It seems that Reddit has been prioritizing controversial posts to increase engagement
Is Reddit purposely surfacing more controversial posts to increase engagement, and if so when did it start happening?
strategy as old as the day when some corporate ghoul clocked that more engagement = more ad time. facebook is probably the worst offender with youtube being a close second
Have you ever browsed twitter post musk (not saying you should)?
But elon musks’ “X” is probably the worst offender here.
post-elon twitter is bad, but both fb and yt overtakes it vastly by having much larger user base
Read all about it in this month’s issue of Duh.
I miss Norm :/
There's apparently another issue that's depriorotizing "niche" subs in the recommendation algorithm, that some mod claimed was a bug.
It's pretty obvious, they're just prioritizing generic engagement for profit.
When they killed RIF, I went to the mobile site a handful of times. There was crap from subs I didn't subscribe to for a reason on my front page. Super annoying. I stopped browsing at that point, and only go back for niche subs
My email is still subscribed to reddit sending me recommendations. It's always the most boring posts of unrelated subreddits that have like 6 votes.
The company is so incompetent it's astonishing.
Just like every other social media site. I get redpill BS in my tiktok feeds because I commented one too many times calling them idiots.
Why even use tiktok?
Oh, so like every other media out there? Using controversial content to incite outrage to get more clicks and reactions?
God I'm so tired of this shit.
News on TV, on the internet, in newspapers, posts on all sorts of social media, it's all the same outrage BS.
Remember when companies primarily used to try to monetize our happiness and comfort? Doing things like associating their brands with good times and shit?
Never thought I'd miss that hollow hallmark garbage(... is hallmark even a thing still??)
Yeah it's still a thing. They mostly do cheesy movies for white Christian moms now though.
SHOCKED, I TELL YOU!!1
yeah now whenever i visit reddit (when i run out of fresh lemmy content) i constantly see things i would rather not. I'm doing my best to limit my "bad news and shit happenings" exposure and reddit recommends i watch all the tragic traffic accidents when people post them to r/maybemaybemaybe, right inbetween the freshest news from the genocide frontlines, and the newest bullshit coming from American politicians
If you don't mind, I have a suggestion that could help with avoiding running out of stuff to check.
To see the same posts over and over is pretty annoying, me thinks. So while I don't use much lemmy world, when I do, in the lack of a native function, I hide posts through ublock origin.
For example, the link of the OP over at your instance is:
lemmy.world/post/18355071
So I pick the number at the end of the link and add to a custom filter in ubo:
lemmy.world##a[href="/post/18355071"]:upward(div[class="post-listing mt-2"])
And yes, needs to be done to each post you want to hide. It can be a bit slow, but not as bad as seeing the same posts over and over again, me thinks.
And as a last note, if you want a native post hide feature, places like where I'm talking from now and lemmy.ca have it.
oh i have feed wide filters for lemmy things in my boost app, hiding everything that has "Trump, Musk, Elon, Israel, Palestine, USA, Genocide" in the title. i don't mind seeing the same meme 3 times a day, but i am taking active measures against being constantly reminded that the world is shit and misery is at every corner. The internet is great and all but the human tendency to report on tragedies instead of nice things is awful for my, and everyone's, mental health. It's always a "16 year old who was about to cure cancer died in a tragic accident" and never "92 year old grandma had ice cream that reminded her of her first love", just ugh,
I know we're wired to focus on the negatives and dangers for our own survival, but I don't think nature ever planned for us to be able to access a constant stream of reports about everything going wrong on earth, this instinct was supposed to make sure we remember where the bears are so we don't get killed, not make us depressed :(
And as a last note, if you want a native post hide feature, places like where I’m talking from now and lemmy.ca have it.
Indeed. People might consider getting alts on instances that are on 19.5, it's quite neat
Funny that someones post got removed for having negative Karma lol
I'm kind of shocked that EA's comment that was heavily downvoted wasn't deleted. I guess EA wasn't paying enough to get that service.
Pump the rage into their veins, that's the ticket. Can't possibly go wrong, and even if it does it wasn't us.
OK, maybe it was us but it's not that bad. Ok, it's bad but who knew?
OK, we kinda knew, but that monetization tho!
That strategy works so well for Xitter.
bots, shills and feds driving narrative while normies upvote and add non sequitur comments
Downvoting to indicate you're not interested is not how it works (or worked). Same for Lemmy.
*I'm saying that voting doesn't impact your feed in the way of "show me more like this" or "show me less of this".
Unfortunately so. The original goal of downvotes in the reddiquette used to say that downvotes were meant for posts and comments that were uninteresting/spam and didn't contribute to the discussion, but unfortunately most people use it to shut down viewpoints they don't agree with.
Reddit had, historically, been pretty good about the first few posts in an article complementing or rebutting the headline (particularly when the OP is controversial). Now the degree of fake engagement has made that harder to come by, simply because its hard to procedurally generate a rational set of ideas.
But in more insular and criticism-hostile communities, you'd regularly see a "Fuck <Thing We All Don't Like>" as the most upvoted comment, with any critique or nuance buried under a hill of downvotes. You'll also see some variation of Fed-jacking/Bot-tagging used to rebut any thoughtful criticism.
In fairness, we see it around here, too. People get dogpiled for having an .ml source account. People get tagged as "Russian Bot" or "CCP Tankie" for expressing the least bit of criticism of US/UK foreign policy. There's just an orgy of hate in social media, even in areas that don't explicitly encourage it.
Reddiquette doesn't work when you see in-group shitposts as positive contributions and outsider critiques as inconsequential spam. Doubly so when the mods are pushing a particular agenda.
Would be nice, I realized recently that a lot of people here will still act that way and downvote your stuff as a disagree/don't like button
Even your 100% factual comment is downvoted. Are Lemmy users that afraid to acknowledge who they are and what they do?
It's how we all use it guys, own up.
Oh shit, for real?
That's part of why I am here now. Even engaging in communities in the way that you would logically think is ok, can get you banned now. The REEEEEE crowd are making it untenable. And dont get me started on the far right either. Everybody has just lost their damn mind.
Welcome
Ditto!
<High five>
Welcome !
It's also a (US) election year, which tends to just be crazier than normal. It's possible Reddit is tweaking things, but it's also possible that election years bring out the worst in people. I definitely noticed a change back in 2016, less in 2020 but also COVID made everything weird.
There is also the obvious exodus of users in the past year. I'm not saying it's a lot in terms of numbers, and I'm sure they were replaced, but I suspect some shift in demographics.
Also Twitter. Twitter had a huge rage problem before Muskrat took over, but now it is soooooo much worse. For some reason people don't leave and then I'm sure carry over that rage to other sites.
They could have banned the russian bots, but they were desperate for their traffic. (Or Spez is in their pockets/did some weird things he doesn't want to be seen)
You could tell they were heavily tweaking their algorithm in 2016 while they were shifting from a list of default subs to an algorithm based selection.
All of those platforms have used that strategy. I think both FARK and Reddit had/have professional trolls on the payroll back in the day to drive controversy and therefore engagement.
Honestly, I've almost noticed the opposite for about 2 months now - but I only use mobile browser with no account so it may not be a fully accurate experience.
The main reason for this opinion is that I'm Canadian, and until recently the super right wing echo chamber bot farm Canada_Sub, no longer appears on my popular/hot in Canada feed and has been replaced by the far more left wing Onguardforthee.
The 'Sub' group went private, then back to public but it's no longer being pushed on my feed.
In general, I'm definitely seeing less right wing talking points for Canadian content, not sure if that's due to the overall algorithm, or if admins have been cracking down on bots and the right wing Canadian subreddits don't have enough traction without them to crack relevance.
Maybe reddit is taking it's content more seriously with all the AI content scraping they're about now. Their content won't mean squat if it's polluted by bot content like other social media.
As opposed to lemmy where all the worst takes just naturally float to the top.
yep
Oh, so like every other media out there? Using controversial content to incite outrage to get more clicks and reactions?
God I'm so tired of this shit.
News on TV, on the internet, in newspapers, posts on all sorts of social media, it's all the same outrage BS.
Roughly one year ago, you say? Gee, I wonder what could possibly have happened roughly one year ago, hrm? Can't really think of anything particularly memorable that happened roughly one year in the past... [them, OP and all the commenters]
I wonder what the timeline is before the inevitable selling of data results in users getting doxxed.
That is when Reddit starts selling Reddit Premium to not sell all your data, bc fuck all you all apparently, according to spez.
Edit: holy shit that may have already just started.
No controversial has been pushed for 7 years on reddit