If they were just talking about Reddit, I’d assume something dodgy was going on connected with the IPO. But Quora is supposedly back from the dead too… Am I missing something glaringly obvious here?
They are probably paying clickfarms.
Reddit probably isn’t, as that would be cooking their metrics and Huffman would get fucked by the long arm of the SEC. They might still be, Huffman loves Elon and Elon got away with tons of shit.
Advertisers are probably paying more content farms to astroturf it though.
Plus without the API, do you really think people just stopped scraping Reddit? They just run a headless Chrome instance now and I bet Reddit doesn’t look the gift horse of traffic in the mouth.
Except I can totally see them committing securities fraud in order to pump up the numbers. It seems very much like something they would do.
Election is coming up, all Russian bots
It’s all kinds of bots; Russian, Chinese, Liberal, Conservative, but most of all its Reddits own bots meant to inflate traffic stats ahead of the IPO.
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.
I must say I’ve seen in increase of conversations on Reddit that seem like everyone involved has severe lead poisoning.
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.
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
I’ve had to start limiting the date to pre-2023 to keep ai bs out of the results
Just add
before:2023to your search query BTW.Add what? Didn’t show up on mobile
add “before:2023” to your search query
I cannot wait for reddit going public, it’s going to generate so much drama, that’s going to be soooo good.
Lemmy instances brace yourself
