Used Reddit for years. There's no way the percentage is that low.

Lol. I guess it's hard to tell when you haven't seen the site change over time but.. yeah?

It uses to be "argumentless" discussions on esoteric tech and philosophy issues.. then a few years later it was people commenting the same 9 memes for 9,000 comments.. then a few years later suddenly everyone's anecdotes are praising China, or capitalism, or offhandedly mentioning some product or influencer.

Tbh tho, most of Reddit now just reads like Subreddit Simulator. All of the site's value regarding sincere, unique, and detailed user content.. yeah, that's gone. They're just coasting on past laurels, will be fun to watch the wheels fall off as the data stays locked in 2023, before the LLM Ouroboros.

Lemmy wouldn't have that problem because we're all too busy enjoying an ice cold Coca-Cola.

Dead internet here we come!

those are some low numbers. between corporate, state, and anonymous shills and trolls, I wholly believe at least 50% of all reddit content is paid for or manipulative for agenda based groups. the sheer number of repetitve posts with repetitve comments constantly being on the front page is pure propaganda. Of course I rmemebr back in the old days when the reddit feed was in (almost) real time where you couldliterally wait every 10 minutes and refresh for an almost completely new front page. Now it's all about repetivie agendas and narratives operating in cycles to manipulate public opinions. the same lame post will sit on the front page for entire days.

I've said this before, but we also need to be cautious about this on lemmy and devise ways to empower mods and the community to fight back against this, I'm not entirely sure how since it's a very complex problem

Capitalism consumes everything.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that in terms of marketing, reddit has a disproportionately high level of return in interaction relative to its size, while Twitter has traditionally had a low level of return relative to its size.

For some reason, comments on reddit has always been viewed as more trustworthy relative to other social media platform, despite reddit or's general reputation for being confidently incorrect on many subjects.

There are certain people whose entire career was made by their reddit posts, yet, it was always odd to me that reddit never managed to effectively capitalize on this other than making their platform worse with every update.

Testing out this theory has been interesting.

Only 15% 🤨

Y combinator discussion suggests this author posts completely made up garbage:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38700636

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38627266

The director of marketing at my company just got out of a meeting with reddit and is super hyped at funneling all our Facebook and Twitter dollars into reddit instead. I didn't have the heart to tell him he's five years too late.

Not surprising at all.

In other news, GTA Online is awesome! I am definitely not a plant or anything like that, go check out GTA Online!

Or something like that.

lol

"At least" doing a lot of lifting here.

Uh, this post is a bummer and I don't even know if I actually believe the premise... Whatever I guess, lett's all actually just get out of here and go get some Sprite® brand family products, you guys.

Remember the_donald started out as a meme sub that got taken over? I fell victim to astroturfing that election season. Thankfully it has made me more skeptical about online interactions now.

"At least..."

I feel like the 15% number is very, very low.

Key word: At least

Why is Medium conflating trolls and shills?

Paid propagandists are shills, not trolls.

People are literally defenceless vs propaganda. Me too. It takes extraordinary effort to decipher the fake from true and whether the true is a full truth or some small piece on silver platter.

At this point I gave up and I just try to find out motives of every… player and align myself with these that best serve my interests.

I don’t read much news because it’s all leftist or alt right propaganda drivel and while I align myself with the left because it serves my interests the best I won’t waste my time listening to their whatever narrative they crafted last week…

Just observe their actions and try to find out the motives and then ask if their motives align with yours. Their words or narrative are worthless drivel at this point, mostly.

Alt right drivel however is especially toxic and insulting but that is specifically done to evoke emotions. Anti gay propaganda crafted by closeted bisexual priests that want a piece from the table. It’s a bit like these email scammers who filter out less naive by making lots of grammar errors on purpose. You are supposed to be enraged either way.

I don’t have a Medium account. Could someone post a link to the study?

And now imagine that companies paid reddit money to be enabled to train their AI on them...

Wonder what the percent of AI datasets being propaganda is

I'm confused. So this is a study that shows that significant less content on reddit is bots and trolls than it seems? Like ONLY 15%?

I feel like 15% would have been a realistic number a few years ago, but nowadays you have a hard time comunicating with a real human. A bit like online customer service.

15% only? Not bad I’d say. I was expecting more like 30%+

I remember writing a comment about invasive advertising by Instagram. Just shared some anecdotes about how a few extremely specific conversation topics soon became the topic for the ads I was seeing on Instagram, and pointed out that if they were in fact using background conversation to target ads, it would be extremely easy to automate with the voice recognition technology available at the time, so why would they ignore the opportunity if targeted ads are their main source of revenue?

It became one of my most down voted comments at the time, and I had about twice as many replies as downvotes, claiming all kinds of wild or easily disproven shit to disprove the idea that Instagram used such tactics. Was very fishy

You regularly see posts with 10k+ upvotes and about 5 comments. Even the users say it's scummy as hell.