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 gonna be a shithole.
There was also some very good and valid reasons why real people wound up with those usernames - mainly, that the signup process (from the App I think? maybe also in New Reddit?) both downplayed, and obstructed changing, the default username during the process - and instead led the user to believe that only the “display name” selected later would appear to other users on the site.
Completely omitting the fact that anyone on old reddit or accessing through an app would only see the username, as “display names” don’t seem to have ever been served via the API.
To many of those users, they had no clue that what people were seeing attached to their comments or submissions was “extravagant_mustard_924” and not “Cool Dude Brian” or whatever they’d put in as their display name. They were led to believe that the latter was all that would display, and that signing up with a default account name would only determine what they entered in the top box while logging in.
This is me learning display names were even a thing. I didn’t stray much from the Apollo app.
It’s amazing how half-assed everything about Reddit is.
TIL Reddit has display names. Why on earth would I know them is beyond me, but thanks for restricting your API ig ¯\(ツ)/¯
I’m finding out only just now that reddit even has display names.