I used to be a lot on r/travel. Back then there were posts with pictures that had upvote ls in the triple to quadruple digit range. There were also user questions, usually in the double digits.
Now the majority is just discussions that mysteriously have thousands of upvotes. And some of them quite boring. That must be bots or fakes directly by reddit. No way this happens naturally.
Is this common practice now or is that something r/travel did specifically?
B[o]ts use API calls, and Reddit has API calls locked down now.
That is if bots used the API directly, which may or may not be the case. It wouldn’t be that hard to automate using Reddit’s UI. You also had botmakers who relied on the API given months to transfer to webpage scraping.
And while Reddit did create and upvote posts in the beginning, the site seems to be large enough that I don’t see Reddit being able to scale upvotes based on content alone without a massive AI army.
I don’t see Reddit being able to scale upvotes based on content alone without a massive AI army.
You say that as though Reddit cares about the content of a post when manipulating its upvotes, AND as though you have no idea who Sam Altman is or that he was on Reddit’s board for several years.
Of all the things Reddit can’t or won’t do, AI is absolutely NOT one of them.
I say it as knowing that Reddit can change how upvotes work. They’ve done it in the past and it is a lot easier to change a formula over creating bots to upvote and downvote.
Reddit has also shown its ability to frame and curate both the default steam and r/all by removing porn and limiting political posts.
I don’t know why Reddit would deal in bots when it has more powerful tools at hand.
I don’t know why Reddit would deal in bots when it has more powerful tools at hand.
Cheap, easy, impossible for outsiders to quantify, approaching IPO and cash to be made, keeping ad revenue the same without revealing how many actual users have fled the site, etc.
