Title says it all. If you think Reddit’s been trending down lately, just wait.
Reddit now:
What’s your all-time favorite video game?
u/totallynormaluser: “I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, I don’t have personal preferences or emotions, so I don’t have the ability to have a favorite video game.”
u/AngryBeaverBeaver : OP, why do you even bother posting here when 90% of replies are bots?
OP : I’m sorry, but as an AI language model…
u/AngryBeaverBeaver: Aight imma reporting every bot
Mod: I’m sorry, but as an AI language model…
Reddit will probably appreciate the extra traffic bots will create
Until that IPO happens and investors want an audit of bot activity vs daily active users and then it all goes south from there.
What’s this “from there”? It’s already heading south and they haven’t even had the IPO yet.
Maybe, maybe not. Advertisers are definitely going to want to know how many of their impressions are actual people and how many are bots.
I fear your right, seems the kind of scummy I’ma god-complex type thing spez would do
As if Reddit isn’t already a shit show now… just wait. It’ll be overrun with bots.
Maybe that’s the plan, charge the bots to talk to each other
Close.
- Make people have to sign up to use Reddit
- Have bots do the work of people by reposting old top posts
- ???
- Profit
It’ll be like watching a bunch of CPU players fight each other in Smash Bros. That’s entertaining, right?
In otherwords they’re speedrunning the capitalism fueled ai takeover
I don’t understand why they are going to keep the service running through October? If you are leaving, why not get it over with - could someone enlighten me?
Generally speaking, responsible stewardship of a service involves a tail of wind-down and end of life support. It gives time for people to adjust to new services and/or set-ups, troubleshoot the transitions, and provide some lingering support while the service is deprecated.
As another example, Christian was willing to try to find a way to make Reddit’s new API pricing work, but would likely need a good amount of time (say, maybe 6-8~ months of notice) to be able to refactor the application to minimize API calls, trial out new subscription tiers, and figure out what to do for the lifetime users. Instead, he got 30~ days of advance notice after repeated promises that the pricing would not be like Twitter (a lie) and/or no major changes to the API in 2023 (also a lie).
At the end of the day, the people leading these efforts want to end on a good note so they can point to their work as an example of their skills for future opportunities. It is not a good look, where in the face of a belligerent collaborator (i.e. Reddit leadership), one responds in a belligerent manner. Even if Reddit leadership is well deserving of scorn, responding in kind does not create a great professional image.
BotDefense (and many other third party tools) for Reddit were built for its community members, not for Reddit the corporation, which is to say the “client” here are Reddit moderators and community members. In that regard, the developers are adopting good practices for their primary clientele.
If I recall correctly, that 30 day notice was basically cut in half anyway because communication from Reddit’s side was so wishy-washy and opaque.
Yep, notwithstanding the poor tooling on Reddit’s end. I don’t even think the developer portal was fully functional and ready for production use when the pricing was announced. In fact, Christian had to implement his own API tracking back-end to get a good picture of how many API calls Apollo was making because this information wasn’t readily and transparently available from Reddit’s developer tools.
Imagine charging for an API but not making it easy for your collaborating developers to know how much of the API they are using and will therefore be billed for.
With only a week having passed since Reddit implemented new API rules, it’s alarming to see so many notable community members decide that their volunteer efforts and innovations are no longer worth providing.
I mean they’ve been hamstrung, had their tools removed from them. At that point what can they do?
This is good for reddit.