It doesn’t matter to current leadership of reddit how many people it pisses off. For every user of third-party apps, there are now 10 bots and sockpuppet accounts it gets to count as active users.
And that is exactly how you blow the roof off your IPO. Alphabet and Meta have been lying about their user engagement numbers for decades at this point. “Impressions” are all self-reported and they have zero incentive to be honest. Reddit’s VC money is begging Spez to get into this game before the IPO. For all they lies they are saying out loud, this is the quiet one.
I don’t understand this claim. Do you have any evidence?
Where am I going to have evidence that reddit is defrauding IPO investors?
This is just an exercise in figuring out what’s going on here. We can assume Spez is a moron who is mishandling this whole thing, or we can assume he’s accomplishing exactly what he wants, and it looks irrational because he just can’t say what that is out loud.
Elon, in all his wisdom, was all in on the bots angle when he was negotiating Twitter’s purchase price and has been completely silent since. Why the discrepancy? Because it benefits him in both instances.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62571733
"Some bot experts claim Twitter has a vested interest in undercounting fake accounts.
“Twitter has slightly conflicting priorities,” says Mr Davis.
“On the one hand, they care about credibility. They want people to think that the engagements are real on Twitter. But they also care about having high user numbers.”
The vast majority of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertising, and the more daily active users it has, the more it can charge advertisers. "
The exact same applies to Reddit.
Companies start out with a simple plan to generate revenue via providing a service worth paying for, but they all end up falling victim to Goodhart’s law.
Social media is an interesting case study in how the pursuit of perpetually increasing profits through metrics can make them become oblivious to the fact they don’t really produce any useful product, and that they are wholly reliant upon charity to survive.
They only care if revenue go up and cost go down - so instead of creating legitimate value for those who feed them content, they psychopathically take the path of least resistance and lie about the metrics.
The fact that anything a company says is believed is baffling, but that’s a separate discussion.
It’s also worth noting that spez was recently quoted in this interview specifically calling out how much he admires Musk’s recent handling of Twitter.
Anyone with half a brain cell can see that Musk has completely shat the bed, repeatedly, on his Twitter takeover.
Anyone who doesn’t see a pattern here isn’t paying attention.
I don’t understand how having third party apps prevents reddit form lying about their user stats.
Do you mean paywalling API access makes it more difficult for third party analysis tools to detect bots vs real users, or something like that?
It’s much harder to fake volume when a portion of it can be counted very accurately using play store/ Apple store statistics. Kill those apps off and you kill activity verification.
If anything, 3rd party apps and free apis makes bots and fake users MUCH easier. This new policy should help Reddit in that regard
Web scraping is not a problem for bad actors, lol. They don’t need an API.
I’ve suspected this for years… it’s part of why I went over to imgur. The bots aren’t as good at processing images, or at least they weren’t back then. Reddit is probably the worst of the bunch, just because of all the exposure and openness.
Hell there are entire subreddits devoted to training gpt bots, where they just game out theoretical directions the conversations can take with each other.
