Reddit has severely damaged their reputation recently, and usage has dropped.

I'm pretty sure the article is just an attempt at revising history in front of the IPO.

according to their S-1, usage did not drop.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...

I wouldn’t put it past them to ramp up the bot activity as real users bailed so their S-1 would look somewhat okay…

It could also be that they have had modest growth from normies offsetting the losses from earlier users. This could explain why it appears to be in steep decline for many of the people here but may look almost ok from the outside.

Or it could just be bots.

That’s the go to jail kind of securities fraud.

If you think any major social media site is not willfully ignoring some percentage of the bots, I've got a bridge to sell you.

And it's much easier to hide this problem on a site where the users are anonymous.

Reddit wouldn't be the first company to juice the numbers before an IPO. They've also admitted to taking advantage of fake accounts in the past: https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/

> If you think any major social media site is not willfully ignoring some percentage of the bots, I've got a bridge to sell you.

Sell me. How do they usually do that? Any concrete example?

you can simply buy upvotes, stars, views, retweet's, reviews etc some will even guarantee delivery. If you buy 1000 and all of those bots get banned they will deploy 1000 new ones to deliver the order.

You prefer them to create real looking accounts or they start stealing them.

If it gets harder only affects the price.

If a site has an API, it has bots. They call that common sense.

I have a generic email address and its constantly being added to various new websites, apps, projects, etc. Its bizarre how blatant this is.

Its very cleary an IPO strategy is to hire "marketing companies" that are really botnet controllers to create users for your site to make it more attractive to investors. Then leadership gets to play dumb when these "marketing companies" are filling their user roster.

Exactly.

Maintaining plausible deniability is all that's necessary to avoid the legal issues. Add very minimal bot detection just to claim you aren't doing nothing about the problem.

I've stopped using reddit for a lot of reasons. But a big one was that more and more of the content being posted was from fake users. I had an account for ~11/12 years and this was always an issue. But it seemed to really ramp up in 2023. I also started receiving direct messages from bots in 2023. That had never happened before.

This is an anecdotal experience. But there are quite a few users saying the same thing lately: there's a bot problem like there wasn't before.

And there are people who go to jail for fraud. Let's not forget about the whole CEO editing comments fiasco.

CEO editing comments has what to do with fraud?

If he can't handle arguments without modifying the history in his favor, it's not completely unlikely that he'd also modify the stats of his business in his favor too. Parent commenter implied that since it was a "go to jail" kind of a offense, it's not likely. Maybe less likely, but his past behaviour shows that he does do suspicious things.

A whole paragraph for something I figured didn't need expounding.

You don't need to ADD bots, you can just not ban as many...

the usual M.O. is to spend a lot on growth campaigns, and then they can claim that there's growth! how did the user acquisition cost change over time?

that's hilarious you think that every major platform doesn't have the same amount of bot activity.

Agreed.

After the API thing, I stopped using for a few months, converting to Lemmy instead.

Then I got booted from Lemmy for not being communist enough, I started looking at Reddit again maybe once a day.

At first, I was so happy to see a lot of activity on my small subreddits that never had much activity before.

But after a few weeks I realized it's just bots basically rephrasing popular posts from the past. And bots rephrasing responses to those posts.

Where is the next Reddit? I miss it.

Did growth rate take a pause?

Not sure but there seems to be a lot more bots on reddit. Entire threads with hundreds of comments from bots are all around reddit.

I can't dispute this, but since you shared an anectdote I will also. I haven't seen this in any of the communities I visit personally. Do you mean bot accounts which are passing themselves off as real people and karma farming? Or bots that self identify as such to fill a legit need?

not out to defend reddit here, it also feels to be going donwhill to me, but this is not something I've personally experienced on the site yet

"everything i don't like is a bot"

How else do you explain people who still post on /r/politics or /r/whitepeopletwitter?

There are lots of terminally online people on the Internet.

Indeed, like it or not, the people who complained are the power users, a very vocal minority who still use old.reddit. Normal people don't give a shit about any of the controversy.

They lost all their users that provided value for reddit as a platform. Reddit will surely continue to flourish as a way to show ads to children and astroturf Google search results for product reviews. But I've noticed a ginormous drop in posting quality since they neutered their API. Even small subreddits that were fairly active are now filled with spam and engagement farming, moderators aren't interested in cleaning anything up because their app to do so is trash, users don't want to post because the subreddit is shit up with garbage. It's gotten bad.

Any examples of such subreddits? For the ones I visit, like askhistorians, programming, etc, it's been business as usual.

That's because askhistorians only let's other historians ask questions. I've tried asking some serious questions there before and I always got immediately deleted. IIRC it was always something about how the quality of my question was beneath them.

That's definitely not true, most questions on there are from amateurs. If your questions keep getting deleted, there is something wrong with how you are asking your questions, perhaps they are too broad to be unanswerable.

Recent example I've noticed, /r/patientgamers has had repeated posts in my feed that are the exact same copy of "no matter how many times I try, I just can't get into <GAME NAME>"

I didn't used to see these copy pasted posts regularly at the top of subreddits but it happens frequently now.

Well, that's to be expected from such a sub, who'd recommend games from recent history over those of, say, the Pong generation. That is simply how people grow up.

No idea either. They haven't changed much in years.

They added a chat application, so you can get daily spam from onlyfans promoters, or cryptocurrency schills, before you get so annoyed you disable it.

I think he's talking about Yishan Wong and Ellen Pao. BTW, true or not, that's a hell of a way to refer to them, respectively.

I guess it was unclear, I meant what's improved at Reddit since spez's return?

As far as I can tell it's gotten worse from a user perspective.

Honestly neglect sounds more like the pre-Yishan era where Reddit was effectively a few people in the metaphorical corner of a conde nast office.

Not to mention Steve editing users' posts, Ellen Pao being in the same social circle as Epstein, Maxwellhill conspicuously going silent when Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, promising and then failing to deliver on direct user funding and adrev sharing, and flatly ignoring user feedback for the better part of a decade.

What is this "Maxwellhill" thing refer to? I vaguely recognize the username as an old reddit powermod, is the implication that reddit power users are involved in human trafficking?

There's a theory that account belong to Ghislaine herself. I'm personally uninterested.

I'm uninterested inasfar as her having a reddit profile and posting things. I'm much more interested as to why reddit inc refuses to answer the simple quandary that many people have as to if she was behind the account in question or not.

They more or less Streisand'd the conspiracy into plausibility by doing so, which is generally a bad idea. That's the reason I included it.

I think the connection between u/maxwellhill and Ghislaine Maxwell is dubious. The account is named after the town Maxwell Hill in Malaysia, and they had posted in Malaysian subreddits years before any of these theories came out. It seems more likely to me that the similar names are a coincidence and that the account owner quite reasonably stopped using the account when they became suspected of being involved in a major international conspiracy.

Didn’t they only become suspect, because they stopped posting at the exact time Ghislaine was arrested?

All they have to do is post once since she’s been locked up and yet they don’t…

Maybe they died.

That's the issue. The thing that made them worthwhile was a very basic set of functionality. Every single other feature they've tried to add was poorly implemented and not picked up by users.

It just doesn't make sense as a business. You don't need a million devs to run a forum site, you need them to add more and more bloat to convince investors you're growing.

All they have done is pushed ads harder. That is all they really have to offer.

I rarely use it now because of the web front end. Yeah old.reddit.com and plugins to redirect to it help a bit. Also why on earth would I want to use an app instead of a web browser for a site that lists wen links. Oh yeah they stopped making the site about links and more about internal content.

It really is a pile of shit compared to what it used to be.

Reddit is the forum to end all forums, with a spice of imageboards.

And it is ad-supported. People who have partaken in small PHPbb style forums probably can tell the story - moderation and bandwidth cost time.

That's all, a simple, dumb business model based on advertising and market share, or better: mind share.

The last part is Reddit's moat, no more, no less.

My 2 cents.

They are growing every year.

https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1309791/reddit-mau-worldw...

Ah, but I would guess those are low quality users, i.e. they don't vote, they don't comment, they don't post. While that doesn't matter to advertisers, it does matter to the health of your content network. And their features have had zero positive effects on their community health.

You can run an ad on a subway and get more users. That doesn't mean you're doing a good job. The only reason those users have something to see is because of community health.

I would guess they're no different to any other users in the past decade. In other words a percentage will comment and a small percentage will post.

It's always been that way.

LLM's-at-home are in a vastly different place than they were 10, 5, or even 2 years ago, so I'm not sure the assumptions about typical traffic from then hold true now.

What are you basing this on?

And they still have one of the worst apps (and website) in the game. Seems like that would be some low-hanging fruit.

i still use the old version on web and it works great

i agree the new version is very busy and buggy on mobile web

Yeah, I have Old Reddit redirect on all of my devices, and I won't touch the official app with a ten foot pole.

Never got the complaints with the official app. What's the issue?

Last time I asked someone this question they mentioned some power user stuff that didn't really apply to regular Reddit content consumers / casual posters.

imo it's just unnecessarily busy and can be buggy. if you spend some time using the old web version, which feels very HN like, you'll wonder why you'd ever use the new one.

the app is absolute trash and the new.reddit is almost as bad. if they remove old i'm out

That growth is predicated on a feature set that has been more or less untouched for over a decade. That core feature set is still very good.

I've seen no evidence that anything they've introduced in the last 10 years has contributed to any of that growth, and my evidence is that just about every feature announced or implemented since then is now either gone or largely ignored by the userbase.

There is nothing special about Reddit unless you mean Reddit was in the right place and the right time to establish a two-sided market.

It's very hard to kill a two-sided market when it gets established. Look at Craigslist or Twitter.

An interesting thing about Reddit to me is many people who look at it see strongly offputting things like being overrun by image memes but when you look at it closely there is so much there about so many subjects. From time to time you find those brilliant social media posts that remind me of some of the emails from the Enron Emails data set where people talk about what they did for training in the army. Perhaps that is what keeps people coming back or maybe they are all about the memes.

I firmly believe that niche content like what you mention is the life-blood of the site, and the biggest contributor to it's longevity. People come for the memes, but they stay for the litany of small communities that cater to their very specific tastes

The fact that people often append "reddit" to their Google queries is a testament to this. Even if they aren't active participants in these niche communities, they know that they are the easiest place to find reasonably reliable information from other humans on them.

If these types of communities stop flourishing on Reddit for any reason, then the site will become much easier to replace by any other generic meme factory.

What market are you referring to at Reddit?

Readers and writers.

Even the overhauled UI has gone ignored by many users, thanks to the old UI remaining available as an option, but I imagine it's only a matter of time before they pull the plug on that so they can "enhance the sponsored post viewing experience".

I have no evidence for this, but my hunch is that an inconsequentially-small percentage of Reddit users go out of their way to use Reddit’s old UI.

Those users are disproportionately mods and active users though. Reddit can't easily do away with it.

They considered this around the 3rd party app fiasco and it was clear old Reddit has a few years left because mods allhate the new Reddit UI

Yes but what percent of active posters use it? It's going to be much higher and the site will die without new content.

Interesting, I used to be a member of the French community which peaked around 2017/2018 and kept decreasing ever since. I wouldn't say it's a ghost town now but it became a minor forum.

I guess they grew in other countries.

Now show us the percentage of those that are real people and not bots, and the number of accounts that are from previously banned users. I mean heck I've gotten to the point where I can only go 2 or 3 months before my account gets banned and then I have to spin up a new one.

Come to think of it that might be a reason why their ban happy, more people you ban who come back looks like a new user signup.

> I mean heck I've gotten to the point where I can only go 2 or 3 months before my account gets banned and then I have to spin up a new one.

User error.

It's really not hard to not get banned. Site-wide, at least.

I'm pretty active and my account is nearly 13 years old.

Pretty easy if you have no controversial opinions.

This reeks of "Oh you know the ones"

https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...

Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views

Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?

Con: LOL no...no not those views

Me: So....deregulation?

Con: Haha no not those views either

Me: Which views, exactly?

Con: Oh, you know the ones

There is a blog post describing the criminal history of a particular mod. If you post that link on Reddit you are automatically banned.

If you must know some reasons I got banned is horrible awful terrible evil opinions such as

- suggesting that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak due to not following safety protocols

- Questioning if the full shutdown of schools for a disease which had a relatively low mortality rate in children was the best decisio and if we fully had considered the impacts.

- suggesting that predators could abuse gender self identification laws to gain access to new victims.

- and one satirical posts advocating "let us grill it all in a beautiful nuclear inferno."

It seems though you are suggesting there are only a narrowly defined opinions that are acceptable to hold and that deviations outside of those are so heretical that should not be allowed to exist.

Were you getting banned site-wide for expressing those opinions? Or just banned from specific subs?

Only admins can ban you site-wide or shadowban you, and I can't imagine expressing any of those opinions being worthy of a site-wide ban from an admin unless you expressed them in an offensive way. ie, for the first opinion, using a slur when referring to the Chinese lab workers, or basically in any way accusing them of poor standards because they're Chinese. Likewise, for the third opinion, I've too often seen transphobia get disguised as concern trolling.

If it's moderators banning you from specific subs...well...that's just shitty moderators. Some of them are extremely power-hungry and ban happy, but they're not employees of reddit, and their actions should not be reflected on reddit as a whole.

Those are the ideas that he's talking about. Paul Graham is a dinosaur. He thinks that spez's rampant monetization is a great idea, despite the fact that it has outraged the community that gives Reddit any power at all.

Perhaps that's the meaning of "almost unkillable": Look at how much room there is to enshitify without losing all the users!

pg is just trying to use his audience to drum up interest in the reddit IPO.

Reddit has nothing to offer investors but Paul needs a return so he's trying to make sure someone else ends up holding the bags.

Astonished people don't see the link with the timing.

Getting drunk and editing production database to delete mean comments is certainly innovative CEO behavior.

Hah, I saw this:

    Steve was not a big fan of authority, so he also liked the idea of a site without editors.

and remembered him getting prod database access to censor comments criticizing him. I guess it's true what they say about power corrupting you.

Sometimes, those who are most vocal against authority, are projecting their own potential misuse of authority onto others, unable to see someone wielding power differently.

And people want to invest in this IPO? Seems like two trains moving towards each other but can’t tell if they are on the same track yet

There is only one set of tracks.

But everything is fine, you can just go swap places with any passenger if you want.

You’d have to be a total moron, but if there’s one thing I learned from Reddit it’s that there are far more morons out there than I realized.

* Editing people’s comments critical of him.

Which is actually worse.

Indeed

The controversy around this one was always wild to me.

Mods editing comments was the most standard behavior on every phpbb/vb board I grew up on.

His edits were clearly edited, clearly jokes, and TBH I found them pretty funny. And people were *outraged* that he had the capacity and the temerity to edit their sacrosanct posts...

I took it as a sign of the changing times

The thing is, when the mods would troll the hell out of users on the old BB's, they were doing it all the time, it was part of the culture. It happening on reddit, where a user's posts were thought to be immutable caused very understandable outrage.

It’s an abuse of power, that’s why. It doesn’t matter if it is or isn’t funny or if anybody was harmed, the act itself was improper for any engineer dealing with other peoples data and egregious lack of judgement by a CEO.

Yeah this is the changing times I was talking about

Reddit founders made hundreds of fake profiles so site looked popular:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

Basically this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-W0CBOGnnI

I always wondered if they continued this behavior while GPT and ML started picking up. I saw a lot of suspicious posts especially around bitcoin and crypto related subreddits start around 2013. This massively increased with the_donald and trump running for office. Covid and the disinformation policies seemed like a way to cause divisiveness and attract viewers to the site while providing a reason to cull some bots (whether internal or external). The API change and the resulting moderator backlash seemed manufactured to provide management a reason to purge moderators and more accounts. Now they have plausible deniability when people claim Reddit is the dead internet, full of AI bots. Because now their user count isn’t heavily tilted towards fake profiles (which would need to be disclosed in an IPo)

Just my conspiracy theory of the day

Relevant: “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” (2014), Air Force Research Laboratory, Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf

…a.k.a Reddit's "Most-Addicted City" of 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...

Reddit IPO'd today and the purpose of this piece is to add whatever hype can be added to that IPO so that PG and other early investors can maximize their return, and then likely, slowly and carefully unload their positions into the public and other investors who will be the bag holders when the price inevitably declines over time.

The "idea" is "make PG even more money", and that's a great idea if you're PG.

Wow, that was fast. Just recently I got the "hey you have a shitton of karma - do you want to be in the IPO" notification. Before I even dug in, it's public…

> Reddit IPO'd today and the purpose of this piece is to add whatever hype can be added to that IPO

To PG's credit, he has an uncanny ability to pluck out relentlessly resourceful founders (self-fulfilling prophecy and all that, notwithstanding) who have greater chances of outsized success. And he's been more right about startups than almost anyone else. When he praises those founders, it often comes off as an exaggeration, but I am convinced he is being thoroughly honest.

  "As someone who went through YC and met PG while he was still actively running it, I can tell you that at least in our batch he was 100% spot on about who was going to do well. He had a tendency to spend his free time with the same individuals who ended up doing phenomenally well. It would be easy to be dismissive about this and say something about doubling down on his best investments, etc. But during our batch many of those companies had not yet become the clear cut winners that they are today, and instead only turned into them a year or so down the road."

-u/aerosimle, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25381893

>He had a tendency to spend his free time with the same individuals who ended up doing phenomenally well.

There's a causal relationship here, but it's not obvious what direction it points.

If this guy is not only able pick successful people to spend time with, but to make people successful by the very act of spending time with them, he must be some kind of god.

TBH the obvious conclusion of the causal relationship seems more likely than what you are implying.

Money begets money is more of the lesson I think.

Find and support people likely to succeed? That's standard operating procedure for VCs.

Didn’t they already unload when they sold to Condé Nast? Or did PG partake in the re-acquisition?

I’d be fascinated to know if he uses old.reddit in private

Unfortunately, yes. A throw away quote at the bottom of one of the many articles during the API protest that was ignored by most:

“I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” Huffman said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.”

Edit: here is the story. I changed "he" to "Huffman" since I took the quote out of context of the full story. It's way down almost at the end. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko...

Oh. Oh, no.

I wouldn't blame much the firing of victoria, Woody Harrelson became a mock point when he did not confront some allegations made to him on the site. Which, sure, bad, but also, why would you risk going to a website to answer serious allegations? seems a huge risk to even go there.

Didn’t Rampart predate Victoria?

- victoria sacked 2015 - ama was 2012

So, It did, either way, victoria being there would not prevent a PR disaster. because that would require censoring.