u/sega31098

Has anyone else noticed Reddit's sudden pivot towards marketing itself on authenticity and human connection? I've suddenly been seeing a lot of borderline fluff pieces from both Reddit and others about how supposedly authentic and human Reddit and its userbase is. For example, when signed out you're greeted with a sign-in message calling Reddit "the most real place on the internet". Spez has even appeared on Amanpour to promote Reddit as being the "most human place on the internet", with the title of the video claiming he believes it can "heal America's divides" despite being infamous for being the polar opposite even among other social media userbases (though to be fair the latter quote was by Amanpour's staff rather than Spez). Google - which also has a deal with Reddit - also frequently uses the words "authentic" and "human" to describe Reddit in its AI summaries and cites it as a reason why it ranks extremely high on Google search. A lot of this marketing also seems to have paid off in the media, given even outlets like the BBC and the Motley Fool have published stories about Reddit's sudden reputation for "authentic" content.

I'm not in any way claiming that Reddit doesn't have a lot of authentic and human (i.e. not AI) content - for all the problems it has faced over the years it has also hosted a trove of subreddits full of helpful users and thoughtful posts from experts. But I find it rather ironic that Reddit is suddenly and aggressively promoting itself on that image now, just as the site has been facing a huge influx of AI bots and covert marketers and the admins have actively made changes that have made it much harder for both mods and ordinary users to sus out bad faith actors (ex. changes to the API, adding the ability to hide post history), not to mention pivoting away from its former model based around relatively self-contained subreddits towards a more algorithm-curated experience. To me, the whole thing feels kind of two-faced given it feels like they're promoting themselves on an image that has not only been dubious at times but has also been heavily eroded in recent years by the things I just described.

Thoughts?

I've been trying to make Jamaican ginger beer using this recipe on YouTube. Boiled with sugar, cinnamon, cloves and a lot of ginger and then left it to cool before adding my ginger bug. However, the ginger beer solution absolutely refuses to carbonate even after leaving it for ~2 weeks and it remains sweet. I've tried adding more ginger bug and sugar from time to time but even then it stays flat. The ginger bug I'm using seems to work perfectly fine (I've used it to carbonate juice and make kvass), so I doubt that's the problem.

Has anyone run into this problem before? If so, has anyone found out what seems to cause it? It kind of feels like there's something in the ginger juice itself that's killing the yeast and stopping it from fermenting.