Is it me or does reddit feel, weird?

These are engagement farming posts. Both reddit and Twitter are full of them, because both sites are now offering money to accounts whose posts get lots of upvotes/comments.

It feels gross and inauthentic.

Reddit isn't the only place this is happening.

Nice to know there are other monkeys on this planet that can open their fucking eyes.

Anyone notice the amount of memes used as free advertising? Disney has been doing it for a while, and crushed it with the mini Yoda in that shit TV show.

Fuck Disney.

Dead Internet Theory at work.

The internet has a grim future and it doesn't involve you and I interacting if they get their way.

You can blame bots, but having also worked as a soul crushing social media manager for a few months, you make shit like this to get karma (or on other media, interactions.) Humans deserve some blame!

That said the greatest irony is a toooon of the votes and comments are also bots and/or shills. The weirdest thing I found success on with Twitter, for instance, was wishing people a good morning, using a company account. Weirdly drove profile traffic and follows. >.>

Karma bots making low effort shitposts because our dumb monkey brains will upvote it. it happened before but you ignored it because you cared enough about the organic engagement on the community and mods did enough to try to stop that behavior

Now that Reddit removed mods that actually did their jobs and you’re one of us, it’s all you can think about

You are not the only one noticing it. Probably trying to maximize the user provided content they can sell to language model creators

The GenX sub is the same now. It's just a bunch of questions now like "what's your favorite song from the 80's?". It used to be a sub with substance and now it's lame.

I still use reddit for some of the niche and sports communities that just aren't really present on Lemmy (or not yet at least). I only use old reddit, and I only use my front page or the multis I curated myself. One thing I've noticed a lot lately is posts with zero upvotes and usually zero comments appearing in hot, top, and best filters. Most of these are absolute trash posts that were clearly posted by a bot.

I do not understand what benefit they're seeking by shoving bad posts with no positive feedback into these sorting options but it's fuckin weird.

Why are you using r/videogames as an example to make this claim?

There are at least two more subs that are wildly more popular and have much more activity and substantial posts and commenting.

• videogames - 293k subscribers
• Games - 3.3m subscribers
• gaming - 40m subscribers

I am subbed to both of those last two and didn't even know the first one existed because it's offshoot trash.

It's because of bots, in the past there was enough moderation to deal with them plus a larger amount of natural engagement.

Now after the exodus there is significantly less real engagement and much poorer moderation. Those combined allow bots and low effort posting to thrive.

My guess is with the protests that some of the top content creators moved away and never came back.

I remember sorting by hot once gave a wide variety of things and now it seems to be more drama posts like AITA posts.

Although it feels like I'm still following an ex, There was one place over there I used to visit a lot and I believe if you took a snapshot of the top ten posts of a random day few years ago and today, they'd be very different. Today's seems to be a group picking up a trend and running with it and before it was more original content. I remember going there because I knew there'd be something new I'd likely laugh at or be amused by and now it feels heavily recycled.

The subscriber count is still way up, but I'd you look at the online/active user count, it feels like its around 10% it was off recent highs.

It felt like the sub had a ship of thecleus moment where it seemed to just be growing, but was also losing people until the group changed but the name was the same.

Someone else said the new reddit gold allows people to receive real money* if people gild their posts (by spending real money) * receiver must be in certain countries.

I saw a post recently on a wholesome memes page where someone tagged repost sleuth bot and someone else commented that todays post was literally a copy of the third top voted post of all time. It was.

I also remember that bot support got affected and this led to a spam detector bot being moved from active development to sunset mode where it was still supported but not actively enhanced.

On that note, anyone feel like YouTube comments have recently turned "too nice"? Like if you go to any yt let's play, usually the first 10 top comments won't be talking about the video contents, just "I love that we're getting regular videos 🤗!" Endlessly. It feels so weird to me compared to the actual discourse that could happen there, and obviously yt comments are infamous for being a cesspool so that's even more of a jarring change

You WILL consume the slop

I didn't expect it to reach this level...it doesn't feel appealing.

Do they have some AI chatting in comment ? :)

One more thing to notice here is that despite it being top of all time, none of the posts are even a year old

the Facebookification of Reddit. bots are raking in engagement so they can astroturf as "legitimate" accounts later.

When I first joined lemmy, there were bean posts everywhere. People kept posting shitty puns about beans with pictures of beans, and people kept upvoting them. But it eventually died down.

Could these kinds of posts just be a fad on reddit right now?

It's all bots, reposts, and corps trying to use the system to drive engagement towards their shit products/websites/services. The comments are worse. jokes, memes, SJWs, and random proselytizations on the most banal shit you've ever ignored. Every time I'm on Reddit it just feels like dead internet.

I've tried to give Reddit another chance and the majority of posts just seem artificial, AI or bots, I'm not sure but it has definitely lost its organic nature.

bots are fucking atrocious for generating just miles and miles of trash content on Reddit.

As a mod for many years, the real moding work was finding ways to keep the bots at bay.

It got real bad since around 2020ish...

They can train their AI's all they want on Reddit, it's a complete waste of time.

That data is corrupt as shit. It's already littered with garbage old AI posts and comments, and it's gonna poison their models real bad.

None of those even reference current games, they could all be repost bots reposting stuff from years ago.

The "Which era did you start playing video games" is missing the last 4 years of consoles.

Fluent-in-finance sub has the same problem. Every day, it's a twitter screenshot of some politician statement and the title is always an engagement question like "Is punitive wealth tax gay?" that makes it to /all

The couple of times I snooped in on Reddit to see how it was going, Top Day felt like going through some TikTok/Instagram Story clone.

Honestly I think you just fell out the meme train and now you're looking at it as an outsider.

Yeah, it feels very repetitive.
Only some niche subs like r/sysadmin are somewhat normal. But even those niche subs are becoming this weird version.

i think the problem is you went back to reddit, giving them additional traffic and supporting their removedry.

9gag memes were similar.

Telegram is just lousy with crap posts and comments now as well.

I mean I'd argue that's how any even moderately sized social media system feels. It's because it drives clicks. Influencers, Youtubers, sites, they all crave to do more of this because it gets the cash rolling in, and it's a business after all.

You are right to feel weird. It's gotten progressively worse over the years, but it's essentially just a website full of bots and karmafarming accounts. They contribute absolutely nothing except gaining reddit clicks and comments.

Its probably buzzfred trying to scam a story out of someone

Its been weird for a few years now ever since they started shutting down the more triggery subs and those folks were left to spread out into the general population

Has that not always been how it goes? There was a time where the joke was "what can you say at both _____ and _____" because it was posted to absolute death. I know there's been loads of stuff like that so is that not the same as to what's going on? Is it not just a meme?