If they were just talking about Reddit, I’d assume something dodgy was going on connected with the IPO. But Quora is supposedly back from the dead too… Am I missing something glaringly obvious here?
Wasn’t it that (they want to) offer a way to get money for your karma points?
It’s sort of become a bit of a meme to end every google question with ‘reddit’ to trick it into showing you an actual human response. I’m sure that’s been good for traffic
I’ve had to start limiting the date to pre-2023 to keep ai bs out of the results
That’s an excellent tip! I draw occasionally and finding references for animals is so much worse than it used to be.
Just add
before:2023to your search query BTW.Add what? Didn’t show up on mobile
add “before:2023” to your search query
Thank you!
I’ve heard some AI experts on Hard Fork suggest 80% of the Internet will be AI bot trash in 2 years.
Honestly wouldn’t surprise me. There’s already so much garbage when you google pretty much anything
Bots produce traffic as well, though. So it’s absolutely possible that traffic increased significantly. Just not in a meaningful way.
IPO padding for the CEOs golden parachute.
From SEO perspective, user generated content like Quora and Reddit are dominant the Google search result right now. It’s in the top ten of the results while it’s just in 30-50th before, I guess it adds up
bots?
I wonder if there was some kind of technological revolution that made it exponentially easier to generate text that happened recently.
Good Post Theory
The article seems to suggest a change on the Google search algo and how Reddit pumps the SEO is to blame as it’s showing up in search rankings above other more relevant results.
I’m assuming “traffic” here is individual page visits, which would shoot up if people are just pulling up one page from a “how do I do X” type of search. I doubt this boost is coming from people sticking around, but I’m sure that’s not how Reddit will spin it.
This would be my guess- Reddit is more reliable for random queries than much of the internet, as AI propagates.
I see more and more suggested “my search Reddit” on Google even as I visit Redfit way less now
I do believe reddit pops up in my search results more frequently these days than it did a year ago, without any explicit prompting with ‘reddit’ keyword… (just based on my impression, though)
I honesty can’t search a damn thing and not have Reddit be the first result. I basically been using AI over search to fix things… probably as intended.
That or google bought a lot of shares ahead if IPO.
There are search addons able to filter out specific sites, if you’d like it.
A lot of AI LLMs have been trained on reddit…
Not saying its bad info sometimes. There’s a reason most of us used reddit. It just seems like its the new SEO optimized background noise now. It’s not what I’m looking for, and I rather avoid the site now.
So Reddit is turning into Quora.
Painfully accurate.
In that it will soon to shit? Yes.
Yes and no. No, it’s not Reddit doing it. Yes, Google is strongly favoring reddit results. They are combating AI content in this manner.
Google searches are becoming worthless more and more. This may be the beginning of the end for them unless users quickly adopt their generative search approach when they release it.
Dead internet theory.
They are probably paying clickfarms.
Did you guys read the article? It’s all about how since google and Reddit penned a deal to use Reddit to train google AI models, google is now massively pushing Reddit links in search results.
And their answer, ironically, is to avoid “Gen-AI garbage.”
But you should really read the article. It pissed me the fuck off. Because that sounds…massively illegal.
You scratch my back, I scratch yours
I wonder if Reddit user activity has noticeably increased. Probably not.
Like, this will help Reddit in the short term, and honestly is a good idea from a search perspective (how many queries have I manually appended “Reddit” to?), but it doesn’t necessarily help with the fundamentals of the platform.
Reddit probably isn’t, as that would be cooking their metrics and Huffman would get fucked by the long arm of the SEC. They might still be, Huffman loves Elon and Elon got away with tons of shit.
Advertisers are probably paying more content farms to astroturf it though.
Plus without the API, do you really think people just stopped scraping Reddit? They just run a headless Chrome instance now and I bet Reddit doesn’t look the gift horse of traffic in the mouth.
Advertisers are probably paying more content farms to astroturf it though.
Yup, in fact we just banned ~13 accounts tonight from a subreddit I’m still involved with. That’s just the ones we identified, and it’s only a medium sized subreddit
A user noticed that the responses to a post sounded a little off and reported it. Turns out there was a network of bots using generative AI to mix real academic advice (ex. “Go talk to the advising office”) with occasional subtle advertisements (ex. “I recommend using grammarly and (advertised service)”.
Once we caught on, we looked through the history of those accounts and gathered as many as we could identify and banned them all.
I don’t think this is Reddit’s doing, and they’re usually good about banning spam bots site wide once a mod report is made. Still, they benefit from increased activity and they have an incentive to do less of that. It was also much harder to notice the problem because of the AI generation. If a user didn’t explicitly report it, I probably wouldn’t have noticed
I highly suggest you ban what the were advertising and not just the account.
If advertiser’s realize the shady bot farms they deal with are causing any comment that mentions their product to be automatically deleted, they will stop.
This is going to be the Idiocratizing of the internet. AI is going to be training in itself with these unidentified posts and get dumber and dumber.
Let’s hope no one lets it have access to anything important…
It feels a little like how steel from before above ground nuclear testing, called low-background (or pre-war) steel because it isn’t contaminated is prized for building some sensors.
Pre AI information need to be preserved, otherwise we might not really know if the info we’re seeking is fact based in any way.
This is going to be the Idiocratizing of the internet.
I know, because I was there!
I was too. The internet was never for normies or businesses and between the two of them they’ve managed to turn it into a complete dumpster fire.
93/94 was when I first got AOL on a 14.4k modem. I’m one of those shitty users!
We used to use gopher and college FTP sites to download warez as a freshman in HS, and then moved on to Hotline trackers.
The SEC got its funding slashed by Trump - are they like the IRS now where they don’t have the resources to truly do the job anymore?
The API is not gone, and is still free for both “for non-commercial researchers and academics under our published usage threshold” and “for moderator tools and bots”
https://www.redditinc.com/blog/apifacts
There are several ways to add your personal API key to (modified) final versions of Sync, Relay, Infinity, and even Apollo on iOS to be able to continue to use those clients, however Reddit has changed how Reddit links work, so those methods are becoming more and more broken.
Except I can totally see them committing securities fraud in order to pump up the numbers. It seems very much like something they would do.
I think that’s what this part of the comment was about:
They might still be, Huffman loves Elon and Elon got away with tons of shit.
Simplest explanation is that the general public doesn’t give a shit and while Facebook is on the downturn (not sure if numbers can back that up) people need to go somewhere else. Maybe that is reddit right now, they got the marketing and content to get people on it.
I’d like to hear that crapbook is going downhill, but its share price says otherwise
Its share price doesn’t matter in this context, since Meta also owns Instagram, which is absolutely not going downhill at the moment.
Facebook however is losing active users, especially in the younger age ranges and even more pronounced in Europe and the US.
They also own WhatsApp which has a massive user base outside of the US.
But it’s not really a cash cow. At least I don’t know of any widespread attempts at monetization (yet).
WhatsApp is monetized by selling your private data, same as.FB
Stock price isn’t a representation of the current value of a company, it’s the projected value of a company down the line.
Enron’s share price was very high right up until the end, too. Share price is not necessarily a good indicator of underlying fundamentals
I cannot wait for reddit going public, it’s going to generate so much drama, that’s going to be soooo good.
Lemmy instances brace yourself
Im just sad my bank won’t let me buy puts without using my house or business as collateral
Part of it is either Reddit manipulating search positioning or Google (most people’s default search) prioritizing Reddit results. Searching for answers to questions often results in a half page of Reddit links. They may not be relevant, but that doesn’t become apparent until you’re there.
If you read the linked article it’s the latter. They explicitly say Google changed their algorithm and reddit consistently ranks at the top now. Even over the articles which the reddit thread is about.
ewh google
Yes. Google is strongly favoring both in search results in their feeble, and failing, attempt to combat AI.
The growth trend according to Google Trends indicates that it is still growing, but definitely not a quadrupling over 6 months.
seems sus to me
