saarth

Hi, The article mentions 400M unique visitors for all of 2012, putting MAU at 400/12= ~33-34M MAUs?

Facebook it seems was doing a billion MAUs at this time, so 1000/33 = ~ 30. So reddit was approximately 30 times smaller than Facebook.

Now Facebook as far as I remember has always been a logged in experience. Back in the early days of reddit a lot of visitors did not sign up (because it was a link sharing website like digg), and I am not sure how good cookies and user attribution was back then but surely a lot of those 400M unique views weren’t unique people. But this is just my guess. Ignoring this stil makes reddit much smaller than fb.

Marketers btw, still consider reddit to be a niche social media. Look at this post here - https://www.reddit.com/r/redditstock/comments/1vj4i4i/just_learned_reddits_ad_revenue_is_lower_than/

Reddit get less money from advertisers than Bing and Yahoo in 2026. You might tell me that marketers are not paying for ads and instead using bots to pay for free and even that is the case, it’s much much smaller than other mainstrem social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok)

Buy him some warhammer 40k or model ships next time.

The accounts posting fake product reviews to promote products are usually not bots. They are either actual people from ad agencies/brands, posting as a part of the campaign and other people from the agency upvoting (sometime also using engagement farms).

I don’t know how much activity on reddit is bot driven, but logically it makes little sense to me to run bot campaigns there. Until 2020, reddit was quite small and insignificant in terms of how many people you could reach. And now, reddit has made their API increasingly more expensive, making it prohibitive for large scale bot posting. Even scraping data is hard and very expensive, let alone posting at scale.

There might be engagement farms and content farms mass posting, but that is manual, not bots, and happens on all social media platforms.

Also propaganda bots on Lemmy are an absurd assumption. Very few people use lemmy as compared to watching TV or Netflix or YouTube or Twitter or Instagram. Any entity that wants to influence anyone would not waste time, money and effort on Lemmy. The returns on investment just aren’t there for Lemmy as a channel (and this is how these media decisions are made as ad companies are often involved in political campaigns).

We are on Lemmy, so yeah, they are here. Just take a look at how many people are defending Russia invading its neighboring country and murdering the people there. Or try calling Xi Jingping a dictator who is doing a genocide on the Uighurs.

I have never seen anyone claim that Putin or Xi are faultless. I have seen people claim and i agree with them that they are no worse than western leaders. Every imperial project has blood on its hands, be it Rome, Spain, Netherlands, Great Britain, USA, USSR or China, or even India for that matter.

Are these Russian bots in the room with us?

Don’t the internal angles need to be 90°? Two of those right angles aren’t right angles on the inside.