alt Hacker NewsAgreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.
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But one problem on reddit were the mods. It was why I retired.
Bots and AI spam can be annoying but mods that lock you out of discussions are much worse.
$1 is far too low to discourage abuse. Spammers and scammers will still make exponential returns. PR agencies are paid tens of thousands to craft narratives for their clients. With institutional actors the sky is the limit. Even just your average basement dwelling troll might consider it worth their while to pay a dollar for a sock puppet account.
Reddit could pay the mods. Let us not act like spam accounts are undesirable for the lil piggy. MAU doesn't differentiate between real and fake users.
Lol, I guess I'm glad I checked-out from reddit before the whole "AI" thing took off. My life is honestly way better without reddit. HN isn't far behind though, honestly. The less time I spend here, the better for everything else going on in my life. HN has at least been somewhat useful for my day-job and employment future.
Something Awful has retained a weirdly high level of quality these days by (still) charging :tenbux: to register an account.
> give subreddit moderators a fighting chance
Moderators are part of the problem really, there are a handful of moderators holding the reins over all the popular subreddits, and "smaller" (even big ones) subreddits suffer from the same problem.
As an example, r/MistralAI, r/LocalLLaMA, r/ChatGPT, r/OpenAI and r/grok are all run by the same person.
The only survivable places on reddit left are the subreddits with small amount of contributors that aren't trying to gain something by participating and organizing. But they're so few.