Now Reddit’s not just promoting ragebait and AI generated stories, but divisive conservative rhetoric. Anyone else notice the non-political subreddits spontaneously hosting a population of chuds and propagandists where a few weeks ago they weren’t tolerated?
Has reddit changed the algorithm? Has some nation begun its bot operation? Has reddit deployed bots at musk’s behest? Has twitter sent its worst users to brigade? (All of twitter’s users are its worst users) I don’t know, but the effect is striking. All I’m certain about is that I’m avoiding reddit even harder now.
Reddit is definitely trying the ragebait thing from what I saw before I left. With however the algorithm works there these days, /r/all actually got pretty good at showing me more of what I’m interested in (same as adverts to be honest, I did not mind getting random romance fantasy novels and shit advertised to me), which made me even more suspicious every time it would slip /r/conservative into my feed, even if the post only had like 10 upvotes.
And maybe it’s just in my imagination but I would especially start seeing subs like conservative after literally just being active in subreddits that shit on conservatives. So it felt a lot to me like Reddit’s algorithm was actively trying to bait me at times to get into fights in places I should just ignore or block.
Hello. I have come today to talk to you about our Lord and Saviour, adblockers.
Haha I use adblock (uBlock Origin to be specific) in Firefox but I was talking about the app in particular. I actually have a hosts level ad blocker installed too but it’s disabled a lot of the time because every now and then it breaks something and I’m too lazy to toggle and reboot any time that happens.
Honestly though, I didn’t mind Reddit ads that much. I’ve spent the last few years questioning gender and shit and honestly, watching targeted advertising try to figure me out on various platforms has been oddly fun and affirming in a lot of cases that I’m on the right track, in the right place and asking the right questions.
Not that I’m defending it, no ads is of course better but I’ve seen much worse and more obnoxious styles of advertising than the way Reddit handled it. For all their faults, if they had to go down the advertising route, at least they managed to keep it somewhat more classy than almost everyone else.
Definitely wasn’t just you, I’ve noticed Reddit actively feeds me content from subs I’m subscribed to that will bait me to argue with less than 100 upvotes, meanwhile it won’t show me major posts from the same sub that I actually wish to see.