These stats claim the sub has had 10-20 comments per day in just the past month, so maybe 300-600 tops.

In reality it's had 1200+ comments just in the past week alone and probably closer to 5000 for the month. And you can see the activity with your own eyes in every thread, so I definitely trust reddit's own stats more.

Sounds like Reddit itself has recovered in terms of raw numbers, but I (and others) have noticed yet another downtick in quality. Lot more bots (AI craze doesn't help. And despite the API narrative being used to counter them, they probably suferent the least), comments seem to be as hostile as early pandemic. But these are hard to measure objectively.

It could just be that the longer you're on there, the worse the quality appears to get to you as newcomers come. People always start to feel that way after being there some time. But then again people have been complaining about the quality of reddit going down literally almost as long as reddit has existed.

I think a much more effective strategy would be a user-led LLM "spamming" campaign.

Package up a lightweight, easy to use LLM for Windows users and let them turn their accounts into noise. Purposely generate overly-argumentative, blatantly wrong prose on every subject and in every subreddit.

Reddit would hate that. Just a hundred users engaging in it could probably tank the quality of the whole site.

Because of those things Prank spammers usually don’t last long. Usually a small gang of people will try something like that and you can quickly ban them. They might try to come back on new accounts but eventually tire of it and find another way to keep themselves busy.

I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but it would be more difficult than you might think. If you try to automated completely it would cost you an awful lot in fees (Open AI’s server bills are “eye-watering“ and if you go past the free limit they start passing that cost onto you), and the admin’s would probably be able to identify the accounts doing it and ban them site wide.

Also hugely immoral.

If you don't like Reddit and decide to not use it: fine, your choice, obviously.

But completely fucking over a platform because you don't like it? That's an entirely different thing. Who are you exactly to decide how Reddit runs it site?

This is just a DDoS attack, but in a slightly different form.

Reddit and its userbase have always been on the activist spectrum (SOPA, PIPA, CEO changes, API changes, etc.) And before it, Digg was much the same. Given the fact that they'll brigade r/Place with automation tools and protests, I'm surprised it hasn't happened in the form of a broader protest.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425415

You should probably also point out the big red text on the subredditstats pages. I didn't see it when I posted the links, since I'm colorblind and hues of red are entirely invisible to me. Also I have trouble counting past the number of fingers on my hands, so I didn't notice that the numbers were a bit off. If I had noticed that, I still would've needed one of the very clever people here to explain the significance.

> If I had noticed that, I still would've needed one of the very clever people here to explain the significance.

I don't know if that's sarcastic or serious or if that's some dig at me? What an odd comment.

I also suspect that smaller subs are a more useful measure than these huge subs, because I'd expect them to die off much quicker than the huge ones with a lot of inertia.

That said, I understand it can be annoying having 16 people tell you you're wrong all in slightly different ways. It's the price of posting on the internet I'm afraid. But it was (and still is!) the top post on this thread, even though it's not just factually wrong, but spectacularly factually wrong – which is fine, everyone is wrong sometimes – but people do have the tendency to point that out. As long as it's not a pedantic point I don't think that's wrong even if there's a comment already, if you think you can make that point better.

The data is useless as an absolute measure of activity, sure, as described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425501. The message at the top of the main subredditstats page says, "...the data collector is not robust, and so the numbers should only be used as a general guide." You can read that. Let's assume I can read that, too.

But it does track as a representative sample of trends. Picking something less noisy than a niche sub, we can ask whether there have been recent newsworthy events that might show up as spikes in this data. And, there is: look again at the posts/day and comments/day graphs on https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews, and you see clear spikes in activity right around October 7 -- well after Reddit's API changes would have affected subredditstats.

If the data collector has only been able to pick up, say, approximately 20% of the site's activity for each subreddit, then trends are still trends as long as the data collection hasn't changed in a radically new way. And, sure, that could be the case after Reddit's API changes, but as I pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425150 (and as supported in another user's reply using an entirely different source of data), the API changes don't line up precisely with the change in user activity, and Reddit is clearly, observably, less active now in all of its large subs.

Now, for my part, I assumed this would all be pretty obvious stuff. I'm not doing a terribly deep analysis here; I'd expect anyone else to see the same things at a glance. But a few people seem to think that because the numbers aren't a perfect match, the entire point just collapses and clearly Reddit is now busier than ever, and those people are completely missing the point. Using a 12,000-subscriber sub with the noisiest possible data to try to disprove sitewide trends is even more wrong, and then smugly saying, "everyone is wrong sometimes", is not just condescending, but frankly embarrassing.

The diametrically opposing argument here is that Reddit is perfectly healthy and the API changes and blackout protest had no significant impact on the site, and that checks notes 12,000 subscribers in r/thethickofit are sufficient evidence for this. And, like, okay, if that's your argument, cool, carry on, just come out and say so.

I doubt that's the case, but just as there are sites that analyse an Amazon product's reviews to judge real vs. fake, it's not impossible that a Reddit comment counting serving could do the same.

> The insults in the show are often colorful and inventive, but they can be quite explicit. Due to their explicit nature, I won't provide a verbatim quote here

You can ask it to not filter profanity, but it seems I need to do it every other message. In general ChatGPT is about as useful as a marzipan dildo here.

I'm willing to bet that exactly 0% of the content of that sub is LLM generated, and the same for most of those smaller subs. Who even cares about these tiny subs? Certainly not Reddit.

Even if this was true (which I seriously doubt), how can you prove that, and what makes you think the subredditstats website cited above would be able to tell the difference?

The operator freely admits his/her stats probably underestimate real traffic due to the expense of collecting data, and they make no claim to having software to detect real commentors from fake. Meanwhile the real internal reddit stats available to mods show numbers that are both much higher and much closer to the live traffic we can see for ourselves as readers.

How much of Reddit's engagement is faked is up for debate - I suspect it's less than we think. However, it'd be really funny if, say, when Reddit IPOs, someone at /r/WSB catches onto this and triggers a bunch of people shorting the stock.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeDzx4SUME via https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red...

And if it wasn't, everybody would be doing it. What makes you think reddit would have an advantage in doing that over anyone else?

Some malicious actor is fabricating 100 comments a day about the nitty gritty of the New York Times crossword?

But Reddit probably has the scale to do without in popular parts of the site.

Put aside peer pressure for a moment, couldn't you create your community on Lemmy to make sure that you are always in control of your social media presence?

Yeah not sure how it works over there with new platforms and everything but that won’t just fly here.

I do browse the fediverse and am somewhat ambivalent so far. It's definitely at a crossroad point where the next 2-3 years will determine whether it's the next Blender, or the next Gimp. And my biggest fears is that usability won't be prioritized in order to ensure that it won't be the next GIMP. There's a lot of core UX to rework to make it more intuitive.

Particularly the nsfw loss hits hard for those interested in niche communities. We've lost tumblr, never had any of the Meta (FB, Instagram) views, Reddit is holding on on threads, Pornhub went down in flames following their outright incompetence, and Twitter has gotten a hellscape from EM's hopeless attempts to keep the spammers away (and his other antics).

I suspect this is the bigger issue to be honest. I certainly stopped because of this. Not that I begrudge people having OF or advertising that, but please, for fuck's sake, stay on-topic, and don't spam the fuck out of things with content barely related to the sub's topic.

I also really hate the shift in language to be more personal; e.g. "would you like to [..]" / "I would like YOU to [..]" and stuff like that. It's just creepy and manipulative. Sell your pr0n pics, fine, but don't pretend we have some sort of personal relationship, because we don't.

Also imgur's NSFW purge probably didn't help.

https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

Particularly where "weird" fetishes are involved, the rates for custom content can be pretty exorbitant, but still a drop in the bucket for the clientele.

I wonder where those posters went to though. Lemmynsfw is nice but very sparse.

Ps OnlyFans spam was killing it for longer already

I just hope the fediverse or any other alternative is preparing itself for that next big drama. Because I feel it's a matter of when at this point, not if.

The question is, does the Fediverse want this level of responsibility? Moderating ordinary content is hard enough, moderating porn is worse because of all the legal liability: various countries have extremely strict laws regarding access of minors (e.g. Germany), there are various definitions of CSAM (again, Germany being very strict by banning not just anime "minors" aka lolicon but also textual erotica of such), then there is the issue with "revenge porn" and getting that deleted across the Fediverse...

But at the same time, I doubt all instances will clamp down and ban it. It brings a lot of traffic and I'm sure many moderators have strong free speech vallues and will defend it under that banner. It's extra work but some will take it up. There will most definitely be NSFW-dedicated instances in the worst case.