As someone who still semi-frequents reddit, it's mostly bots, more and more of which are clearly using some form of ChatGPT or another LLM. It's actually kinda absurd, I've seen many a comment chains where it's just different bots replying to each other, both pretending to be real people.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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If bots actually do start frequenting Reddit, and they get hard to detect, the AI content generation will start poisoning itself. Isn't that cool?
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Subs picked to be "mainstream" get botted to death and every other sub is half dead, so not really. Quality fell off a cliff.
Fuck me, I'm not even using Google directly, I'm currently on MetaGer which is a meta search engine, and even there, I got annoyed today already that half the top links were shitty Reddit links.
I hate this shit so much. I work as a Software Engineer, so using web search was half our work day a few years back.
Personally, I'm thankfully already at a point where I can figure out most things by fucking around. But we have an intern who's new to the job and she regularly tells me that she struggles to find anything useful on the rather mainstream technologies that we're using.
To some degree, LLMs are still a workaround for that, but they won't be able to update to newer information without pulling in LLM spam, so either we're stuck with the current technologies for the foreseeable future or we won't have a way of finding anything in a few years.
And the worst part is that I can't think of a real solution. Maybe we could use a search engine, which only queries official documentation directly. That could be an improvement, as often not even that shows up in the normal search results. But really, what our intern needs is tutorials and those are virtually indistinguishable from LLM spam...
Official documentation can, sadly, only contain so much information. Lots of tools are community driven and there are some niche uses of libraries that official docs don't know about, or including them would just take up space.
Yeah, for sure. I'm mostly saying that she sometimes struggled to even just find an appropriate Hello World example, to the point where she would ask me for help after a while.
Then I, having already gotten used to the terrible search engine results, opened the official documentation directly and had it after a handful of clicks.
Obviously, she understood pretty quickly, but the official documentation doesn't always have a built-in search and can be difficult to navigate, so that's why I'm saying even just a search engine for that could be good...
Ai generated content
Bots all the way down
It's sort of become a bit of a meme to end every google question with 'reddit' to trick it into showing you an actual human response. I'm sure that's been good for traffic
Iβve had to start limiting the date to pre-2023 to keep ai bs out of the results
That's an excellent tip! I draw occasionally and finding references for animals is so much worse than it used to be.
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Taking a cursory look I feel like posts still aren't being engaged with like they used to. I remember seeing posts with 100,000 upvotes very regularly on the front page, but you really don't see that anymore. Yeah maybe they tweaked their calculations but why make your site look like it's not as engaging as before right before a major IPO offer?
bots?
Google has massive swing; there's a whole industry around getting Google to prefer your low quality crap nobody wants to see over others' low quality crap nobody wants to see.
If Google has finally figured out a metric to measure "helpfulness" of a website and punishes unhelpful websites, a bunch of dogshit that would have otherwise gotten top spots may have been banished to page 2.
Reddit results would naturally creep up because of that (and therefore get a lot more clicks), even if they didn't change at all.
I actually have noticed a lot more Reddit in my search results recently.
Didn't Reddit signpost that they'd signed a deal with Google over AI? Is Google driving visitors to Reddit in exchange and to their benefit?
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