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.