[beachy]

I feel reddit is having a near death moment.

There are prowling bots trying to strike up engagement with stupid open ended questions "do you find that using a golf simulator improved your golf?"

And some subs seem infested with submarine advertising, posts that mention a single product name almost in passing.

Nearly always these people have their posts hidden. Reddit has always been looser, people can edit and delete their comments and entire posts, and enjoy some frothy conversation while hiding their old rants.

There are plenty of signals that reddit could use to push out bots but they just don't seem to prioritize it.

When you find your self wasting time responding to a bot it's a bit of a sucker punch. Too many of them and Reddit will be on the ropes as a wasteland.

[bloomca]

I've seen people on reddit having entire conversations with clearly bots, often on a post clearly written by a bot itself. I am sure some people are disgusted by that (I am certainly not a fan), but it seems that many are fine, or who knows, maybe it was even other bots.

I suppose there could be a tipping point if enough people leave and genuine interaction becomes rare that it will be too obvious, but at this point I don't know. But I am on a brink of quitting reddit, nearly all popular subs I like are AI-infested and it is just exhausting.

[beachy]

It could be there's a fork in the road for reddit.

Some people are probably fine, even happy, immersing themselves in an all-bot world that panders to their worldview and strokes their virtual needs.

While others are looking for thought provoking interactions with humans.

Reddit needs to pick one or the other as their target audience. Trying to satisfy both will kill them.

Solving their bot problem would obviously nuke their audience and engagement metrics, but reddit is in a unique position to take that hit - at this time anyway.

[axus]

The government shills in /r/worldnews get paid the same if their conversation partner is a bot or a human