Social network Reddit recently began blocking mobile visitors to its website while pushing them to download the official Reddit app, and it's fair to say that the move is not going down well with users. If you visit reddit.com on your iPhone today, you may see a new popup that can't be dismissed, asking you to "get the app to keep using Reddit".
How many are bots?
Its like facebook. Engagement is up, audience is increased, but, its likely by a small number of people. I started noticing that in the Aussie subs, that every week, near the weekend (right before night), there were obvious lobbyist posts, which suddenly shot up (stuff like pro guns, pro- one nation etc). At this point, our local racism party was clearly doing heavy lobbying on the platform (despite losing 30 years of elections, based on reddit, you’d think they were #1).
Like facebook, a lot of people are switching off now, and trying to find alternatives.
Moderation has also gotten really bad recently. I had an account for 14+ years, never got banned. Made a new account, and within a few months, I got a temp ban for apparently being racist (despite the fact, I spent a lot of time arguing AGAINST racism).
On facebook in fact, on the heatpump posts, I actually noticed 1 or 2 names pop up on almost all the adverts saying they were an engineer, and that heatpumps don’t work, etc (with bad info). Reddit allows infinite accounts, and no doubt, it is not much better there
IKR, I left reddit a couple of years ago when they did the API thing, and even then it felt like there were a lot of bots around. I can only imagine that’s increased massively with Gen AI having become so ubiquitous. If I were an advertiser or investor, that’s a question that would worry me.
Advertisers and investors are drinking the same coolaid. It’s the customers of those advertisers that need to be questioning their ad space purchases.