Reddit right now listed by popular/hot

Great… it’s like dollar store Facebook or Quora for 12 year olds or something.
- Well, to be fair, most of the really good content was rarely make it to r/all. Reddit's biggest strength was always the sometimes oddly specific niche communities. You had a niche? You'll find a place or multiple places where you can sate your hunger.
  To this day I still look into Reddit, albeit I don't participate anymore, because there are some niche communities that I can't find in a similiar form somewhere else.
- Isn’t Quora for 12 year olds already?

Its that or relationship/AITA type posts that are so wildly insane I dont know why anyone bothers replying.
My (58M) wife (18F) cheated on me with my brother's ex-girlfriends hockey coach. AITA for not attending SIL's wedding because her dress code specifies hockey jerseys and they refuse to tell me if BXGHC will be there? Also the dinner is a plate of skittles, which I have a bad history with.
- I'm convinced theres a troll game going on to make the dumbest aita post, last time I went in to check my messages I saw one with a guy asking if he was the asshole because he yelled at his daughter for missing her recently dead mother
- "NTA - only a psychopath would serve skittles, so everything you did was right."
  
  "YTA, skittles are the food of the gods. Also you could easily dress up like a hockey puck and get hammered by the coach."
- YTA, you should support your brothers ex-girlfriends hockey coaches right to copulate with your wife, stop being such a control freak by trying to keep them apart. Also, skittles are an excellent meal and a good source of nutrition. Nothing to see here, just a drama queen looking to have their shitty decisions justified by the libtards.

The titles sounds like research for BuzzFeed articles. "The ten movies that hook you from the beginning" etc. Wouldn't surprise me if the posts are just lazy article farms.
- Ding ding ding

The only worth it really had were the niche communities. Some of which became meme centric over time and went down the shitter.
I jumped over here on lemmy and till today im still confused on the instances, federation and defederation thing. It seems a lot of the niche communities I used to partake in do have multiple equivalent instances, but none of them are active. I actually feel lost over here if I'm being perfectly honest...
- If you’re interested in niche communities, the problem is that you’re not going to see those posts unless you visit them specifically or make a multireddit for them.
  BTW, now we have a community for unexpected factorials too.
  !unexpectedfactorial@sopuli.xyz
  unexpectedfactorial
- Yep I also miss some of the reddits, eg icecreamery, and fitness. Weird thing is, fitness reddit is super popular and there's nothing active here as far as I can tell.
- That is exactly my thought. I don't think Lemmy is better. I want there to be something that makes this place feel like a true future platform but really it just feels like a bunch of people making websites that share comment sections and almost all of them being shitty or dead.
  
  For now I think if we all try to keep an engagement quota soon enough the snowball will start pushing itself

Synthetic engagement.
I think it's been this way for a while, maybe 8 years. I also think there are certain companies that pay reddit for this kind of engagement. It's a completely unfounded conspiracy theory of mine own, but I think Disney and Marvel fandoms have been synthetically built up using this kind of astroturfed engagement. By using my bots to build a strong baseline, you create the sense that there is far more involvement than there actually is. Because these bots are owned by reddit, they can steer the engagement. It's not a guarantee, but it's a part of an overall strategy.
- There is absolutely no question that Disney and Sony are both heavily engaged in viral marketing on Reddit. You can always tell when a new PS5 exclusive is about to drop because subs which almost never hit /r/all end up getting tangentially related gaming memes on the front page with 4000 comme ts talking about how excited everyone is for the new PlayStation game. Same with Marvel movies for a while there. Reddit even had engineers writing code for the Thanos snap thing.
  Reddit has very clearly been trying to monetize guerilla marketing for a while, and I think a big part of the API issue is precisely that everyone realized that it's super easy to just cut reddit out of the equation entirely with bots.
  
  My first time saving a post because, yeah exactly.
  For me it was always very obvious, but also clear they were trying to be subtle.
- I always thought it was so stupid when people complained about "karma farming bots" when it was obviously synthetic content that primarily benefitted Reddit themselves.
- Of course the marketing dept of large companies and sports leagues work directly with reddit. They also have the ability to sponsor and boost organic posts, place top comments etc…
  
  I believe it but I'd like to have direct evidence for it.

Question is a common question people Google for. Potentially AI generates.
Post is filled with AI bots answering to inflate user numbers.
Post is used by websites to generate new content. Often by AI.
AI scrapes reddit post for data, and verified it on those websites.
AI ouroboros
- Thanks to those API changes, Reddit is AI free!
  
  You don't need APIs to bot. APIs provide a "official" method and make it easier.
  You can automate web scrapers and bots without APIs since forever.

Perhaps there really are thousands of worthwhile comments to make about these topics.
Couldn't even keep a straight face writing that.

I'm not sure what's so weird about this
- It's all "engagement-bait" from bot accounts.
  
  It always was. Astronaut.meme
  
  Ah didn't notice that
  
  What's their endgame here? These parts won't even collect karma since they're self posts.

Prolly bots doing bots thing.

What profession is willing to pay for social media recruitment?
What prejudice do you want to have confirmed?
What product do you wish to advertise?
What media product do you wish to advertise?
Can you believe this obvious lie?

So, one of the benefits of decentralization is that I don't Lemmy will ever get to that point, honestly.
On reddit, there is only one or two places everyone goes to for these kind of "ask the community" kind of things. Due to how reddit works, your comments will be buried in one of these threads big threads if you comment too late, but people will gamble and join the rat-race for karma.
On Lemmy though, since there are a couple of "ask Lemmy/our instance" comms, the people who don't want to have their comment buries in one of those gigantic threads has options to go to one of the less active communities instead.
- Wow, Margot! Such a beautiful input. No wonder how you sold Barbie for the producers.
  
  That's "Esteemed character actress Margot Robbie of Hollywoo" to you, Mr. Adultman.
  Also, how did your business go at the stock market today?

I am on Lemmy to not have to see it.
- Maybe block reddit@lemmy.world
  
  Sure, done

AITA -insert fake story that never happened where I'm clearly the asshole-
- NTA. Your story, your rules.

Reddit has devolved into a Taboola chum feed.

“Men of reddit: What is something that women do that we don’t want them to do that we could collectively tell them to stop doing? I’ll start: not letting me sleep with their sister“
- Followed the next day by, "Women of Reddit, what's something guys do..."
  Followed again the next day by, "Men of Reddit..." by people who didn't see the original post.
  
  “Men of reddit, what’s your favorite way to receive fellatio?” by ARealWomanIRL
- I'm so glad I didn't have to. I can't really stand her sister.
  
  Is it a tradition in your family?

Reddit sucks.
Consider nuking your comments then deleting your account:
https://old.reddit.com/r/redditseppuku
- Already done my dude.
  It’s Lemmy for me now and into the future.

Looks like some tacky headline articles from a magazine or something. So glad I left that place. Can we let it rott in silence

Everyone’s a bot there except you it seems
- Good Bot
  
  HA. HA. HA. WHAT A FUNNY HUMAN JOKE BETWEEN US HUMANS! HA. HA. HA.

The same questions every fuckin day. This was the reason I unsubbed from all of the default subs and in the end at least part of the reason I moved here

While you were using the subreddits you were subscribed to, the general default subreddits were always seeing activity like this.
But over time reddit has been attracting a far more general audience of regular people from other social media platforms.
- I think it's young people and people from countries that are just now getting as connected to the Internet and they see no reason to complain cause they just are excited to have the space not knowing of its change. It is what it is and we won't change people that don't care.
  But it does mean the user base is really different, those comments are so miserable and cruel and shitty. r/all stuff is full of comments that make me want to punch a lot of people and I don't think I can go back there anymore.

Bots

That's looks like everyday reddit.

Too late to meaningfully join any of them.

Haha I was just trying out the Stealth client and saw those posts.
And, um... What's wrong with that exactly? Seems like useful debates. I took a peek at the movie opening one.
Look at Lemmy top posts for hour/Xhours/day, and it's nothing but memes.
- Zero desire to answer a likely machine generated generic question that's been answered a 1000 times before only for my comment to get lost in 10000 other likely machine generated answers. At least that's how I view these posts, a waste of time. I dislike when I see a new community on Lemmy that is trying to echo this model.
  
  It's the "most popular" from all around the world, of course it's gonna be generic. It's either this stuff, or more Ukraine war, or memes.
  Nothing is preventing you from scrolling down, or switch to different sorting, or watch specific subs... Honestly, going to the Hot section, and expecting something suited to your specific tastes, and being upset that it's too generic - that's pretty ironic.

I assume on /r?
I don't know who would do that. The only reason I view all on Lemmy is because there isn't enough activity to limit what I see. Despite the downhill trajectory on reddit, it isn't at that point yet.
- I browse all, but that can he bot heavy at times as well.

~~c/WatchRedditDie when~~ oh wait we have Snoocalypse alr lol

And yet we keep tabs on it.
and it remains unscathed
Edit: Bad source was bad. I’ll take my L.
- I'm confused; the link says it was updated in 2023 but none of the data is from later than 2022. Am I missing something?
- The most recent data here is from like 2021
- March 2023 is prior to the blackouts and exodus. This tells us nothing.