They gotta read more Dante

Is your username your (old) phone number?

Could be the ham radio sign-off "73" which is basically "cheers/best regards".

Amazing comment and I'm sort of left begging... how does Dante tie into this? (serious comment)

Just copying the playbook of every social media platform using monthly active users as a bullshit metric to pump their perceived value.

I'm curious about what a better metric would be.

Social media sites are usually valued by how many active users they have, so what's a better measure of that?

DAU/MAU ratio tells a lot more. It's often called "stickiness." It's a good metric of who continues to come back to your platform.

Those numbers would still be juiced in the same way with artificial traffic. Revenue / user or revenue / request is less easily gamed as the more artificial traffic you add the larger that drops. Of course that's a lagging indicator but at least that forces Reddit into a position where they'd have to be defrauding their advertisers (or overcharging them on impressions which they'll push back on).

I'm not sure. But the answer should not be, for example, Instagram doing literally nothing about the sea of bots.

Should be illegal for the purpose of pumping your value for becoming a public company

Funny enough i've been getting multiple daily notifications of people following me on reddit.. Never used that feature.. nor does anyone I know use it. All the names are clearly generated too. Is it a 3rd party? Is it Reddit trying to create user metrics as a social platform? It's all suspect at this point.

I assumed this is simply spammers as they accounts are ~always deleted quickly.

In my experience it's all OnlyFans porn spam, which I doubt are bots created by Reddit.

Maybe for you. Those girls were genuinely interested in my thoughts on philosophy.

careful you're putting descartes before the wh... nevermind

Thanks. This made my day.

Wonderful!

Just share your credit card and they'll share even more... thoughts.

I know I have accidentally followed like half a dozen people. Looks like the UI is a bit different now but it used to be way too easy to click that button.

As others said, those are non-Reddit-operated spambots. But as for the names, any new Reddit users gets a WordWord1234 type name now, and you have to go out of your way to change it, so there are also a lot of legitimate users using those generated names.

I noticed the same thing this past week.

I am not very active, but people are following me daily.

Funny, i get multiple daily notifications for suggestions on subreddits to follow. I'd love if we could just cut out the middleman and get the users following you to follow the threads that get suggested to me instead.

Doesn't this potentially open them to serious securities fraud? They're making financial statements about the revenue they receive per user. By flooding with fake users, their trying to make their top-line numbers seem high while pretending like the revenue / user is staying constant. It's one thing if it's the initial seed to a two-sided marketplace, but if this gambit doesn't pan out that seems like a problem. The SEC failing to enforce securities fraud like this is a separate matter.

Since those users are their own, it's easy to just write "select count(*) from usres where fake = 1" and report it.

It's not like they need first to detect those users are bots.

I assume you meant "fake != 1"?

I think both would be correct, though your interpretation is more likely.

They could use “fake = 1” to report the number of fake users. Or “fake != 1” to report the number of real users.

I can’t imagine the gymnastics they would have to do to make a fake user count palatable in a road show so again, I think your interpretation is most likely. Then again, I’m about a billion dollars short of my opinion mattering…

It would make me so happy if they have an SQL table or whatever they use that's actually called "fake." That'd really be cutting the bullshit while also creating bullshit.

It's more likely to be some kind of prettified name like "internal public accounts for assuring control of external applications," some sort of technical name that doesn't really make sense by itself but is complicated enough that it looks like someone knew what they're doing when they came up with it.

Management would flip if they stumbled on anything titled "fake." It's way easier to just hide red flags behind technical sounding terms than it is to try to explain why a "problem" isn't a problem and shifting the blame to someone you won't miss.

The don't have to include those fake users in the active users count. They could exclude them.

Generating content is not the same as falsely counting users.

Sure, they could be dumb enough to do that, but no evidence of it.

>Generating content is not the same as falsely counting users.

I agree, but all content _is_ generated by users.

Are bots users?

> Doesn't this potentially open them to serious securities fraud?

Maybe they're hoping to find a private buyer for all of their equity who's willing to waive due diligence.

Pulling a Twitter XD

and it's hard to blame them no? As much as I hate Reddit and their ways to force me to login or use their app, if they want to get more users from some countries why not fake it til you make it?

Uh, yes? It looks dumb and low quality. And it’s not as if Germans are a tiny minority, the German sub has over 1 millions subs, and at least on samplesize, they are the largest group after the 3 big English countries (US, UK, CA)

Have you looked at nextdoor or fb groups lately? They look the same

No, because in Germany we use nebenan.de :D And the fb groups I know are sane, otherwise I wouldn’t be there.