Same. My reddit consumption and engagement has dropped drastically when they fucked over their power users. I believe that has hurt them immeasurably but at the same time they're massive.
Anecdotally I was on a thread yesterday reading the comments and my god it's not disgusting but it's a weird uncanny valley. Methinks they have internally masked the impact by building out bots using LLMs.
I got 4 posts to a reply on my cake day. That to me is abnormal behaviour.
I saw a comment get a reply linking the exact same YouTube link not as a quote but in the reply with very generated language. That was then followed with very much "this is a reply my fellow good human" type replies.
I honestly think they're fucked. I think they're just hiding they're fucked.
Ok so it isn't just me? I can't tell if it's just maybe people from fledgling online countries all trying to simulate what they think the Internet is like cause they are excited to finally be part of it or just literal bots trained to sound like humans to pad numbers.
Upvotes still seem like bot controlled with massive variances in the same subreddit from the ones that feel like ads to posts that are clearly human generated.
There is a weird vibe over there. Like a city full of plastic people.
There is a weird vibe over there. Like a city full of plastic people.
Perfect summary.
To be clear as well I've been on reddit 10+ years. It's "different" now. Uncanny valley. I'm trying to be objective. I don't have near the vitreol of many people here on lemmy. I'm actually fairly indifferent outside of them running their site into the ground.
Also worth mentioning it's more visible in large subs. My city sub is real ppl. I got the weird vibe from a top 10 sub.
That describes what Reddit feels like currently pretty accurately. Was it like this since that api shutdown or before then? Because as a long time user it’s definitely gone downhill in terms of healthy engagement.
I purged my account history to useless amounts after seeing this. I still stick to having Reddit account just for having "freedom" of access to information. RedReader and old Reddit + RES are doing well for me.