I used to be a lot on r/travel. Back then there were posts with pictures that had upvote ls in the triple to quadruple digit range. There were also user questions, usually in the double digits.
Now the majority is just discussions that mysteriously have thousands of upvotes. And some of them quite boring. That must be bots or fakes directly by reddit. No way this happens naturally.
Is this common practice now or is that something r/travel did specifically?
Reddit has quite literally been using them since they were first founded. To get the site off the ground, links, votes & engagement was artificially populated for years as the userbase grew. Reddit has never been organic. And anyone who believes reddit ever stopped manipulating those numbers after their “seed phase” to make the site look better is no more than a sweet summer child.
Or people are boring.
Until recently, Reddit has been seeing an increase in active users. That has made upvotes more available, causing karma inflation.
Also, Reddit has been taking a lot of effort to kill the default sub list, so it is distributing people to subs they wouldn’t normally go to.
But upvotes on discussions there are literally 100 times what they used to be just half a year ago. No way that happens naturally.
Yeah, but that wouldn’t be Reddit doing that.
It’s absolutely Reddit doing that. Buts use API calls, and Reddit has API calls locked down now. Bots have to request access, at the very least.
And given Spez et al’s overwhelmingly stalwart commitment to honesty, transparency, and not fucking over his user base (lol) how are you so sure it’s not Reddit doing that, when that’s exactly what they did to boost numbers when Reddit was new?
Huffman and Ohanian first began Reddit by submitting links from various fake accounts.
B[o]ts use API calls, and Reddit has API calls locked down now.
That is if bots used the API directly, which may or may not be the case. It wouldn’t be that hard to automate using Reddit’s UI. You also had botmakers who relied on the API given months to transfer to webpage scraping.
And while Reddit did create and upvote posts in the beginning, the site seems to be large enough that I don’t see Reddit being able to scale upvotes based on content alone without a massive AI army.
I don’t see Reddit being able to scale upvotes based on content alone without a massive AI army.
You say that as though Reddit cares about the content of a post when manipulating its upvotes, AND as though you have no idea who Sam Altman is or that he was on Reddit’s board for several years.
Of all the things Reddit can’t or won’t do, AI is absolutely NOT one of them.
I say it as knowing that Reddit can change how upvotes work. They’ve done it in the past and it is a lot easier to change a formula over creating bots to upvote and downvote.
Reddit has also shown its ability to frame and curate both the default steam and r/all by removing porn and limiting political posts.
I don’t know why Reddit would deal in bots when it has more powerful tools at hand.
I don’t know why Reddit would deal in bots when it has more powerful tools at hand.
Cheap, easy, impossible for outsiders to quantify, approaching IPO and cash to be made, keeping ad revenue the same without revealing how many actual users have fled the site, etc.
I’ve said this and I’ll say it again. Anyone that’s on Reddit still, doesn’t make quality content or have comments that are worth a shit. All those people went to mastodon, lemmy or somewhere else. Same applies with facebook, xitter, or any other corpo social media.
