Reddit says its daily users are up 47 percent year-over-year. Reddit just turned a profit for the first time. As part of its third-quarter earnings results released on Tuesday, the company reported a profit of $29.9 million, along with $348.4 million in revenue — a 68 percent increase year over year.
I seriously doubt there are even half that many users these days. Go look at the posts and comments on the site now. They’re all pointless drivel, and obvious bot posts designed to get other bots and rubes to comment. Stuff like “What is your favorite color and why” makes it to the front of the homepage with a hundred thousand upvotes. I mean come on! How could that be actual people?
I’ve been lurking that platform for over a decade and the quality has definitely gone downhill. The interactions with users are extremely inauthentic to the point where I suspect a large proportion of users aren’t even real people.
Reddit‘s business model is selling advertising views. I doubt it matters to them whether those views come from real people or machines.
The second aspect of their business model is selling content to train AI, which is basically free money these days from AI zealots, but the data quality is garbage.
Both of these revenue streams will dry up without a long-term sustainability plan i.e. an actually good website. And even if I’m wrong, hey, I’m happy here. Their success does not diminish my happiness.
They will train their bots on my shitposts!
In addition to the occasional inauthentic replies you get, most comments don’t get replies now. It’s all top level replies to the post, and nothing else. Nobody is interacting.
I have an account over there and it just feels like things are being pumped up for the sake of pumping things up. I have a hard time accepting that this is sustainable for them.
I haven’t had a good conversation on Reddit in years. Lemmy? Basically every day I see a thoughtful response from what feels like an actual human. It may not have the users but it definitely has the soul.
I agree. Reddit seems to be bustling, but it feels completely devoid of life.
Not quite top performance, but people were happy to answer: https://lemm.ee/post/46119357
Lol, nice experiment you’ve got going on there.