Maybe 81 of the 84 comments were either third party bot comments, or a Reddit-run LLM designed to make the sub look more active than it really is (the 2023, fewer people hours, version of what they did to launch the site), and subredditstats.com has detected that?
I doubt that's the case, but just as there are sites that analyse an Amazon product's reviews to judge real vs. fake, it's not impossible that a Reddit comment counting serving could do the same.
It seems more likely that subredditstats.com detected that "This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah." given that that's what it says in the big wall of red text at the top.
>Maybe 81 of the 84 comments were either third party bot comments, or a Reddit-run LLM designed to make the sub look more active than it really is
Even if this was true (which I seriously doubt), how can you prove that, and what makes you think the subredditstats website cited above would be able to tell the difference?
The operator freely admits his/her stats probably underestimate real traffic due to the expense of collecting data, and they make no claim to having software to detect real commentors from fake. Meanwhile the real internal reddit stats available to mods show numbers that are both much higher and much closer to the live traffic we can see for ourselves as readers.
Yeah, that's a load of bollocks. 90% of that sub is just people quoting applicable insults from that TV show at each other, most of which probably won't make sense if you haven't seen the show. This isn't something that's easy to mindlessly spam LLM-spam at. Actually, many probably won't pass ChatGPT's profanity filter; ChatGPT says:
> The insults in the show are often colorful and inventive, but they can be quite explicit. Due to their explicit nature, I won't provide a verbatim quote here
You can ask it to not filter profanity, but it seems I need to do it every other message. In general ChatGPT is about as useful as a marzipan dildo here.
I'm willing to bet that exactly 0% of the content of that sub is LLM generated, and the same for most of those smaller subs. Who even cares about these tiny subs? Certainly not Reddit.
One of my favorite conspiracies is that reddit is mostly just LLM's and paid agents talking to eachother. Employed by various intel agencies, governments, and reddit themselves trying to astroturf and sway conversation in one direction or another.
While this is absurdly conspiratorial, there is a grain of truth to it: early on in Reddit's history, the admins created fake accounts and posted on them to boost engagement[0]. More recently, after the blackout and user exodus, /r/de noticed a bunch of new German-language copies of popular English-language subs being created with a bunch of autotranslated comments[1]. So Reddit's administration is not above creating fake accounts and content to juice numbers.
How much of Reddit's engagement is faked is up for debate - I suspect it's less than we think. However, it'd be really funny if, say, when Reddit IPOs, someone at /r/WSB catches onto this and triggers a bunch of people shorting the stock.
It's one thing to add stories to a startup website and created the illusion of a couple dozen users instead of just zero. But all these years later Reddit has millions and millions of unique users per month and is still one of the top ten most visited websites in the US and has been for many years, beat out only by google/meta properties and wikipedia etc. You can fake "activity" internally but it's harder to fake stats calculated by independent evaluators.
And if it wasn't, everybody would be doing it. What makes you think reddit would have an advantage in doing that over anyone else?
It's not that Reddit is faking their own stats. The conspiracy theory is that these fake users are created by various non-Reddit organizations to promote an agenda, sell stuff, gather intelligence, etc. Reddit's level of awareness and complicity is secondary.
Wouldn’t those same people just do the same thing everywhere on social media across the Internet though? Because if so it’s still doing well in the relative rankings.
They specifically reposed users content from other platforms then pinged them that it was being discussed on reddit. It's what caused me to use reddit for the first time.
This is why I say that anonymous sites like Reddit are not Social Media. If I am on there, there is zero proof that anyone else commenting is a human. They all could be bots and I have no way to prove otherwise.
On some of the niche travel-related subs like r/bikepacking, it’s actually quite common to run into one’s fellow redditors in real life on some popular route around the world. You definitely know the high-value posts are coming from real people. Some posters aren’t anonymous at all, because they also have linked YouTube or Instagram accounts that use their real name and face. And from e.g. the person’s gear, the past travels they describe, or the internet drama they have witnessed, it’s easy to identity a person you run into as a fellow member of the sub.
You are axiomatically not wrong about bots. That's what all the platforms in the Reddit genre do to fill content voids. It long predates sophistication like LLMs. It's like bots in a poker room site. The UX would suck without them.
But Reddit probably has the scale to do without in popular parts of the site.
I doubt that's the case, but just as there are sites that analyse an Amazon product's reviews to judge real vs. fake, it's not impossible that a Reddit comment counting serving could do the same.