From SEO perspective, user generated content like Quora and Reddit are dominant the Google search result right now. It's in the top ten of the results while it's just in 30-50th before, I guess it adds up
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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IPO padding for the CEOs golden parachute.
I wonder if there was some kind of technological revolution that made it exponentially easier to generate text that happened recently.
Good Post Theory
Yes. Google is strongly favoring both in search results in their feeble, and failing, attempt to combat AI.
Only if you count bots lol
I had my Reddit very heavily curated, my subs were mostly smaller subreddits. I was incredibly active and had my settings so that anything I voted on would not appear on my homepage. I got to see a ton of posts because of that.
Around 2021, I started noticing that reposts weren't just people coming in and posting things we've seen a dozen times because they had no way to know it was a repost. It was bot networks that would take top posts and then other bot accounts would recreate the original post's comment section. The accounts followed patterns and became really obvious to spot after a while.
The original tells were the bots taking really specific posts that only made sense in that context. Popular post from last Christmas? The bot doesn't know what Christmas is, sees a popular post from a few months ago and reposts someone happy about their gifts in August. Look at this beautiful picture I took of the summer Alaskan wilderness this morning but it's February. The photography subreddits were obvious because the bots would rotate the picture a few degrees which would sometimes ruin the picture's aesthetic.
I'm not sure if it was just me spotting them easier or if they were really ramping up into 2022 but by the time they killed API access and I stopped using it, I think over 80% of posts were bots. Made leaving the site way easier.
Yeah, repost bots were out of control and places like freekarma4u helped them propagate for years with no interference from reddit. Would've been simple to shut that down if they were really worried about stopping bots but instead they ignored numerous reports, allowing the bots to run rampant.
Yeah this isn't Reddit but more than 80% (>4/5) of Twitter is bots. It's to the point where you can find any blue checkmark account, reply to them with a prompt, and more likely than not they'll have a wacky and clearly autogenerated response. Sometimes they just reply things like "sorry, I can't generate content that depicts violence" to random posts too.
Dead internet theory is almost a reality and I hate it. It's already happened to Google search results / blogs.
Almost? It’s been a thing for awhile. Shit, Reddit got started by using bots to feign engagement. It’s just that it’s gotten so much easier and faster
Like Lemmy. Full with cross posting bots.
cross posting bots are a lot less problematic to me than bots designed to mimic human engagement to said cross posts
Bots are a fact of life, unfortunately.
Almost 50% of all internet traffic is bots.
Not even close if we're talking about current users or active contributers. After they shut down third party apps and sided with advertisers over mods there was a huge migration off platform to several other platforms. Many smaller subreddits are ghost towns and the biggest ones that are still active have a smaller participating community, less total votes, and changing norms.
It's not just eternal September, it's the same thing that happened when digg died in reverse where communities grew and changed because people were joining. Users are adding site:reddit.com or whatever to Google searches because of SEO general searches are an advertising dumpster fire, but those search results are going to degrade over time along with the site's quality if they continue to make such shitty decisions for communities and users or people move to other ai based search tools.
Where did everyone go? I thought Lemmy was the new hangout but it still seems so small, even popular posts are only getting a handful of comments?
It feels much more filled out than after the initial exodus. Smaller/niche communities are pretty bare, though.
tiktok? ffffff
For me, Lemmy content is better in every way, EXCEPT for local subs / communities. I really miss my well populated, engaged local subs.
I think its that many people didnt really leave reddit, some migrated to lemmy, some to discord, some to other small sites, and some just quit that style of website.
Lemmy definitely is still pretty small, but i think its growing pretty well (i remember checking it out years ago and it being a super tiny niche site). It takes time for things to set up & for users to get comfortable and grow communities they care about. Organic growth is slow.
Well, the federation kinda spreads users out. Like I can’t login to kbin on my Lemmy apps but I can see kbin posts, but the vast majority of my time is on lemmy. IOW it’s harder to participate across instances so less people.
There are other platforms that are probably suffering some form of the same fate, they got an influx of ex-redditors, but not a high enough volume to really take off and get high participation rates.
I dunno, I prefer Lemmy/fediverse. The churn isn’t there so you can actually interact with people instead of competing with inane reddit quips and top comment retreads.
I think I've comment this before but over the pandemic years I did a little experiment. Every day I bookmarked the obvious content reposting bot accounts on the first few pages of r/all. After a while I checked back on the accounts. The majority of them become cryptocurrency spam bots. A very small percentage spam random things. There was an extremely high success rate of picking out the bot accounts. Pretty much all them were except for maybe a handful.
spez is basically exit scamming with reddit. Whoever is buying the dataset is getting robbed blind. That's if reddit inc isn't being upfront behind closed doors. Maybe they are. After all reddit does have well over a decade of mostly organic activity. The recent data has to be absolute trash though.
It isn't like you can't otherwise get the older data if you really want though, pretty sure it's on torrents. The newer stuff is all they have to sell.
Google wants the data to be exclusively licensed, so they can pursue any competing LLMs and sue them to death - I mean, develop a 'moat'
It's not really about the actual data access
I don't buy that, given
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All the effort Reddit has put into locking down data access
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Google itself was behind the lawsuit establishing fair use for scraped datasets, and it's looking likely that will be upheld
Would be happy to hear it if there's reasons I'm not aware of that this is the intention though
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