silicon_reverie

To be fair, much of the modern news cycle comes from Reddit. When I worked as a tech journalist years ago, we had half a dozen bots watching relevant subs and alerting us to breaking news. We’d clean it up, fact-check, call sources for comment, and do all the “journalistic” stuff you’d expect, just like with any other story, but Reddit was absolutely part of our workflow. You’ve got to look for news wherever the news is happening, be that a press release, a leak on twitter, or a convo on Reddit, and frequently it happened to be Reddit.

These days you even have tictokers cutting out the middleman and straight-up reading r/AmITheAsshole posts over Minecraft footage for views. Is it any surprise that news sites are commenting on their content firehose being turned off?

Great news! But how do lemmy.fediverse.observer and fedidb.org separate “bots” from “non-bots”? It feels like “we don’t have any bots” is a pretty laughable thing to say.