Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed

#For sale: Ads that look like legit Reddit user posts

“We highly recommend only mentioning the brand name of your product since mentioning links in posts makes the post more likely to be reported as spam and hidden. We find that humans don’t usually type out full URLs in natural conversation and plus, most Internet users are happy to do a quick Google Search,” ReplyGuy’s website reads.

  • RagnarokOnline@programming.dev
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    6 months ago

    The only remaining use for reddit for me is basically being a Stack Overflow for non-technology stuff (want to find the best bidet, there’s probably a review post on reddit that someone put together).

    Now that comments might be well-hidden marketing attempts, there’s legit no trusting that information anymore.

    Way to go, Reddit. In a few months, I’ll no longer have any reason to look at a post from 2024 or later.

    • wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Same, plus porn. I haven’t run across active communities on lemmy that cater to what I’m looking for, but reddit still going strong in that regard.

      Other than that, I haven’t visited in months.

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        I gave up even on that a long time ago. Every subreddit was overrun by softcore pics from women with onlyfans.

          • catloaf@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            Every one I was subscribed to. Or at least that’s what showed up on my front page feed, because they were the newer posts and in greater numbers.

        • wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          I use the (hidden?) rss feed that every sub has, to get a chronological order of posts. Then when I find a user I like, I’ll add their (again, hidden?) user rss feed to a category of users I follow. It was a huge pain in the ass to start but now I have a pretty steady flow of users whose content I like. All this is wrapped together via FreshRSS, which I self-host. This has the unexpected side-effect of capturing images/links that may be taken down by picky/overbearing mods, but because I still have the source link (not just the reddit post link), I can usually still access it.

          When they silently axe that feature, it’s the end for me.