posted in Technology
Reddit fades from ChatGPT citations
www.axios.com/2026/08/20/chatgpt-reddit-citations-geo-strategy
“For communicators, Reddit’s value is in the real conversations that people are having about your brand today, not where it surfaces tomorrow,” said Adam Collins, Reddit’s chief communications officer.
Reddit defining its platform as a place for consumers to discuss brands speaks volumes about its motives.
Replying to @Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz
I mean, you’re talking about Reddit, which is a brand, in this comment.
Like, people talk about things, and a lot of things have brands.
It’s just a bit two-faced and dishonest for Reddit to be marketing itself to users as a platform for genuine discussion while in actuality being a marketing platform for brands.
If more Redditors realized what Reddit has become, they might be more willing to join a platform without the centralized control that enables manipulation.
Replying to @Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz
With enough users on the Fediverse, the astroturfing will come. It’s not really inherently resistant to brand placements etc. It’s just not big enough to get corporate attention.
Astroturfing will come, but the platform itself can’t as easily be designed to enable it with preferential algorithms and tracking. If an instance modifies the frontend to add ads, users can switch instances or use an alternative frontend or app; if a specific instance is known to host promotional posts, it can be easily defederated or otherwise blocked.
The same cannot be said for blocking ads or tracking on Reddit, particularly for mobile users.
I mean, it kinda is.
Lemmy is setup in a way that it totally crumbles at around 100-200k active users. The “every instance replicates almost everything while being legally liable if it doesn’t correctly moderate everything” means that it’s close to impossible to run a Lemmy instance if there’s too many people on the platform.
Reddit has more than one billion accounts and hundreds of millions of active users.
Lemmy physically cannot sustain anything near those numbers. Thus it’s kinda hard-coded to prevent it from getting serious astroturfing, for better and for worse.
For comparison: Both the LTT forum and the crackberry forum have more total and more active users than all of Lemmy combined.
If it ever grew that much instances could go private for signups, require referrals, only federate to select communities (it would be necessary at that point to avoid bad actors) Like a whitelist instead of or in addition to the blocklist.
fucking s&p 500 stock. What are they expecting