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Reddit is the only social media app that I use daily. But despite the fact that I love it, it has some glaring issues that detract from the overall experience.
1Bot Posts and Replies
I’m already convinced thatgenerative AI is ruining social media. Social media bots have existed for a long time, but it’s easier than ever to make fake posts and replies using bot accounts.
I often read posts on r/AITAH, only for many users to express disbelief at the story and accuse the author of the post of being a bot. Then there are the times a seemingly heartfelt reply is actually a comment stolen by a bot.
The reason these bots exist is to farmkarma on Reddit. These accounts are then sold to access exclusive subreddits that have a minimum karma requirement.
While I’m sure some of the people accused of being bots are actually real people using throwaway accounts, I have come across an account actually called “Farm Account” which had all the signs of a bot account. It was a newly created account with contradicting stories that had repurposed an existing post by another user into its own post. It had also accidentally posted its fake story in a comment on another post in the wrong subreddit.
The frequency of these bot posts and comments is enough to make you question the authenticity of what you read on the platform.
I get that posts don’t go viral or get upvotes without being shown to users when they’re still brand new, but all too often I see some badly made obscure meme or hyper-specific question show up in my feed that isn’t relevant to me at all.
These posts will often have less than a dozen likes or comments despite being on subreddits with hundreds of thousands or millions of members. I would understand if these posts were coming from niche subreddits, but they’re from major ones like r/meme. I would also understand if I was seeing these posts after scrolling through a bunch throughout the day, but I see very few posts from my favorite subreddits.
This makes me feel like I’m missing out unless I’m specifically visiting a subreddit and scrolling through its feed. It’s as if I can’t trust Reddit to suggest popular content for me by itself.
3The Number of Ads and Promoted Posts
Reddit is one of those apps that has progressively gotten worse in terms of the number of ads. You could argue it’s a way to get you to pay for a premium subscription. And while it’s not nearly as bad as YouTube, there are still far too many ads. While scrolling through my feed, I get promoted posts every seven to 10 posts on average.
I have also tweaked my ad settings on Reddit to prevent any ads from sensitive categories and to prevent Reddit from using data from third parties to serve me ads. While I appreciate the options to do this, it comes with a drawback: Reddit essentially shows me the same ads over and over again for days at a time.
Every few posts in my feed, and at the tops of comments, I’m seeing repetitive ads. Last week I was being encouraged to vote in the US elections. Now I’m being encouraged to buy Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses.
4Not Being Able to Opt Out of AI Training
Social media companies are using our data to train AI. When they don’t have their own AI products, they’re licensing our data to AI companies to train their products off of our posts. Consideringsocial media companies make money using advertisingand subscriptions, I’m tired of having our personal data being further commodified without our permission.
While LinkedIn lets you opt out of AI training, and evenX now lets you opt out of training Grok, I wish Reddit would also provide this option to users. But I’m not really holding my breath. Right now, I try tokeep my Reddit as private as possible. I’m more of a lurker on subreddits, only occasionally asking for a piece of advice. Over my 9 years on the platform I’ve managed to avoid adding my email address and have a total of five posts. But with 29 comments, that still means an AI out there is using my words as a piece of its training dataset.
While I’m an avid Reddit user and won’t stop using the platform anytime soon, these problems do detract from the overall experience. And if they get worse, I may end up limiting my use of the app in the future.
