the same type of mindless corporate stupidity that happened in my state, about how something successful was ruined because all they could see was at the surface level…
When the mini-market chain AM/PM opened some stores in Baja California, they came up with a hybrid concept that also included a made-to-order fast food kitchen serving burgers, and a sizable seating area, they called this Dave’s Kitchen. It was a huge, huge hit.
Enter 7-11 into the scene. Getting wind of this new phenomenon and armed with corporate cash from their Mexico offices in… Monterrey I think it was… they bought every AM/PM in the state and converted them to 7-11s, surely salivating at the prospect of this large client base that was supposedly built-in with their acquisition.
So what was the first thing they did?
They shuttered Dave’s Kitchen. Poof… gone!
They got rid of the soda machine, the ice cream machine… instead of assimilating the business model of what they had bought, they got rid of everything that made these AM/PMs unique in the market, replaced it with their own bland and generic way of doing things according to the home office in Monterrey.Within a month, the new 7-11s had lost around 3/4 of their customers. Their emergency response was to send in a squad of corporate poll takers to pester the customers still there and see… why the other ones had gone, I guess?
Asking the wrong questions (why did the customers leave in droves?) to the wrong people (the few remaining clients who didn’t leave). And thus, nothing of value was learned, because when your corporate business school suits are clumsy unthinking hammers, every situation and problem look like a goddamned nail.
Gather round children; as I tell you the story of Georgie Pie, it offered cheap local (to NZ) fast food, in this case meat and sweet pies.
Highly successful and well loved, it was a common sight across the country. Unfortunately, the corporate entities from off shore came in, diluting the fast food dollar across many more options. MacDonald’s brought the struggling Georgie Pie; mainly for its locations and to remove a competitor from the market.
Every few years; to maintain the trade mark, MacDonald’s runs a Georgie Pie promotion where you can get a pie from MacDonald’s. It is like the zombie of local “cuisine” reanimated over and over again to server its master; for the only job it is good for.
Now this truly does sound like a horrifying story.
Move over McRib, 'cause here comes Georgie “Please Let Me Die” Pie, even less often than you do!Imagine if McDonald’s had actually defeated Jollibee in the Philippines, absorbed them, then resuscitated their menu once a year.
But that didn’t happen, I wonder how did Jollibee not only survive, but thrive? What was their crucial chessboard move there?
Perhaps they realized it would be cheaper to stop the growth of a superior product. Especially when that superior product would likely require more types of costs that would eat corporate level profit. More higher paid employees that can’t be mechanized.
Status quo is incredibly profitable, assuming nothing threatens it. That’s why big business does everything they can to increase the barrier of entry, and happily overpays to buy out successful competitors, with the leadership of the competitors having enforceable noncompetes for the model.
The fact that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup. This kind of thing regularly happens as well where I live despite noncompetes basically not being enforceable.
Acquiring companies is easy, but it extremely rarely goes well. The incentives and skills required to buy something and give a sales pitch to a private equity firm simply do not overlap with the incentives and skills required to vertically integrate that thing without completely destroying it.
In many ways these corporate ghouls are like serial hobbyists. Buying all kinds of expensive toys and tools they don’t understand then breaking them and/or giving up.
Obviously absolute speculation on my part, but if they were truly doing what I suggested intentionally, part of the plan would need to be plausible deniability to avoid anti-monopoly issues, and also public sentiment nightmare. Killing your favorite shop out of incompetence doesn’t win good will, but you will still go there. Doing it out of malicious intent could have people in other states joining a boycott.
I’m in management, participated in the acquisition process of the company I’m at being acquired. At least at the 150mm/year revenue level there’s no one doing the shit I’m suggesting, no one is so competent. Cash on hand is bad , acquisition is an obvious way to deal with that. You’re spot on about skills though, 95% of management at every level is totally incompetent at the work required to actually do management shit. All the competent people leave as soon as they can because the work just got way harder and the money doesn’t follow.
that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup
Yes, this is my thought as well. They bought their way into the market, somehow thinking it was the chunk of real estate and not the services provided that kept customers coming back over and over again. They didn’t even bother to see what these services were, came in like a bull in a china shop, indifferent to the point of oblivious about it, even as the accounting department back at the home office had to process out all the kitchen equipment, the self-service soda and ice cream machines, etc., from every store in Baja.
Nowadays, 7-11 is still there, puttering along, as a generic clone of Oxxo, the other large mini-market chain in Mexico, offering nothing special, except maybe along the lines of - “Hmm… Oxxo is three blocks this way, 7-11 is one block that way, I guess I’ll go to 7-11”, and Oxxos are everywhere, Jesus… like somebody gleefully abused the copy/paste function.
AM/PM honestly sounds like what the Sheetz chain does these days in a lot of ways.
Ok this red on black contrast is awful on the eyes.
News flash: it’s not just ask Reddit. It’s Reddit entirely. That place is a shithole of bots.
The only good answers I find to things are 3+ years old.
Yeah. That or niche subreddits that just aren’t popular enough to warrant bots. Like specific game communities. But even some of the big ones are full of bots.
Beep, boop! I am a bot, and this action was performed naturally.
Am I really a bot though?
I look forward to meeting my undeleted zombie Reddit account one day. I’m picturing it like Shaun and Ed at the end of Shaun of the Dead.
I’m almost tempted to turn off 2fa on my account and give it a weak password just to see what its next life becomes.
It’s remarkable, the questions that aren’t from bots are completely indistinguishable.
It’s all low quality engagement bait, and all these questions were on the front page of askreddit a hundred times with slight variations.They’re indistinguishable because they’re copied from top-voted posts that are a few years old (title, text, and image if applicable). It’s guaranteed to produce a post that fits the community and gets a lot of engagement, so it’s a cheap and effective way to mature a bot account. Once you start looking for it, it’s everywhere, and Reddit admins don’t care.
Have you ever noticed those low effort reposts also getting the same top 10 comments as the original? It’s slop all the way down.
What’s the aim? What do they use the accounts for once they’ve acquired the karma, which I am assume is the goal.
I’m speculating, but my guesses are:
- Gathering enough karma to post on subreddits that have a minimum threshold.
- Getting enough post and comment history to pass a casual inspection, either by human moderators or spam filters.
- Maturing the account to the point where it can be sold to another shady company.
- Generally having a lot of bot accounts ready, just in case.
Once mature, it’s usually used for spam or astroturfing. There is a noticeable uptick around big elections, wars, etc.
I saw one repost-bot that metastisized into the most vile porn-spam-bot you can imagine, but they’re usually more subtle than that.
Possibly vote manipulation as well, I mean where else would the sites to buy upvotes and downvotes get those voter accounts.
Advertising or scams usually. A high amount of posts, comments, and karma makes an account look trustworthy.
Thanks
how are people so bad with colors
If reddit hadn’t locked their API behind absurd paywalls, it would have been a cool project to try to make a browser plugin that gives accounts a “credit score” based on the factors you’ve been looking at, in order to let users quickly judge how likely an account is a bot.
It could let people adjust the metrics it uses to calculate that score in the settings, so even if it becomes popular enough for bots to start trying to game the system, people can adapt their scoring metrics themselves and share config profiles that they think are more effective at rating bots.
Might be something cool to see for activitypub/fediverse/lemmy accounts, but with the data available varying by instance it might be a little harder to calibrate a “catch-all” scoring config
I’ve never understood what anyone gets out of hosting and spamming reddit with bots
Selling accounts with high karma to people wanting to push an agenda with a seemingly legit account
Conspiracy hat on:
It’s done by Reddit themselves. They know user visits are dropping. They know power users have slipped. To avoid making it look like a desert, they have bots create content.
Reddit’s origin story is sockpuppeting as users.
They’ll do it again
The difference between now and then though, is they were a private company.
Unless they disclose they use bots to post content and make the site look active, any use of user count and engagement for any aspect of the company becomes fraud as its misleading investors.
Oh we have 1 million posts an hour! Fraud.
Oh we have 100 million monthly active users! Fraud!
Investors Q/A - do you use bots? Answer No. Fraud.
Fraud doesn’t really stop a big company, if they can get away with it.
Facebook for example.
And whose to say it’s not them directly, but a “third party who Reddit pays for user acquisition” services?
They can pay a random LLC to do it for them.
Q&A do you use bots to generate content or have you used any 3rd party that uses bots themselves directly or through another party.
As long as its asked and it gets leaked they lied it’s fraud.
Plausible deniability doesn’t work if proof comes out.
You don’t hire a hitman and get off scott free when proof comes out you hired a hitman.
The 9Gag way…
Conspiracy: Reddit sells bots and bot acquired analytics to high paying corpos, but are losing sales to secondary markets undercutting the reddit sold bots.
My friend still uses reddit
Could also be so they can make more ad money, since it makes it look like more people use the site, and more people see the ads. Allows them to get more money from advertisers.
Mature accounts with some activity are worth money to people looking to AstroTurf political discussions.
Not just political, it helps brands advertise as well
How much can I make with a 10 yo account with average karma? Where can i sell it?
Web queries work best, first two results
https://www.playerup.com/accounts/redditaccount/
https://swapd.co/c/social-media/buy-sell-reddit/99
But look around and see a place that you feel comfortable with
Even ebay works
Huh, even the most “aged” and high-karma accounts seem to top out under $1k, average for a well-used account seems $300-500, and most for way less. Wonder how many sales are actually made.
A lot of the site feels like it’s been overrun by bots. The more niche communities seem to still be pretty good (and I do still enjoy engaging in them). But the subs like ask Reddit, Aita and the relationships one? Yea, it all feels like bs.
I stay away from any big subs now. The smaller stuff that tends to have 2 to 15 posts a day (like game specific subs) feel like they did before. Although I really feel a lot of those are going to discord as well.
Yea same. Now that you mention that, gaming really is one of the only reasons I’m on there anymore. Destiny for example, still has a pretty active sub. But to your point, the couple discord groups I’ve joined over the past couple years are way better.
If only the niche communities over here were a bit more active. For instance, I’ve been hyperfixating on Tamagotchi, but there isn’t a Tamagotchi community here yet :(
You should make one!
I’d like to, but I’ve never really run a community before and I need some pointers 😓
Create one, friend! It’ll start off slow, but it may build up.
for real!! im also currently fixated on tamagotchis and the tamagotchi sub is the only active community i could find, im pretty sure tamatalk has been dead for a while :[
remember when they banned bots on r/mademesmile or something and there were no posts anymore?
Wasn’t that just recently?
Wholesome memes, actually.
How could mods ban all the bots posing as human users?
I used to call out bots sometimes about 2-3 years ago and I can tell you it already was like this. The only difference is the addition of AI, but early bot networks just used Google translate back and forth to copy entire old posts without being noticed.
They often just copy highly upvoted answers to threads they deem as related
That’s true but those bot networks were easy to find with reverse search. There were different types of bots and the clever ones went under the radar easily.
A lot of them are using old, pre-AI tactics, too, going by the image.
The worst part is that they’re all really fucking bland questions. The shit you’d see on Facebook.
They’re engagement fodder designed to elicit human responses to provide a larger training dataset for future LLMs. That and to drive up Reddit usage and engagement numbers.
Some may have been copied directly from Facebook since most bot posts copy from ones humans have made before.
Askreddit was a scummy Karma farm already. This still sucks, though.
