AI Slop Is Ruining Reddit for Everyone
Reddit is considered one of the most human spaces left on the internet, but mods and users are overwhelmed with slop posts in the most popular subreddits.
no ; reddit is ruining reddit for everyone.
⭐
{lemmysilver}
nah reddit is fine for loads of things
better than lemmy in fact but then it has FOUR orders of magnitude more active users
no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no; no;
Reddit was one of the most human places on the Internet, until King Steven the Turd decided that it's human interactions were a valuable resource that he could sell.
Now, it's all just bots talking to bots to learn how to sound human.
The engagement bots constantly peppering my comments with inane remarks to draw a reaction is what drove me to Lemmy. I was there early on, and it was awesome. As its popularity grew, it became less nice, but I still enjoyed going there. In the end, I didn't feel like commenting because I knew that I'd just get hit with stupid responses calculated to draw a response. It just felt harassing.
peppering my comments with inane remarks to draw a reaction
They're here, too.
I occasionally see comments to the effect of, "Oh, really? Can you tell me more about that?" That seem pretty likely to just be bots trying to generate data on certain topics for AI training. Thankfully, most people seem to ignore them.
Digg 2.0 jumper in 2009. I always thought there would be a new Reddit after 2014. But it took 10 years for Lemmy to show up.
Now, it’s all just bots talking to bots to learn how to sound human.
No, there's a lot of human bigotry too.
Maybe in 2012. Once it started to be a right wing information warfare battlefield it got pretty insufferable. Like a lot of the niche content was still there, but the broader culture changed immensely.
Reddit was ruined for me a couple of years ago and AI wasn't involved. I no longer interact there but I do still read Reddit occasionally. Personally I find it difficult to wade through hundreds of one-liners without forgetting what the post was about.
I mean, yeah, I left during the first wave of API changes and before the company went public, but the AI has definitely made it completely unusable.
Every sub I was active in has become one of two things:
I find the usefulness of a subreddit is inversely proportional to its size (popularity). There are still some good ones but they are quite small.
I had hoped Lemmy would fill this void for me but it’s still too small overall such that the smallest communities are barely active at all. Thus I tend to just scroll the feed of everything and see what catches my eye, admittedly a much less useful way to spend my time since I get sucked into ragebait instead of discussing cool hobbies.
Are you me? Because that's exactly what I've been doing. I set my default browse experience to Top 6 hour and then scroll All.
I do miss the community aspect of Reddit. There were other users who I ran into regularly in the comments. And usually not in a hostile way.
Hell, there was one sub where I was invited to the mod team because of those interactions. I did that for a couple years and continued to be active in the sub until Reddit start pissing off mods. That and my main "friend" on the mod team had his account nuked by Reddit after he fell for a troll.
Reddit removed every comment he had ever made, including wonderful and well cited rebuttals of the right-wing bigotry of the day.
So yeah, I logged out of that reddit account and have never logged back in, instead I use a burner account and try not comment on anything.
Yeah if there was a niche Lemmy sub for everything I would no longer visit Reddit at all but I can’t get my Nightreign fix here sadly
Now AI is also ruining reddit users ruining reddit!
Someone should write a Reddit client that automatically hides the top two comments and all their children, because they’re inevitably stupid jokes that add nothing.
Oh right. No one can make new Reddit clients anymore.
spez ruined reddit for everyone
What? What did the moderator of r/jailbait do now?
That one always rung a big hollow to me because of the timeframe of it. At the time he was made a mod there, invites didn't exist. Folks could just be added to subs- it was actually a method for trolling. At the time, I could add Steve to r/SteveLovesDiddlingKids, for example, and he'd have no say in it. They changed it to an invite system after a subreddit called r/CrabBucket heavily abused it to force folks to stay.
That said, one can quite readily say that spez implicitly supported the jailbait subreddit when he left it up for several years knowingly (Including it being a subheader for reddit on google searches, and it getting nominated for subreddit of the year along with several votes for it.) and only got rid of it when Anderson Cooper did a report on CNN about it.
Creepy little shit.
No, Reddit ruined Reddit for everyone. The AI slops are simply what replace the people who left.
Yeah, also the people. The comment sections are cancer. Lame jokes from dickheads that don't add anything.
This is key.
If there weren’t bots…Reddit would make its own bots. Reddit dances a fine line of allowing the population to be a certain proportion of bots because they increase real engagement by picking fights with its real users, as well as creating never-ending “content” for people to read and vote on. They only ban bots when real users notice they are bots - which is less and less frequently - even though Reddit has the tools and information to ban them long before that point.
Reddit could easy eliminate almost all of them, but that would be expensive and they’d lose real users as a result.
Yeah, after reading the article, it was like, oh, so the same fake stories but actually grammar corrected?
Also, most people who sre like "i have this tells tl detect AI" would not know at all whether something is AI or not lol
reddit already ruined reddit for everyone long before AI was a concern.
I mean that’s why we’re here…
People still use reddit, thought it was a bots only network
And yet it still had room to get worse, and it's still not even in its shittiest form.
Reddit was ruined long ago, this just accelerates the decline.
Letting gallowboob "moderate" the basically the whole front page was an insane decision. Some of those guys were selling product placement.
The centralization of power to few mods was always a problem, but smaller communities got by.
The huge quality drop came when Spez felt he missed the IPO wave around 2018 and decided to growth hack the site. Then they finally killed most of them too with the API drama.
Popular and moving away from hot to best was also bad. They horribly failed to discipline abuse from the_donald for years...
New reddit is still not even usable from a phone. It crashes frequently and i swaer to God it only shows like 8 posts and just fucking loops through them (how have thry not noticed this, I only check 4 subreddits and its unbearable).
Niche communities that simply don't exist on Lemmy. If your only hobbies are tech, lemmy probably covers all of your bases, but there are nearly no niche non-tech communities here.
They did exist before reddit as forums, however they where fragmented across different languages and websites. At some point Google started to show reddit more often, because it was more search engine optimized and mobile friendly. This means new users found reddit first, and old users where slowly pulled away from their forums into reddit.
Can't lie I miss r/sneakers. As an avid collector I miss the engagement
There’s also fun bullshit communities that refuse to migrate too. I listen to some of them on YouTube as they read the stories from there while I work on other things or drive.
I tried creating a community here but never got others to post their show too.
Some are pretty limited even in reddit too
Right now I don't have a reddit account and I just lurk there, but if I really wanted to talk about, say, a specific TV show I like, or a Movie, or Anime, or a Book... that would not exist on the fediverse. It's either just Reddit or maybe Discord.
If I wanna talk about stuff from a non-white perspective, the best place I'd really find my people outside the great firewall is Reddit.
I mean I the amount of Cantonese-speakers on Lemmy is like... single-digits
As long as people keep going to reddit instead of starting a post about the latest episode, or movie, book, etc. there will never be anything here for people to talk about.
I use redlib to lurk.
I find the drama subs like /r/AITAH entertaining. I know its all fake, but the groupthink responses are intriguing.
Let's not blame AI for everything: Reddit had a lot of problems before AI became big. Repost bots are so common that you'll see the same posts over and over again. Some of those twitter screenshots must have been posted hundreds or thousands of times. OnlyFans spam also works without AI. And we have had those bots spamming the same stupid comments before people were even thinking about GPTs.
While I agree being shitty is a human problem, shitty people are using AI to be shitty faster.
We can absolutely blame AI for everything. The reason AI took over Reddit is because Reddit fired their human moderators in favour of AI moderation. It’s basically a vicious circle of bots learning how to avoid being banned, and auto moderation learning how they’re avoiding being banned…repeat.
…the obvious problem being that bots are valuable to Reddit because they increase real engagement…if there weren’t bots, Reddit would make its own bots to do basically the same thing. Reddit only wants to restrict bots to a certain proportion of the population, rather than eliminate them.
Yeah, that happened way before the current AI slop bubble.
Yes it did. Making up variation of the same story in order to farm upvotes used to be done by humans.
But the strategy of throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks has now been industrialized with AI, because the machine can produce tons of cheaper, faster, smellier shit.
Reddit and generally socials are basically the perfect application for AI. Unreliable results are not a bug but a feature. You have thousands of humans helpfully training it for free by up or downvoting the result. And the AI companies get a machine trained to persuade large groups of people of any made-up story.
Don't need ai for that. Before AI, bots would simply copy top post from a year ago to farm up votes, and then sell the account to marketers.
The AI slop is just extra piss in a lake full of piss.
Reddit's founder and investors killed reddit, the method they used is immaterial.
What, did /u/spez change his name to /u/AI_Slop?
Reddit already ruined Reddit. The AI slop is just the broken glass in the turd.
Reddit is already ruined and has been for a while. And it's been ruined by the greedy Reddit CEO.
Also the turtle fucker that is a mod everywhere. I'm so curious how they make money being a shitty person.
Yeah AI had nothing to do with it. Ruined waaay before AI took hold. That's why I left.
The UI was becoming unusable, the policies were unreasonable, the greed got to them, etc, etc.
Yep. It was headed downhill with the bots, reposts, karma farmers, hive-mind, troll farms, and of course the reddit c-suite "purging" the site of things like WPD, morbid reality, spacedicks (yeah, not subs for everyone, but noetheless...not hurting anyone), getting rid of Victoria, getting rid of mods and leaving petty power mongers and sycophants in place, and allowing shit like The_Donald and similar subs to run unchecked. The forced commercialization, crushing of protest and reddit app was the final straw.
Reddit was the good place after the fall of Digg 2.0. Now Reddit has become the bad place.
spez is ruining reddit for everyone.
and venture capitalists.
Yeah, but did you hear? Spez is a billionaire now! The last step of the business model! Great job everyone!
And not only reddit, but the internet as a whole.
Yes. But, to perhaps a lower extent, this headline is also true if you change 'Reddit' to 'the internet'.
Yup very true. Even parts of Lemmy are showing brain rot, some instances are trying to limit to actual humans but there are ways around it.
Or "most things" even.
The World Wide Web, the Internet is the physical network and servers upon which many software stacks run including the Web.
oh no
Anyway.
AI slop is ruining everything *
I'm reading AI content there, and when I post, I'm getting accused of being a bot / using an LLM. Fantastic.
You mean those pictures all over the front page of kittens with a caption like "I found this guy in a shoebox, in the basement, hungry. I fed him and named him Mortimer." are not real?!?!
No, really it was a large slug. And TBF Mortimer is a great name for a slug.
My God! You ruined my world.
It's ruining far more than reddit.
Fuck reddit
Reddit was ruined long before AI came into the picture. that place hasn't been good for a decade.
Reddit was the playground for ai slop long before commercial LLMs existed. Subredditsimulator was like 2014 or 2015 and people were fucking with markov chains and other shit that dated back to like the 90s or even 70s but that also had some people experimenting with rudimentary neural networks, though obviously none with the computing power of shit like chatgpt or gemini. And obviously that whole experiment was inspired in part by the fact that botted comments were becoming increasingly common and obvious on reddit in the years leading to it, so why not make a subreddit where everyone participating is a bot?
There’s no proof but openai researchers may have been fucking around on that sub. There was a fairly drastic increase in quality of posts in that sub around the time openai would’ve been making gpt1 (2018ish) and then they began aggressively scraping the entirety of reddit, quora, etc for content. Could just be a coincidence though and they’ll never confirm it even if it’s true bc redditors will flip shit
Damn I had forgot about subredditsimulator. It felt like AI was stupid and funny, and look where we are now
Honestly subreddit simulator was amazing. At that time I was super into text generation, I programmed a few basic Markov chains as well. It is a shame that modern generative AI sucked the joy out of what I considered a fun toy at the time.
Why would they care? People still on reddit don't seem likely to leave
one of the most human spaces left on the internet
Journalism once again demonstrating they are about 10-15 years behind on the times. Did they forget reddit completely broke back in 2016 when the_donald left the place in a permanent troll state.
I'm not going to read the article on account of time right now but I'm guessing it's written as if reddit was invented yesterday and the prior 20 years of reddit history is didn't happen.
It hasn't been human since the early 2010s. Reddit was botted to death long before LLMs.
Didn’t the owner of the_donald try to close it down himself, only to be told by the admins that he couldn’t because it brought too much traffic to the site? Or am I thinking of that KotakuInAction sub?
Good...GOOD
imagine ruining reddit
Not for me! I left that place years ago…
Is? It's done already. But the bots got there years ago, so who really cares about now.
Here's the thing though, Reddit provided a lot of AI training data. Now AI content is ruining Reddit. This is like a large corporation making millions off cider and then destroying the orchard.
lmfao no, corporate greed and "shareholder value" is ruining both AI and reddit (and pretty much everything else) for everyone.
reddit was ruined by reddit
it's just evidence that the site went the way of social media and is saturated with people who circulate such things
I went on reddit yesterday just for a minute. Saw a post about some guy asking what he could do with a small hallway like space in his house (imagine a small walk in closet without the door). Almost every response I opened up was an AI generated image. That thread alone probably wasted a small swimming pool of water just cause some people couldn't be arsed to copy and paste a server rack.
For all the criticism of AI, this is the one that’s massively overstated.
On my PC, the task energy of a casual diffusion attempt (let’s say a dozen+ images in few batches) on a Flux-tier model is 300W * 240 seconds.
That’s 54 kilojoules.
…That’s less than microwaving leftovers, or a few folks browsing this Lemmy thread on laptops.
And cloud models like Nano Banana are more efficient than that, batching the heck out of generations on wider, more modern hardware, and more modern architectures, than my 3090 from 2020.
Look. There are a million reasons corporate AI is crap.
But its power consumption is a meme perpetuated by tech bros who want to convince the world scaling infinitely is the only way to advance it. That is a lie to get them money. And it is not the way research is headed.
Yes they are building too many data centers, and yes some in awful places, but that's part of the con. They don’t really need that, and making a few images is not burning someone’s water away.
Nope, can't ruin it for me because I have left this cursed place.
Reddit is now Facebook 2.0.
Lemmy way better than Reddit
That's mostly a result of obscurity.
Doesn't make it any less better. It sucks that the second something becomes mainstream, it gets sloppified imediatelly. Look at Reddit, Discord...
True and true.
Reddit has been ruined for a while now, this is just it getting worse.
I hate that now there's even automated profiles managed by AIs which basically ragebait constantly on normal subreddits. And im not even talking about large ones. Heck this must be the worst psyop ever made in recent history
Let’s be real…Reddit itself is moderated by AI.
People who moderate subs should be called “hall monitors” or something. It’s rare to find moderators who are actually moderating with impartiality, rather that being petty and taking sides. They also have tools to exploit the Reddit auto-mod system.
It was enshitified ages ago.
There's no point in taking moderation seriously. It's a volunteer position and the tools to handle slop aren't there.
I hear they're bringing back digg.
I also hear it's a former Reddit C-suite that's bringing it back, so it'll probably be more of the same.
Everyone? Lol. Was this written by an idiot that still uses Reddit as their main outlet?
I like to amuse myself on reddit. If my comment is getting downvoted I might delete it and repost it. Then it usually gets upvoted. It just shows the groupthink on reddit where you get "Oh, this got down/up voted, guess I'll do it too."
When the admins started getting marching order to squash any and all talks of making the rich accountable for their crimes against humanity, it was ruined. Even hint at an uprising and you get banned.
I'm amazed that anybody could even be surprised at this end result. We truly live with some moronic apes on this earth.
Just pouring gas on the existing dumpster fire
I am thankful for reddit becoming a mess and Trump made me ditch american companies anyway.
Otherwise I never would have discovered Lemmy.
I used to have a reddit account and truly enjoyed it - but I quit when it became obvious that most of the site is simply run by bots that aim to stir the pot and divide people. I still read various reddit posts - but there is no longer any real knowledge to be gained. Mostly, I now just experience frustration, mistrust, and disappointment.
Default subs were already heavily astroturfed garbage. Smaller subs still generally fly under the radar, for now at least.