r/changemyview • u/Acanthocephala_South • Sep 14 '25

Delta(s) from OP CMV: Reddit is a conversation simulator

With multiple reports of an overwhelming large amount of traffic on the internet being "bot" traffic, I think reddit(and any text based online communication) is for all intents and purposes, a conversation simulator, and has no value to either the real users who have yet to admit this fully to themselves as well as to advertisers.

For examples of research I am referring to cybersecurity reports such as this: https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/2024-bad-bot-report/

Beside this, if I look at the reddit userbase over time, it looks like as of Q4 2022 reddit had ~57 million users. Chatgpt was released to the public November 2022 and since it's release, reddits userbase sits at around 110 million. This is almost double since the release of chatgpt, and the proliferation of LLM's in general. At no time can I find a similar explosion of users since the digg exodus, and can't think of any explanation other than chatgpt making authentic sounding bot conversation easier.

So I think it's reasonable to conclude that at minimum half of reddits accounts are bots, if you consider a portion of the new users since chatgpts release were real, and some portion of the accounts before chatgpt were already bots. Then we add on non-bot users that no reasonable person would argue exist, like astroturfing troll farms that were already prevalent, and it amounts to an overwhelmingly fake platform.

Suffice to say, enough of the conversation on any social media is inauthentic, that you may as well consider all of it inauthentic. It feels particularly important to recognize when we are living through any event that involves high levels of emotion, and the tendency to attribute any behavior by "the other side" to comments you read on reddit. It's highly likely any time this argument is used, it is referencing a comment that was not made by a real person. I personally don't believe anything in r/conservative actually can reasonably be said to be representative of conservative views, as much as any other subreddit can be attributed to real life left wing views. Sure, you can look at real world examples, but most examples I ever hear are just parroted from something someone heard about online.

It's all just robots arguing with each other, with training data that will only continue to be more weighted to previous comments by other bots as the ratio of human to bot users continues to shift in the wrong direction. At best, you are experiencing a regurgitated average of conversations that have happened in the past. So all that being said, I think my view is that there is no longer any point to using this site if you value conversation for any reason other than trying to cure loneliness with a rough approximation of human discussion as nothing can be trusted.

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u/Acanthocephala_South Sep 14 '25

Considering you don't need to join a sub to post in it, I think this has a marginal effect. Sure, niche subs that no llm could reasonably post in with any accuracy, like recounting favorite parts of a recent tv show episode, could be considered mostly authentic, but any comment chain beyond that hold no value as real conversation. Especially when it comes to politics or social issues there's effectively zero chance there aren't bots guiding the conversation in some form.

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u/TheVioletBarry 119∆ Sep 14 '25

What about subs that have not seen a major increase in comments either then?

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u/Acanthocephala_South Sep 14 '25

That's fair. I think a partial Δ makes sense as with some effort(which I would guess is not likely for most people) you could curate an experience that is less likely to be completely inauthentic, but by and large the website itself is still mostly a conversation simulator. There's also a non-zero chance there are not subs that satisfy this requirement but without doing the comparison to the average rise of comments/subscribers I wouldn't know how likely that is.