Asklemmy

Election is coming up, all Russian bots

They are probably paying clickfarms.

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.

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.

Only if you count bots lol

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

I wonder if there was some kind of technological revolution that made it exponentially easier to generate text that happened recently.

Subs picked to be "mainstream" get botted to death and every other sub is half dead, so not really. Quality fell off a cliff.

Simplest explanation is that the general public doesn't give a shit and while Facebook is on the downturn (not sure if numbers can back that up) people need to go somewhere else. Maybe that is reddit right now, they got the marketing and content to get people on it.

I cannot wait for reddit going public, it's going to generate so much drama, that's going to be soooo good.

Lemmy instances brace yourself

The article seems to suggest a change on the Google search algo and how Reddit pumps the SEO is to blame as it's showing up in search rankings above other more relevant results.

I'm assuming "traffic" here is individual page visits, which would shoot up if people are just pulling up one page from a "how do I do X" type of search. I doubt this boost is coming from people sticking around, but I'm sure that's not how Reddit will spin it.

Yes. Google is strongly favoring both in search results in their feeble, and failing, attempt to combat AI.

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.

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.

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?

IPO padding for the CEOs golden parachute.

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...

Part of it is either Reddit manipulating search positioning or Google (most people's default search) prioritizing Reddit results. Searching for answers to questions often results in a half page of Reddit links. They may not be relevant, but that doesn't become apparent until you're there.

The growth trend according to Google Trends indicates that it is still growing, but definitely not a quadrupling over 6 months.