by magnora7
Reddit seems odd lately. The comment sections seem full of strange disjointed comments and the votes don’t make sense either. This has been getting increasingly worse, and it seems the real people who are logical and conversational have left the site which only increases the density of bad actors as well as bots and shills.
The real proof is the numbers, if you look at searches for ‘reddit’ on google trends it’s a bizarrely straight line that is ever-increasing. Here is a graph of it compared to some other similarly-searched websites, including buzzfeed, bing, and 4chan: trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit,buzzfeed,4chan,bing
Objectively, I find it hard to believe that reddit has had such endless growth since 2008. I also find it very hard to believe how perfectly straight that line is, it seems more like an algorithm to me.
Plus consider how reddit gains its value. It’s run as a company by a huge parent company. It was bought by Conde Nast, who then ended up giving it to their parent company Advance Publishing, who then in turn spun it off to its own company. Consider the line started going up in a straight line around 2008, which was soon after Conde Nast bought it in Nov 2006.
Consider that reddit’s revenue depends on three things:
- Reddit gold sales
- Advertiser space sales (most important)
- Hush money (who knows how big this is and how many organizations might be contributing money toward this end)
Then we can also consider the shills and bots running amok on reddit, while the admins did nothing for years, even when these groups are proven to be real and working together to falsify votes and comments to push agendas. Like the Jetpack fiasco a long time ago, or Shareblue and Cambridge Analytica in the modern day to just name a few.
Reddit admins (not sub moderators, but the site admins) allow the shilling and fake voting for 2 reasons.
- They might get paid to look the other way, because those shilling orgs can have a fair amount of money due to the effectiveness of “native advertising” on social media sites like reddit. They can create the appearance of organic community content in a way that TV or a billboard cannot. It’s a great way to sell things to people, including ideologies.
- They need the site traffic. Their advertising revenue depends on how much traffic reddit gets. More eyeballs = more income. Both for the advertiser and for reddit. So they are fine with other groups creating the appearance of traffic, because it also convinces the advertisers when they see their banners are getting more views. And so reddit gets more ad revenue, because there’s more views. So when these bot and shilling networks come alive and take over vast portions of reddit, they will turn the other way as long as it’s a net gain in views, because that means a net gain in ad revenue.
I think this is the reason the line is so straight going up It seems there are also bots doing google searches for reddit, and the number of fake searches is increasing with an algorithm as time passes, to show steady growth of the site. They’re giving all the indicators that the site is popular and growing. They just overlooked the fact it shouldn’t grow perfectly linearly because that doesn’t look organic at all.
Meanwhile we the people actually using the site are bombarded with propaganda and enraging nonsense, and entire prominent subs have to be completely ignored because they’re so filled with one-sided garbage. This is on the 13th most-visited website in the US. Well, that’s if we could trust the numbers. Who knows how many humans actually visit this site compared to what they say.
This is a true conspiracy in the legal sense of the term, and it seems to be the everyday life of this website. Meanwhile the true quality and value in the human relationships and exchanges on this site continue to be hollowed out as sane people are driven out by the sheer noise of non-organic activity.
Releveant:
Reddit is being regularly manipulated by large financial services companies with fake accounts and fake upvotes via seemingly ordinary internet marketing agencies.