Trucchucchut ,

From SEO perspective, user generated content like Quora and Reddit are dominant the Google search result right now. It's in the top ten of the results while it's just in 30-50th before, I guess it adds up

SomeGuy69 ,

IPO padding for the CEOs golden parachute.

fidodo ,

I wonder if there was some kind of technological revolution that made it exponentially easier to generate text that happened recently.

lorty ,
@lorty@lemmy.ml avatar

Good Post Theory

TheAnonymouseJoker ,

Dead internet theory.

Lucidlethargy ,
@Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works avatar

Yes. Google is strongly favoring both in search results in their feeble, and failing, attempt to combat AI.

FartsWithAnAccent ,
@FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world avatar

Only if you count bots lol

Zeroxxx ,

Like Lemmy. Full with cross posting bots.

qdJzXuisAndVQb2 ,

Bots are a fact of life, unfortunately.

SchmidtGenetics ,

Almost 50% of all internet traffic is bots.

TheAnonymouseJoker ,

Lemmy is not even in the ballpark of oom that Reddit and western social media sits in. Lemmy has 40-50k real active users.

bradorsomething ,

I’m doing my part!

TheAnonymouseJoker ,

No, you were not supposed to be the bot.

merthyr1831 ,

cross posting bots are a lot less problematic to me than bots designed to mimic human engagement to said cross posts

force , (edited )

Yeah this isn't Reddit but more than 80% (>4/5) of Twitter is bots. It's to the point where you can find any blue checkmark account, reply to them with a prompt, and more likely than not they'll have a wacky and clearly autogenerated response. Sometimes they just reply things like "sorry, I can't generate content that depicts violence" to random posts too.

Dead internet theory is almost a reality and I hate it. It's already happened to Google search results / blogs.

Fades ,

Almost? It’s been a thing for awhile. Shit, Reddit got started by using bots to feign engagement. It’s just that it’s gotten so much easier and faster

Turious ,

I had my Reddit very heavily curated, my subs were mostly smaller subreddits. I was incredibly active and had my settings so that anything I voted on would not appear on my homepage. I got to see a ton of posts because of that.

Around 2021, I started noticing that reposts weren't just people coming in and posting things we've seen a dozen times because they had no way to know it was a repost. It was bot networks that would take top posts and then other bot accounts would recreate the original post's comment section. The accounts followed patterns and became really obvious to spot after a while.

The original tells were the bots taking really specific posts that only made sense in that context. Popular post from last Christmas? The bot doesn't know what Christmas is, sees a popular post from a few months ago and reposts someone happy about their gifts in August. Look at this beautiful picture I took of the summer Alaskan wilderness this morning but it's February. The photography subreddits were obvious because the bots would rotate the picture a few degrees which would sometimes ruin the picture's aesthetic.

I'm not sure if it was just me spotting them easier or if they were really ramping up into 2022 but by the time they killed API access and I stopped using it, I think over 80% of posts were bots. Made leaving the site way easier.

FartsWithAnAccent ,
@FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, repost bots were out of control and places like freekarma4u helped them propagate for years with no interference from reddit. Would've been simple to shut that down if they were really worried about stopping bots but instead they ignored numerous reports, allowing the bots to run rampant.

whotookkarl ,
@whotookkarl@lemmy.world avatar

Not even close if we're talking about current users or active contributers. After they shut down third party apps and sided with advertisers over mods there was a huge migration off platform to several other platforms. Many smaller subreddits are ghost towns and the biggest ones that are still active have a smaller participating community, less total votes, and changing norms.

It's not just eternal September, it's the same thing that happened when digg died in reverse where communities grew and changed because people were joining. Users are adding site:reddit.com or whatever to Google searches because of SEO general searches are an advertising dumpster fire, but those search results are going to degrade over time along with the site's quality if they continue to make such shitty decisions for communities and users or people move to other ai based search tools.

cerulean_blue ,

Where did everyone go? I thought Lemmy was the new hangout but it still seems so small, even popular posts are only getting a handful of comments?

RememberTheApollo_ ,

Well, the federation kinda spreads users out. Like I can’t login to kbin on my Lemmy apps but I can see kbin posts, but the vast majority of my time is on lemmy. IOW it’s harder to participate across instances so less people.

There are other platforms that are probably suffering some form of the same fate, they got an influx of ex-redditors, but not a high enough volume to really take off and get high participation rates.

I dunno, I prefer Lemmy/fediverse. The churn isn’t there so you can actually interact with people instead of competing with inane reddit quips and top comment retreads.

hazeebabee ,

I think its that many people didnt really leave reddit, some migrated to lemmy, some to discord, some to other small sites, and some just quit that style of website.

Lemmy definitely is still pretty small, but i think its growing pretty well (i remember checking it out years ago and it being a super tiny niche site). It takes time for things to set up & for users to get comfortable and grow communities they care about. Organic growth is slow.

thebardingreen ,
@thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz avatar

For me, Lemmy content is better in every way, EXCEPT for local subs / communities. I really miss my well populated, engaged local subs.

TacoButtPlug ,
@TacoButtPlug@sh.itjust.works avatar

tiktok? ffffff

PsychedSy ,

It feels much more filled out than after the initial exodus. Smaller/niche communities are pretty bare, though.

forgotmylastusername ,

I think I've comment this before but over the pandemic years I did a little experiment. Every day I bookmarked the obvious content reposting bot accounts on the first few pages of r/all. After a while I checked back on the accounts. The majority of them become cryptocurrency spam bots. A very small percentage spam random things. There was an extremely high success rate of picking out the bot accounts. Pretty much all them were except for maybe a handful.

spez is basically exit scamming with reddit. Whoever is buying the dataset is getting robbed blind. That's if reddit inc isn't being upfront behind closed doors. Maybe they are. After all reddit does have well over a decade of mostly organic activity. The recent data has to be absolute trash though.

chicken ,

It isn't like you can't otherwise get the older data if you really want though, pretty sure it's on torrents. The newer stuff is all they have to sell.

thesporkeffect ,

Google wants the data to be exclusively licensed, so they can pursue any competing LLMs and sue them to death - I mean, develop a 'moat'

It's not really about the actual data access

chicken ,

I don't buy that, given

  1. All the effort Reddit has put into locking down data access

  2. Google itself was behind the lawsuit establishing fair use for scraped datasets, and it's looking likely that will be upheld

Would be happy to hear it if there's reasons I'm not aware of that this is the intention though

Perfide ,

As someone who still semi-frequents reddit, it's mostly bots, more and more of which are clearly using some form of ChatGPT or another LLM. It's actually kinda absurd, I've seen many a comment chains where it's just different bots replying to each other, both pretending to be real people.

anarchost ,

If bots actually do start frequenting Reddit, and they get hard to detect, the AI content generation will start poisoning itself. Isn't that cool?

ninja ,

Before I migrated the bots were doing quite well by taking old posts and rewording them into new ones. I only started tracking them when I noticed one posting about a months old event as if it had just happened.

emptiestplace ,

For me, the cool part is that the vast majority of people can't tell anything has changed.

Also, we can be rather poisonous ourselves.

Couldbealeotard ,
@Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world avatar

I must say I've seen in increase of conversations on Reddit that seem like everyone involved has severe lead poisoning.

ArmokGoB ,

Nah, it's always been like that.

Neon_Dystopia ,

Subs picked to be "mainstream" get botted to death and every other sub is half dead, so not really. Quality fell off a cliff.

Ephera ,

Fuck me, I'm not even using Google directly, I'm currently on MetaGer which is a meta search engine, and even there, I got annoyed today already that half the top links were shitty Reddit links.

I hate this shit so much. I work as a Software Engineer, so using web search was half our work day a few years back.
Personally, I'm thankfully already at a point where I can figure out most things by fucking around. But we have an intern who's new to the job and she regularly tells me that she struggles to find anything useful on the rather mainstream technologies that we're using.

To some degree, LLMs are still a workaround for that, but they won't be able to update to newer information without pulling in LLM spam, so either we're stuck with the current technologies for the foreseeable future or we won't have a way of finding anything in a few years.

And the worst part is that I can't think of a real solution. Maybe we could use a search engine, which only queries official documentation directly. That could be an improvement, as often not even that shows up in the normal search results. But really, what our intern needs is tutorials and those are virtually indistinguishable from LLM spam...

derpgon ,

Official documentation can, sadly, only contain so much information. Lots of tools are community driven and there are some niche uses of libraries that official docs don't know about, or including them would just take up space.

Ephera ,

Yeah, for sure. I'm mostly saying that she sometimes struggled to even just find an appropriate Hello World example, to the point where she would ask me for help after a while.
Then I, having already gotten used to the terrible search engine results, opened the official documentation directly and had it after a handful of clicks.

Obviously, she understood pretty quickly, but the official documentation doesn't always have a built-in search and can be difficult to navigate, so that's why I'm saying even just a search engine for that could be good...

Chewget ,

Ai generated content

atlasraven31 ,

Bots all the way down

kandoh ,

It's sort of become a bit of a meme to end every google question with 'reddit' to trick it into showing you an actual human response. I'm sure that's been good for traffic

GammaGames ,
@GammaGames@beehaw.org avatar

I’ve had to start limiting the date to pre-2023 to keep ai bs out of the results

Alice ,

That's an excellent tip! I draw occasionally and finding references for animals is so much worse than it used to be.

NostraDavid ,
@NostraDavid@programming.dev avatar

Just add before:2023 to your search result BTW.

GammaGames ,
@GammaGames@beehaw.org avatar

Thank you!

ftothe3 ,

Add what? Didn't show up on mobile

NostraDavid ,
@NostraDavid@programming.dev avatar

add "before:2023" to your search query

Lemmy_2019 ,

I've heard some AI experts on Hard Fork suggest 80% of the Internet will be AI bot trash in 2 years.

GammaGames ,
@GammaGames@beehaw.org avatar

Honestly wouldn’t surprise me. There’s already so much garbage when you google pretty much anything

FleetingTit ,

Bots produce traffic as well, though. So it's absolutely possible that traffic increased significantly. Just not in a meaningful way.

kryllic ,
@kryllic@programming.dev avatar

Taking a cursory look I feel like posts still aren't being engaged with like they used to. I remember seeing posts with 100,000 upvotes very regularly on the front page, but you really don't see that anymore. Yeah maybe they tweaked their calculations but why make your site look like it's not as engaging as before right before a major IPO offer?

iAvicenna ,
@iAvicenna@lemmy.world avatar

bots?

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