Reddit says its daily users are up 47 percent year-over-year. Reddit just turned a profit for the first time. As part of its third-quarter earnings results released on Tuesday, the company reported a profit of $29.9 million, along with $348.4 million in revenue — a 68 percent increase year over year.
Bots ain’t users, spez, you greedy little pigboy.
It seems that they are, if he can manage to sell them as people to the advertising firms.
Fuck spez.
Wasn’t deleting bots to appease advertisers the thing Elmo had to do over at Twitter?
I don’t know how spez manages to do it - it seems fairly obvious to anyone paying attention.
Oh, this comment in one of the cross-postings seems relevant: https://lemmy.world/comment/13157556.
Cool, I like it here more.
Of course they are having more users not just necessarily human users. Hope the advertisers get good value for what they spend /sarcasm
Well that’s too bad
I seriously doubt there are even half that many users these days. Go look at the posts and comments on the site now. They’re all pointless drivel, and obvious bot posts designed to get other bots and rubes to comment. Stuff like “What is your favorite color and why” makes it to the front of the homepage with a hundred thousand upvotes. I mean come on! How could that be actual people?
Not quite top performance, but people were happy to answer: https://lemm.ee/post/46119357
Lol, nice experiment you’ve got going on there.
I’ve been lurking that platform for over a decade and the quality has definitely gone downhill. The interactions with users are extremely inauthentic to the point where I suspect a large proportion of users aren’t even real people.
Reddit‘s business model is selling advertising views. I doubt it matters to them whether those views come from real people or machines.
The second aspect of their business model is selling content to train AI, which is basically free these days from AI zealots, but the data quality is garbage.
They will train their bots on my shitposts!
In addition to the occasional inauthentic replies you get, most comments don’t get replies now. It’s all top level replies to the post, and nothing else. Nobody is interacting.
I have an account over there and it just feels like things are being pumped up for the sake of pumping things up. I have a hard time accepting that this is sustainable for them.
I haven’t had a good conversation on Reddit in years. Lemmy? Basically every day I see a thoughtful response from what feels like an actual human. It may not have the users but it definitely has the soul.
I agree. Reddit seems to be bustling, but it feels completely devoid of life.
“Auster is the king of Mars!”
Source: myself
From what I’ve heard, it also got a whole lot worse in terms of user experience, so I don’t really care.
Well looks like the great Reddit exodus wasn’t so great after all and Reddit more than made up for it. Financially at least, things are looking up for them. I kinda really wish it weren’t so… but at least some of us got to know Lemmy as a consequence.
Hard to say isn’t it? If 100 users join and 80 leave you assume they are up 20 users. If the number of bot accounts that joined was 30 of those, they actually lost 10 users, and advertisements are selling more ads to computers than people. Unless we can separate real accounts from fake ones… It’s all useless information
Doesn’t matter to reddit as long as the advertisers still pay them though
It will matter to Reddit in rhe long run if advertisers notice they aren’t getting as many clicks on their ads from Reddit as their metrics say they should be getting and then pull their ads off the platform and/or sue Reddit for falsifying metrics.
Well and behind is is stealing other peoples’ work (posts and comments) and selling them as yours. The oldest capitalist criminal trick in the book: privatization AKA primitive accumulation AKA enclosure of the commons.
On the whole it’s gone way downhill since the API fiasco in my opinion. The only thing worth a damn on Reddit nowadays is that some specific communities are better than elsewhere (sports, mental health, niche hobbies) but only because discussion boards (php) have mostly died and Facebook somehow manages to even MORE toxic as far as racism, sexism, etc.
It’s depressing. At one time Reddit on the whole as an entity (not the company, the community) was very vibrant and amazing.
Was a Member since 2012… it all went downhill 2016 when 4Chan-Stormfront-Nazis “grew up” and moved over to reddit. Man I hope these people taste their own medicine better sooner than later.
Traffic in big subreddits dropped up to 50% whenever there was some news that another huge botfarm was busted.
Edit:
Or when Russia is busy starting a war. Completely natural pattern there. The screenshot is from 2022
