This may not be a bold prediction, but I imagine that more and more fake users will continue to exist on reddit. No action will be taken to remove bots that are used by governments, marketers, researchers, and soon script kiddies. Reddit employees will know that this is a massive problem, but the business will not want to do anything to stop user growth and jeopardize the value of their platform and its size. Most real people won't know how frequently they are talking to bots, and conversations will be drawn down into the gutter. Within 5 years, 50% of all posts and users will be bots.
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That's an incredibly documented expose. Do you maintain a database of sources about this or was this all collected and written specifically for posting here?
Well said. Good content contributes a lot.
You're right too that niche communities are less inviting targets. This isn't really surprising since the 90s vision of the internet was always a decentralized place where people run their own site/blog without large, centralized platforms. We know how this largely turned out with a few sites/companies dominating the internet. There are engineering and economic reasons why centralized systems will always be more efficient, but those who seek freedom and privacy will prefer the decentralized systems.
I don't know what the solution to this is for communities like phuks if a larger community develops. Besides the engineering and economic forces that push for centralization, there might also be an element of selection bias in these communities too whereby mainstream sites attrack more casual users.
Its no wonder that reddit is not publicly traded.
The reddit admins are complicit in the artificial inflation of user statistics, which artificially inflates the value of advertising on the platform, which would in turn would increase the theoretical stock price.
If an employee ever blew the whistle, the FTC would be all over that shit.
Twitter is basically the same story and has been getting away with it even though they are publicly traded though. I do wonder if we can expect "readjustments" to their financial reports.
I think twitter might be a bit different, only because their staff is probably not directly involved in protecting those bot accounts. I also seem to recall twitter having a few rounds of "bot-takedowns," which might just be a clever way to cover their ass and make it look like they're fighting it.
Hard to say what's going on at twitter though. They've been operating at a loss for... idk, a really long time.
who cares about reddit?
It's not a problem
Yes, but that will change in a few years. AI is advancing fast.
Possibly, if the API is working by then. We'll see if the bots make better posts than the humans.
This is posted in a sub to discuss reddit.
My bad. I tend to forget checking the sub since I lurk /all.
This sounds believable.