Technology

I think one has to gather more proof before concluding that the gap is due to LLMs. It can also be that the engagement was lost due to third party app drop. We don't have stats to distinguish them.

Reddit has been trying hard for years to move beyond being a discussion forum to another mindless scroling app.

The reason is because in the time people read one discussion thread they only see one ad, but scrolling memes, etc they will see many more. It makes the ads much more valuable.

Im not surprised by how quick it dies, base solely on the bad attitude of Spez.

Reddit is so useless. I write occasionally, and whenever I hit a wall researching a character's background, everyone tells me, "ask on Reddit!"

I stopped asking on Reddit five years ago, because I can't get any feedback besides a handful teenagers making wild guesses. Thank you for trying, kids. I guess.

To be honest, it feels much more likely to see posts on the Fediverse with many upvotes, few or no comments

Damn I didn't realize how artificial it is now. I remember before the protests I can feel the entire platform reposting stuff over and over with the same content. Pretty much the only good subs are the small niche subs, but those large ones are atrocious.

In addition to factors already mentioned by other users, I believe that there are also social/cultural reasons for that lack of engagement.

Commenting in Reddit is like stepping on a mine field - no matter how innocuous your comments are, you're bound to have users there assuming words into your mouth to screech at you. Plus all the "ackshyually", one-upping, "wah TL;DR!" (i.e. "I'm entitled to an abridged version of what you said, even if you likely spent far more time writing your comment than I would reading it").

Eventually you say "why bother commenting? Just to get a headache?" and stop commenting altogether.

IIRC they changed the way they calculate the scores a few years ago, which generally increased the numbers you saw.

I think this disparity in votes and comments is also hugely affected by how the UI has been changing over the years as well as the destruction of third party apps. The site is now designed in a way where active participation is less encouraged than ever before unless you’re running old reddit on a traditional computer with an ad blocker.

Reddit is ded, and for good reasons

Just wait till the advertisers find out the eyeballs they are paying for are also just AI sock puppets. Enshitification strikes again.

I’d say in about 2 years, the entire place is going to be bots with AI generated content that try to mimic “real users” using their new Dynamic Product Ads tool

Yeah, it's just partially like that now lol. A few weeks ago there was a side-by-side reddit screenshot post on Lemmy. It showed the exact same reddit post, with the exact same tens of comments (all word for word, some in response to each other iirc), from different accounts less than a year apart. 100% fabrication. I'd never seen such extensive bot-masquerading as people behaviour; it was a realization moment for me

Reddit is a PsyOp

We can still find engagement in small niche subs on Reddit. We've known, for many years, that people were going to move away from large corporate-controlled sites such as Reddit, Twitter etc..

The Fediverse is addressing this. It isn't a panacea. However, it is a re-imagining of what we want the Internet to be.

There are many others, that will come along after us, to address this further.

As I've heard someone say last year: "I wish Reddit a happy Digg.com"