I stumbled across a Reddit bot posting emotional rants about how bots are ruining Reddit; just to sell AI-generated books through affiliate links. A perfectly dystopian grift for the dead internet.
This is largely the problem with most social media, and generative AI has made this problem worse just like it has made other pretty terrible facets of human interactions worse.
Anyone who was paying attention on reddit the last couple years (even pre-pandemic) could see that bots were taking over. The main difference (love mods or hate them) was that mods who’s subreddits didn’t rely on bot content to stay active were moderating the bot problem as best they could.
Now, most of those mods aren’t mods anymore and the vast majority only really want the engagement anyway so of course they’ll let bots basically take over.
Reddit the corp never cared about keeping bots off the platform and they care even less now. Bot engagement counts. Bot views of ads count. Removing bots actively hurts their bottom line in the short term so of course they aren’t going to do anything with that.
The actual human users on Reddit don’t care because they’re there to consume. It doesn’t matter to them if the posts they engage with are made by bots or not.
This is largely the problem with most social media, and generative AI has made this problem worse just like it has made other pretty terrible facets of human interactions worse.
Anyone who was paying attention on reddit the last couple years (even pre-pandemic) could see that bots were taking over. The main difference (love mods or hate them) was that mods who’s subreddits didn’t rely on bot content to stay active were moderating the bot problem as best they could.
Now, most of those mods aren’t mods anymore and the vast majority only really want the engagement anyway so of course they’ll let bots basically take over.
Reddit the corp never cared about keeping bots off the platform and they care even less now. Bot engagement counts. Bot views of ads count. Removing bots actively hurts their bottom line in the short term so of course they aren’t going to do anything with that.
The actual human users on Reddit don’t care because they’re there to consume. It doesn’t matter to them if the posts they engage with are made by bots or not.
they have been actively culling human users for months now, leaving mostly bots.