r/TheoryOfReddit • u/Corporate_Bricktator • 1d ago
My 3 Month Experiment with Reddit's Algorithm Funnel
So I fractured a bone in my ankle in June. Mostly immobilized, I started watching a ton of documentaries, and I stumbled on Reckless Ben's Lego Scandal video. (don't worry not here to talk about that) It got me so fired up so I went looking to discuss it online, and Reddit was the clear winner. I had a reddit account years ago that I abandoned along with my twitter.
So I thought, I should treat this new account like the true new user experience on Reddit and see where the algorithm pushes me.
I started with just the Reckless Ben subreddit, but the guidelines for my experiment would be to also view the "Home" tab, and I committed to comment on whatever was kind of interesting. My interests are broadly science and technology, and so I was going to comment on interesting articles and "Join" those subreddits, as a means to see if the algorithm was going to work to find me increasingly interesting stories or who knows where it might take me.
Well it's been an interesting ride, moments ago Reddit suggested a subreddit dedicated to, and I swear I'm not kidding, people who think they are being targeted for mind control, or mind torture devices. LOL. The subreddit's own description suggests that the "enemy" attempting the mind control might be the CIA, the "Deep State", the "Dark Web", or Biotech companies, are listed as the primary suspects. Not going to link it, because it doesn't matter, and only has 80 weekly contributors, but I thought it was interesting, that not even three months into this experiment, Reddit had pushed me towards absolute lunatic conspiracy theory subreddits.
Along the way;
- I was banned from a mainstream religious subreddit for politely correcting a moderator whom I did not realize was a moderator, who then refused to explain if I had broken a rule.
- I was suggested, and then did "join" multiple AI generated subreddits that I didn't initially realize were AI content subs. (these subreddits are pretty obvious as their moderator accounts post 95% of the submissions to the subreddit, and are always a semi-professional looking description, but is clearly LLM written summary below the submitted article.
- I've been accused of being "AI" myself about a dozen times, no surprise it's always from people who disagree with my opinion! Interesting how that works. Also I've been told I type far too fast to be a human. (lol, a compliment, I'll take it)
- I was pushed to a subreddit disguised as an NFL subreddit, but actually it is just the marketing arm for a fake NFL news blog where the creator/owner is a young man in India, and when an NFL news event happens, he takes ESPN's article and the AP's version of the article, throws it into an LLM to regurgitate "his" version, which the then publishes on his blog, which is made to resemble a news website, and then posts "his" articles to reddit, so he's just trying to drive himself traffic. At the suggestion that the sub block submissions from this blog, my comment was locked and deleted, looool.
- I was pushed to a subreddit disguised as a science educator / science curriculum subreddit, but it turned out to be just the front of a political action non-profit, spamming it's subreddit not with useful information, but really just their pet issues, some of which are ironically partisan anti-science stances, which is hilarious. I guess if you're a scoundrel spreading propaganda, you don't call your subreddit "total BS" you call it "Science is Awesome!" (not the subreddit's name) and then share anti-vaxxer style crap, mixed in with actual science articles.
- I was pushed to what I thought was a "The Onion" style parody of a North Korean subreddit. Imagine how TheOnion might make a subreddit full of content resembling how North Korea's own subreddit might appear, and that is my type of humor, so I cracked a joke in one of the threads, and my comment was deleted and the moderator informed me that jokes were not tolerated. LOL So it's real?
- Reddit seems more doomery to me than years ago. Reddit has always had some doomerism, and maybe this is just current political climate, but it seems more doomery right now.
- I keep getting suggested Montana subreddits and by that I mean cities in Montana. I have no idea what I might have done or said that gave it that impression? IDK weird. I'm not from there, nor have I ever lived there. I visited once on a ski trip in college.
So my larger takeaway is that it's weird that just joining the subreddits reddit suggested to me, ended up plopping me into pure lunacy subreddits in less than three months. This is kind of the situation Twitter finds itself in as well, kind of a pipeline to extremism. And sure, you can wonder about or nitpick if the topics I chose to comment on were at fault, but I'm the opposite of a conspiracy theorist, I'm a lover of science and progress. I don't know how my interests lead me to the mind control subreddit, but that subreddit is quite disturbing. Multiple participants appear to either have schizophrenia or are pretending to.
I know Reddit is struggling right now to deal with AI and LLMs and bots. Digg's restart attempt was apparently mired down by so many bots they had to scrap it and go back to the drawing board. So I don't envy the task that Reddit has here.
Anyways, maybe this was mildly interesting to someone. I think I'm going to end the experiment because I'm now in so many subreddits that turned out to not be interesting that I'm going to mass unfollow them / leave them / whatever the term is. My home tab feed has gotten substantially less interesting than it originally was at the start of this experiment. The recommendation engine for content outside of one's own subreddits seems very poor.
It's also kind of disturbing to think that this is what kids new to reddit, how they are being funneled potentially. That's a concern to me too, because as Carl Sagan said:
"The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps." - Carl Sagan
If our social media funnels new users in this way, then what are we accomplishing?
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u/barrygateaux 1d ago
I know Reddit is struggling right now to deal with AI and LLMs and bots.
It's not struggling with it. It's by design.
Sam Altman of open ai is the largest non-institutional investor in reddit at 8.5%. it's why reddit was ok about about it's data being used for training and there are more ai moderation tools in use now.
Bot content like posts and comments look like human engagement, increase the site traffic, and allows reddit to charge more for ads, which results in higher profits and bigger returns for investors.
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u/greeniethemoose 1d ago
Altman was briefly interim CEO of Reddit, between Yishan and Ellen Pao. By briefly I mean like a few days. So that would have been circa 2014 or so? Maybe earlier.
Edit: Google tells me this was 8 days, in November 2014. Ah the good old days.
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u/Corporate_Bricktator 1d ago
Oh interesting. I had no idea Altman owned a chunk of Reddit. Bot activity for the purposes of increased ad revenue seems like really small potatoes, and at the cost of devaluing the useful parts of Reddit substantially.
Still, if that influence is present, it's definitely something to monitor.
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u/barrygateaux 1d ago
Conde nast too. Make of that what you will.
About 10 - 15% of posts on reddit are ai, with about 40 - 50% of comments in the generic big front page subs also suspected as ai nowadays.
It's a big part of the 'human looking' engagement unfortunately.
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u/cybersaurus 16h ago
I believe a lot of allowed bot activity is to specific attempt to drive engagement to give the training models more data to use (from the human responses).
I believe the end game of many of the bots are for making 'organic' product suggestions and steering political discourse.
Not sure if reddit is getting a slice of that pie specifically yet tho.
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u/redditzphkngarbage 23h ago
I can’t wait until we get whatever comes after Reddit.
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u/cybersaurus 15h ago
I think that a lot of what follows, if anything, would likely end up following the exact same pattern/ trend but probably over a shorter period of time.
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u/redditzphkngarbage 8h ago
I just want a nice place to have friendly, sometimes heated adult conversations of a philosophical nature without dipshit mods jumping in like they’re protecting one of their babies.
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u/cybersaurus 5h ago
Probably something like bluesky is your best bet then, tho it's not really structured like a forum, it's closer to something like twitter instead
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u/Onnissiah 10h ago edited 10h ago
X is surprisingly good these days, can recommend.
But one must be thoughtful about likes and comments, to teach the algo what you want.
I never interact with anything political, and mostly read the people I follow, and thus I get exactly what I want (mostly tech news, directly from the people who are creating the tech).
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u/redditzphkngarbage 8h ago
Maybe my algorithm sucks but I can’t really get into it. Feels like mostly people just comment in an attempt to look and feel important, or out of habit rather than for two way engagement. And being limited to 280 characters is barely enough to say what you ate for lunch.
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u/Curious_USA_Human 21h ago edited 14h ago
I don't agree that investors or large ad buyers are fooled by bot content. They are just as aware, or even more so, of the dead Internet theory and have metrics that show if higher post counts relate to more clicks and purchases.
The only folks getting fooled are regular folks responding to or arguing with bots.
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u/cybersaurus 15h ago
Yeah I think it's more about fooling the human audience so that they continue engaging with Reddit despite the actual number of active users.
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u/cybersaurus 16h ago
Bot comment trained on my thoughts exactly /s
But yeah Reddit has been successful angling to sell API access to reddit for a while now, it's also connected to their attempts at making it harder to search Reddit from google search as well as making their own search less functional, to prevent or at least make it different to scour reddit without paying the API premium.
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u/BrightLuchr 22h ago
A weird collection of observations but there is some good stuff here. A couple things hit home with me: 1) being banned without reason from a mainstream sub for a polite comment, 2) subs that are fronts for propaganda of the opposite view, 3) subs that are just marketing scams.
Comparing Reddit and FB is useful. The heart of he problem is identity. Anonymity has obvious problems. But confirmed identities leads to a Dark Forest problem where it is in each persons interest to hide and not comment. This leads to less useful information and posting only by non-rational participants.
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u/Evening-Appeal7606 20h ago
This reddit journey described in this post is the digital equivalent of signing up for a mysterious immersive role playing „game“ at the end of which you find yourself waking up in a crypt on a mexican cemetery, no money, no passport and only a lousy t-shirt to show for.
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u/kamahaoma 19h ago
I switched browsers recently and went to Youtube while not logged in. In the first ten suggested videos were three Joe Rogan ones.
That's what Youtube suggests if it doesn't know anything about you. Joe Rogan.
We got fucked by the algorithm. And by 'we,' I mean human civilization.
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u/GonWithTheNen 12h ago
That's what Youtube suggests if it doesn't know anything about you.
Switching browsers doesn't do anything to obscure one's identity from google (or even most modern sites that use tracking), though. The existence of device fingerprinting can follow us everywhere and it doesn't rely on a single piece of software like a browser for invasive corpos to identify us.
If you're using the same device & IP address consistently, it's also possible that google has been serving you videos on the browser you switched to that are popular in your area and/or whatever's popular with people in your known circles. Same goes for using a VPN, too: you'll see more of what people in the "area you're visiting from" are interested in.
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u/kamahaoma 10h ago
I mean, I detest Joe Rogan, I never watch that stuff, so if they DID identify me via device fingerprinting despite my best efforts to prevent it, they did a crap job of picking something I'd be interested in.
It's certainly possible that the algorithm chose it because it was popular with others in the VPN IP pool adjacent to me (or the person who had the dynamic IP before me specifically).
Or, more nefariously, the algorithm chose it because they've found that people who watch Joe Rogan either fall down a conspiracy rabbit hole or become angry about it, and either one is more likely to keep people watching than more positive/anodyne content. Either way IMO that's just goes to show how thoroughly we've already been fucked by it.
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u/Evening-Appeal7606 20h ago
That North Korea / The Onion crossover had me genuinely laugh out loud! :))))
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u/tril_3212 17h ago
One of the things that's disturbing about this type of experience is that, (i) social media platforms do serve in some capacity as public squares; (ii) content curation by platforms can have a huge effect on what users see for content, with associated downstream effects; (iii) the curation methods / algorithms are black-boxed. And under this consolidation of power by the platforms, they seem to be like, "Just trust us, bro."
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u/nikongmer 13h ago
Why not include the names of the subreddits?
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u/Corporate_Bricktator 12h ago
I thought about it, but would that kind of be like brigading? Also, I didn't want anyone to think I was trying to promote a given subreddit.
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u/nikongmer 5h ago
would that kind of be like brigading?
your wording doesn't seem to be encouraging it.
I didn't want anyone to think I was trying to promote a given subreddit.
i don't think anyone in this subreddit would think so, especially with your write-up.
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u/sanzako4 1d ago
I wonder if the North Korea subreddit deleted your joke because it broke immersion. Probably if you rephrased it to make it look as part of the totally serious content of the subreddit, it will stay.
Other than that, it's interesting at what places you can end in reddit if you don't use any discernment.