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Georg_Simmel t1_j1bn2tv wrote

There's something going on across reddit right now. I know a lot of people are claiming it's "bots" doing this but I don't think that's the case because this same thing is happening in lots of other subreddits (like r/movies and r/television). I think there was a change made to the algorithm that is boosting question/discussion posts (like this one!) so they show up in our feeds. I suspect that, in the case of this subreddit, the AI posts aren't actually any different than what typically get posted here *but* the algorithm is boosting them now.

There are probably more AI posts because that's a popular topic right now so more people are making their way here to talk about it. This sort of pattern is entirely normal and didn't used to get any attention. Now that reddit is shoving them into our feeds, they're getting a lot more (negative) attention instead of being ignored.

As another example, I've noticed in both r/movies and r/television that there has been a flood of low-effort discussion posts about older movies/shows (like, "What did you all think about season one of White Lotus?!?") popping up in my feed.

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icedrift t1_j1bpwhr wrote

Funny you mention those 2 subs because I'm subbed to neither yet they've been frequently popping up in my feed. Hell one of the threads even got me to start watching "The Expanse" you might be onto something.

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Georg_Simmel t1_j1by9xl wrote

Maybe it was you who mentioned it in your other post but I’m pretty sure it’s an “engagement” thing to get people involved in posts other than the popular ones.

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icedrift t1_j1c0a5m wrote

Yeah that's my best guess. Perhaps reddit wants more interactivity and less upvote read a few a comments and move on type behavior.

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TtK_Thanatos t1_j1c90ce wrote

Yeah something weird is going on, the past few days reddit has been showing me low quality posts from a few random subs that I usually don't go into very often. They'll be tons of posts shown with 0 up votes and some either really dumb question, or some super generic question that's been asked 400 million times and it'll only have like 2-5 comments and it's from 5 hours ago. Why TF should I care about these posts? I guess maybe now they're trying to get me to go into the subs themselves to see posts with thousands of upvotes instead of just scrolling thru my "home" feed to see all the good shit?

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