Comment by SauntSolaire
11 hours ago
Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.
11 hours ago
Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.
> give subreddit moderators a fighting chance
Moderators are part of the problem really, there are a handful of moderators holding the reins over all the popular subreddits, and "smaller" (even big ones) subreddits suffer from the same problem.
As an example, r/MistralAI, r/LocalLLaMA, r/ChatGPT, r/OpenAI and r/grok are all run by the same person.
The only survivable places on reddit left are the subreddits with small amount of contributors that aren't trying to gain something by participating and organizing. But they're so few.
> But they're so few.
Given how many subreddits there, I have to ask if you have statistics to back up this claim.
My intuition is that people have problems with a bunch of popular subreddits, but the vast majority of subreddits are just fine. I have no statistics to back up this intuition.
Do you?
There’s a whole vibrant industry of people you can pay to market whatever you want on Reddit. They can’t all be competing for the same few popular subreddits. They must be differentiated by targeting niche subreddits.
5 replies →
There are two problems in computer science, accepting payments and naming things.
Reddit's principal problem is that the first person to take r/foo is often a BDFL for foo for life, and no other subreddit about foo will ever be quite as recognizable. If we instead had subreddits with a numeric ID and a non-unique display name, that problem would be solved.
Payments would also solve the spam problem, but many users who have $1 can't easily get that $1 to Reddit, so that's not really an option either.
Reddit is eager to remove mods who it disagrees with. Any remaining mods are there because Reddit approves of them.
Admins actively choose moderators, removing ones they don't like and inserting their favorites. Recently, a mod was removed from r/LivestreamFails and made a public crashout video. In exactly the way you'd expect a Reddit mod to.
Reddit recently announced a change that capped the number of large subreddits than any individual can moderate. It might reduce this problem.
They'll get two accounts
I don't necessarily agree, the Rust subreddit is fine (except for all the AI slop posts this year, which the moderators have a hard time keeping up with) and some of the more niche 3D printing subreddits are doing fine, basically it feels like the past few years haven't happened there. The Arch Linux subreddit is a bit chaotic, but the moderation is not really the problem I think.
Maybe all of these fall into your last paragraph and I simply don't frequent the type of subreddit you describe. The thing is, it is hard to tell if it is you or me who have a representative sample here, or if we are both off. Two samples is not statistically significant.
There are over 100,000 subreddits and the vast majority of them (and all of the ones I follow) fall into their last paragraph ... it's not at all "so few". And even if it were, "representative sample" isn't really relevant when you can select and mute subs ... it's really not much different from usenet, which I was very active on in the 80's and 90's.
Here's one of 'em [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E36G9QOolxk [video][12 mins]
But one problem on reddit were the mods. It was why I retired.
Bots and AI spam can be annoying but mods that lock you out of discussions are much worse.
$1 is far too low to discourage abuse. Spammers and scammers will still make exponential returns. PR agencies are paid tens of thousands to craft narratives for their clients. With institutional actors the sky is the limit. Even just your average basement dwelling troll might consider it worth their while to pay a dollar for a sock puppet account.
Requiring a valid payment method before posting will take out 99.9% of spammers and trolls. Newspapers discovered this when they went behind paywalls. SomethingAwful discovered this 20 years ago when they required $10 to create an account.
Reddit could pay the mods. Let us not act like spam accounts are undesirable for the lil piggy. MAU doesn't differentiate between real and fake users.
Lol, I guess I'm glad I checked-out from reddit before the whole "AI" thing took off. My life is honestly way better without reddit. HN isn't far behind though, honestly. The less time I spend here, the better for everything else going on in my life. HN has at least been somewhat useful for my day-job and employment future.
Something Awful has retained a weirdly high level of quality these days by (still) charging :tenbux: to register an account.
Also survived the great cancellation [1]
[1] - https://www.somethingawful.com/cliff-yablonski/i-hate-you-01...