A mild realization just hit me. Reddit used to come up in daily conversation, even with randos. Now when I mention it nobody even knows what it is, and those that do remember it... speak of it only as this vague place they used to go years ago. "Oh yeah I remember reddit"
Reddit never came up in daily conversation for me. It came up only occasionally, and it actually seemed to do so more often after it went public.
It was a weird coincidence
no because they banned so many people, whats left was propaganda bots, and spammers looking to earn money from rs by directing traffic to thier businesses. this effectively stopped or poisoned thier AI data scraping.
i assume this affects things like libdirect, continum,,etc. old reddit still works on some browsers and 2 extensions.
No, they aren't. The headline is just a giant lie. Why would anyone pretend to believe it?
Reddit was destroyed by bots years ago. So that's nonsense. But they have two strong reasons to pull public access. First, if the public has access to the data, then companies won't buy it for AI training. Second, if the public has access to the data, they can prove (as we already knew) that Reddit is full of bots, so there is no reason you would want to buy training data from it.
reddit also wants GENUINE human generated content, not AI-generated posts or comments that poisons thier data, thats why the forced logins. im in another forum where the spammers, have to "make genuine' content to evade thier spam/bot filters.
It's both. The LLM scrapers are now relentless. They are also closing the door so they can sell the data to Google.
and people who buy ads on Reddit thinking it's going to get a certain amount of views but they don't know most of those views are bots until after they paid for the ads. Then they have to prove to Reddit they were tricked and good luck with that unless your a corporation Reddit wants to have a good relationship with.
Reddit is killing ~~RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots~~ itself.
I tried visiting old.reddit.com yesterday and it was a redirect to a login page that appeared to be the modern ui. So I guess PC browsing is off the table, Reddit’s modern ui is trash.
it still works on FF. on mobile its a little trickier, you use the old reddit extension and sink it or oldyesterdayreddit extension as well.
You can use the old Reddit extension of Firefox but yeah, the latest changes suck.
Lots of people here confusing scrapers with bots making posts. This is talking about the former, which I think we all agree are bad, but most people seem to think it's the latter, which reddit is happy to host.
Obligatory Fuck Spez
Fuck Spez
I think he might've misunderstood a message and thinks there's really that many people who want to have sex with him...
Reddit never gave a shit about bots. To them it's something that pumps up their active users numbers to woo their investors. They're only doing this so they can force people to view their ads that are designed to look like posts.
Who goes on Reddit nowadays anyway?
they never ever did anything to propaganda bots at least not recently, and since trumps 2nd win in the WH it was clear they were banning.
They're concerned about AI scraping. They want to sell access to users' content for training, not let the AI in for free.
Unfortunately a good chunk of linux distro resources and troubleshooting, and also many hobby stuff is over there.
Seems like most people don't really care about or understand stuff like "private platforms enshittify". Certainly not enough to be inconvenienced. People will be like "that's where the good memes are" or "that's where my video games post". Heavens forbid you miss the hot memes.
I still go on reddit often since that's where most of the game communities I want to hear from are.
I go on Reddit read-only fairly often, but these days it's quite rare that I'll post or comment. And when I do I always take the opportunity to promote the fediverse.
I mostly stick to Lemmy but there are times when I have a question to ask and the larger number of eyes on it does feel better even if it's just a placebo
i had to ask very specific questions, that Reddit has the niche subs for, that lemmy doesnt have recently.
I think the issue is also related to how Reddit makes money. Reddit makes money from selling advertisement. I would guess they are charging a certain fee based off subreddit activity the ads are shown in. When most of that Reddit activity is bots and fake clicks on advertisement then the company won't see the return on their investment because they thought a million people would see their ad but only 100k real people actually saw it.
(annoyed at the copy-paste of a bad title imo)
Those RSS feeds have been so heavily rate-limited over the past year that they were practically unusable already. I'm glad they're finally making an announcement about it. No more ambiguity. No more aggressively sporadic 403 and 429 errors.
Go ahead and kill the only reason I ever used your site.
because of AI bots
because they want to charge people for the privilege to have their users data
Imagine thinking that a super intelligence is going to emerge from reading reddit comments.
Reddit is slowly dying. It will eventually be 100% bots.
thats whats FB has become.
I'd like to believe it is but I also know that the majority of people online do not give a damn about user experience and things getting shittier. I do not understand these people, but its because of them this shit is still happening. If they all left sites like reddit there'd be no incentive to become shittier and shittier.
Not trying to shift blame though, in the first place its companies like reddit even coming up with strategy who are to blame.
When I left Reddit years ago I was already convinced than more than half the accounts were bots.
During the exodus, it felt like 20-30%
Anything with an even mildly AI-adjacent topic is a solid 75% bots right now...
/r/nvidia, /r/amd, /r/hardware, etc, etc..
the "meat" is where all the propaganda can target like the front page subs.
If it was bots they'd have to shut the whole site down.
Bots my ass
Yeah…
AI bots….
That’s why.
The reddit community that I'm still sort of active in relies on RSS in order to run and judge contests. We have a portal which sucks comments in via RSS because they revoked the API key which was used for the same purpose.
Without RSS, we'll either have to come up with some other way to pull in reddit comments, or force everyone to use PieFed.
My vote is for the latter, of course!
They're very much making it hard to be a mod. I wish my community would follow me here.
reddits plan is to have AI mods to fully automate subreddits eventually. enough witht he pesky human ones that soured them in the past.
Today in "no fucking shit news" reddit continues to suck and water makes things wet. Next week on "everyone already knows this" join us when we reveal our breaking stories "republicans are traitors to the constitution, and spez sucks donkey dicks"
reddit is more akin to psyllium husk, that it took to much and clogging the insides require more invasive procedures to remove it.
reddit dies more every day than the day before and it’s already long dead
Reddit is such a tucking corpo
I don't doubt that it's because of the bots but it also conveniently forces people into their enshittified "modern" interfaces.
The API was effectively killed off years ago, so no loss there.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
