Comment by aucisson_masque
5 hours ago
I think at this point I'm ready to give up on Reddit, most of my questions are already answered by LLM.
And the discussions quality on Reddit are abysmal, its filled with bots.
5 hours ago
I think at this point I'm ready to give up on Reddit, most of my questions are already answered by LLM.
And the discussions quality on Reddit are abysmal, its filled with bots.
> I think at this point I'm ready to give up on Reddit, most of my questions are already answered by LLM.
That's a bizarre and self-sabotaging path to take. Almost all LLMs get a substantial portion of their knowledge from Reddit. In order to evaluate the quality of those LLM responses, you'll have to click through to the Reddit threads and critically evaluate the quality of the underlying discussions.
If you just blindly accept LLM responses without evaluating the sources, you'll be accepting a lot of garbage, and it'll show.
> And the discussions quality on Reddit are abysmal, its filled with bots.
I spend quite a lot of time reading and writing on Reddit, and while I encounter plenty of low-quality posts and comments, I'd say that essentially none of them are written by bots.
It’s just crazy to think that Reddit and the massive volume of text it allowed to be created helped lead us here….
I'm a moderator on a moderately popular and active subreddit, and I can assure you that there is an unreasonable amount of bot activity on reddit. They range from just spam (usually obvious) to bulk astroturfing. We try to stop what we can, but plenty gets through.
Any ideas to mitigate?
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I agree with them. In many of the subs I used to frequent, the outrage is high and the signal is low. LLM really is the best way to consume the content there. Retrieve the new posts of the day/week, filter out the outrage and politics and low-effort Reddit in-jokes/copypasta, then summarize the various comment threads. My time is too valuable to sift through the utterly mind-numbing nonsense to get the occasional new piece of info. If you want to dig deeper, ask the LLM to dig in. Or have it regurgitate verbatim a pre-filtered selection of comments.
Reddit is a good source of new happenings and discussions, but I’m willing to spend some tech company’s compute to clean it up for me. For example, I often want to branch out from a particular musical artist. Reddit has many good recommendations. LLM is perfectly capable of gathering these.
I gave up on it years ago when they killed off 3rd party clients, I have to say it doesn't seem like I've been missing much. The rare occasion I do need to see something on it, it's just full of deleted accounts and comments. I do also love how VPNs get blocked but accessing it over tor is allowed (genuinely I think allowing access over tor is great, but it seems so antithetical to everything else they've done recently)
I suspect they’re not blocking tor to maintain both an image of being some kind of safe haven for democracy warriors and because tor is monitored by the 5+1 eyes it’s also a conduit for intel and asset development among those kids who think they’re democracy warriors or something.
You can't login via tor anymore in my experience
>I gave up on it years ago when they killed off 3rd party clients
Revanced.
VPNs get blocked? Your VPS needs an ip update.
VPN blocking is a thing now. It's always a game of whackamole, but the whacker is getting a lot better lately thanks to states and countries having new laws against accessing age restricted content.
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A lot of the programming adjacent subreddits have been post after post of weekend vibe coded projects. It's become really exhausting how easy it is to turn out a new wheel that's going to get abandoned in a few weeks at best.
Yeah, it's a problem a lot of those subs are grappling with.
They broke the mobile website. You scroll a little and it blocks content and asks you to get the app.
old.reddit didnt but now you have to login to use it.
I just want to read. I dont want the app and I dont want to login.
Not sure how long it will survive, but opening it in a private browser tab helped.
Also, funny enough that this pissed me off so much, that I started asking LLM to search for something on reddit. I don’t care about the answer since due to it being reddit, LLM is not helpful, but what we get access to; is the citation/links exactly to the post you want and never had trouble in the ios webview within the apps. Use it as a billion dollar scraper and you won’t be disappointed with AI.
https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit-instances/blob/master...
I cancelled my Reddit subscription when they killed third party clients and haven't really used the site since.
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At least the sheer stupidity of bots is understandable. It's arguably the real users that are worse...
The discussion quality is unbelievably shallow in most of the subreddits.
Unless it's a niche and technical subreddit such as mathematical topics, bio science subtopic, the discussion is quite shallow and in some cases simply misinformed.
For e.g., a recent question about "is this person racist?", everyone jumped on the bandwagon and said "yes!", "100%", "obviously" without citing any sources. They simply paraphrased a small segment of a video of what that person said.
It turned out the thing they paraphrased it was completely out of context and in fact proved it was opposite of what people were believing.
There were a couple of people who pointed this out but they were downvoted into obvilion: -50 downvotes or something like that.
So these comments were hidden by default.
This is what makes reddit an ecochamber. Now just imagine people coming in and reading this post without any prior knowledge, and taking away the wrong conclusion.
This happens ALL the time.
I used to enjoy reddit back in 2011-2013 when it was all about silly memes and jokes.
EDIT: "They simply paraphrased it" --> "They simply paraphrased a small segment of a video of what that person said."
> everyone jumped on the bandwagon
Reddit has become the epitome of Idiocracy, but let's not pretend like spam-level shallow commenters sucking each other off hasn't infected this place too.
I honestly think if we took voting away the dynamics of online discussion would reset to normal.
Looking at the conversations tied to movie fandoms has been fascinating. People treat movie franchises like a religion.
Well. Sort of… if you are an NPR or POLTICO or WAPO or NYT follower, you are going to have been told for months how amazing The Odyssey will be and how it definitely makes sense to cast a 5’2” small transgender person as a warrior etc etc… and that the only people that don’t like these all non-Greek and nonsensical casting choices are the bad people.
It is religion, but it isn’t coming from Reddit. Reddit is just the paper the new bible is printed on.
The only subs of any value are the niche subs, hobby subs that show off creation, and city-sized geographical subs.
Everything else is politics, trolling, ragebait or simple spam. So much spam.
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Not sure why you'd expect anything except a list like to be of "any value".
It's like, say, talk.politics.theory back in the Usenet days. For a while it was fun, and then it wasn't. Too big, too wide .. it killed itself as a useful place to discuss/debate politics.
Not even the city-sized ones. My local ones (Seattle when I lived there, and Orange County ones now) are political cesspools full of intolerant people and outrage bait.
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>and city-sized geographical subs.
lol. No. Every city sub is the EXACT same far left lunatic that needs to make everything about politics. Doesn’t matter if it’s a purple area, red, and reasonable-blue areas far reflected as bizarro versions of themselves if you go off their city reddits.
You may not notice depending on your perspective.
> I used to enjoy reddit back in 2011-2013 when it was all about silly memes and jokes.
Reddit is as it's always been. You just got older and don't get the current silly memes and jokes.
I never said anything about not getting the current memes and jokes.
I was alluding to the current mix of the content on reddit. It has gotten more political and less entertaining if you look at the default feed whether you create an account or browse anonymously.
And in any political or open ended discussion, unless it is scientific, the discussions are shallow.
I will however concede that non-scientific/technical discussions were always shallow.
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How do you think the bots are trained? Reddit has really good data since its comments and tags and specific subreddits basically have ranked questions and answers by points driven by the title and the comments are ranked by points which have quality answers.
Eh, that only works when fleets of bots aren't upboating their own commercial content.
I left Reddit years ago and it’s been an absolute pleasure. I’ve never come close to wishing to participating there again, and everything I hear from people who still hang on seems to reinforce my decision.
I don't go to reddit for answers.
those bots are extremely effective at manipulating LLM results via comments and faking entire reddit threads.
at least if you go to reddit, you know the answer came from reddit, and can be accordingly cautious.
Reddit is must have if you want GEO presence
once they break RedReader ill be out. old.reddit.com is now defunct
What do you mean it's defunct?
I use old.reddit.com all the time.
If old.reddit.com goes, I'm done with reddit.
I might try out some kind of alternative front end from https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends#reddit though.
But if that's not good enough, I'm done.
It now only works if you're logged in.
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That's news to me, I use old reddit com all the time