Reddit Meta

It's most obvious when you look at NSFW accounts that are clearly ran by agencies, but even more obvious when you see the muted reaction to this kind of behavior. Reddit used to be a place where any attempt at defrauding or fooling the community would be met with immense hostility, but I've seen comments on large threads get "called out" for using ChatGPT, and people will openly admit to it and defend it by saying it's still representative of their thoughts. That may be true, but between the capitalists interests of marketers on Reddit, karma-farmers, and political astroturfing, I think most of Reddit is already bots and bot-curated content. You could have made this same claim in 2015 and been correct, but I think it's even worse now.

I remember Redditors complaining about always seeing the same lazy comments before the AI revolution. I'm not saying those are fakes. The realest thing a Redditor can do is parrot lazy jokes. What I am saying is that it would be incredibly easy to create bots that regurgitate the same unoriginal jokes, comments, and posts, and the closer you look at the content that makes it to the top, and the content that entirely flops, you come to realize just how massive of an issue it is.

I saw a post on a small subreddit recently that didn't match the subreddits theme at ALL, yet had five times the amount of upvotes of the next highest post. This is accomplished very easily, and unethically, so I won't spread that here, but that raised a lot of red flags. Mathematically, it doesn't even make sense to push irrelevant content so excessively, as this kind of manipulation should incur some kind of cost. That means that the people behind it have it down to such a science, that they're able to waste an inordinate amount of money doing it--, or already have cheap alternatives. The problem is, in the case of this post, it's so obviously a bot account that it's even more alarming that it's making it past thousands of users and moderators. I think there's just too much spam to filter through. Whereas most Reddit accounts, when investigated, seemed normal, with a passion here, a disagreement there, a personal story that matches up with another 3 months apart, now most Reddit accounts are inherently sus. People have been questioning what power users get out of maintaining a subreddit of cat gifs for years as if it were there job for a long time, and the simple answer is that it IS their job. I'm just wondering what percent of Reddit are bots/businesses versus actual users in 2024. It's the freshest business platform in social media, and believe it or not, Reddit still hasn't hit it's mainstream capacity. Just wait until 2025 when we start seeing ads for parental controls on Reddit.

Anyway, that's it from me guys. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Next time we'll discuss DickButt: The man, the butt, the legend. Where is he now?

I'm mainly referring to the app because I use old-school mode on desktop. I continually see things that irk me and get under my skin, and I'm invariably drawn to click them and sometimes even leave a thorny comment due to my exasperation at the content. Obviously, this is a me problem partly. I'm perhaps weak-willed and easily influenced by negativity, but it's not entirely my fault...

The Reddit app seems to do what virtually all social media services do now in that it specifically shows me things it knows will annoy me. And you might say, 'well just unsubscribe from those subreddits then', but that's not the point. For example, there are many subreddits I'm subscribed to that invite open-ended discussions, such as , but as I'm scrolling through the app I'll only see a hyper-specific post from about 21 hours ago that befits something I've had a grievance with in the past, or that is simply controversial. It'll almost always be a post with a negative like/dislike ratio, and somehow that's arising on my front page...

It's obviously some kind of algorithmic selective bias. Of course, the upside is I'm sometimes shown things of interest to me, but the powers at be know I inexorably gravitate to that which peeves me as well, and it's infuriating. I know I should use Reddit (and social media in general) less, but I work in marketing and it's hard to disentangle from it. Every day I see some post that's just monumentally stupid, immature, incel-based or attention-seeking. I know the responses will be telling me to ignore it but it puts me in a bad mood. I used to use Reddit to escape the derangement of other sites but now it's arguably worse.

Does anyone else experience this? Or do I need to go touch some grass?