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?
IPO padding for the CEOs golden parachute.
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.
Enron’s share price was very high right up until the end, too. Share price is not necessarily a good indicator of underlying fundamentals
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
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?
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.
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.
Subs picked to be “mainstream” get botted to death and every other sub is half dead, so not really. Quality fell off a cliff.
Bots have quadrupled.
seems sus to me
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.
I do believe reddit pops up in my search results more frequently these days than it did a year ago, without any explicit prompting with ‘reddit’ keyword… (just based on my impression, though)
I honesty can’t search a damn thing and not have Reddit be the first result. I basically been using AI over search to fix things… probably as intended.
That or google bought a lot of shares ahead if IPO.
There are search addons able to filter out specific sites, if you’d like it.
A lot of AI LLMs have been trained on reddit…
Not saying its bad info sometimes. There’s a reason most of us used reddit. It just seems like its the new SEO optimized background noise now. It’s not what I’m looking for, and I rather avoid the site now.
This would be my guess- Reddit is more reliable for random queries than much of the internet, as AI propagates.
I see more and more suggested “my search Reddit” on Google even as I visit Redfit way less now
So Reddit is turning into Quora.
Painfully accurate.
In that it will soon to shit? Yes.
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…
The growth trend according to Google Trends indicates that it is still growing, but definitely not a quadrupling over 6 months.
Yes. Google is strongly favoring both in search results in their feeble, and failing, attempt to combat AI.
They are probably paying clickfarms.
Reddit probably isn’t, as that would be cooking their metrics and Huffman would get fucked by the long arm of the SEC. They might still be, Huffman loves Elon and Elon got away with tons of shit.
Advertisers are probably paying more content farms to astroturf it though.
Plus without the API, do you really think people just stopped scraping Reddit? They just run a headless Chrome instance now and I bet Reddit doesn’t look the gift horse of traffic in the mouth.
Except I can totally see them committing securities fraud in order to pump up the numbers. It seems very much like something they would do.
I think that’s what this part of the comment was about:
They might still be, Huffman loves Elon and Elon got away with tons of shit.
The SEC got its funding slashed by Trump - are they like the IRS now where they don’t have the resources to truly do the job anymore?
The API is not gone, and is still free for both “for non-commercial researchers and academics under our published usage threshold” and “for moderator tools and bots”
https://www.redditinc.com/blog/apifacts
There are several ways to add your personal API key to (modified) final versions of Sync, Relay, Infinity, and even Apollo on iOS to be able to continue to use those clients, however Reddit has changed how Reddit links work, so those methods are becoming more and more broken.
Advertisers are probably paying more content farms to astroturf it though.
Yup, in fact we just banned ~13 accounts tonight from a subreddit I’m still involved with. That’s just the ones we identified, and it’s only a medium sized subreddit
A user noticed that the responses to a post sounded a little off and reported it. Turns out there was a network of bots using generative AI to mix real academic advice (ex. “Go talk to the advising office”) with occasional subtle advertisements (ex. “I recommend using grammarly and (advertised service)”.
Once we caught on, we looked through the history of those accounts and gathered as many as we could identify and banned them all.
I don’t think this is Reddit’s doing, and they’re usually good about banning spam bots site wide once a mod report is made. Still, they benefit from increased activity and they have an incentive to do less of that. It was also much harder to notice the problem because of the AI generation. If a user didn’t explicitly report it, I probably wouldn’t have noticed
This is going to be the Idiocratizing of the internet. AI is going to be training in itself with these unidentified posts and get dumber and dumber.
Let’s hope no one lets it have access to anything important…
It feels a little like how steel from before above ground nuclear testing, called low-background (or pre-war) steel because it isn’t contaminated is prized for building some sensors.
Pre AI information need to be preserved, otherwise we might not really know if the info we’re seeking is fact based in any way.
This is going to be the Idiocratizing of the internet.
93/94 was when I first got AOL on a 14.4k modem. I’m one of those shitty users!
We used to use gopher and college FTP sites to download warez as a freshman in HS, and then moved on to Hotline trackers.
I know, because I was there!
I was too. The internet was never for normies or businesses and between the two of them they’ve managed to turn it into a complete dumpster fire.
I highly suggest you ban what the were advertising and not just the account.
If advertiser’s realize the shady bot farms they deal with are causing any comment that mentions their product to be automatically deleted, they will stop.
Did you guys read the article? It’s all about how since google and Reddit penned a deal to use Reddit to train google AI models, google is now massively pushing Reddit links in search results.
And their answer, ironically, is to avoid “Gen-AI garbage.”
But you should really read the article. It pissed me the fuck off. Because that sounds…massively illegal.
I wonder if Reddit user activity has noticeably increased. Probably not.
Like, this will help Reddit in the short term, and honestly is a good idea from a search perspective (how many queries have I manually appended “Reddit” to?), but it doesn’t necessarily help with the fundamentals of the platform.
You scratch my back, I scratch yours
Dead internet theory.
I wonder if there was some kind of technological revolution that made it exponentially easier to generate text that happened recently.
Good Post Theory
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.
