[barfoure]

> Reddit is becoming less believable than ChatGPT.

Hard disagree, and I’ll cite a simple example: Reddit isn’t one community. It’s a hub and spoke model. There are many good communities with curators and SMEs.

My canonical example that’s counter to this is HN. No offense to anyone but Reddit doesn’t have a hive mind - communities do. And HN hive mind is wrong more often than right and has been targeted by all sorts of astroturfers along the way. I personally take very few comments on here seriously, no takes seriously, and mostly show up to read comments by some actual hard cred people (f.e. animats). Everyone else might as well be a shill bot. AI doesn’t change this. I still get cream of the crop from Reddit.

Having said that, social media isn’t dead. It’ll transform. Two things are eternal: 1) women’s need for attention, 2) men’s need to get laid.

[Rebelgecko]

IME some of the smaller communities on reddit that are based around hobbies are actually MORE astroturfed

The bots have gotten a lot smarter about making their ads look organic too. Even easier now with the ability to hide post history

[nospice]

I mean, yes and no. The default Reddit experience is absolutely overrun by fake content. Or, there are tens of thousands of real people who have nothing else to do in their life but to go to /r/news or other "front page" subreddits and post the same political talking points multiple times a day, whether the story warrants it or not. Frankly, the AI / paid-shill explanation is greatly preferable in my book.

The non-default experience is a mixed bag. Specialized communities are usually moderated pretty strictly, including rules against outgoing links, product reviews, etc. That said, you definitely see product placement disguised as questions / off-the-cuff recommendations where some previously-unheard-of Chinese brand is all of sudden mentioned every day.

HN has its problems, mostly in the form of people pretending to be experts and saying unhinged nonsense, but it's far less commercialized. If you want your brand to be on the front page, you sort of need to make an effort to write at least a mildly interesting blog post. Now, AI is changing that dynamic a bit because we now get daily front-page stories that are AI-generated... but it's happening more slowly than elsewhere.