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But upvotes on discussions there are literally 100 times what they used to be just half a year ago. No way that happens naturally.
Yeah, but that wouldn't be Reddit doing that.
It's absolutely Reddit doing that. Buts use API calls, and Reddit has API calls locked down now. Bots have to request access, at the very least.
And given Spez et al's overwhelmingly stalwart commitment to honesty, transparency, and not fucking over his user base (lol) how are you so sure it's not Reddit doing that, when that's exactly what they did to boost numbers when Reddit was new?
That is if bots used the API directly, which may or may not be the case. It wouldn't be that hard to automate using Reddit's UI. You also had botmakers who relied on the API given months to transfer to webpage scraping.
And while Reddit did create and upvote posts in the beginning, the site seems to be large enough that I don't see Reddit being able to scale upvotes based on content alone without a massive AI army.
You say that as though Reddit cares about the content of a post when manipulating its upvotes, AND as though you have no idea who Sam Altman is or that he was on Reddit's board for several years.
Of all the things Reddit can't or won't do, AI is absolutely NOT one of them.
I say it as knowing that Reddit can change how upvotes work. They've done it in the past and it is a lot easier to change a formula over creating bots to upvote and downvote.
Reddit has also shown its ability to frame and curate both the default steam and r/all by removing porn and limiting political posts.
I don't know why Reddit would deal in bots when it has more powerful tools at hand.
Cheap, easy, impossible for outsiders to quantify, approaching IPO and cash to be made, keeping ad revenue the same without revealing how many actual users have fled the site, etc.
Or just change how upvotes are counted and displayed; no bot is needed. Reddit doesn't publish exact upvote and downvote numbers and hasn't for a while.
It also gives Reddit more control at a higher level to tweak certain numbers in certain subs.
For vote manipulation, no.
For faking user engagement and creating content and pretending like hordes of actual humans haven't left and real eyes are actually looking at all these ads, yes.