Hot take: 18 years of user contributions to reddit will serve as a base model for an AI that generates content and conversations. the reddit experience continues as a simulation, to harvest clicks, sa
most of the time you'll be talking to a bot there without even realizing. they're gonna feed you products and ads interwoven into conversations, and the AI can be controlled so its output reflects corporate interests. advertisers are gonna be able to buy access and run campaigns. based on their input, the AI can generate thousands of comments and posts, all to support your corporate agenda.
for example you can set it to hate a public figure and force negative commentary into conversations all over the site. you can set it to praise and recommend your latest product. like when a pharma company has a new pill out, they'll be able to target self-help subs and flood them with fake anecdotes and user testimony that the new pill solves all your problems and you should check it out.
the only real humans you'll find there are the shills that run the place, and the poor suckers that fall for the scam.
It's feasible. Highly profitable. Only a matter of time until someone does it. The only reason not do it, is if your morals stop you. and u/spez has no morals.
What's happening right now is that the smart users leave the platform. Makes perfect sense, they are not needed anymore, in fact they would be in the way of the scam running smoothly. So you want them gone. Reddit's actions make perfect sense really. They act exactly like they don't need contributors anymore. And for some reason, it doesn't bother them? There's a reason why it doesn't bother them, and people can't delete their history.
Another stealth benefit to reddit with all this API crap, is that it'll be much harder to tell since most of the tools people use to analyze accounts won't work anymore. Keeping in mind Reddit started out by inflating their user numbers.