Yup, I also think that it's a retention tactic. Not the first one: karma, user profiles, that new year crap etc., they all boil down to "we're giving you reasons to consistently come back, and produce content for us for free."
The timing hints me that the Reddit userbase is getting a lower rebound ratio nowadays. i.e. user goes there to see some junk, then forgets about the site.
It's also just part of a wider internet trend I think. More and more games and social media have them. Developers are getting better and better at hacking people's attention and reward pathways. For Duolingo I think it's fun, because learning a language is a fun and productive thing to do anyways (and despite the hate it has really worked well for me) but for games and things like social media or whatever I just find it annoying.
For duolingo it's the same mechanics, but from a whole different movement.
Reddit's action belongs in the "enshitification" movement. I don't know if it's the accepted term yet, but it should be. It's a general movement away from user experience and approval and towards agressive retention and sales (ads) tactics.
Duilingo's actions belongs woth the "gameification" movement. Where the intention is to make learning more fun by adding gaming mechanics like points and rewards.
Both make use of the body's dopamine mechanics, but one is evil and the other is good. Just like how nuclear power can be use for evil and for good.
I'm pretty sad these days when I see an issue marked as solved, but then when I get to the solution it just says "this comment has been deleted in objection to the API changes and Steve Huffman is a dirty little piss boy". We've lost millions of hours worth of answers because of Reddit 's greed.
The best way to find information on the internet is to give up on Google and use Kagi. Add a question mark at the end of your search and it'll summarize all of the top results for you, directly giving you the answer and saving you tons of time. They include sources if you want to dig deeper.
That's understandable, but you're nowhere near private with Google either. They definitely know who you are, even if you never log in. At least with Kagi they're not logging everything and keeping a record of everything you do. They do have an option to enable history, but I have it turned off.
They do have an option to enable history, but I have it turned off.
Actually, that "setting" is there just for show. It can't be turned on. Underneath the setting, it says
Currently this option can not be turned on. Kagi does not save any searches by default. In the future we may add features that will utilize your search history and then we will allow you to enable this.
Sadly, their CEO is kind of a weirdo. There was a recent post chain on Mastodon I think where a user shared their disappointment with Kagi - had something to do with their not being as privacy-focused as they claimed they are - and the CEO just decided to keep sending unsolicited emails to the OP about this, trying to with them over with phone and video calls
it'll summarize all of the top results for you, directly giving you the answer
This is literally what the Google AI thing that everyone has been mocking does. For example, it suggested gluing cheese onto a pizza because that was a highly up voted comment on the reddit thread that was the top search results.
Tbh I find it hard to believe that it's actually better, knowing how many resources Google probably poured into getting the summaries right already. If the same amount of scrutiny were applied to Kagi's summaries, people would probably find similarly embarrassing answers.
Perhaps, but it has worked well for me. Plus they have features to change your results to forums, listicles, and other formats, rather than having to add qualifiers to the search. You'd think Google's general results would be better too, considering all their resources, but they've been trash for years now. They're more focused on making every penny possible than producing good search results.
Well, you see in June last year, Reddit decided to make some greedy corporate changes. So in response, tons of principled leftists departed the site. What did yall expect? Same thing happened to Twitter.
yeah....its just surreal. I grew up when there was no Internet at all. Now we have bots mining data from a website to get more human-like responses (and more $$). Its a strange world.
yeah…its just surreal. I grew up when there was no Internet at all. Now we have bots mining data from a website to get more human-like responses (and more $$). Its a strange world.
Almost makes it useless to bother posting on online forums anymore, if you end up just wasting your time talking to an AI bot, instead of another human.
Which is a weird way lets the 1% win. If the rest of us can't converse with each other because the 'virtual town square' becomes so polluted that meaningful conversation with other humans cannot happen.
There are a lot of people on Reddit and Reddit makes it easy to organize by whatever degenerate interests someone may have, such as sharing their goon cave
People downvoting this post: don't shoot the messenger.
I'll copypaste what I said in !redditmigration about this topic:
As I mentioned in the kbin comm about redditfugees: I think that the platform stopped being sustainable, and that changes like this - either trying to increase engagement or appeasing power users - are only a symptom of that.
They won't work, by the way, because of the trust thermocline (the impact of an act violating the users' trust is considerably greater, if there's a backstory of trust violations).
...excuse me while I grab some popcorn. I'm loving to watch this.
Fun comment (from a user) in that thread:
Because it's a Reddit Product Decision, you can always expect one step forward, two steps back, and four steps off in a random direction that makes no sense. FAQ Can people who used all their gold due to your short-sighted mistake get it back? Haha, no. Are you offering any compensation? Sure, we'll give you some free bullshit. And it expires, so make sure to Drive Engagement and Interact with Posts before the end of the year! Wait, you're replacing the stuff you made arbitrarily expire with a different arbitrarily-expiring currency? You know it. Can you use Gold that people give you on other posts? Absolutely not. Gold you are given goes into a big pot where it will remain, serving no purpose, unless you're like the 0.1% of people on this site who ruthlessly and relentlessly farm for gold and karma. If you're one of those people, you can financialize your Reddit experience, earning upwards of, like, five bucks! I run a subreddit that provides resources for people in mental health crisis or other major medical issues. Can I turn off gilding to stop people boosting bad or unsafe answers? At Reddit, we believe that consumers deserve choice, and in this case, the choice they deserve is to seethe and cope. You absolutely cannot turn this shit off. You're at least blacklisting the really high-risk subs from the new old Gold program, right? Yes. What happens when you inevitably miss a sub and end up causing massive headaches for mods? They can contact us at the Mod Help PO Box in Anchorage, Alaska. When the intern checks the mail in 6 months, we'll get right on it. What if I'm not eligible for the Contributors program? Go fuck yourself. Does it work on Old Reddit? What do you think?
Additional detail: did anyone notice that you can't log through old.reddit any more? I don't even have an account there any more, but if you try it, here's what you get:
Uh, this post is a bummer and I don't even know if I actually believe the premise... Whatever I guess, lett's all actually just get out of here and go get some Sprite® brand family products, you guys.
Remember the_donald started out as a meme sub that got taken over? I fell victim to astroturfing that election season. Thankfully it has made me more skeptical about online interactions now.
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