Whats up with reddit lately? Why is it so quiet?
Reddit seems oddly quiet these last few days. Its kinda eerie. Posts that would normally generate a ton of comments just have 2 or 3 comments. It feels a bit like a calm before the storm.
Anyone know whats up?
Everyone I know, including myself has been banned and they will not allow new accounts, and many subs refuse to allow posts from accounts with no posting history, which means no new users.
All I can guess is that they paid for some awesome AI moderation.
probably them banning bots again, they purge alot.
Not positive, but I came to Lemmy today (would've came sooner had I known about it) because I was IP banned from Reddit overnight for agreeing that Jimmy Kimmel's show shouldn't have been canceled in a random comment.
Not here to make any political statements, just mentioning it because it seems like Reddit is on a banning spree and getting rid of anyone with opinions lol
Listen, I dunno about your instance rules or whatever but on Lemmy we make a lot of political comments. Mostly left-leaning mind you; but because it’s one of the few places where you still actually can on the Internet.
If I were to guess their utilization of AI to deal out bans has come back to bite them in the ass. Anything that remotely suggest protesting for example will result in an automatic ban. Anything that could potentially go against the grain of ad revenue will result in a ban. Moderators fearing for their "job" are also way more heavy handed and they were previously.
Thus they're gradually killing off their userbase and instead what you'll find are bots and agenda pushing accounts in their place.
Shadowbans , are probably the reason behind this, once you get shadow banned it's next to impossible to use another acc, without them banning you immediately, the only way to use it if you have a different, device, IP and browser to evade their detection. As opposed to actual sitewide bans, that they still allow you to use another account, provided you don't interact with the sub you were banned in.
The purges this time around were different, they were just linking accounts and banning them all at once now. Also from another forum, I read they got better at detecting the methods that they were using to evade bans.
They banned all the legit users, so now it's just bots.
50% prior to the purges were already bots, now it's probably skewed higher percentage for bots. Also with the invasion of New bots
Not my experience at all, but I hang out in niche subreddits only.
I will say that I am noticing a trend where if I sort top posts by year, damn near everything is 10-12 months old. Between that and just a general lack of good info on recent topics, it's clear a lot of the subject matter experts have moved on. To Discord, maybe.
Their indiscriminate AI ban hammer with no real appeal system is probably a large part of it as well. They have likely IP banned a large portion of the real humans that previously used the site.
I used it for over 11 years and was a top contributor or whatever before randomly getting axed for no reason
i noticed it alot on the shadowban sub, people are still get shadowban for no reason, additionally they sometimes do large purges at once. Their nov-april purges was pretty much nonstop, which was unprecedented, they probably realized they got rid of too many actual users, and is trying to hide the numbers right now. Theres also significant amount bot/ai posting reposting old threads or new propaganda
I feel like they've been shuffling chairs on the titanic to cover up their falling engagement. Their default sort is now showing things from 4+ weeks ago, "Hot" posts with 0 upvotes on massive subs, hiding total sub member count with a rolling view count, etc...
Not sure who they're trying to fool but it's not hard to tell that activity has dropped. Stale posts, niche subs have dried up, active readers in the single digits, deleted comments, etc... But their stock is higher than ever so that's nice I guess?
yea i noticed they are showing OLD posts, that were done a week ago, They purged way to many real accounts this year and it really shows.
hiding total sub member count with a rolling view count
Wouldn't that be worse? I've seen a sub that had close to 5 million members and the new metric showed today 98 000 weekly users. r/gaming had what? 30 millions? Now it's 2.4. This makes it look worse, doesn't it? Or am I missing something?
But I agree with anything else you said.
It's busily dying. Activity and engagement has been falling for years, but only recently reached tumbleweed territory.
I mooched over there recently. Saw a post in /r/UKPolitics that looked interesting. The overwhelming majority of comments were by frothing right wingers who want to see all immigrants drowned at sea.
I unsubbed.
Bots. I presume they're gearing up and are about to do something massive soon.
Are you sure you're on popular?
Probably because Reddit is busy censoring and deleting everyone's posts. I had the number-one comment on a thread with hundreds of likes, and they deleted my account just because I was talking about the evil of Netanyahu (which was relevant to the post). Short answer: I believe they are ramping up censorship.