this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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[–] jasep@lemmy.world 264 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Used Reddit for years. There's no way the percentage is that low.

[–] JeromeVancouver@lemmy.ca 143 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That is probably correct. 15% of total content, but probably 70% of the content you see. Reddit has a tonne of content posted that almost nobody sees

[–] DacoTaco@lemmy.world 47 points 5 months ago

15% of content and then fake upvoted to heaven. Could work

[–] niktemadur@lemmy.world 37 points 5 months ago (2 children)

A chronic compulsive content-stealer creature like gallowboob might have encompassed that 15% all by himself.

[–] vaquedoso@lemmy.world 17 points 5 months ago (4 children)

We have our own version of him here on lemmy as well

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[–] vxx@lemmy.world 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

You don't need much content or many comments to achieve the goal, when you have thousands of votes behind it for the good placement.

You may only need a couple hundred though. Reddit's algorithm is particularly broken and once a post is on hot it's unstoppabe.

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[–] stembolts@programming.dev 144 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (8 children)

Lol. I guess it's hard to tell when you haven't seen the site change over time but.. yeah?

It uses to be "argumentless" discussions on esoteric tech and philosophy issues.. then a few years later it was people commenting the same 9 memes for 9,000 comments.. then a few years later suddenly everyone's anecdotes are praising China, or capitalism, or offhandedly mentioning some product or influencer.

Tbh tho, most of Reddit now just reads like Subreddit Simulator. All of the site's value regarding sincere, unique, and detailed user content.. yeah, that's gone. They're just coasting on past laurels, will be fun to watch the wheels fall off as the data stays locked in 2023, before the LLM Ouroboros.

[–] zephorah@lemm.ee 48 points 5 months ago (1 children)

A few very niche subs appear unaffected, but mostly the questions are all like someone shook a magic 8 ball and the same crap pops up over and over and over.

You know how your brain feels after being assaulted by a commercial? Reddit feels more like that now.

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 16 points 5 months ago

That's the part that people don't get and is intentionally hard to find numbers on. The entire appeal was on it not being an influencer centric space. The entire value was always at odds with monetizing that value beyond it's upkeep and paying the people (who apparently aren't that many) a reasonable salary. It is the worst growth case you could have ever had.

[–] TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 42 points 5 months ago (6 children)

I watched it happen while drinking a refreshing Coca Cola. I've never felt so sad and refreshed at the same time.

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[–] Zehzin@lemmy.world 132 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Lemmy wouldn't have that problem because we're all too busy enjoying an ice cold Coca-Cola.

[–] Hupf@feddit.de 54 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Please drink verification can now.

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[–] HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world 22 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Omg the amount of sneaky coke ads I saw on that site was insane

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[–] nl4real@lemmy.world 89 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Dead internet here we come!

[–] archchan@lemmy.ml 48 points 5 months ago (12 children)

Makes me miss the wild west days of the internet. Everything felt more... human. Now it feels like a soulless corporate husk. It's wild that covid babies won't know what those days were like.

[–] Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 32 points 5 months ago (9 children)

Agreed, but Lemmy feels like the old Internet for the most part. I suspect that 90% ish of comments here are actual humans. The remaining 10% is pushing some kind of agenda.

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[–] nilzen@lemmy.world 61 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

those are some low numbers. between corporate, state, and anonymous shills and trolls, I wholly believe at least 50% of all reddit content is paid for or manipulative for agenda based groups. the sheer number of repetitve posts with repetitve comments constantly being on the front page is pure propaganda. Of course I rmemebr back in the old days when the reddit feed was in (almost) real time where you couldliterally wait every 10 minutes and refresh for an almost completely new front page. Now it's all about repetivie agendas and narratives operating in cycles to manipulate public opinions. the same lame post will sit on the front page for entire days.

[–] Aolley@lemmy.world 18 points 5 months ago

I'd say there is a huge amount of bots, then the smart bots, then the actual shills. The smarter ones run complex operations and are able to use their own power to self propel their own stories. And there are a lot of similar 'power users' who are not wholly paid for by someone but would do work for the highest bidder. I'd bet that yes, 50% of what's on the front page of major things is reputation management or Hail Corporate stuff, then I'd wager the mostly less popular stuff is actual people, with a ton of bad posts from all sides at the low popularity

[–] egeres@lemmy.world 56 points 5 months ago (4 children)

I've said this before, but we also need to be cautious about this on lemmy and devise ways to empower mods and the community to fight back against this, I'm not entirely sure how since it's a very complex problem

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 37 points 5 months ago (4 children)

I am convinced this is already happening. One example is the endless new accounts posting ibtimes links.

There are also propoganda websites posted regularly by new accounts (especially sowing disinformation about Russia's war on Ukraine).

Basically be wary of anything posted where it's their first post. Often they make accounts and don't use them for months so they look older.

I also think astroturfing is happening but at lower rate than reddit.

Like you, I have no idea how we can counter this at scale.

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[–] Starayo@lemm.ee 30 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

It's bloody difficult.

I used to mod on /r/videos years and years back. We had this one guy who was not very active as a mod in the day to day stuff, but was respected because he'd basically disappear for a few months and then reappear with a huge post in our modding sub basically going "so these are all spammers/malicious actors, here's their profiles, the accounts were created in these waves, here's where they've copied existing posts / the identical generic comments and things they use to get around our posting requirements, the targets they've been promoting, etc". Just huge pages of thoroughly researched proof.

This was well before we had huge awareness of situations like Russia manipulating social media - it was usually those viral video places that buy up rights to videos and handle licensing and promotion. It's why for a long time any licensed videos from places like viralhog etc were outright banned - they were constantly trying to manipulate reddit postings in bad faith, and even trying to socially engineer the mod team in modmail, so any videos that mentioned a licensing deal in the description were automatically banned from posting.

If we didn't have that one guy spotting the patterns, most of it would have gotten by easily. Unfortunately he did eventually disappear for good. No clue what happened to him, hope he just cut out social media or something. But with the spamming and astroturfing stuff... Even after fighting it for years I can't tell you what to do to counter it besides "have more of that guy".

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[–] m13@lemmy.world 48 points 5 months ago (40 children)

Capitalism consumes everything.

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[–] MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 47 points 5 months ago (4 children)

One thing I've noticed over the years is that in terms of marketing, reddit has a disproportionately high level of return in interaction relative to its size, while Twitter has traditionally had a low level of return relative to its size.

For some reason, comments on reddit has always been viewed as more trustworthy relative to other social media platform, despite reddit or's general reputation for being confidently incorrect on many subjects.

There are certain people whose entire career was made by their reddit posts, yet, it was always odd to me that reddit never managed to effectively capitalize on this other than making their platform worse with every update.

Testing out this theory has been interesting.

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[–] ultratiem@lemmy.ca 45 points 5 months ago (3 children)
[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 21 points 5 months ago (1 children)

at least

Uh, no, not "only"

[–] dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee 14 points 5 months ago

"Only at least 15%"

As in one could expect the study to yield a higher low bound.

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[–] MyEdgyAlt@sh.itjust.works 44 points 5 months ago (4 children)
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[–] ashok36@lemmy.world 44 points 5 months ago (3 children)

The director of marketing at my company just got out of a meeting with reddit and is super hyped at funneling all our Facebook and Twitter dollars into reddit instead. I didn't have the heart to tell him he's five years too late.

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[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 40 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Not surprising at all.

In other news, GTA Online is awesome! I am definitely not a plant or anything like that, go check out GTA Online!

Or something like that.

lol

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 20 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (8 children)

I remember when /r/HailCorporate was a trending sub and then it just sort of got strangled to death.

Also remember the periodic waves of "Hillary is bae! Mother of dragons! Yas Queen!" and "I love Mayor Pete" and "KHive ftw!" and even a smattering of Mitt Romney fanboi-ism on /r/politics, as their campaigns rose and fell.

Nevermind the absolutely sycophantic corporate ghoul AMAs. Bill Gates, Ann Coulter, and Don Lemon all leap to mind. Just the absolute worst moderation imaginable for these guys. Then there was the Elon Musk AMA. Jesus fucking Christ.

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[–] Donjuanme@lemmy.world 31 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

"At least" doing a lot of lifting here.

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[–] nieceandtows@programming.dev 29 points 5 months ago

Remember the_donald started out as a meme sub that got taken over? I fell victim to astroturfing that election season. Thankfully it has made me more skeptical about online interactions now.

[–] Snapz@lemmy.world 29 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Uh, this post is a bummer and I don't even know if I actually believe the premise... Whatever I guess, lett's all actually just get out of here and go get some Sprite® brand family products, you guys.

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[–] Veraxus@lemmy.world 25 points 5 months ago (5 children)

"At least..."

I feel like the 15% number is very, very low.

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[–] MikeOToxin@lemmy.world 22 points 5 months ago
[–] Nicoleism101@lemm.ee 21 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

People are literally defenceless vs propaganda. Me too. It takes extraordinary effort to decipher the fake from true and whether the true is a full truth or some small piece on silver platter.

At this point I gave up and I just try to find out motives of every… player and align myself with these that best serve my interests.

I don’t read much news because it’s all leftist or alt right propaganda drivel and while I align myself with the left because it serves my interests the best I won’t waste my time listening to their whatever narrative they crafted last week…

Just observe their actions and try to find out the motives and then ask if their motives align with yours. Their words or narrative are worthless drivel at this point, mostly.

Alt right drivel however is especially toxic and insulting but that is specifically done to evoke emotions. Anti gay propaganda crafted by closeted bisexual priests that want a piece from the table. It’s a bit like these email scammers who filter out less naive by making lots of grammar errors on purpose. You are supposed to be enraged either way.

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[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 21 points 5 months ago

Key word: At least

[–] Bertuccio@lemmy.world 21 points 5 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (5 children)

Why is Medium conflating trolls and shills?

Paid propagandists are shills, not trolls.

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[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 20 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

And now imagine that companies paid reddit money to be enabled to train their AI on them...

[–] bananaa@lemmy.world 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don’t have a Medium account. Could someone post a link to the study?

[–] npz@lemm.ee 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Wonder what the percent of AI datasets being propaganda is

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[–] norimee@lemmy.world 17 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I'm confused. So this is a study that shows that significant less content on reddit is bots and trolls than it seems? Like ONLY 15%?

I feel like 15% would have been a realistic number a few years ago, but nowadays you have a hard time comunicating with a real human. A bit like online customer service.

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[–] mrfriki@lemmy.world 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

15% only? Not bad I’d say. I was expecting more like 30%+

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)
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[–] drev@lemmy.world 15 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I remember writing a comment about invasive advertising by Instagram. Just shared some anecdotes about how a few extremely specific conversation topics soon became the topic for the ads I was seeing on Instagram, and pointed out that if they were in fact using background conversation to target ads, it would be extremely easy to automate with the voice recognition technology available at the time, so why would they ignore the opportunity if targeted ads are their main source of revenue?

It became one of my most down voted comments at the time, and I had about twice as many replies as downvotes, claiming all kinds of wild or easily disproven shit to disprove the idea that Instagram used such tactics. Was very fishy

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