When compared to ~5-10 years ago, I find Reddit comments and posts to be more difficult to read.
I am curious as to why this is. I suspect this could be because of bot posts, but am not sure.
Probably a number of reasons. Reddit’s main strategy for profit growth has been to expand to countries that speak English as a secondary language. Much of it is regional dialects such as Indian English. I think there might also be auto-translations? That would make writing appear odd when written in a different language and reddit translating it to English for them.
This might be trite but the overall intelligence level of reddit is at all time lows. Apparently reddit is really popular now with teenagers in certain parts of the world.
Several years ago I noticed a starkly different style of writing appearing all over reddit. Comments were being written one sentence per line. The lines were all disjointed. There wasn’t an overall idea. They write a random bunch of sentences that barely made sense together. Other accounts would engage with it as if there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. I haven’t been able to figure that out.
That was probably the training of GPT-2 or 3. I remember when the infinite nonsense conversations of the LLMs showed up, we all thought it was cute.
What is really telling is if you change location using VPN you’ll find that if it’s U.S. it’s posts about being 35yo but if you swap to India it’s teenager. Some of the “hot” posts that show up are like a AskReddit post but it’s clearly written by a 30yo for millennials. Also don’t try to change location using Reddits own sorting filter as it literally just ignores what you put there unless a specifically flagged post for that region. The only location their algo cares about is your IP.
All the cool people are leaving reddit and coming here, leaving only dumb people and LLM “agents”.
I’d argue that it’s not even the cool people coming here anymore. Seems most of the cool people are moving on with the real world and dropping social media completely.
Did you just call me a loser?
“Fight, fight, fight” /s
Good!
You aren’t supposed to be reading the comments you are supposed to be clicking the ads.
The neat thing is the comments are the ads now.
I had a high school student tell me the others day that they were out of school for “confrinsis” so I think education is part of this. I have a few friends that are teachers and they’ve said since covid and especially with AI, kids can’t read, can’t spell, and can’t think critically. Obviously not all of them but enough to notice.
Edit, a word.
Maybe you just became older and don’t understand modern slang? Plus censorship progresses, so many people express their thoughts in more intricate way.
It isn’t slang that’s throwing me off, per say. It’s the poorly written sentences (that’s if they even use punctuation).
I suspect people with worse English in general and bots like everyone else but I just think it’s the turbo eternal September of Reddit.
The actual writing of Reddit posts and comments was, I think, better than any other platform even remotely similar in size. As the userbase broke past just techies and computer touchers and Reddit went from niche to a parallel mainstream to a piece of the mainstream, the type of thing that would get discussed became more averaged out and closer to the general internet, and so did the actual quality of writing. That’s part of why I think the tipping point was the LLM arms race, Reddit as a resource (as a corpus) is simply peerless.
I think it was just the fact that everyone would write relatively well and get clowned on if they didn’t, alongside a relatively opaque UX that kept lid on user growth helping keep the site’s culture move more slowly.
I haven’t been a regular user since the API got killed.
Just more non-native English speakers? LLMs usually write quite well grammatically. Can you, for example, read my messages without that “off” feeling? My English is rather basic.
it’s defo non native speakers and translators. and these days some people tend to paste an llm ‘paraphrased’ version instead of a direct machine translation
I do not relate honestly.
A significant portion of the population are bots looking for an in to shill something. It’s the dynamic unwittingly well parodized with poople, which I’m not affiliated with in any way. The others (who might be real people or bots gaining credibility with trite observances and ritual utterances) are under the iron curtain of enforced online politeness, free to express any opinion which will not make an insane chronically online mod mad.
