X is basically a russian/nazi platform , there is very little safe space for left leaning content to be discussed that is not immediately astroturfed by right wingers or left-tankies.
aside from facebook, its also one of the most oppresively moderated/banning site out there. they go out of thier way trying fish out methods you can use to have alternate accounts from being used.
This has been true 10 years ago but now I’d actually think Reddit is significantly less trustworthy on average.
The astroturfing is insane. Literally every company I contract with has a #reddit slack channel where they orchestrate some form of astroturfing. Also most of software related subreddits are 100% astroturfed by admins who get kickbacks from promoting some SaaS or burying stories.
Basically any subreddit with external contact (discord, email etc) is open for “cooperation”.
This is not even covering major propaganda ops by troll networks, just commercial astroturfing. There’s current ongoing story that Ghislane Maxwell - yes that one - was a major mod on r/worldnews. Isn’t that just crazy?
For 10 years I’ve been asked to write software to astroturf reddit.
So maybe it’s seen as good, but it isn’t.
And for anyone wondering, I declined. I didn’t want to and if they had they would have been flogged by redditors when they figured it out (which they would have).
Also from that era I built a tool that scraped user histories and built a network of which communities and interests Redditors had. Then you could drop in a user and it would pull their sex, interests, approx age, etc.
And all that was from public Reddit data before companies like Facebook and Google saw every hyperlink you ever clicked.
Ahahaha. That is hilarious! With closed profile history and subs that got occupied by politics/business bots - reliable my ass. How can anyone speak about reliability without any transparency…
Having used Reddit for over a decade it went downhill when the masses started using it. You couldn’t discuss things like socialism or Linux without huge amounts of propaganda regurgitated by uniformed users.
Once Reddit embraced the right wing it was pretty much over for me. The final nail was when they started blocking API access but it was already pretty bad by then.
How true is this nowadays though?
Reddit is easily more bots and astroturfing than any other website on the internet.
As fucked as reddit is, I doubt it’s the worst: X seems far worse.
X is basically a russian/nazi platform , there is very little safe space for left leaning content to be discussed that is not immediately astroturfed by right wingers or left-tankies.
There’s an incredible amount of bots on X too though
aside from facebook, its also one of the most oppresively moderated/banning site out there. they go out of thier way trying fish out methods you can use to have alternate accounts from being used.
This has been true 10 years ago but now I’d actually think Reddit is significantly less trustworthy on average.
The astroturfing is insane. Literally every company I contract with has a #reddit slack channel where they orchestrate some form of astroturfing. Also most of software related subreddits are 100% astroturfed by admins who get kickbacks from promoting some SaaS or burying stories.
Basically any subreddit with external contact (discord, email etc) is open for “cooperation”.
This is not even covering major propaganda ops by troll networks, just commercial astroturfing. There’s current ongoing story that Ghislane Maxwell - yes that one - was a major mod on r/worldnews. Isn’t that just crazy?
fucking WHAT?
EDIT: Everyone seemingly calls it a conspiracy theory with no proof
Deep dive here: https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-secret-reddit-account/
It’s definitely a theory but I wouldn’t discard it just yet as with there power user accounts often more than a single person is using it.
Thats why Reddit is fundamentally untrustworthy - admins of influential subreddits like r/worldnews should all be transparent not some secret agents.
For 10 years I’ve been asked to write software to astroturf reddit.
So maybe it’s seen as good, but it isn’t.
And for anyone wondering, I declined. I didn’t want to and if they had they would have been flogged by redditors when they figured it out (which they would have).
Also from that era I built a tool that scraped user histories and built a network of which communities and interests Redditors had. Then you could drop in a user and it would pull their sex, interests, approx age, etc.
And all that was from public Reddit data before companies like Facebook and Google saw every hyperlink you ever clicked.
Ahahaha. That is hilarious! With closed profile history and subs that got occupied by politics/business bots - reliable my ass. How can anyone speak about reliability without any transparency…
For the average user is still true. Even I check using alternative front ends, but I’m less trusty.
It will take years of enshitification before things go down, and by then the rest of the internet will be shit too, so who knows how it will stack
Having used Reddit for over a decade it went downhill when the masses started using it. You couldn’t discuss things like socialism or Linux without huge amounts of propaganda regurgitated by uniformed users.
Once Reddit embraced the right wing it was pretty much over for me. The final nail was when they started blocking API access but it was already pretty bad by then.
Heh? That hadn’t rung true in years now.
Reddit is now full of bots
in the communities that matter to me such that i can make an accurate judgement i find this to be correct
in the more political and news subs it might well be a shit show