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by wayoutthere 1740 days ago
It really depends on the size of the subreddit. There is definitely an inverse correlation between subreddit size and quality of content / discussion as more karma is available for bots to farm.

But Reddit is great for niche hobbies or topics. The subreddits are much smaller and more manageable to moderate without needing full-time influencers to moderate. The sweet spot seems to be around 100,000 subscribers with a few hundred active at any time; at that size you have enough new content that the default view isn’t static, but not so much that you get lost in the noise. As for being time-based, forums suffer from this as well — if your post reply isn’t on the first or last page, it’s probably not getting read.

Forums suffer from significant bitrot — particularly when images are involved. A sizeable percentage of those useful forum posts from 10 years ago aren’t really useful anymore because all the images are gone and the links are dead. Reddit at least has a centralized infrastructure that is actively maintained.

Furthermore, accounts can be anonymous and not linked to e-mail which limits the blast radius of any data leaks (which are VERY common once a forum starts to fall behind on patching). For relatively niche topics, Reddit is probably the best option.
1 comments
OJFord 1740 days ago
> more karma is available for bots to farm.

Are there bots 'farming' karma? To what end, what's the point?

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wayoutthere 1740 days ago
You can sell high-karma accounts or leverage them into mod positions. For whatever reason people take high-karma accounts to be a signal of quality (or at least activity). Mod positions on large subs are used to signal-boost corporate social media campaigns (ever notice how a bunch of fast and furious memes always pop up across a ton of subreddits a month before the movie comes out?) There’s money in that and it’s basically the same role and business model as a social media influencer on Instagram.

Some people also do it for the lulz, it’s not that hard to build a bot using markov chains (there are plenty of Reddit comment datasets you can image match to the same meme, which is an interesting engineering project for someone wanting to learn those methods).

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