Reddit's auto-astrosurfing (again) in non-English-speaking communities
Originally, this was a comment elsewhere, but I think it's worth sharing with as many people as possible because right now, Reddit is collecting Reddit moments.
TL;PL: title, but without typeface
Disclaimer: everyone's a bot.
Back in January, I pointed out to the right and to the left, notably on r/FrMods in this topic, that many communities were being invaded by publications that were machine translations of old English topics. But in the absence of any reaction or explanation, I'd left it at the assumption that it was simple karma cultivation for future astroturfing campaigns for political, marketing or trolling purposes. I didn't really look any further, and nobody seemed to care, even though it regularly bordered on the absurd to see people seriously answering bots' questions. I myself fell into the trap more than once on r/litterature or r/ecriture. I even saw a topic on r/ELI5fr where someone used ChatGPT to answer the bot's question in the first degree. But the modos just let it happen, like here, here or here, except when it was really blatant, like in this case, this one or this one.
I'm convinced that these bots have contributed to artificially increasing the visibility of these communities, both locally and for newcomers, to the detriment of others that are more rigorous about their content. They have also contributed to the decline in activity of these communities, since the creation of a publication is not limited to a question or a paragraph that serves as content. Sheepishly, we go where there seems to be people and activity. Hard to compete with r/ on steroids.
But that was just a theory I hadn't delved into. I'd simply unsubscribed from these bots' breeding grounds and tried to forget that part of Reddit I don't like at all, where everything is repeated in a loop for a short-memory, all-consuming mass.
And then I came across this publication on r/de.
In a nutshell, an admin contacted some of r/de's most active redditos to inform them of the creation of German-speaking communities equivalent to big r/ like r/TooAfraidToAsk r/offmychest or r/tipofmytongue. It didn't take long for someone to notice that the publications of these and other older communities were bad translations of originally English content. Promoted by a fucking admin. Members of r/de investigated and discovered that these accounts are sometimes the only ones active there, and reply to each other in broken German.
I was intrigued by the fact that not only publications, but also comments were being inflated, so I went to take a look at the growth in the number of members of certain French-speaking communities. It's worse than anything else, and so pathetically
the manipulation is blatant.
In April 2022, you can see the r/place effect in the abnormally high jump in the number of new members. Then there's the absurdity of a whole month of dizzying, constant progress in 5 karma-farming communities. The previous month also saw artificial growth in r/bonjour, the community publicly managed by French-speaking admins. Over the same period of time, it's the same progression, then a slow decline because this page has become a pseudo French r/all, but editorialized and without much interest. And this artificial crowding-in of members comes at the expense of the activity of smaller communities that require more than asking a question, or more than a paragraph.
All this to say that the exorbitant pricing of API access, with the consequent end of third-party apps, but also the probable loss of certain moderation tools, is part of the same logic with a view to increasing the site's profitability and its publicly desired IPO as early as December 2021. Reddit wants to do everything it can to please advertisers, even if it means becoming a shell at the expense of the people who are supposed to run the site.
Added: I don't know why the last part disappeared, I've put it back.