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Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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Technology
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Have to wonder how many of these "users" are actually people too.
I think that most users there are still human beings, but botting has become a big enough problem that the platform can't be seen as a place for genuine content any more.
I am becoming increasingly skeptical of that, repost bots run completely unchecked: The admins 100% do not give a shit and haven't for a long time, pretty much always ignoring reports because it artificially inflates their numbers.
Bots are parasites: they only thrive if the host population is large enough to maintain them. Once the hosts are gone, the parasites are gone too.
In other words: botters only bot a platform when they expect human beings to see and interact with the output of their bots. As such they can never become the majority: once they do, botting there becomes pointless.
That applies even to repost bots - you could have other bots upvoting the repost, but you won't do it unless you can sell the account to an advertiser, and the advertiser will only buy it if they can "reach" an "audience" (i.e. spam humans).
I'm not saying there aren't still people there, I'm saying a HUGE number, possibly even the majority, are bots. Might not be more than 50% yet, but there have always been a lot of bots on reddit and it only got worse over time.
Yup, I got that you don't mean that everyone is a bot there. I just don't think that there aren't so many of them as you're saying; it's certainly not as much as half the users, or even the activity (bots tend to be more active than actual users).
They're still wrecking damage on the place though. Eventually they'll reach a plateau in proportion, but their numbers will go down, alongside the actual users.
Maybe, maybe not, but I'm pretty damn sure they'll never disclose the actual numbers or police repost or astrotufing bots.