got the notification to verify my age when trying to access NSFW posts or profiles already for a few weeks now, but as of today my whole account is blocked unless I verify. I guess that’s it then. Based in Austria btw, so there is no specific law in place that forces Reddit to implement this and I will definetly not give my personal information to Persona, a company that belongs to Peter Thiels Palantir group.
no you’re correct. reddit corp does NOT want to do anything about its bot infestation. even the apipocalypse carved out exceptions for the botnets that make their entire platform function.
bot content spew keeps doomscrollers doomscrolling and pumps up the metrics that they’re intentionally manipulating to appear like organic traffic. having their cake and eating it too, even to the very end of everything the platform used to stand for
I’m convinced this is true. Ever since the big redesign in 2018 (holy shit was it really eight years ago?) that kind of homogenized the whole platform, it became clear that the people reddit was trying to attract was not the communities but the mindless scrollers.
But the paradox was that some person had to want to post the content and make it feel alive, but that person is not needed anymore.
Facebook is entirely slop, scams, and bottom of the barrel memes but they make billions from attracting the dumbest users who will click on ads and that’s where reddit wants to be.
same reason mr musk cried about bots on twitter constantly and promised to wipe them out only to make it more artificial and manipulated than it ever has been (i’m told)
2018 is when propagana bots/troll farms started to appear , and thats when they started banning significantly even for the slightest misunderstanding, it obviously got worst overtime.
thier purges last year did a huge number on thier engagement thought, they overcompensated, and then open-ai and google stopped scraping so now they are tyring to force logins so people can be datamined again.