It could also be that they have had modest growth from normies offsetting the losses from earlier users. This could explain why it appears to be in steep decline for many of the people here but may look almost ok from the outside.

Or it could just be bots.

Agreed.

After the API thing, I stopped using for a few months, converting to Lemmy instead.

Then I got booted from Lemmy for not being communist enough, I started looking at Reddit again maybe once a day.

At first, I was so happy to see a lot of activity on my small subreddits that never had much activity before.

But after a few weeks I realized it's just bots basically rephrasing popular posts from the past. And bots rephrasing responses to those posts.

Where is the next Reddit? I miss it.

That’s the go to jail kind of securities fraud.

If you think any major social media site is not willfully ignoring some percentage of the bots, I've got a bridge to sell you.

And it's much easier to hide this problem on a site where the users are anonymous.

Reddit wouldn't be the first company to juice the numbers before an IPO. They've also admitted to taking advantage of fake accounts in the past: https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/

I have a generic email address and its constantly being added to various new websites, apps, projects, etc. Its bizarre how blatant this is.

Its very cleary an IPO strategy is to hire "marketing companies" that are really botnet controllers to create users for your site to make it more attractive to investors. Then leadership gets to play dumb when these "marketing companies" are filling their user roster.

Exactly.

Maintaining plausible deniability is all that's necessary to avoid the legal issues. Add very minimal bot detection just to claim you aren't doing nothing about the problem.

I've stopped using reddit for a lot of reasons. But a big one was that more and more of the content being posted was from fake users. I had an account for ~11/12 years and this was always an issue. But it seemed to really ramp up in 2023. I also started receiving direct messages from bots in 2023. That had never happened before.

This is an anecdotal experience. But there are quite a few users saying the same thing lately: there's a bot problem like there wasn't before.

you can simply buy upvotes, stars, views, retweet's, reviews etc some will even guarantee delivery. If you buy 1000 and all of those bots get banned they will deploy 1000 new ones to deliver the order.

You prefer them to create real looking accounts or they start stealing them.

If it gets harder only affects the price.

If a site has an API, it has bots. They call that common sense.

You don't need to ADD bots, you can just not ban as many...

the usual M.O. is to spend a lot on growth campaigns, and then they can claim that there's growth! how did the user acquisition cost change over time?

that's hilarious you think that every major platform doesn't have the same amount of bot activity.

And there are people who go to jail for fraud. Let's not forget about the whole CEO editing comments fiasco.

CEO editing comments has what to do with fraud?

If he can't handle arguments without modifying the history in his favor, it's not completely unlikely that he'd also modify the stats of his business in his favor too. Parent commenter implied that since it was a "go to jail" kind of a offense, it's not likely. Maybe less likely, but his past behaviour shows that he does do suspicious things.

A whole paragraph for something I figured didn't need expounding.