New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion
The Impact of Corporate Trolls on Reddit: A Growing Problem
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Lol. I guess it's hard to tell when you haven't seen the site change over time but.. yeah?
It uses to be "argumentless" discussions on esoteric tech and philosophy issues.. then a few years later it was people commenting the same 9 memes for 9,000 comments.. then a few years later suddenly everyone's anecdotes are praising China, or capitalism, or offhandedly mentioning some product or influencer.
Tbh tho, most of Reddit now just reads like Subreddit Simulator. All of the site's value regarding sincere, unique, and detailed user content.. yeah, that's gone. They're just coasting on past laurels, will be fun to watch the wheels fall off as the data stays locked in 2023, before the LLM Ouroboros.
A few very niche subs appear unaffected, but mostly the questions are all like someone shook a magic 8 ball and the same crap pops up over and over and over.
You know how your brain feels after being assaulted by a commercial? Reddit feels more like that now.
That's the part that people don't get and is intentionally hard to find numbers on. The entire appeal was on it not being an influencer centric space. The entire value was always at odds with monetizing that value beyond it's upkeep and paying the people (who apparently aren't that many) a reasonable salary. It is the worst growth case you could have ever had.
I watched it happen while drinking a refreshing Coca Cola. I've never felt so sad and refreshed at the same time.
Maybe they'll do a Behind the Bastards podcasts on the corporate influences that ruined the internet. I look forward to that listen while enjoying some delicious Cool Ranch Doritos.
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Yeah reddit totally respects deletion requests
Does deleting our old helpful comments only hurt our fellow web surfers?
The same thing that happened to Digg
Reddit is going to end up just being trolls arguing with bots and corporate shills... if it isn't already. I haven't been there in a long time, but I'm fairly confident in that assessment.
What i really wonder about is how long a site can profit off of the majority of activity coming from bots. I'm not tech savvy enough to know if the analytics can tell the difference between a bot posting and a person. How long can that go on before the site stops being profitable via ads? Will companies pay to advertise to bots? Would they even know? It's kinda funny to think about honestly.
It'll be really interesting to see how reddit's downfall comes to be though.
What's damning is how the most harmless subreddits is now full of astroturfing. Television subreddit? Suddenly the top article is praising some show you never heard of. Meme subreddit? Here's a meme about some music video or hot new product. Game subreddit? Here's some random cosplay girl that's only here to advertise her social media.
I don't remember who said it but there's a general rule that if your subreddit has over 500k subscribers, it's already full of bots and dying. Any mainstream sub is insanely astroturfed.
And don't get me fucking started on social media twitter accounts. HAHA GUYS CHECK OUT THIS FUNNY MEME SHARED BY #WENDY'S!!
then a few years later suddenly everyone's anecdotes are praising China, or capitalism, or offhandedly mentioning some product or influencer.
There used to be a satire sub called Church of the Current Thing that made fun of this phenomenon. It eventually got banned around 2022 thanks to a cohort of bad faith actors mass-filing dubious reports of subs they didn't like.
(I believe there was also a sub devoted to cataloging all such subs that got paved over in the name of le brand safetyTM, but it may have also gone the same way. I don't keep up with the place)
I mean you can see it happening here. How many cyber armies do you think are starting to pop up on Lemmy, from the US, from China, from Russia. How many corporate astroturfers do you think are coming on here, apple dicksuckers, etc. shit, mainstream media is trying to dip it's toes into federated spaces.
Edit: a word, added an -ing
Addendum: Do you guys think that defederation campaigns can be weaponized? Isolate and destroy type stuff? Creating bubbles that can be easily analyzed and manipulated?
They will certainly come here, but as a defederated website we don't have to defend against them with one approach, everyone can take a different approach, see what frustrates them the most, then mass adopt that. I see this as the ideal.. no idea how it will unfold in practice.