Post #4440696

2026-08-01 04:02 UTC

They do A/B testing where they put one feature in front of some folks and a different feature in front of others so they can gather data about what people will and won’t tolerate. Between that and the massive tracking they do with IP addresses for people going around account bans, and there’s no real way to know if they were targeting you through cookies/IP, or if you just fell into different groups. I don’t think they put a lot of thought into what’ll that do for some of the subreddits that are for desperate people looking for advice since two people back to back won’t get the same advice. There’s no way to swap notes, no reddit-of-record, and now all that good advice (and some of it was good) is locked away. It warms my cold dead heart to see their stock tank because they don’t deserve the best of their users.

Replies (1)

@impairedimperator@lemmy.zip 2026-08-01 04:23

Essentially yes, my thinking was simply that it’s A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H…etc testing. I had reddit accounts in the past, though I deleted them all and stopped participating about 2-3 years ago. My assumption is that my passive scrolling was connected to previous accounts through IP, device ID, proximity to other devices, other accounts, typing cadence, etc., and I fell in the category of “maybe we can entice them back”. I also agree that reddit likely made the decision to sacrifice a lot of high quality low engagement content for the purposes of mass market engagement farming. It’s sad as shit. I’ve got copies of wikipedia from back in the day, but I never thought to download reddit.

Open ##4443039