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.
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.