• ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    When the Reddit admins figured out that a large portion of the site is now bots

    Just fyi, bots use API calls. Thus, Reddit has ALWAYS known exactly what percentage of users and posts are bots, and which bots are Reddit’s own.

    And it’s not the first time. You could almost say it’s what Reddit is built on. When Reddit was first launched, the founders used alts to build numbers; now it’s bots.

    My own personal view is that they’ve used bots all along. More recently, they made up for drastically reduced numbers last summer with bots, and that’s when the writing was really on the wall for Reddit because at some point it becomes a serious legal liability to continue to sell ad space and accept ad money based on numbers of users and posts that simply do not exist in reality.

    So the IPO has to happen sooner rather than later, and RDDT will tank as soon as it goes public, which is why they’re trying to sell the rubes as many shares as they can at a guaranteed pre-IPO price: that’s free money for them, which they will take and go while Reddit implodes.