cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/37870004
reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.
another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.
size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.
we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.
Even if you block the ads and ignore them the site is so heavily botted with these bots pushing all sorts of products.
One of the most useful aspects of reddit used to be getting other perspectives on products you were interested in. This is no longer useful because of the massive networks of bot farms. You simply can no longer tell what’s real on that site and what isn’t.
The accounts posting fake product reviews to promote products are usually not bots. They are either actual people from ad agencies/brands, posting as a part of the campaign and other people from the agency upvoting (sometime also using engagement farms).
I don’t know how much activity on reddit is bot driven, but logically it makes little sense to me to run bot campaigns there. Until 2020, reddit was quite small and insignificant in terms of how many people you could reach. And now, reddit has made their API increasingly more expensive, making it prohibitive for large scale bot posting. Even scraping data is hard and very expensive, let alone posting at scale.
There might be engagement farms and content farms mass posting, but that is manual, not bots, and happens on all social media platforms.
Yep it used to be you could hop on and get great guidance on products. Now you never know what’s real
apparently indian bot farms of BJP (modi) is very heavy in indian subs, maybe thats why we are seeing alot of indian content.
That and their banhappy atitude towards real users.
that’s an internet wide problem though.
I agree and it boils my blood. I have to calm myself by puffing on a smooth and mellow Marlboro Extra Deluxe Cigarette.