Reddit is (Still) Lying and Faking
Working for Wall Street and Silicon Valley
YESTERDAY somebody told us that Reddit was gloating about "success" in what seemed like slop pieces (LLMs, trying to game the market now that this company - which is fiscally a disaster (huge losses!) - is in Wall Street and loaded with ads).
There is nothing that truly supports this assertion of "success" because in the US, for instance, Reddit fell from 10% to 2.5% since August. It looks like Reddit isn't keeping up and Reddit at its core is only about posing, faking, cheating. As a Web site and as a company too, especially the latter (which sells data of the former), Reddit isn't doing too well and LLM slop will probably worsen things for them; there is a cluster of companies found to have defrauded investors by lying about number of members/users (and they only got caught after selling; the buyer did an audit). It's just outright ridiculous. They sometimes conflate number of visitors with number of "members" or "users". It's like Techrights saying it has a million registered users (technically true in WordPress, which had over a million users, but over 99% of those were spam).
Reddit has long embraced deceit and false marketing. It even tries to pass itself off as a "community" with "Redditors".
"Reddit always was fake," an associate reminds us, "and only gained a modicum of popularity by lying about Swartz's involvement and covering up the fact that he walked away from their bullshit without even saying bye. That and the collapse of Slashdot caused them to temporarily pick up users."
It's not just Reddit though. Another example is "Hacker News" (HN). Jim Nielsenβs latest blog post ("Hacker News Clones") says: "I kinda love that there are still places on the web where people can explore creating alternative experiences without being shut down because they are outside the officially-sanctioned environment."
Haha, that's funny. As we covered here many times before (even in long videos), "Hacker News" is neither hacker nor news and it's closely controlled by large corporations. It's also heavily censored by them. The same is true for Reddit; it's working for advertisers like Microsoft.
An associate has said that the above blog "completely misses or actively ignores the real censorship situation at HN".
Don't fall for this phony idea that the above sites are grassroots or edgy; they're not. β