Yeah, caption misses the fact that you can be easily banned for simply interacting with such bot in comments in any way against the bot.
Reddit is bots talking to bots
Reddit is admin bots banning real people for messing with other bots.
And the humans that do reside there have the same opinions as the bots
Congrats for the moderator of /r/Jailbait for becoming a billionaire! /s
Oh god, I had forgotten about that…
Note to self: If the Epstein files ever come out, search for Steve Huffman in them.
Is reddit dead yet?
Sadly, but no. From good news we only have increased amounts of bad reviews online and in app stores like Play Market.
Its spirit is dead, but its corpse lingers on.
Idk people used my reddit post trails to be creepy little bitches back in the day.
Eh. If a webcrawer took a snapshot, they could just be indexed anyways. Its false sense of security.
Just like upvote/downvotes on Lemmy. Btw its all public lemvotes.org
A post made on a public forum is public information. I’ve used post history to figure out if someone was serious vs telling a joke that fell flat or for weird patterns.
But then how would you check if someone is a disingenuous troll, or a hypocrite, etc, it’s the usual privacy vs open information trade off
The only thing on the UX manager’s mind, when considering this decision, was “engagement.”
Nothing else is even in their same universe.
Bots only upvote their own bot circle or content which makes their owners $$$$.
Real human concerns will only be heard if they align with $$$$.
We are remaking the whole world for bots.
Most of Reddit was bots interacting with bots a while ago already.
The site makes most of its money selling ads. The value of that ad space is based on user metrics.
Many users are now fake. They are actively hiding this fact.
Apropos of nothing, the company has a $34 billion market cap.
Why is anyone paying for adverts that no one will see though? Surely adverts only have value if it brings in sales.
Would be amusing to see the entire advertising market crash tbh.
It’s extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of online ads and most companies have an incentive to inflate their numbers since they’re sold as a certain number of views/impressions.
Advertising is a scam for both those who buy it and the intended audience.
At the end of the day views/impressions don’t matter, people actually buying the thing is what matters. If no one is buying you can have a billion views and impressions but it wouldn’t even be worth £5. So then advertising companies would struggle to find buyers if buyers quickly see it isn’t worth it.
The point being made is that the big corps advertising have an exceedingly hard time measuring whether ad buys resulted in sales, and especially which ad buys resulted in sales.
Buyers don’t see that it isn’t worth it, they can only guess.
You think that in 2025 companies with large media budgets are buying digital ads and just saying “well fuck it maybe we’ll make money on it”?
They track EVERYTHING. From the impression to the click tot he purchase, and there are trackers and attribution platforms by the hundreds out there to help them understand what the ROI they’re receiving on those ads are.
Companies are buying ads because people are buying products.
Even if the site is 90% bots there are enough real people using the site to make buying ads profitable.
I suspect part of the reason for bots is to keep people on the platform. But if people start to realise which is probably going to become more likely as the number of bots rises and quality drops, then real people would start to leave or lose interest.
Could be short term engagement at the risk of long term platform health?
I’d imagine that’s exactly what’s happening.
Whether it plays out with people leaving remains to be seen. It’s become such a busted out shell of its former self, I can’t stand it anymore, but plenty of people almost certainly feel differently.
The amount of money bot views bring in shows that yes, they are just yoloing buying ad space.
Yeah.
To misquote a paper, “attention is all you need.” It’s like the motto of the 2020s.
From your lips to god’s ears
This timeline had been more “from God’s ass to our mouths.”
From your foot to god’s dick
If you then train new bots on the generated content, the models will degrade yes?
If you look a lot of new posts, they are actually highly upvoted old posts. So bots probably stay the same.
The bots know what is bot content and what is not.
Actual users don’t.The bots know what is bot content and what is not.
Probably not. It’s way easier to generate bot content than to detect it. Unless they’re coming from the same group, but I find this unlikely.
Absolutely horrid feature. Supposedly it’s to protect vulnerable people’s privacy if they post in certain communities, but if they truly wanted that to be how it’s used, they’d have limited the ability to apply the feature only to subreddits where mods have specifically coordinated with the admins to get approved as places where vulnerable people are posting. Or, and here’s a shocker, they could just rely on the tried-and-tested method of using alt accounts. Instead, bots and trolls just hide their entire post history from people.
Now, supposedly, mods can see the full, unhidden history of any user who has recently posted in their subreddits. Which is good. But the number of other good-faith users being obstructed by this change is huge. It’s overall a massive failure from Reddit.
only to subreddits where mods have specifically coordinated with the admins to get approved as places where vulnerable people are posting
I don’t believe subreddits like r/otherkin or r/NPD would be able to get that approval, despite being support spaces for vulnerable people who wouldn’t necessarily want to be outed.
Besides, you can still see their post history simply by searching
"u/username" site:reddit.comIt gives people a false sense of security
I need to remember that
Yeah, but it’s an extra step many won’t take.
If someone had a dedicated stalker, that stalker would definitely take extra steps to keep going.
Yeah, won’t keep away the stalkers, but will keep away the regular people.
I see it a lot with AskReddit, surveying (or possibly influencing) how people feel when something happened in the news. Those posts get bumped to the front page.
Reddit did WHAT?
huge number of people who make controversial statements (particularly those who are pro-russia) have their profiles set to hidden so you can’t see what else they have posted
That is very much the first people I would expect making use of that feature, yes.
I use it, just because some people’s first reaction in an argument is to look you up. While if you hide it then googling you takes longer and is not ordered properly. Hell a while back I replied to someone about my opinion on something and the first thing he said is “a guy who’s into x hobby can’t seriously have valid opinions”. So yes, since then, my profile is private.
Then you’re not one of the bad actors I’m concerned about. The problem with this change is that there’s no way for other people to tell the difference. If I have suspicions about the motivations of the person (assuming they are a person) I’m interacting with, and I cannot disprove those suspicious to my own satisfaction, that leaves me with two rational options: 1) Blind faith, which in an anonymous Internet context is particularly unjustifiable, or 2) To assume bad faith and act accordingly.
This has some really unfortunate consequences.
Huh. How hard is it to make a browser extension that automatically down votes posts by any such person? Asking for people who might still be on there.
Probably easy. However, anyone using such extension would be banned for voting manipulation. YMMV on how justified the later is.
honestly people just need to stop using the site.
Yeah, but what constitutes vote manipulation is an issue that pops up here, too. I bet most instances would ban someone acting like this, too.
Mfw putting “author:username” into the Reddit search bypasses this
for now
Which is the worst of two worlds, because now most people will still not be able to verify other account’s credibility, however people with bad intentions - who are usually more prepared - will still be able to continue their activities.
Now imagine you’re a fragile person who’s really paranoid about their internet activity. This is obviously a good change for them, so they click it. One day, someone decides to use this backdoor to bully that person by insulting them under multiple posts and comments that were meant not to be traceable. I can only imagine the consequences.
If you want to be anonymous on the internet you can’t rely on some website to protect you.I get your point but people need to really start learning the reality of the internet again.
This is an example of social darwinism. That doesn’t mean I don’t agree with this idea, it’s just that I don’t agree that it is viable to expect it from everyone.
Companies must be forced to care about peoples’ security and privacy. Actively fighting against bots infestation would be a part of that.
Public stalking-enabling was always the worst aspect of reddit. That it helps bots is incidental to how good it is for user privacy.
As others highlighted:
This only helps the bots. It’s useless against stalking, since you can still find a list of the person’s post/comments by searching their username in Google or even Reddit itself. And a stalker, unlike someone trying to denounce bots, will do it.
If anything this harms users. A false sense of security is worse than accurately feeling unsafe.
And the motivation for that is clearly to hide the bots. Bots give you metrics. Metrics give you ad views. Ad views give you money.
There used to be a site called Reddit, where you were your post history. Now that site is dead - the URL still works, I guess, but it links to some weird Twitter with an alien logo.
That’s the best description of reddit I’ve ever seen both past and present, and you’ve completely bypassed all of the usual sayings about reddit in the process. I applaud you! Now where’s that Lemmy gold thing…
On a side note, an actual financial implementation of Lemmy gold would probably be a really good feature to drive donations to hosts. I’d imagine the implementation as the user donates to their host and receives a configurable amount of gold to give as a reward for donating. That gold is entirely tracked by the instance their account is on, then when they gift gold to a user the receiving instance just receives notice that gold was given, similar to an upvote. Then to filter for bad actors instance admins can whitelist/blacklist instances from giving gold to their instance, and probably also make it possible to see which instances a user’s gifted gold came from as a layer of transparency to help spot bad faith instances that give free gold or too much gold or whatever.
I could also see an extension where a portion of the gold’s value is transmitted to the recipient via cryptocurrency (about the only thing cryptocurrency is actually good at, peer to peer online transactions) but that has way too much opportunity for abuse. Maybe that can be done manually by admins to help ensure a fair dispersal of gold funds? Still overcomplicating and introduces a ton of opportunity for abuse though
I’m not sure if gold would be a good fit for the Fediverse forums. As problematic as the voting system is, tying visibility to popularity is less worse than tying it to money spent.
Instead I think the current approach (donations) should be improved. I expect the same type of people who’d buy gold to finance their instances to be OK with donations, as long as they know it’ll be well used.
People able to pay money, to have their voice louder than the rest, is one of the many current plagues throughout our societies right now. I don’t think gold or awards would be good at all for the fediverse. Please dear satan, no
Wait, hold on, slow down. Are you telling me there are bots on Reddit?
Transcription
4chan greentext post with a photo of a robot with its mouth open wide in surprise, wearing glasses and an orange singlet with the Reddit logo on it:
>be me bored redditor
>click on obvious bot account using ChatGPT
>want to check post history for confirmation
>“this user has no posts”
>wtf.jpg
>realize reddit added an option to make post history invisible
>bots now basically untraceable
>reddit “accidentally” made it harder to tell real users from bots
>engagement numbers go up nobody questions it
