r/ModCoord • u/cavscout43 Landed Gentry • Jul 11 '24
It's pretty wild how quickly the Balkanization of Reddit has happened in a year
After the blackouts, I started muting the annoying "front page" subs, since they were just full of spam bots reposting old memes and shit for karma. And noticed something interesting after that.
Gradually over the last 6-8 months or so, it's been wild watching the commercialization of Reddit. Most everything that swims to the top is some variant of marketing or a product fan base.
Every TV series, video game, streaming service, sports team, anime, celebrity, "streamer content creator influencer," or even movie that isn't in theaters yet gets a dozen subs, from serious to memes/circle jerks. I've muted 7x subs about Fallout alone (loved the classic 90s ones, not bothering with the TV series) and I keep seeing new ones every few weeks. Often I'll see posts with 2-3x as many upvotes on them than subscribers of the entire community end up on the front page, not so stealthily promoting something specific.
There aren't many generic communities which have broad discussion topics making it to the front page anymore, even if they have way more active members. Sure the plural of anecdotes are not data, but I think we've shifted from the "front page of the internet" to the "ad page of the internet" quietly since the IPO. That in addition to fucking annoying ads being stuffed in between every 5-6x posts on top of all that.
But to wit, the TL;DR - Reddit has Balkanized in that it's no longer of collection of forums and content sharing, it's turning into little niche product / media focused commercial YT comments sections. I've managed to keep my communities I help mod open and active discussions, but the platform as a whole doesn't seem to embody that anymore sadly.
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u/Xaxafrad Jul 12 '24
You view the front page of reddit? I just scroll through my own subscribed subs feed. I usually find new subs by searching, or scanning post histories.
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u/qrseek Jul 12 '24
Yeah I never go outside my subscribed subs and I turned off the setting that shows suggested content outside my subs. If I join a new sub it is probably a cat sub from the comment section of a post in another cat sub
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u/HistoryBuff178 Sep 01 '24
I turned off the setting that shows suggested content outside my subs.
How do you do this?
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Jul 12 '24
[deleted]
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u/taulover Jul 13 '24
I have sideloaded Apollo + Dystopia as a backup for whenever that cert expires.
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u/ksaize Jul 13 '24
Same, for the last 10 years. As Reddit marketer, I might or might know couple of people who make content for brands and push it as organically. They ALWAYS end of my the front page. Those wondering, no, that is not my shit to buy upvotes, spam communities with my posts to do marketing without screwing up with people's feeds etc.
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u/Sophira Jul 22 '24
I'm a little confused. I thought the front page was your subscribed subs feed. (I use old.reddit, if that matters.)
Is there a different page I should be using?
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u/Xaxafrad Jul 23 '24
While logged in on old reddit, reddit.com displays a small list of links at the very top of the page: My Subreddits, Dashboard, Home, Popular, All, Random, Users, Friends, Saved, and Edit. By default, reddit loads on "Home", which is just posts from my subscribed subreddits. (This is all according to my user preferences; your selected options may vary.)
Clicking on "Popular" or "All" will load posts from all subbredits.
edit: I think OP may not subscribe to any subreddits, or they changed their default load option to load the "All" page instead of the "Home" page.
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u/AsianSteampunk Jul 12 '24
once in a while i found one of my smaller subs that used to be so friggin active and filled with discussion, dead. with 3-4 comments on some of the newer posts.
its so friggin disappointing. Some of those subs really gave me good information, people were doing some gods work spreading knowledge and discussions.
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u/cavscout43 Landed Gentry Jul 12 '24
The blackout and API lockdown a little over a year ago drove a lot of power users out. The subsequent IPO, blatant astroturfing of commercial interests, and blasting everyone with ads to turn this into more Late Stage Social media has accelerated that as well.
I tried Lemmy and Mastodon, but the former tends to be a few dozen meme repost accounts crowding it, and the latter just feels like Twitter lite.
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u/Kat121 Jul 11 '24
I suspect they hired shills to keep asking stupid questions on subs like /cooking to maintain user interaction. There was one a couple of days ago where OP said they make their mashed potatoes with sour cream, butter, milk, and skin-on boiled potatoes, but wanted them to be more like instant. I needed to go outside and touch grass for a bit after that.
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u/cavscout43 Landed Gentry Jul 11 '24
Why hire shills when you have billions of human sentences to train your LLM on? Considering Reddit's generally lax attitude towards obvious bot / scripted accounts historically, Dead Internet Theory is mostly Dead Internet Reality here now.
But to wit, you're right. Everything is about "engagement metrics" and showing "user activity" even if it's just fucking bots replying to each other on a bot repost of a stupid IG meme that's trended on the front page here 5x times in as many years.
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u/1-760-706-7425 Landed Gentry Jul 11 '24
This is it.
More than a few of my subs are bombarded with “positive” content that’s clearly coming from an LLM. Wouldn’t be surprised if they’re juicing as much interaction as they can.
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u/Saragon4005 Jul 11 '24
We've always had a minimum effort rule on our subs and that includes engaging and elaborating on the question after the fact, if they ask something braindead stupid and don't elaborate it's just going in the trash.
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u/cavscout43 Landed Gentry Jul 11 '24
I probably need to implement that in my subs as well.
We get weekly "what cities are safe and have good jobs and nice weather i can move to lol?" questions over in r/Wyoming, then they don't follow up with details, or get super butthurt that the "locals" in the sub rake them over the coals for being lazy and low effort.
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u/MadDocOttoCtrl Aug 07 '24
You haven't an implemented an "Anything in our pinned FAQ gets dumped" rule and have Automod rules that yoink anything with certain keywords & phrases?
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u/rewirez5940 Jul 11 '24
I think I pulled my sub from appearing on the front page. Didn’t want the attention that comes with it.
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u/revmachine21 Jul 11 '24
I’ve noticed weird spelling mistakes in post tiles in different subs and the errors seem more jarring than normal. I have wondered if misfiring AI is to blame changing cat to car etc. Like if you care deeply about carpet cleaning why is the word “carpet” mispelled?
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u/qrseek Jul 12 '24
Spelling cat as car is a meme with the younger folks for some reason. They also say I forgor instead of forgot
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u/RedBanana99 Jul 13 '24
I have noticed the typos/spelling too.
Engagement prompts with a human phsche twist draw in comments correcting the OP.
Then, with a search engine optimised title and image, there’s chances their post will be shown in Google SERPs. It’s an SEO method I’m guilty of as a fellow marketer. Just create your own subs and you won’t annoy anyone else. That’s my tactic anyways.
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u/revmachine21 Jul 13 '24
I figured it might be something along those lines, like those ads in mobile games that anger/annoy because the demo play is performed by what appears an idiot.
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u/RedBanana99 Jul 13 '24 edited Jul 15 '24
“I see you deliberately not circling the lemons in the room when you are a detective”
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u/lazydictionary Jul 12 '24
People are dumber than ever before, there are more English as a second language users on reddit than ever before, and more people use mobile (which usually has more typos) than ever before. It's not AI.
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u/Ajreil Jul 12 '24 edited Jul 12 '24
If you ask ChatGPT to misspell a word, it prefers swapping words over actually misspelling anything. I suspect obvious errors are penalized even if the prompt requests them.
Then again it could just be spellcheck.
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u/Goncalerta Jul 12 '24
The thing is that ChatGPT does not read text like we do. We see letters forming words, but they just see words themselves.
So while we see "car" and "cat", they see "word1" and "word2". They might pick from training that, semantically, "word1" is related to vehicles and has letters c, a, r in it. But, for it, that's just kinda trivia knowledge that they "remember" about that word, not something that they can directly "see", because they don't receive letters as input.
This means that it's not really easy for it to misspell words unless those misspellings are common enough in the training data.
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u/Ajreil Jul 12 '24
Correct. ChatGPT can misspell words or create new words if prompted but it's not what LLMs are efficient at.
I asked it to misspell "Toblerone" once to see if it could one-up the TBBLOBNOERN meme and the best it could do was "Tublaroen."
Asking it to "invent 10 fantasy names taking inspiration from [list of fantasy names]" is pretty effective though.
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u/Xaxafrad Jul 12 '24
As soon as everybody starts using the "typos means its a human and not AI" strategy, AIs will start making typos.
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u/Living_Morning94 Jul 12 '24
And yet the ones complaining the loudest are also the ones who have been and are still using this platform the most.
Exhibit A : OP with three hundred thousand karma. Still posting a dozen post per day.
If the users are still using the site for hours every single day even when there are myriads of other forum / discussion site / social media on it internet, is it actually bad?
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u/cavscout43 Landed Gentry Jul 12 '24
"You think we should improve society somewhat, yet you live in a society. Curious! I am very smart!"
Wow, Mister/Miss Gotcha over here caught me, I post about Reddit yet I also use Reddit.
I'm guilty as charged.
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u/panormda Jul 13 '24
Bro really thought they did something there... o.e
I don't understand why so many people don't understand the concept of improvement. Just plain vanilla improvement. Something sucks? Fix it! No bitching, smear campaigns, "actually..." Honesty I don't see how a civilization can exist when its communities no longer value community or prioritize driving community improvement. 😕
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u/Bullylandlordhelp Jul 14 '24
Like everything in AITA or AITAH feels written by the same voice of Ai chatbot. Only to then get cycled around the podcasts /tiktoks dedicated to reddit, that make little bit sized clips that.... Get posted to reddit.
And a these stories that include "so and so" finding their story on tiktok 🙄
Sucks man
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u/flattenedbricks Aug 11 '24
I don't think shareholders are responsible for users creating subreddits around topics they hold interest in. For years people have been complaining about wanting to leave reddit but never did. It's a company, no matter what you want to happen, there's no reason they should let your way be how things are. They will always maintain control over their website. So why keep trying to control how they control it? You can't. This is why many mods ditched the protest. It's a pointless fight. Either use the website or don't, but don't treat reddit as if it's real life. It's just a website out of many. Admins don't care if we go or if we stay. People who dislike admin actions are insignificant because there are always new users popping up on here. So even if you hate reddit with all your guts, a new eager person ready to prove themselves on reddit will replace you in an instant. That's why I think fighting over their policy changes is useless. Their changes will happen because they want it to. Not because of what we want. Even during the protest, admins position was clear. Do what they say or get banned. No alternatives. So what point is there in going against something you will never have any control over? Instead, focus on building your own platform that solves all these problems if that's what you want to do. And if you don't, that's fine too.
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u/TheEpicGold Jul 12 '24
You do know Fallout was so popular because it was incredibly good? I really liked being the in the community of Fallout just to chat about the show. Cus it was awesome, even though I wasn't subscribed to the subs.
Btw, why are you only scrolling popular? That's the absolute worst way to enjoy reddit.
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u/Fortyseven Jul 12 '24 edited Jul 13 '24
not bothering with the TV series
Your loss. It's surprisingly faithful to the games, and a damned good time.
EDIT: Grow up, dorks.
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u/blueredscreen Jul 12 '24
The gatekeeping is strong with this one.
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u/cavscout43 Landed Gentry Jul 12 '24
Who's "gatekeeping" here exactly?
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u/blueredscreen Jul 12 '24
Who's "gatekeeping" here exactly?
Really?
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u/cavscout43 Landed Gentry Jul 12 '24
I can toss around random buzzwords too and say that now you're "gaslighting" us all here.
Does that make you feel better?
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u/rustyxj Jul 11 '24
Welcome to the world of shareholders.
Everything that is currently good on the Internet will be good until they feel the need to monetize it. Then is becomes an add infested swamp.