Now Reddit’s not just promoting ragebait and AI generated stories, but divisive conservative rhetoric. Anyone else notice the non-political subreddits spontaneously hosting a population of chuds and propagandists where a few weeks ago they weren’t tolerated?
Has reddit changed the algorithm? Has some nation begun its bot operation? Has reddit deployed bots at musk’s behest? Has twitter sent its worst users to brigade? (All of twitter’s users are its worst users) I don’t know, but the effect is striking. All I’m certain about is that I’m avoiding reddit even harder now.
This is the conclusion I came too. I left when they killed 3rd party API’s, now when I drop in to r/all it feels like 50% AI/propaganda. Posts linger for DAYS! Back in the 2010’s you’d be lucky to find anything from the top 25 in the top 100 the following day. In the last month when I’ve refreshed the page 24-48 hours later, the majority of posts are purple. It’s obvious the volume and quality of posters has fallen off a cliff.
…And now the r/Conservative echo chamber is regularly hitting the front page? What a fucking joke. I’m glad I left. It was certainly the right time. If I started using Reddit today, instead of 2009, I probably wouldn’t have gotten addicted at all. It’s such a shell of what it once was, Lemmy is already close to surpassing it.
Edit: Oh look, after weeks/months of reddit artificially promoting conservative threads to the front page — a sub which has remained an auth echo chamber of mentally ill narcissists for over a decade — is now doing “open threads” where they all act like they’re just your working class neighbors who want peace on earth, and to make the world better for everyone “but just don’t agree on how to get there” as though they don’t openly support fascism and authoritarianism every other day of the week. Pigboy has officially turned Reddit into yet another fascist propaganda machine, and safe space.