I don’t know why I decided to browse a popular sub today, r/books (logged out, I don’t have an account anymore). Maybe I hoped I might learn something. As if! People make the absolute same posts over and over. Today I read a book! I read one page of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and I already know it’s a masterpiece and the best book ever. I read 1984 and wow, just wow. I hate stickers in book covers. Audiobooks good. Actually audiobooks bad. I hate movie covers. The absolute same thing as yesterday, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years ago. May I remember this feeling next time I decide to browse Reddit again.
Why do old users put up with this? How can they even pretend that they haven’t already read this stuff a million times before? Or are these subs 100% driven by new users and repost bots? The complete lack of new content is mind boggling.
It is majority bots. I got the groundhog day feeling too. So a few years ago I started looking at the account that post rather than the posts itself. There’s a simple pattern. The account is registered but lays dormant for a couple months. Then it becomes active and starts reposting top ranked post of all time from subreddits. Their comments are copy pasted out of replies to old posts.
It’s inexplicable why the real human users put up with it though. At some point the zeitgeist stopped having baseline expectation of content quality.
More recently there’s a newer phenomenon where clickbait stories (“My (45M) wife (18F) of 5 years left me everything but the icecube trays AITA”) are posted by brand new accounts. Except all those subreddits don’t allow brand new accounts to post. So it must be the mods are selectively approving them. They are farming outrage with stories (most likely fake) meant to maximize user activity.
I think the bots were always there but now they are free to run wild. There are no mods (human or bot) to regulate them. And since there’s no more quality, human made content this shit bubbles up to the top instead of being buried.