Is this new to post-blackout reddit is or has it been this way for a while. Top post of r/all is a tweet from like 2 years ago about a “current event” that no one has talked about since then and 100% of the comments are talking about this like this topic is the focus of today’s or any recent time’s 24 hour news cycle. Nearly 30K upvotes. 100 comments. Feels like ai/bot cosplaying what an actual hot reddit post would be like but in a world without people.
I don’t think the quality of the front page changed all that much in the last month.
It has long been screenshots of twitter (primarily WhitePeopleTwitter, BlackPeopleTwitter) for years, at least since 2016.
Also short form video is all the rage and Reddit is really pushing it, but that basically means it’s just all TikTok re-uploads (or crops of TikTok, or crops of TikTok of crops of Youtube). The new Reddit video player is really mostly screen recordings of things.
The last year or two once Reddit became really really mainstream has had a lot more repost bots though. They basically do two things: farm small subs and repost their content into larger ones, or pull content from the front page from 6+ months ago and repost it (even the top comments are often blatantly reposted). The bots coincide with reddit getting more into ads and mainstream advertisers.
But, there have been prolific reposters like Gallowboob for many many years.
I don’t know. I don’t think I agree. I’ve been seeing a lot more truly garbage-tier content on the first few pages of r/all lately, from some really weird, never-before-seen, garbage-tier subs. Half of them I don’t even know what they’re supposed to be about. What the fuck is a Honk Star Rail? Where the fuck did Pop Culture Chat come from? Who the fuck is Peter, and why is he explaining jokes? I used to doomscroll down to page 8 or 9 before I started seeing weird stuff like this, and now it’s right there on page 1. In the past, when I started seeing that weird Taylor Swift Simp Cult sub, I knew I’d been on reddit too long. Now they regularly show up, if not on page 1, then high on page 2.
Along with the r/AmITheAsshole scab copy sub, r/AITAH, which somehow managed to make it to the front page in record time after it’s creation, even though it has about 9% as many subscribers as the original did.
Hell, some of these posts on page 1 of r/all only have 1500 upvotes. That’s insane.