• ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Between the loss of original content and the genuinely obscure/questionable shit now dominating r/all, I’m pretty sure they’ve backfilled their DAU losses with bots.

    I’d go one step further and allege it’s a deliberate scheme, because if repost and content bots are running it’s because they have unhindered access to API calls, and that comes from admin. Also, Reddit can actually analyze their traffic and know far better than we can what is likely human and what is likely bot, and use that to try to better hide the authorized bot traffic.

    So yeah, they may well have traffic, but I would put money on some unknown yet significant portion of that traffic not being human, as a deliberate strategy to retain advertisers.