That's assuming you can get your ad seen, plenty of times I've seen Reddit's own ads for advertising on Reddit and I'll never see my ads. So I'm bidding against Reddit on Reddit's own platform.
The incentives to create fake engagement to satisfy their actual users who want discussion are quite clear. Doing this also gives reddit an advantage when monetizing their data. Scrape posts & comments for free, and you won't know which are LLM-generated and which at least have a human in the loop (but the human still may use an LLM, so this is where fingerprinting comes in). Perfect for incentivising the ai labs / other consumers of reddit data to pay up for an official feed.
Here on YC News, even a minor comment a few lines long might get at least one or two upvotes (or downvotes). I'll get a reply about 50% of the time.
On Reddit there are posts with apparent huge volumes of "user interaction": thousands of comments, thousands of upvotes per top comment, etc... but if I comment on one of those posts... nothing. Zero up or down votes, zero replies, just... silence.
I'm learning to recognise these posts now, and they're the majority of the "front page" volume. The only posts where I'll get any interaction now is the really niche ones like the hobbyist ones or "owners of specific gadgets" and the like.
Even with certified real humans who actively clicked rather than being counted one if the many ways these counts are padded accidentally (or not so accidentally), you might be expecting far too much of their attention span when expecting a full 1% to care enough to think long enough to respond before scrolling on. It is worse these days than it used to be, because many who might previously have bothered may instead assume they'd probably be taking to a bot.
Unless you somehow insult their favourite entertainment franchise / political party / deity / etc., or praise one of the same that they don't like. That will get you piles of responses, though not in a way useful to your app!
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