If they were just talking about Reddit, I’d assume something dodgy was going on connected with the IPO. But Quora is supposedly back from the dead too… Am I missing something glaringly obvious here?
Removed by mod
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.
I must say I’ve seen in increase of conversations on Reddit that seem like everyone involved has severe lead poisoning.
Nah, it’s always been like that.
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?
Before I migrated the bots were doing quite well by taking old posts and rewording them into new ones. I only started tracking them when I noticed one posting about a months old event as if it had just happened.
For me, the cool part is that the vast majority of people can’t tell anything has changed.
Also, we can be rather poisonous ourselves.
Subs picked to be “mainstream” get botted to death and every other sub is half dead, so not really. Quality fell off a cliff.
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.
ewh google
Yes. Google is strongly favoring both in search results in their feeble, and failing, attempt to combat AI.
I wonder if there was some kind of technological revolution that made it exponentially easier to generate text that happened recently.
Good Post Theory
IPO padding for the CEOs golden parachute.
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 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, even if they didn’t change at all (and therefore get a lot more clicks).Google directly said a few months ago that they’re changing their algorithm to expose more Reddit content.
Source?
Google
The whole reason that Google exists today is that their PageRank algorithm was a great way to identify good content. At its basics, it worked by counting the number of pages that linked to a certain page. More incoming links meant the page was more useful. It didn’t matter how many relevant search terms you stuffed into your page. What matters was votes from other people, expressed in the form of linking to your page.
But, that algorithm failed for 2 reasons. One is that it became cheaper and easier to put up sites that linked to sites you wanted to promote. The other was that people stopped blogging on their own blogs, and stopped creating their own websites, and instead used walled gardens like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. That meant it was hard to measure links back to a site, and that it was easier to create fake links.
So, now it’s a constant war of SEO people vs. Google Search Quality people, and the Google people are losing. Sometimes there are brief victories for Google which result in good Reddit results appearing higher up. Then the SEO people catch up and either pollute Reddit and/or push Reddit links off the first page.
It would all be really depressing even if it weren’t for generative AI being used to pollute everything. With LLMs coming in and vomiting their content all over everything, we might be forced back to the bad old days of Yahoo where some individual human curated lists of good things 99% of content was invisible.
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?
So honest. So unbiased.
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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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?
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.
It feels much more filled out than after the initial exodus. Smaller/niche communities are pretty bare, though.
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.
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…
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’d like to hear that crapbook is going downhill, but its share price says otherwise
Stock price isn’t a representation of the current value of a company, it’s the projected value of a company down the line.
Its share price doesn’t matter in this context, since Meta also owns Instagram, which is absolutely not going downhill at the moment.
Facebook however is losing active users, especially in the younger age ranges and even more pronounced in Europe and the US.
They also own WhatsApp which has a massive user base outside of the US.
But it’s not really a cash cow. At least I don’t know of any widespread attempts at monetization (yet).
WhatsApp is monetized by selling your private data, same as.FB
Enron’s share price was very high right up until the end, too. Share price is not necessarily a good indicator of underlying fundamentals
seems sus to me
