Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!
Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!
How is it possible, that with 90% of subbreddits set to private, the number of posts and comments created on reddit do not decrease according to https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/? (EDIT: I might have based this percent on false information, see EDIT at end of comment. But I leave the following paragraphs unchanged for history.)
Activity only decreased by 20-30% if I’m being generous looking at the graph. How is this possible, is the graph accurate? How can 10% of subreddits be so active, like nothing happened? That would meanthe remaining 70-80% of activity is happening in 10% of the subreddits which are still open! Which is craaazy.
I have a theory - maybe we are underestimated the amount of bots on the site and they operating like nothing happened in the open subreddits? If this would be the case (and I’m gonna enter speculation and conspiracy territory here), but what if certain parties have quotas to fulfill for advertisers or propaganda machines, so they have to post (using bots or other means)?
I struggle to find the cause of this anomaly, of course you wouldn’t see 1:1 decrease in subbreddits going dark and activity, because people are subscibed to plethora of subbreddits. But I thought that it’ll be at least 50-60% decrease in post activity. Worst case scenario is that these are real users creating real posts and comments, because that would make this protest moot - It would just show reddit management that the community doesn’t matter, general public who come to the site will still interact with the remaining slop, advertisers rejoice.
EDIT: I based the 90% number on this site’s statistic: https://reddark.untone.uk/. My understanding was that these subreddits makes up for most of all subs on reddit. Turns out, as @brightside@compuverse.uk mentioned in this comment, these are only subreddits that participate in the blackout. Based on the README.md of this reddark fork, it pulls the list of participating subreddits from the threads on r/ModCoord.
However I still feel the impact of the blackout a little lackluster. If this is the case, this statistic could be explained by another phenomenon: that the distribution of reddit activity by subreddits have an incredibly long tail. Meaning, that a significant portion of comments and posts are created in a very large quantity of small subs, which does not participate in the protest.
An interesting feature of Apollo is the ability to highlight accounts that are less than a month old. Between seeing that highlight, and a slew of randomly generated usernames, it’s amazing how many accounts on there that are almost certainly bots, just chatting away.
You’re forgetting about porn/OF promotion subs. You have no idea how many posts/comments they have per day. The mumber is mindbogling. Trust me, they make up well over 80% of all post/comments on reddit.
True… Hornyposters are a whole different beast, seems to me like a separate “community” within reddit who doesn’t really care about other stuff. I’m not a saint, I browse NSFW subreddits as well, but I cannot comprehend why would anybody want to comment under some random nude. The amount of thirsty comments is mind-boggling
Not even the commenters, but the promotion bots. With as filtered as I had my settings of r/all, I’d often see them in new (a lot of OF small timers just don’t even bother labeling themselves as NSFW). What is notable is they often post the same post to multiple subreddits at the same time. I’m talking like 20 posts back to back by the same OF bot. That’s a huge amount of activity on a chart even if in reality it’s just white noise.
Yeah, this too. The same image/gif/vid get’s reposted on several different subs. Sometimes with the same title, sometimes with a different title, but it is the same content. They don’t wanna crosspost cuz it reveals that they post the same image to several subs, which decreases their chance of actually getting some subscribers.
Concerning the karma farmers and other spam bots: A lot of active redditors who reported them as soon as they cropped up aren’t on the platform at the moment. And some people might make use of ‘the troubles’ to set up new bots or for promotion. The last I’ve seen of those (before blackout) were people gifting karma/coordinate upvotes via subs somehow affiliated with Temu (some newish cheap shopping platform).
Yep, just look at what’s happening on lemmynsfw.com… number of communities is blowing up.
I can unserstand commenting, cuz… maybe it makes you hard and you just wanna like let that gal/guy know that, in the off chance he/she reads that comment, doesn’t have an OF and is actually trying to hook up… and is the original content creator… hope never dies.
Remember that quote from Dumb and Dumer “so you’re telling me there’s a chance 😏”… it’s like that.
I refuse to believe such smut could be responsible. It just doesn’t add up. Maybe if you could tell me what subreddits you’re talking about I could perform my own research into the subject.
Look at the posts from users that post there, mostly OF promotions, you’ll see like 20, 30 posts back to back in 10, 20 minute span.
I cam share some of those subs if you’d like, got an account for that on reddit 😁.
Bots usually post to their own user page/subreddit to my knowledge.
Depends on the bot. There are many that go into subreddits and repost old popular posts. Sometimes in subreddits you wouldn’t think of. Like, for some reason the King Of The Hill subreddit had a really bad reposting bot infestation. I guess those wholesome and kind of niche but moderately active subs are chosen because people are less likely to dig into it, but if you check on the post history it becomes clear it’s an account with no comments that is just reposting content back into subs.
Is this a restriction on bot activity? I guess it would make sense for non-malicious bots using the API, but there’s nothing stopping writing a malicious bot just using the website scraping and automation to post anywhere. At least I never had to fill out a captcha, but there’s possible there are measure against these kind of bots as well.
Depends on the bot and its target subs. Some subreddits are set up to restrict posting below a certain karma line, so bots aimed at those will do stuff like posting to their own profile—to get around, say, a moderation tool that’ll auto-ban accounts that post in “free karma subreddits”—to build up the needed karma to post wherever. Those are the ones I assume @Kay_Angel is thinking of
But, a bot that’s aimed at a less restrictive community wouldn’t need to jump through the hoops so would work a lot more directly.