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What percentage of Reddit users are bots or foreign bad actors? (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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It probably seems weird asking this on Lemmy, but of course posting this on Reddit would get banned or taken down. Reddit doesn’t like being critical of Reddit. Anyways….

Over the last 10 years as a Reddit user I’ve believe the amount of accounts that are bots or foreign bad actors has tipped past 50%. I have no statistics to speak of, but would love if somebody did and could share.

Based purely on some of the conversations, posts, rage bait, strong ideologies, etc… I’m pretty convinced that a reasonable sample of humans could not or would not act the way they do on that platform. So often now I see posts that I feel are specifically attempting to sow discord and disagreement.

Does anyone else agree? What percent of users do you think are bots? Foreign bad actors?

Sadly, I think Reddit has no desire to find out or do anything about it. There would be no upside to them correcting their advertising numbers.

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[–] 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

With you on this. As an old school netizen who watched digg enshitification that led me to reddit, then over the years was astonished about how extreme the rightward shift went... I mean the trump choo choo memes on the front page bought and paid for by Steve Bannon and other net savvy investors. It really went to absolute shit. When they banned the API it was a blessing in disguise cause no excuse to go back, especially with the lemmyverse.

TLDR fuck Reddit that platform is dead

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    i've likewise been moving from one social media platform onto another since things like bbs & icq were dominant; i used to believe that everything w money behind it eventually enshitified until i started seeing enshitification signs on the larger diet reddit instances like .world and lemm.ee

    the diet reddit instances don't have anywhere near the same financial backing that reddit or bluesky has; yet they do the same consent manufacturing and narrative shaping that reddit, bluesky and legacy media does.

    and i wonder how its going to look in the future as the enshitification drives liberals to eventually abandon their diet reddit instances once they realize that reddit or bluesky can do "general interest" better than any lemmy instance ever can.

    lemmy was built for political outcasts and i suspect that the original leftists instances will always stick around and continue to form new relationships with other leftists and other instances from non-mainstream political factions; but i'm going to assume that the sheer massive size of the general-interest/diet-reddit instances (relatively speaking) will have an impact nonetheless

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I was on lemmy.world for a week. My goodness the astonishing degree of bad takes and western propaganda. Yeah, I mean. I hate the data silos but at least on lemmygrad and hexbear there's a modicum of actual good faith dialogue.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Yep, I essentially use Lemmy.ml to correct misconceptions about Marxism, AES, etc and use my Hexbear account for actual discussion and furthering my understanding of Marxism via interacting to LG and HB.

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