After using Reddit for many, many years, at this point I personally am fairly convinced that the majority of posts and submissions on many of the high-value subs is inauthentic content.
Inauthentic content being some combination of bot posts and coordinated shill/sockpuppet posts. Either for political/social manipulation (enforcing a narrative and allowed ideas), as well as some economic manipulation (paid posts shilling for a product/movie/person/etc).
In the past the inauthentic accounts had patterns that you could more easily find. Names that are all generated the same way, or comment history patterns that all match. It was 100% obvious a few years ago that there was a lot of manipulation going on. After being exposed a few times they've improved, and now with LLM capabilities added in it's much harder for a random person to clearly be able to identify them.
I feel like one day there will be a whistleblower who finally reveals to the world exactly how much manipulation has been going on (especially by governments) and it'll be a pretty shocking revelation. Until then we have little proof, as it seems the owners of such sites either willingly or unwillingly or unknowingly cooperate with it.
I am moderating a niche technical sub on reddit and don't see that much of bots. They are probably targeting "high value" subs.
As for alternatives, it depends on what you are looking for. E.g., if you don't need to comment / post, a feed reader with all your favorite discourse forums can cover a lot of ground.
You basically have to moderate it yourself if you ever want to browse /all or whatever the front page is. You have to filter a bunch of different criteria, basically anything that looks like its meant to farm engagement or outrage.
Anything remotely political
any of the meme reposting subreddits
any aita related subreddit
any subreddit that limits replies to subreddit members aka circlejerk and hivemind subs
any user with excessive karma/year that isn't making OC like a comic/ artist or something
any new user that posts anything related to the things above
that cuts out at least 50% of what you see on the front page, still not great but probably better than any other alternative for what you are looking for.
Reddit in large part is very left leaning with a big echochamber, but the individual specific communities are generally really good, especially for search.
Long ago, marketing firms became aware of the "just add 'reddit' to your product search for real human advice" meme. They're also aware of the fact that it's very easy to buy karma, buy accounts, set up upvote/downvote networks, and manage sockpuppets. Now I'm absolutely certain that >80% of all posts in product-related topics are fake. Bots, guerilla marketers, PR firms, reputation management firms, influence operations, you name it.
A lot of the personal stories you see on Reddit are also fake -- posted to farm karma.
The upvote/downvote system there, combined with anonymous accounts that have public post histories, has been a disaster for internet discourse. (Here, at least, it's gated and the community is relatively small. Also, the power of the downvote on HN is very limited, and only accounts with 500 karma can downvote anything. Over there, it's unrestrained and the downvote is too powerful. Reddit has structural problems.)
> Does anyone have any recommendations as to a Reddit alternative?
Forums still exist for most interests. They're usually much better than Reddit.
That would be very helpful, but it would be a lot of work.
Might as well go all the way and be maximally ambitious: A modernized internet directory that functions as an alternative to Google would be a very welcome thing, in this day and age. I have some ideas for how that thing could work.
A human-reviewed and curated list that's comprehensive, searchable (everything on the list is indexed, nothing off the list is indexed,) and ad-free. Businesses who aren't on the directory, but would like to be, pay an application fee. The huge secondary industry that sprung up around DMOZ indicates that this business model would work.
There'd be more to it than that, but that's the basic idea.
I'd love to find enough people who would like to work on such a thing.
I consider forums being hard to find a feature, not a bug. They aren't all exactly like they were in they heyday of forums and not immune to bots and shilling but being j-u-s-t that bit more effort keeps out a lot of the trash.
I use an adblocker and also Reddit Enhancement Suite and have subbed to probably 40 subreddits. Except a very few of those (like /r/politics), they're all niche enough to mostly avoid the bot plague. As long as I'm logged in, my experience is pretty dang good, relatively speaking (compared to the default view).
Get Reddit Enhancement Suite and start tagging posters. Fully ten percent of /all is literally one account posting karma bait.
I've also seen entire threads get "replayed". Bots will post highly upvoted comments from the last time a link was posted etc.
Nearly everything that makes it to the front couple pages of /all is posted by people pushing an agenda, or worse, literal Russian accounts fomenting hate. Remember, their goal above all else is to make you angry, tired, and get you to give up on functioning democracy. Lots of people on the left and "democrats" are fighting with talking points straight out of the kremlin. That infighting is the point.
Everything you see on reddit is meant to make you angry. Someone will mine Twitter for the most hateful nazis shit/most objectionable "I hate men" post, and post a screenshot on reddit as if that's a meaningful representation. This is intended to piss you off, because you will "engage" more if you get pissed off.
The internet doesn't want you to be happy or successful or informed because it is literally less profitable.
There are entire popular subreddits that are mostly agenda posts, either literally part of an operation, or outright useful idiot sycophants.
You almost cannot make it to the front page anymore without a bot farm to to get the "momentum" going on your post. Otherwise it just cannot compete with the manipulated posts.
> I've also seen entire threads get "replayed". Bots will post highly upvoted comments from the last time a link was posted etc.
This is so surreal until you realize it is happening. You kinda know you have seen it before but not really since other comments are different.
Ye Reddit is syntethic nowadays. Some niche subs are OK with strict rules on content.
But the loose ones are too much karma farm and bots to bother.
It wouldn't suprise me of there are like 100 people doing most of the posting with alt accounts and semiautomated workflow. Both as commercial shills and political manipulation.
Bingo. The negative effects of karma farming are already outspoken on platforms like Hacker News and Reddit, and these are both platforms where karma itself is relatively worthless. Adding real money to the equation ruins it for good - look at what happened to Steemit, BAT and Coil.
You are downvoted (probably for saying "nope"), but my account was recently banned for being a bot. I used it almost exclusively for lurking, rarely for commenting or upvothing something. I guess I'm too botlike.
Inauthentic content being some combination of bot posts and coordinated shill/sockpuppet posts. Either for political/social manipulation (enforcing a narrative and allowed ideas), as well as some economic manipulation (paid posts shilling for a product/movie/person/etc).
In the past the inauthentic accounts had patterns that you could more easily find. Names that are all generated the same way, or comment history patterns that all match. It was 100% obvious a few years ago that there was a lot of manipulation going on. After being exposed a few times they've improved, and now with LLM capabilities added in it's much harder for a random person to clearly be able to identify them.
I feel like one day there will be a whistleblower who finally reveals to the world exactly how much manipulation has been going on (especially by governments) and it'll be a pretty shocking revelation. Until then we have little proof, as it seems the owners of such sites either willingly or unwillingly or unknowingly cooperate with it.
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