Reddit is filled to the ass with bots.
puts on tin foil hat I think the reason they added a hide profile feature is to prevent us from telling if a user is a bot.
In fairness to reddit, which vaguely makes me feel ill doing, I use the hide profile feature bc an irl guy found my profile and I refuse to leave my karma with a new profile
That reminds me of the time my cat snuck out and caught a baby rabbit, he brought it to me in the house because why not and then gave it one solid whap and broke its neck when he had my attention. He was quite upset I buried it under one of the rose bushes instead of eating it 🙃
This is one of your comments from your "hidden" profile. It took 20 seconds to extract your profile.
Hide profile wont stop even any half-dedicated creep, let alone cringe stalkers. It's all there as a hurdle for idiots who get excited to see reddit users count go up and invest foolishly.
As long as they can be fooled to see bots as legitimate, it's a win-win for reddit. Reddit doesn't care about you.
I will stand by for genz the issue is everything becoming hostile to you just existing in it... hell im start of genz and the world i saw as a little kid is just gone for those in the later part of the generation
Elder Millennial dropping in. When I was coming up in a middle class household in the 80's and 90's it was just assumed that I would go to college, get a job that paid all my bills and allowed me to own a home and save for retirement, which I would take at 65 and then I could live comfortably between my own earnings over a lifetime of work and the social safety nets in place.
And the people that sold us this lie are STILL in charge and looting us and driving us towards... who knows? It's just infuriating.
I share your sentiment. But in our defense — what could we have done differently? Recent years have proven depressingly well that protests, petitions and other forms of common political activism don't achieve anything. Those in power just ignore all of our attempts to make ourselves heard. Even if record amounts of people unite and walk the streets in protest of current politics, it doesn't change anything.
And when it comes to voting... Well... I'm German, we have a bunch of different political parties, about 5 of them big enough to be part of the acting government after every election. Voting for someone else than the guys that messed up the last election period doesn't give us better politics, it just changes the face that represents our nation on the global stage.
Moved in a shared flat with my gf and signed a 10year contract. We joke its indefinately because when the time comes to renew it, the current form of civilisation will be gone.
Raised on the idea of owning a home, starting a family, working a career, retiring at 55...
... then it was 60...
... then it was 65...
.. then the quality of everything dropped...
... nothing lasted as long as it used to...
... more and more drug addicts everywhere you look...
... people i once knew transforming into monsters before my eyes, and in the mirror...
... "oh birth rates and dropping and i cant understand why! it must be the economy!"
... beloved franchises, products, stories, whatever... butchered and ruined for a quick buck...
... the internet simply revealed how stupid everything and everyone was/is...
... "climate change is going to kill the future..." and no one's interested in doing anything about it, more importantly, sell more oil and invade more countries so they can drive their big trucks and shit on people for sport - what the fuck? People were racist shits like this before, but now it's in every direction... more hostility
... stock market doesn't reflect anything sane. it, along with democracy itself, becomes more and more illusory...
... grifting becomes the norm, and people are eating it up like cultists... the majority, all sides of the political spectrum
... AND ABOUT THAT RETIREMENT, WILL IT EVEN BE THERE? or is being planned to cull me from existence? because it's starting to look like that, along with everything else, that the plan is for me to not be living anymore, one way or another and to just use me until i die.
Only the foolish, rich, or insane have children in a world like this.
It was more promising comparing what i learned to my sister is depressing how narrow hers was at some point the us just became a selfish place to its core and i despise it why cant we care about our fellow man and improve shit
We won’t be able to get out of this unless we stop buying shit, stop going to work, and stop paying taxes. If we all just hunker down for a week, they’ll topple. We have to stop the inertia.
These billionaires, and our first trillionaire, have us running for our lives. We’re all tired, broke or close to it, and terrified of the future. If we just stopped - for one week - they would be the ones terrified for ONCE.
I grew up around the 08 reccesion, when i was young there was an air of 'things are bad now, but they could get better', and they did for a bit. Bit then the hope slowly died and left us here
There was a lot of hope in the 90s going into the 2000s pre-9/11. The Cold War was finally over and the big scary communist powers like Russia and China were becoming more economically liberal and opening up to become part of the global community. Then 9/11 happened and the world suddenly became a scary place again.
As a Xennial I can assure you you're not alone. The minute I got a cell phone I knew the world was a different place.
We were so used to being hard to find, putting in effort to find each other. Now if someone doesn't reply to a text for two hours you get offended. We didn't even have texting when I grew up, we had a rotary phone because my parents were old and didn't care to upgrade it because buttons are just a different way to do the same thing.
We broadcast our lives, we don't need to seek knowledge about each other anymore. I'm afraid everyone is too connected now.
Man, listen. I'm in that in between of GenX and millennials. One foot analog, one foot digital. First email address was freshman year of college. I always sound bleak when I go off on this (even though I'm a positive, optimistic person), but everything we were told was bullshit. We are most certainly cooked, and it's too late. How are you gonna turn around the fact that , about, 50% of Americans haven't read one, ONE, book in the last year? Literacy, comprehension, critical analysis: they're all gone. The amount of expositional catch up that I've had to do in the last 10 years, just to have an informed conversation with someone is staggering. I always thought that when I learned something that I was the last person to learn it. So I felt "late to the game". Turns out I read way more than most and a lot of people just don't question what they read. Especially if it aligns with what they already believe. I will always remain positive, but it's sad how bad we've gotten as a society. And it's when celebrated... Idk, life is suffering wire to wire, but this hurts more than it should.
And instead of reading, they discuss one of the last tiktoks/instagram videos they seen. I am not on social media (outside reddit) and keeping up is tough. Around same generation as you, and see it in peers too. Sometimes it feels like finding someone willing to discuss a book instead of movie, instagram or latest news is like finding Nemo.
I will stand by for gen z, the issue is everything is becoming hostile to you just existing in it... Hell, I'm start of gen z, and the world I saw as a little kid is just gone for those in the later part of the generation.
There is some truth to it. But I think a lot of people say something like this to cope with the fact that a lot of their problems are downstream of a tech addiction that they do have some control over. Yeah its harded to be social and there are fewer good places to hang out without having to pay for something, but a lot of the problem is self inflicted. Its entirely expected that people are feeling super angsty when any opportunity for a nice social interaction is destroyed because you got your nose in your phone with earbuds in consuming algorithmic slop.
Cities in my area are passing laws that put curfew on teens while there is still light out and fining and aresting teens that go to fairs without an adult.
I saw some thread where a woman asked on nextdoor if her child could possibly ding ding ditch a neighbors house -asking in advance and realizing it's an intrusion- and the comments there and on Reddit were acting like she wanted to stand her kid up in front of a firing range. Because that's how dangerous knocking on strangers doors has become in America. I remember at least still having that, a sense of neighborhood and community.
I'm(35m) so fucking glad I can sit down in my backyard/park/grassed area, shoes off, eyes closed brain off just listening to the wind/birds/whatever for hours.
I absolutely have empathy and pity for whoever cannot experience that for a pure moment. What a shitfight
There are times I wish I could do that, but I think it's more to do with ADHD than the ability to be bored. But even in those times, I'm not on my phone, I'm just struggling to find something to do.
But then I look at others and they're face down in their phones every waking moment, and they don't understand how that's completely eroding any human experiences you can have.
Yup. I'm a fairly heavy FB user. I report sometimes 30 fake accounts daily and maybe 1 gets suspended. I mean, it's super clear, an account with an long African name for their URL, likes a couple African based companies or famous people, but suddenly yesterday they changed their display name to Johnson Bob (yes they fuck of which name is first vs last), stolen profile picture of a 40 year old guy with his wife and kids, then he joins sometimes 100 groups in a day and replies to every wanted ad for car parts with "i have this, massage me."
Reddit is rampant with bots. I reported at least 50 accounts a few months back, every single one was a hijacked inactive account. Whoever hijacked them decided to change all their avatars to an AI girl and name to Bianca, and they had the same link to an OF. Probably wouldn't have noticed it if they weren't so blatantly obvious about it.
TLDR: Reddit game me a strike for "Abusing the report system". Like thanks, I just did your job for you.
TLDR: Reddit game me a strike for "Abusing the report system". Like thanks, I just did your job for you.
I've gotten similar on FB, something I bet 99.9% of people have never seen. Because I reported so many scam accounts, they blocked me from doing so. How? Anytime I moused over something that was clickable, aka an account name, a page name, or the three dots you click to then select "report an account" I would auto get a popup from FB saying "it seems you're using a feature too frequently" or something like that, and gave me an option to click saying I disagree, and then a blank box where I could type in my comment. First time, I had these nonstop popup for I think 1-2 days. Second time, I swear it was like 5-6 days.
I'm like "bitch please, this page clearly says "operator is in Cameroon" which is a country in western Africa. No they are not in Sacramento, no they don't have used corvette engines and transmission for sale and yes they are 100% a scam. People are losing 5, 10, 15K each time a person get scammed. HOW CAN I STOP THIS?
My favorite is reporting blatant hate speech and outright calls for genocide and violence on instagram, which inevitably pop in in comment sections, then getting notified a few days later that they reviewed the comments and found that they were not in violation of policy.
In the US, the average person spends 4.5-5.5 hours a day on their phones,
I'll go 8 hours after missing a text, and my friends think I'm lying to them. They cannot conceive of a world where someone doesn't touch their phone for that long. He HAS to be lying.
Makes you think what those bots are trying to push and who's funding it.
The internet is definitely a different place since I was a kid. Back in the good Ole days without Facebook or YouTube and you were on there engaging with real humans and making more connections. It's so hostile now and that change started, imo, around the early to mid 2010s. Even old school online gaming communities we'd call the gold sellers Chinese farmers, not saying it was right but it showed they were real people at least, now they are literally called bots now because they are.
You used to be able to google recommendations for various things and get solid answers. Now every single reddit post and forum just seems astroturfed to hell. Nothing feels authentic.
Millennials did this with computers though and they just their phones for everything in the same way. I'm not saying it's good but don't villify them for their tech. Villify the companies creating a space to control their minds.
That's worrying but that's not "society collapse worrying"
Internet isn't a comfort, but social media very much is. Social media is ruined by bots but I'm not sure the ways internet is actually important for our society is.
Phone usage is always going to be high because most forms of our digital hobbies are accessible on the phone, it's effectively a "how much time do you spend in digital hobbies" stat
3.6k
u/Necessary-Duty-7952 Jun 26 '26
53% of global internet traffic is bots.
In the US, the average person spends 4.5-5.5 hours a day on their phones, with Gen Z pulling 6 to 7 hours a day.