I decided to take a peek at Reddit to see what kind of activity is happening, a good handful of the subreddits I am subscribed to are still super active with posts and commenters.
There’s quite a few news articles on the front page regarding Spez and the blackouts, I am surprised those articles are even still up for people to see.
The comment section is filled with people saying how they should just kick the mods out of the dark Reddit’s and take over, ofcourse these posts are heavily upvoted…
Perhaps there is some AI activity going on, I mean it’s kind of easy to do in this day and age. You just prompt an army of AI bots to defend Reddit, and try to keep users engaged.
I am so happy I found Lemmy, and I am so happy that there is a comfortable level of activity. Sure it’s only a small fraction of what Reddit is activity wise, but it’s so much more hearty and welcoming.
Reddit has just turned into one big toxic mess. Lemmy reminds me of what Reddit used to be 10 years ago.
Reddit app is fine for me. Y’all some cry babies.
Reddit app lacks efficient Mod tools and accessibility settings.
That’s not my problem.
This is the attitude of Reddit rn. Shit’s disgusting in all honesty. It’s genuinely depressing how people try their hardest not to push the world to be better.
This is just how people act in general. It doesn’t affect them so it isn’t their problem.
We’re paying for the lack of meaningful human interaction in our own lives. We’re slowly realizing it was there along with no need for pretext. Lemmy has been super thought provoking for me tbh. I’ve always been a thinker, but I numbed myself to get by. The whole idea of paying for hapiness doesnt sit right with me at all. I’m here now. We need to keep pushing to get better as people. 💪
I think we are all really smart, here. And look ma! No hands! I’m gonna be a real boy!
Yes. The only thing we can do is strive to be better ourselves.
It’s pretty simple. Most people won’t do anything unless it directly impacts them.
This has been true time and time again throughout history as well. People only revolt or start an uprising when things get so bad that it directly influences them. Even then most won’t do anything unless they aren’t able to ignore it anymore.
r/Technology have been the biggest bootlickers in the comments so it doesn’t surprise me. For a sub that has a hard on for hating Google they seem perfectly fine with carrying water for Reddit.
I noticed earlier today that all the top posts were reposts of previous top posts on each main sub.
Like they literally just reposted all the top posts of all time.
That’s the kind of thing that is possible when they own it all.
Lots and lots of gold too. Has anyone ever bought it? I have my doubts.
This happened long ago. Bots would repost frontpage content that’d past the year-long wait to avoid repost detection. Gif subs would be very quiet without that kind of content being recycled
As much as I feel that Reddit was pretty underhanded, I doubt that they’re using AI to fake content to keep people on the site 'cause (a) people would catch on pretty fast by looking at the history of the account and (b) running LLMs probably cost more than the earned advertising revenue.
What’s more likely is that people/bots have always been reposting for karma a while
I don’t think they’ve used AI to do anything or even create fake content. They just reposted things that are already known to be popular, so that new users will experience good content.
Or maybe if Reddit didn’t do it, then it’s just karmabots taking the front-page, because there is no good OC to beat them.
Don’t worry, it will become an even more toxic cesspool soon…
This is the truth, when I heard they were trying to kick out the mods who were pushing the blackout, I knew that whoever is left after all of this is not going to be worth reading. Reddit massively underestimates the value the power users and mods give to the site for everyone else to use. Without them, the site is just a bunch of software trying to push ads on whoever stumbles on it.
Even a few conversations I have on reddit in the last week (after many already migrated)-
Its obvious, lots more trolls. Lots more shittalk. Just- not pleasant.
I’m suspecting phantom upvotes. Neutral or pro-Reddit comments get highly upvoted suspiciously quickly after a sub comes back on line, drowning out anything else.
I would be highly unsurprised. Spez has shown in the past he isn’t above screwing with things in the background.
He’s said he plans to change things so subreddit users can vote mods out - specifically aimed at the mods who are keeping subreddits dark. Certainly there’s no room for anything to go wrong with the voting system that he has direct control over which also happens to have no external oversight or means of 3rd party verification.
what made the switch easier for me, was installing an RSS feed widget to my desktop and adding lemmy instances to it. gradually, i start to notice topics that interest me more and more which are viewable straight from the rss widget itself and i am able to comment on it, thus i have interacted more on here in the last few days than reddit. though it is still hard not to add :“reddit” to my searches online.
That is a great idea. Sorry friend, I’ll have to steal it!
The more on here the merrier! I don’t mind at all. :p
I caught my husband on reddit yesterday. Went into full attack mode, explained the blackout, and offered to help him switch to Lemmy. Showed him that some if his subs have lems and even tried to sway him with lemmy porn. He didn’t care…at all!!! Now, if i want to read anything on reddit i have to go outside or to the bathroom so he doesn’t see me.
Look people have different motivations for different things, like it or not, not everyone is going to take the API issue and greed of a for profit company as a deal breaker, and I personally dont think we should lash out at those people. At the end of the day essentially all they are doing is choseing a different social media service.
Also may I ask why you “went into attack mode” when you still go onto reddit?
Use of the word ‘attack’ was supposed to be humorous. I was just harassingg him for being on during the 'blackout ’ days and trying to get him to try lemmy. I’m shifting…still look to see if favorite subs have been active, share lemmy links if there is one, screenshot some old stuff, …
wait, where’s the Lemmy porn?
I don’t know what cp is, but whenever i set to ALL / NEW and scroll, every few posts theres a blurred out one.
I don’t know what cp is
cp = “child porn” but likely not in the way you’re imagining. A certain subset of people think that “child porn” is any drawing of a girl, or any photograph of a real woman under the age of 35.
Edit: Oh, look. Angry downvotes and not a single attempt to refute me. Guess I was right.
Looking up on that sub and all the current talk, sounds like there was some issue where pedos thought it was okay to post CP there, but it seems under control now.
Probably not them allowing CP in the first place, so much as them struggling to moderate fast enough at first. Make sense for communities exploding this rapidly, and nsfw communities have always and will continue to need to constantly be tightly moderating to get any illegal shit out of there ASAP.
It would appear it’s mostly bots, probably paid for by reddit (or interested groups) to muddle the waters.
I have seen countless posts trying to discredit the fediverse, how it won’t work because it isn’t financially backed (completely ignoring that email is still a thing), or how Mastodon apparently failed. On top of that, there are tons of comments in the threads for subs that went dark where the commenter argues “all this does is hurt the sub”. but when you look into the commenter, they have no previous history of being active in these subs at all.
But, i’ve seen this kind of activity all over reddit for the past 2 years. Especially when something unpopular is happening. There is a lot of the same type of crap you see during the presidential elections of the US. A lot of fake comments, posts, and statistics, and other things to try steer the public opinion in an engineered direction.
lmao the claim that telegram is failing, and i’ll admit right here that i don’t use it and am not interested in doing so, but it’s going stronger than ever now that the loudmouthed chuds that made it popular have gotten bored and the hardcore nerds are all who are left. telegram ain’t dying any time soon, i’ll say that much.
how Mastodon apparently failed
Saw this on my Mastodon home feed:
12,484,940 accounts
+2,493 in the last hour
+66,136 in the last day
+273,430 in the last weekFour time-based charts
Upper blue area: Number of Mastodon users
Upper cyan area: Hourly increases of number of users
Lower orange area: Number of active instances
Lower yellow area: Thousand toots per hourFor current figures please read the text of this post https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/110554252061792575
The idea that anything that doesn’t reach Twitter scale is a failure is annoying as hell
I think this is partially resulting from the bias of people here, who more than likely care about the community involvement aspect of online forums/platforms. If the forum I used to live on 15 years ago was still well trafficked, I likely wouldn’t be exploring these spaces the same way.
The reality is that reddit today ISN’T what it was 10 years ago when it killed a lot of forums. It is now a platform, like facebook, that has mass appeal and is going to therefore operate to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Maybe a lot of “redditors” support the strikes, but I’d believe that a majority of people who use reddit don’t.
People want their feeds. They want their dopamine. They want their predictable comments and hot gossip. That’s what people are in larger groups. That’s who reddit is now designed to appeal to.
I think about this kbin/fedithing as a chance to reboot online conversation in an environment that is different than what reddit has become, but I don’t expect reddit to change in any way other than to continue to become boring and ad-data driven.
Yeah I can see this happening, the one reddit sub I still check in on my local city sub.
Its such a weird complaint that these people are having right now. They’re demanding that unpaid people come back and labor for them for free and/or give away the tools they’ve created for free.
It’s like they have no idea how reddit works. People whining that the NFL sub is closed and demanding it to be reopened for instance. They can go make their own sub and moderate it themselves, but they dont. The entitlement to just demand that people do free labor for you is insane.
whats really funny/sad to me is how mods get no real respect right now or maybe ever
like are some mods lame, sure, but its a super thankless job that i dont think gets enough cred and thats the part that i think has disappointed me the most. mods are super needed online, and its a shame some people cannot see that
I’m not entirely convinced that it isn’t all mostly bot activity.
They don’t care. People are happy in their bubbles.
Occam’s razor tells me this ain’t no AI. Just people who DGAF and want their fun website back.
There are a lot of people who don’t hate the mobile app or only use the website and they probably see this blackout as a huge waste of time.
Personally I’ve moved on. It’s time for the Fediverse to take over social media and forums. It really is the future and I’m here for it.
Occam’s razor tells me this ain’t no AI. Just people who DGAF and want their fun website back.
I would believe that too but at the risk of sounding paranoid, I’ve seen some of these subs open up in real time and it’s always accompanied by some really weird posting/voting patterns. I’ve also seen negative or questioning comments deleted in seconds.
I’ve spent enough time dabbling with AI to conclude that anyone with enough money, can generate enough AI content to drive product forward.
Reddit is now a product, if people are leaving Reddit in droves through the standpoint of a CEO I would think of all kinds of ways to keep the product interesting which means putting on an AI puppet show.
If you go shopping on amazon, often shitty products are reviewed positively by bots to try and drive sales.
Reddit is no different. The money is there, the technology is there, and above it all the greed is there.
It’s no longer paranoia, its more than plausible.
