Maybe ads have two messages in such a scenario. One advertisement for human viewing and another hidden function with prompt injection, prompt leaking or other function for AI bots. Ah, glorious dystopia…
you see here, bots/AI bots are less useful than you think, it actually detracts from the traffic. because bots dont produce useful traffic to the site at all( they dont post meaningful comments/posts) that AI can scrape.
thats why Open AI/and google stop referencing them in thier “AI slop generators” this forced reddit to make Old reddit inaccesible to lurkers, and now they are forcing log ins. the NEW UI is a horrid feature, even for people who “likes to use REDDIT”.
the sources of bots come from propaganda farms like russian troll farms israeli bot farms, apparently India has thier own bot farms targeted at indian Subs. I suspect the majority of the sub will probably cater to india eventually, because they have 1bn+people who likely wil uses reddit.
the other source is the lowest hanging fruit that reddit filters out, the single users with hundreds of account whos pam on the site.
Well, except for the (apparently) vast swathes of long-time users who get permabanned for bullshit reasons (or no given reason at all) and then can’t make a new account because of “ban evasion.” I guess they just aren’t allowed to experience Reddit at all, even lurking.
I got banned for ban evasion recently. I do have two old accounts, but neither were banned before so idk why lol.
Their website is so shit that I can’t even ask why. The auto mod sent me a DM and says if I want further info to reply to that message, but I have to accept the message request. Which I can’t do because I’m banned.
the reason is that, permban has caused many to just lurk on the site instead. even the ones that still have accts are afraid to login. they want people to login, but htier AI moderation/filters are still yay high. plus its not even stopping most bots / AI botting anyways, they can just create a single use account, post and move onto the next thing.
This is a good point. You lose existing users through attrition. How do you attract new subscribers to a site they cannot see?
They could leave the front top 50 posts of the day available as an attractor. With a “sign up to see more” banner at the end of the scroll. Is current leadership smart enough to do that?
They went with the assumption that as Google buys their data and replaces their links in search queue with LLM gen answers, their organic traffic from searches would get reduced into nothingness, so they can push their login requirement with little drawbacks. They increase price of each ad via personalization in a short run, but without a drag of the likes of Instagram, Discord, Whatsapp etc there would hardly be new users to create content.
reddit already lost to attrition, which is why they want people login. first the purges came last year, reduced overall traffics and users, but not botters, then AI stop using reddit as a datamine, because its not useful if all your content is also AI generated.
maybe they shouldnt do massive purges after the eleciton, and at musks request twice last year, that definitely had an effect users whos has been caught in the crossfire. not only the AI filters ban people on politics, but everyone else using the site, basically they only need a small inkling of “botting” to even ban you.
Sad thing ad networks will perceive it to be better since they better tie tracking between networks and thus better impressions. Don’t matter to me though I just recently gone the next step of filtering Readit out of my search results and have never been happier.
DDG, kagi, searxng, and likely many other engines allow you to hide the domain from results. I use DDG and there you have the ‘3 dots’ button to the right where you can block the site for good.
Surveillance capitalism follows the same rules as capitalism; do whatever is most profitable. The deception/manipulation/propaganda algos are 10-1000x more valuable when they’re able to target you as an individual; across all accounts, space, and time. The users hardest to swindle, who already gave a shit about privacy/anonymity, have already left.
Most advertising on reddit is guerrilla marketing, and reddit either runs their own bots or explicitly enables them to inflate activity and engagement.
Don’t worry, they have all the data on that, and I’m pretty sure they thought of it.
Fact is that most visits from search engines don’t go very deep anyway. They are allowing a brief glimpse at one page before they start prompting you to log in, and that is likely driving logins while barely shortening those SEO visits, which are not of great value in the first place.
It may come as a surprise but websites often have traffic they don’t want. I recall once my boss noticed there was a non-negligible amount of traffic from parts of the world none of our advertisers care about. He built an endless revolving door of promo offers and directed this traffic into it. It didn’t generate much money but it made the rest of our traffic look higher quality right away.
I wonder how advertisers on Reddit will respond to this? It will certainly result in less ad views.
Maybe Reddit will make up for it with all the traffic coming from bots.
Maybe ads have two messages in such a scenario. One advertisement for human viewing and another hidden function with prompt injection, prompt leaking or other function for AI bots. Ah, glorious dystopia…
That’s a fucking rad idea
you see here, bots/AI bots are less useful than you think, it actually detracts from the traffic. because bots dont produce useful traffic to the site at all( they dont post meaningful comments/posts) that AI can scrape.
thats why Open AI/and google stop referencing them in thier “AI slop generators” this forced reddit to make Old reddit inaccesible to lurkers, and now they are forcing log ins. the NEW UI is a horrid feature, even for people who “likes to use REDDIT”.
the sources of bots come from propaganda farms like russian troll farms israeli bot farms, apparently India has thier own bot farms targeted at indian Subs. I suspect the majority of the sub will probably cater to india eventually, because they have 1bn+people who likely wil uses reddit.
the other source is the lowest hanging fruit that reddit filters out, the single users with hundreds of account whos pam on the site.
The argument would be that they provide " higher quality, more targeted views" which is probably correct.
Most people will fold and get the account, what’s one more " sign in with Google" on top of the 1000 other accounts.
Well, except for the (apparently) vast swathes of long-time users who get permabanned for bullshit reasons (or no given reason at all) and then can’t make a new account because of “ban evasion.” I guess they just aren’t allowed to experience Reddit at all, even lurking.
I got banned for ban evasion recently. I do have two old accounts, but neither were banned before so idk why lol.
Their website is so shit that I can’t even ask why. The auto mod sent me a DM and says if I want further info to reply to that message, but I have to accept the message request. Which I can’t do because I’m banned.
the reason is that, permban has caused many to just lurk on the site instead. even the ones that still have accts are afraid to login. they want people to login, but htier AI moderation/filters are still yay high. plus its not even stopping most bots / AI botting anyways, they can just create a single use account, post and move onto the next thing.
If people can’t see the content when Earth would they sign up?
This is a good point. You lose existing users through attrition. How do you attract new subscribers to a site they cannot see?
They could leave the front top 50 posts of the day available as an attractor. With a “sign up to see more” banner at the end of the scroll. Is current leadership smart enough to do that?
They went with the assumption that as Google buys their data and replaces their links in search queue with LLM gen answers, their organic traffic from searches would get reduced into nothingness, so they can push their login requirement with little drawbacks. They increase price of each ad via personalization in a short run, but without a drag of the likes of Instagram, Discord, Whatsapp etc there would hardly be new users to create content.
On the former, yes. Maybe we will luck into attrition being greater than the users they will attract.
For the latter–maybe?
At this point I think it is best for Reddit to quietly wind down and just go away. Eventually it is just going to be a right wing hellhole.
reddit already lost to attrition, which is why they want people login. first the purges came last year, reduced overall traffics and users, but not botters, then AI stop using reddit as a datamine, because its not useful if all your content is also AI generated.
I’m not certain that I follow the logic, but I’m also not certain that the logic would make sense if I was following it.
maybe they shouldnt do massive purges after the eleciton, and at musks request twice last year, that definitely had an effect users whos has been caught in the crossfire. not only the AI filters ban people on politics, but everyone else using the site, basically they only need a small inkling of “botting” to even ban you.
Sadly
Sad thing ad networks will perceive it to be better since they better tie tracking between networks and thus better impressions. Don’t matter to me though I just recently gone the next step of filtering Readit out of my search results and have never been happier.
Same! I use this
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
Ah cool I just use the one built in to the search engine I just dont show me results from this domain
Do you mean adding “-site:reddit.com” to all your queries? Or is there a setting that I am missing?
DDG, kagi, searxng, and likely many other engines allow you to hide the domain from results. I use DDG and there you have the ‘3 dots’ button to the right where you can block the site for good.
DDG only lets you do 5 and for me three of those are taken by fox news domains already.
Whaaaaat?! Thanks for the info. Even more reason to finally give a shot at setting up searxng which I assume won’t have a limit like that.
Surveillance capitalism follows the same rules as capitalism; do whatever is most profitable. The deception/manipulation/propaganda algos are 10-1000x more valuable when they’re able to target you as an individual; across all accounts, space, and time. The users hardest to swindle, who already gave a shit about privacy/anonymity, have already left.
Most advertising on reddit is guerrilla marketing, and reddit either runs their own bots or explicitly enables them to inflate activity and engagement.
Don’t worry, they have all the data on that, and I’m pretty sure they thought of it.
Fact is that most visits from search engines don’t go very deep anyway. They are allowing a brief glimpse at one page before they start prompting you to log in, and that is likely driving logins while barely shortening those SEO visits, which are not of great value in the first place.
It may come as a surprise but websites often have traffic they don’t want. I recall once my boss noticed there was a non-negligible amount of traffic from parts of the world none of our advertisers care about. He built an endless revolving door of promo offers and directed this traffic into it. It didn’t generate much money but it made the rest of our traffic look higher quality right away.
spez just wants to give it to AI companies to scrape for a fee, they already charge 60mil/year to let google have the data.