"Reddit is full of bots" / Dead Internet Theory

[Yaya]

if it weren't for Reddit, my partner would likely have had a longer period of discomfort whilst researching gender affirmation surgery. they may never have found the answers they were looking for because the majority of information exists on Reddit. there are great sites that host resources about trans stuff but Reddit et al. are particularly good at attracting a community of people

I think this is a great point that is often forgotten. I also found Reddit to be an amazing place to connect with people who share the same identity markers as me, or even less seriously, for people who share the same niche hobbies. It can be an incredible place to find community in one centralized space.

Reddit remains a good starting point for many people. I do, however, think that is a signal that people are yearning for community online, and it is my hope that eventually those community spaces will be formed on independent sites!

[grubbyfox]

i want to add a sociological minority's tangent on all of this which i think is important:

if it weren't for Reddit, my partner would likely have had a longer period of discomfort whilst researching gender affirmation surgery. they may never have found the answers they were looking for because the majority of information exists on Reddit. there are great sites that host resources about trans stuff but Reddit et al. are particularly good at attracting a community of people and automating the searchability of their posts; the same is true for any platform that has implemented something like tags, flairs and the like.

except Reddit is big. so people work for them - some of whom likely live paycheck-to-paycheck and would suffer from a mass boycott of the platform because software engineering careers are rare and the folks in charge of employment rarely know how to code so finding a new job in a competitive field is a no-go! those software fanatics don't make the rules for Reddit but they do an awfully good job of keeping uptime for their servers. having a load of users on-site keeps those developers and the entire platform paid through advertising amongst other forms. it sucks that this is the capitalistic default with the majority of the web but it's not as simple as flipping a switch when folks' livelihoods are at stake.

there are plenty of issues with Reddit and the internet as a whole - hence why we're all here creating our own websites. yet to claim about any site that it's useless and advocate discontinued use because it's been used disingenuously or because it has shady practices harms folks. there is nuance to topics like this and nobody can fully comprehend every end user of a platform because there are just so many people living their own tailored lives.

i'm aware this is a bluntly written hot take. i'm aware i haven't covered every subtlety i want to. if i did, i'd likely be approaching essay territory and then i've got to start referencing! still, i've always tried to approach the web revival with any one person's sociopolitical welfare in mind which is something i've too often seen seconded in discussions like this about platforms that are diametrically opposed with the general consensus of what the web revival is.

Yes, this is how I use reddit too! (well, viewing reddit at least.). For smaller communities, or specific things. For example, someone posts the daily challenges/info on games I play on the subreddits for that game. It's not easily available elsewhere.

But I never use the "large" subs" (askreddit, aita, etc.) It's just recycling garbage, bots, fakes, etc. The answers are always so annoyingly lame, I hate the upvote/downvote system on sites like that. But there was def a change at some point. I do remember reading some interesting stuff years and years back. Like, 9+ years ago or something.

Personally I dont think there's much creepypasta-feel of the "dead internet theory" though, although the name of the theory def suggests it! But it could ring true, if for example, everyone leaves Twitter at some point. Obviously not everyone would leave, but if they did, the bots wouldn't know. And you'd have a social media platform still being "active", only by fake users (bots.) that auto-reply to each other's hashtags, etc, arguing, just going about their little botty lives, not knowing that the userbase actually left. I guess that's what the theory suggests in some capacity.

I also never truly trust any goofy tinfoilers on youtube or anywhere else, haha, which is why I ended up going to the waybackmachine just to check if the old reddit blog post was true, and it was. What that really means, well... who knows. I'm the type of person to never truly trust something unless I see it with my own eyes, and even then I'm sceptic, lol. I still found it interesting tho, and I think it's fun to talk about! Sure, there's always been bots, but I feel there's a difference between a chatbot in 2001 and the TwoWordedUsernameStringofNumbers accounts that actively engage in convo/downvote/upvote etc twenty years later.

[garystu]

i want to add a sociological minority's tangent on all of this which i think is important:

https://www.tumblr.com/gothhabiba/722484763716435968?source=share

none of you were women of colour popular in leftist circles in 2013-16 regularly getting graphic death threats, rape threats, and attempts at doxxing flooding your inbox because a post of your’s was posted on /r/tumblrinaction and they had no requirement to censor urls.

actually this happened to a lot of people I knew often enough that we just abbreviated it to “tia,” we all knew what that meant. “inbox off for now because I got tia’ed” (for things including “thinking something is racist that that subreddit disagreed was racist” to “asserting that trans people exist”)

Reddit is like [auto redacted] or kiwifarms to me

Spoiler

(I am a sociological minority who can vouch, but my identities and oppressions do not match the person I'm quoting)

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