I think I’d say that’s consistent with a direction they’re trying to send Reddit, for all that it’s inconsistent with where Reddit is now.
I think some of the current fire over there is actually aimed at winnowing the hyper-engaged members of the community who are hobbyists and niche interest specialists - and then exchanging them for ‘influencers’ who are not amateurs, but who have an external financial incentive to maintain spaces, continue engagement, and to toe Reddit’s line.
An ongoing remark during the blackouts noted that a whole ton of niche google searches went dull after the reddit portions of the results subsequently bricked. Reddit’s niche communities are where people online are going for organic product and service recommendations - people needing advice on products don’t search for review sites anymore, they go to reddit discussions. And I think they’ve realized that the influencer space on IG or similar is exceedingly lucrative.
If they can leverage their own platform’s prominence to either boost-for-fees organic influencers or seed dialogue via AI-piloted accounts, that turns into an alternative way of monetizing their placement and niche online.
If they manage to drive off the hyper-engaged community members who might counteract those seeded recommendations, or recapture communities from real organic hobbyists and similar - they can offer key spaces in niche communities with retail importance to both the companies and the influencers (“organic brand evangelists”) as a monetization angle down the road.
If you have any way of getting their pitch to prospective partners on record somehow, that would be absolutely fantastic.
While I think you might be onto something - I think this only works for consumer focused goods/products/services. Large language models can seed “what car should I get” type conversations - however they have a tendency to be confidently wrong. And in industry specific communities being confidently wrong (especially when attempting to influence a b2b sale) can lead to all kinds of negative ripple effects.
Being confident whilst caring not one jot for being wrong or right is the essence of selling in modern society, especially when it comes to ideas (especially Politics).
Large language models are great at producing text with all the correct subtle details to trigger the reader’s subconscious feeling of “this is somebody who knows what he’s talking” with zero of the subtle details that make people suspect the writer is unsure of what he wrote or even deceitful (in a way, LLMs are the perfect sleazy politician).
That said, I do agree with you that amongst expert domain specific communities populated by people who have actual domain knowledge, assured delivery of bullshit doesn’t go far. It will, however, very likely go far in the more generic communities which seem to, at least individually, have the most subscribers, so an “influencer” strategy selling to “consumers” (so, B2C not B2B) might make sense if most of the population of Reddit are non-specialists using it as a “Portal to the Internet”.
So under this hypothesis, reddit becomes a trove of B2C bots/influencers attempting to pitch outrage/ dopamine (and the occasional consumer good) while letting the professional communities die.
This begs the question - how much of reddits traffic is composed of said technical (as in deep knowledge in a field not tech) communities? Furthermore how much of reddits value prop to large language models is said technical communities (as a source of training).
While I think you might be onto something - I think this only works for consumer focused goods/products/services.
That’s not really a huge limitation when you consider what Reddit’s primary demographics are.
There are very few B2B deals being worked out on Reddit at the moment, but there’s massive amounts of consumer decisions made on any given day, all of which are aided by the discourses taking place on Reddit.
People who are qualified to participate in large-scale B2B aren’t getting buying tips from industry communities on Reddit. People who are just entering that grouping, or are in over their head, or are hobbyists looking to go pro … that’s who is taking buying tips from random community discourse or asking for help picking what X to buy. The people who do not have the experience to screen the “confident-sounding but wrong” answers are effectively the only ones who are asking for that sort of help.
I don’t think this angle even needs to use language models or AI - just exchange current hobbyist mods and/or key contributors with influencers selected by the campaign relevant to that community. If you have already driven off the hobbyists who might check their inputs, then they have free space to seed responses and sculpt impressions.
The other key factor is that in many cases, you aren’t necessarily facing questions about “right” or “wrong” per se - but matters of highly subjective opinion. If your selected influencers are recommending your hardware that’s not technically that much better or worse, but isn’t a proven brand or is marginally better - the average consumer taken in by the astroturf is never really going to see a cost associated in a meaningful way.
Tell us more…
They just have no idea what value the site brings to their actual users.
Essentially, pushing a Reddit as a recommendation engine for “organic brand evangelists” instead of organic community communication.
I’m gonna swing by their booth tomorrow and report back.
I think I’d say that’s consistent with a direction they’re trying to send Reddit, for all that it’s inconsistent with where Reddit is now.
I think some of the current fire over there is actually aimed at winnowing the hyper-engaged members of the community who are hobbyists and niche interest specialists - and then exchanging them for ‘influencers’ who are not amateurs, but who have an external financial incentive to maintain spaces, continue engagement, and to toe Reddit’s line.
An ongoing remark during the blackouts noted that a whole ton of niche google searches went dull after the reddit portions of the results subsequently bricked. Reddit’s niche communities are where people online are going for organic product and service recommendations - people needing advice on products don’t search for review sites anymore, they go to reddit discussions. And I think they’ve realized that the influencer space on IG or similar is exceedingly lucrative.
If they can leverage their own platform’s prominence to either boost-for-fees organic influencers or seed dialogue via AI-piloted accounts, that turns into an alternative way of monetizing their placement and niche online.
If they manage to drive off the hyper-engaged community members who might counteract those seeded recommendations, or recapture communities from real organic hobbyists and similar - they can offer key spaces in niche communities with retail importance to both the companies and the influencers (“organic brand evangelists”) as a monetization angle down the road.
If you have any way of getting their pitch to prospective partners on record somehow, that would be absolutely fantastic.
While I think you might be onto something - I think this only works for consumer focused goods/products/services. Large language models can seed “what car should I get” type conversations - however they have a tendency to be confidently wrong. And in industry specific communities being confidently wrong (especially when attempting to influence a b2b sale) can lead to all kinds of negative ripple effects.
Being confident whilst caring not one jot for being wrong or right is the essence of selling in modern society, especially when it comes to ideas (especially Politics).
Large language models are great at producing text with all the correct subtle details to trigger the reader’s subconscious feeling of “this is somebody who knows what he’s talking” with zero of the subtle details that make people suspect the writer is unsure of what he wrote or even deceitful (in a way, LLMs are the perfect sleazy politician).
That said, I do agree with you that amongst expert domain specific communities populated by people who have actual domain knowledge, assured delivery of bullshit doesn’t go far. It will, however, very likely go far in the more generic communities which seem to, at least individually, have the most subscribers, so an “influencer” strategy selling to “consumers” (so, B2C not B2B) might make sense if most of the population of Reddit are non-specialists using it as a “Portal to the Internet”.
So under this hypothesis, reddit becomes a trove of B2C bots/influencers attempting to pitch outrage/ dopamine (and the occasional consumer good) while letting the professional communities die.
This begs the question - how much of reddits traffic is composed of said technical (as in deep knowledge in a field not tech) communities? Furthermore how much of reddits value prop to large language models is said technical communities (as a source of training).
That’s not really a huge limitation when you consider what Reddit’s primary demographics are.
There are very few B2B deals being worked out on Reddit at the moment, but there’s massive amounts of consumer decisions made on any given day, all of which are aided by the discourses taking place on Reddit.
People who are qualified to participate in large-scale B2B aren’t getting buying tips from industry communities on Reddit. People who are just entering that grouping, or are in over their head, or are hobbyists looking to go pro … that’s who is taking buying tips from random community discourse or asking for help picking what X to buy. The people who do not have the experience to screen the “confident-sounding but wrong” answers are effectively the only ones who are asking for that sort of help.
I don’t think this angle even needs to use language models or AI - just exchange current hobbyist mods and/or key contributors with influencers selected by the campaign relevant to that community. If you have already driven off the hobbyists who might check their inputs, then they have free space to seed responses and sculpt impressions.
The other key factor is that in many cases, you aren’t necessarily facing questions about “right” or “wrong” per se - but matters of highly subjective opinion. If your selected influencers are recommending your hardware that’s not technically that much better or worse, but isn’t a proven brand or is marginally better - the average consumer taken in by the astroturf is never really going to see a cost associated in a meaningful way.
Reminder
I was afraid they were trying to turn Reddit into TikTok. Turns out it’s worse, they are trying to turn it into Pinterest 🤢