Compounded by it being mostly bots doing that.

Reddit is astroturfed from day 1. By that I mean they literally faked it until they made it as in the early days Reddit was 100% consisted of sock puppets, whose activity convinced outside people to join.

remember the silence brand crab? pepperidge farms remembers...

I mean, you're talking about Reddit, which is a brand, in this comment.

Like, people talk about things, and a lot of things have brands.

he means people making content by arguing/responds with BOTS who argue/responds with users and other bots.

In the long term. In the short term, spez makes a lot of money.

I think they got all they needed from us. It doesn't matter what they do now. They sold years of conversations and information.

Their moat is people not being arsed to make an account on a service that's not actively hostile to its users.

The plan is to artificially inflate the number of users with bots to fool advertisers into thinking there are a lot more users than there really is so they'll advertise on Reddit. This is the only thing that matters now.

they want to follow META and tiktoks footsteps.

Same. Ditched my account during the API nonsense, but I still lurked occasionally on old.reddit. When they made that require a login, stopped going to reddit entirely. Which leaves this place as the last social media I interact with. I'm expecting some kinda ban on the fediverse in my country, just cause that seems par for this course. Then I dunno, give up on the internet? It's half bots now anyway.

Meh. I started on usenet. Reddit had some fun little cultural things, but I just like yakking online in forums; not gonna particularly miss it.

the first major reddit drama was '16-17, and who was elected at that time. and when the gop were forcing subs to be shutdown. and then the first sweep of political based bans started which got worst over time, because reddit was developing more and more sensitive ways to detect spam/bots, and even innuendos will catch you a ban. and then starting from the last election to early last year, when they massive purged most user accounts. which led them to now require logins to SCOUR for more AI data.

I’ve noticed the same thing. I was a long time user of Reddit. Practically obsessed over it at times. But after noticing how toxic and just plain stupid it’s gotten lately, I’ve almost completely left it. I don’t even have an account anymore. I think the final straw for me was a video of a kid allegedly being a little shit towards an older woman, so this woman’s husband started hitting the kid. And then another guy came and slapped the kid. And the majority of commenters were on the side of the adults hitting a child clearly under 12 years old. No use being on it anymore when it’s clearly just a rage machine now.

You can see where the AI bots have taken over - entire comment chains where old reddit tropes are just passed back and forth without any real context, critique, humor, or understanding.

That just sounds like the typical askreddit comment section for the past decade, ngl

they also lost a ton of traffic i believe too, AI slop posting and reposting, prop bots, and your spammers have mostly taken over most subs.

im betting those brief comments you mentioned are just the spammers "warming up thier accounts"as to not get banned by reddit filters, they dont contribute anymore than that. im in another forum where they discuss how to warm up thier accounts this way. also propaganda bots do it too.

i to noticed multiple post of the same thing on the front page, if its political or a news worthy, it would be up to 4-5 times on the front page alone, also likely by the same poster. and then alot of the"interesting type subs" are also double/triple posting some clearly AI generated videos.

or eat where the communal toilet is.

Remember when we used to write "redit" after a web search to ensure we got some authentic conversation related to the query?

The fediverse will never have SEO like that, but I am gradually finding increasingly niche topics discussed here, or else I start a discussion with them.

also notice how many posts get double or triple posted, any trump related(breaking news) get 5-6 posted at once.

Advertising on reddit was always a dumb move from the get go. They had to disable comments on ads because they didn't want people actually discussing products openly and freely. It was such a farce.

also googles gemini, and other AI is finding reddit less useful as the site is taken over by AI themselves/and botters, also because they ban people who would contribute with multiple accounts.

they have an ever increasing filter/Ai moderation, this forced login wont save them. but bots/spammers mostly evade them by , at leas the ones that link to thier business sites, or OF they make thier accounts "organic, but pretending to be human" because thier usual methods, like have anti-detect browsers, new devices, IP/PROXIes isnt as foolproff as before.

reddit purposely obscures bot activity, by allowing people to hide thier history, they know how much it has taken over the site.

Or you could just leave, sincerely, somebody who has made the front page about 30ish times and has a few million post karma. I'm not banned if you're wondering. I just left 3 years ago and never looked back.

is it telling you cant comment more than 10minutes at a time, if its that, you have been shadowbanned, they put that limit early last year.(i suspect so people cant complain on the shadowban sub)

I'll raise my glass of delicious, cool Coca Cola to that!

they specifically removed API access after making a deal with google to train their AI on the site (and to pump their IPO numbers)