Reddit fades from ChatGPT citations

“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.

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.

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.

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.