Just a few years ago, you would never see such a disparity in votes vs comments. But these days, this is pretty much the norm. I’ve seen posts with 10K+ upvotes and no more than 80 comments.
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. Not sure how that’s legal as I thought ads needed to be marked or differentiated from regular content, but here we are.
The future looks bleak and AI even bleaker. Because it’s going to be used against us to make the rich richer and not to make our lives better.
I saw some engagement graphs a few weeks ago for a few niche subreddits. Not necessarily niche in the “small” way, but in the “focused interest” way.
Posts and comments per day completely collapsed during the 3rd party app-pocolypse, and never recovered. Community membership didn’t even show a blip, but actual discussions fell off a cliff.
The Reddit app is really bad, and the website is worse. The mobile website is somehow the worst of the lot. Doing anything but voting and scrolling is painful. Reddit has successfully ended its usefulness as a community space. Most people there don’t aeem to have noticed this sea change, yet.
Or at least, they’ve found no compelling reason to go elsewhere yet.
I can echo the last part. I refuse to use the app so I use the both the website and mobile version. Both are almost unusable. Comments often fail to load, just showing the Reddit logo animation. It takes 8 reloads to sometimes load a reply to one of my comments. Half the time it never loads just stalls at 30% loading. The post options to attach images or media to a comment doesn’t work on mobile; tapping the buttons literally do nothing. It works on desktop.
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.
Yeah Ars has already called them out for being basically an ad company that cares only about shoving as many ads and paid content as they can in your face.
Never thought of it that way! What a dystopian world we live in where intelligent conversation dies because there’s no good way to profit off of it.
And what’s worse is that in a few years, thanks to “AI” learning how to mimic us, there will be full on accounts that look legitimate at every level. Probably even have other social media connected to boost validity. But at the end of the day, it’s just a sophisticated bot trying to sell you McDonald’s.
It’s not hopeless! The Fediverse is AFAIK entirely nonprofit, and smaller instances means more moderator eyes on everything, too.
If I had to predict the future, I think apps like Reddit, Twitter, Tioktok, etc will be the places for entertainment and the Fediverse will become the place for conversation.
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.
Been mostly the same for me. If I ask a basic question like how to turn on Find My, I most likely will get a slew of downvotes and then one good samaritan post up the answer. If you ask a more technical question, like why is Find My iPhone using location services indefinitely, literally the entire website is like 🤷♂️
