this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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but 10% is 60+% of actual human engagement. The rest are just bots talking to themselves and clicking ad links.
Will the bots dissapear when the API becomes inaccessible?
The free bots that were helpful (like remindmebot) will probably all die, whereas advertisers will pay for artificial chatgpt users to boost their own content.
Most likely. API access is actually the preferential way of handling things because the alternative (scraping) requires more server resources.
If a company offers a free tier of their API (even if it’s insufficient) it is unlikely they’re friendly to scrapers.
Recently Reddit opened up devvit as a way for redditors to build approved internal bots but it didn't seem like they intended to staff a team to build replacements any time soon
And the front page is filled with trash from fringe subs.
I know that is a fun narrative, but I haven't seen data to back that up unfortunately, it's all been anecdotal evidence.
The companies who heavily track these metrics so they can recommend to their customers what platform to advertise on all seem to indicate that there is still plenty of regular human engagement happening.
The NSFW content seems to be the only part of the protest that has them recommending pausing ad spending.
Also worth noting is that traffic is not made equal. Often 10% of users generate almost all of the content that other users consume.
Reddit has driven away many of its content creators and moderators.