768
BotDefense is leaving Reddit
(arstechnica.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
768 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
59648 readers
1468 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
And yet, with all that supposed experience they still fail to maintain a decent platform.
There's a reason nobody uses their official app.
It's worse than that, when this all started I had a look at their Wikipedia entry. They have 2000 employees across 5 locations. What in the ever loving Christ are they all doing if that app is the best they can do?
Most of them are either admins (read: global moderators to enforce site wide policy) and "community builders" that spam subreddits with reposts and junk to boost activity. Some of that spam was malicious bots of course, but a lot was also from reddit themselves. That's why the site appears as active as it is with so many content creators leaving.
Their development team is probably very small.
Jesus it sounds like they took a look at /r/subredditsimulator and thought, "hey let's make the whole site like that".
I mean what do you think they were doing for all those years? I still remember when r/subredditsimulator would frequently pop up on the front page because of some of the ridiculous and funny things the AI language models would post. But eventually over time as they learned to mimic typical user posts, it got to a point where it was a clone of every other sub on the site and everyone sort of forgot about it. So I honestly would not doubt for a second that they've spread them out to numerous subs and are using them as content creators to try and keep subs appearing active.
This sounds really dumb, but the "activity" is primarily what draws new users and keeps existing ones. The primary complaint/desire of new Lemmy users is more/sustained activity on the platform. That's also what keeps people using Twitter and other SM platforms.
For a company approaching an IPO, increasing amd sustaining activity from real users is maybe the second most important thing to do, second only to showing a clear route to monetization. It doesnt surprise me their team may be mostly admin and "community builders", but it does surprise me that they'd risk loosing major contributors and moderators without a clear replacement.
Most people use their official app
Most people probably just interact with it through the browser via google searches.
Nah, nearly 90% of mobile users interact with Reddit via the official app (most people use Reddit on mobile devices).
Damn, it's so strange knowing that it's so bad and yet people use it. Goes to show just how important the content is even with such terrible UX.
most people don't even bother trying it, from the few that I've seen that do converted real quick.
Where did you get either of those statistics?
These numbers have been thrown around since the beginning of the protest. I don’t believe Reddit actually publishes that data (someone can come and correct me if wrong).
I think what happened is someone did the math on downloads for all the 3PA (or maybe just just major ones) and compared it to active users.
Fact is, no one knows just how many users used 3PA vs the official app except for reddit. Me thinks because the data doesn’t look good for them, otherwise why not back up all that boasting with numbers.
Insightful question. After all, 34.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
That’s bullshit. It’s actually 82.31%
I too am curious. It would also be insightful to see where the real OC comes from, I would think most casual users browsing and occasionally commenting would be on the official app. Where the users who contribute popular, useful content are likely on a 3rd party app and/or pc
I'd guess account age correlates pretty strongly with 3PA usage as well - the older the account, the more likely to use a 3PA, since that's all that existed for mobile browsing back when Reddit was new.
There was a post on r/dataisbeautiful that pulled the estimated values from the app stores. The author noted the massive grains of salt we should take with those figures, and that they couldn't get reliable data from desktop browser use.
I'm not bothering to get the link for two reasons. 1) the aforementioned reasons to be skeptical anyways, and 2) fuck giving reddit some ad revenue.
I meant any browser including phones.