Apologies if this is a repost. They’re scared lol.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14q12g7/subreddits_are_starting_to_see_spam_from/
At least ChatGPT is a more polite than the toxic, racist & sexist shit that remains on Reddit. Scrolled through /r/all this morning and was appalled by some of the toxic comments in the various submissions. I also noticed some sockpuppets somehow spewing the same bullshit opinion about certain topics, using the literal same type of phrasing too, just in different comment chains and with different accounts.
Honestly, probably better for my blood pressure to stay away from most of it.
@fivezero Holy shit that is one top heavy company. No wonder they haven’t made a profit. I’m done with f u/spez but it will be entertaining to watch him continue to devalue the company. Fidelity downgraded the value and who knows what the Chinese investor Tencen thinks. It will be delicious to watch spez screw up his IPO. Desperation has gripped spez and its getting worse.
The downgrade isn’t due to protests, it’s been happening for some time.
@BraBraBra I’ve heard people say that. I’m aware that there have been previous reductions in value. My experience is that investors have the best access to a company’s information, often in real time in a situation like this, so I think the investors are baking in any user loss and loss of revenue even if they are not publicly admitting it.
Spez jelly of that Musk burn your company speed run and wants to catch up
Ozymandias
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEYI met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”deleted by creator
And the beautiful irony is that in their mission to secure an increased IPO valuation they merely reduced it substantially. Gonna need some more popcorn as we watch them burn it to the ground
deleted by creator
Weekend at Spez’s
I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to comment on this.
/joke
Looks like r/programming discovered the astroturfing, so in true Reddit fashion they simply shut down the subreddit entirely to avoid the spread of negative public sentiment. Thanks for galvanizing my resolve to migrate to the fediverse, Spez
Yeah, after reading this I feel like I made the right choice. I can’t believe how quickly Reddit has devolved.
It’s truly amazing. Even people who knew that Reddit was destined to fail someday, wouldn’t have predict it happening so fast.
Like with Twitter, it’s a rapid-fire series of knee-jerk reactions, like a hammer, as in - “When you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”, destined to get caught, to not fix what you were supposedly trying to fix, to generate deeper and more baffling situations in the process, to fail.
It’s like Rome 😭
Most people expect gradual change when many things in life are more like punctuated equilibrium.
Stable state despite gradual change in underlying conditions.
Then rapid change to new stable state.
There’s also the Ernest Hemmingway quote from The Sun Also Rises:
“How did you go bankrupt?"
“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
You’ve now put a fear in me about my life that I wasn’t ready for…
Sorry to do that, but I believe the world makes a lot more sense when viewed through the lens of punctuated equilibrium. It does not make things better, just makes the chaos more understandable.
The dot com bubble.
The housing bubble.
Basically every economic bubble all the way back to tulip mania.
The Arab Spring.
The changes in the USA post 9/11.
And most disturbing of all, the recent rapid swing of pretty much all environmental indicators into uncharted territory. Our biosphere may be heading into a phase of rapid change.
Nobody wants to change. It’s hard and expensive. Until they have to because conditions have required it. Then they change as fast as possible to a new state that works in the new conditions so they can survive.
This article felt a little more relevant, recommended by wiki on the one you linked: Punctuated equilibrium in social theory
Agreed. For years I had truly (and naively) believed that Reddit, despite their prior blunders with which we are now all mostly familiar, would maintain an acceptable level of decency and never push things so far as alienate their core userbase. Shot themselves squarely in the foot on this one I think, as their recent changes affect so many.
It feels more like grabbing 2 shotguns and blasting both feet off at the same time. Unless their goal was to sink Reddit at record speed I have no idea what they’re doing…
What a bummer.
I’m doing ok without it though. I didn’t load old.reddit once today.
I probably won’t tomorrow.
I used to look at Reddit in almost all of my downtime at work. Now I’m trying to write when I see nothing new is coming up on Lemmy.
Still though. 15 years on Reddit. Goddamn. It definitely bums me out. I mean, it’s just a website, but it has helped shape so much of who I am.
I’m an atheist in the Bible Belt for example, and atheism being a default sub back in the day really helped me out a lot.
All things must pass.
I’m waiting for my data takeout, so checking old.reddit.com messages once a day. No other engagement beyond that. Lemmy communities are getting really good now.
I spend my work downtime the 1 day I have to be in office writing dnd campaign material to save my prep time at home.
I understand your pain with that last point. Being an atheist teen in a family that highly values religious holidays (and more) is a life experience I hope people don’t have to go through.
Things got better, as I hope things are well for you.
But that’s just the dig they did make horrible decisions that fucked Reddit up. But the 3rd party apps fixed most of those problems. Whenever I look at new Reddit it’s literally so much harder and spammy to use. For year’s now
Wow. Just checked. The newest post in that sub is 3 weeks old.
I noticed this happened before the reddit blackouts. I haven’t been to reddit since. Is this a new occurrence of the same ChatGPT astroturfing or is this that same news?
Shut down, you say? Every subreddit should post such truths, you say? Reddit will atomize itself instantly, you say?
Okay, maybe not but it’s a fun thought, no?
r/programming was one of the earliest subreddits, I think it was actually #2. Can’t view it anymore, but the moderation team of r/programming would have been pretty reddit admin/staff heavy. Pretty sure spez was listed on the moderation team at one point.
Jesus Christ, do we have a good reason to believe that this was the admins and not some other random third-party group just deciding to do this for shits and giggles?
Because on one hand yeah I could totally see red it doing this after all of their other stupid mistakes so far.
On the other hand this seems really strange to me and it just seems so insane to think that Reddit would even think of doing this.
This is the main issue here. This whole narrative sprung from one comment in one thread that was made without any real evidence other than ‘this account is obviously a bot’. Did the admin do it? Maybe. Did someone else do it? Maybe. On one hand, we know that everyone on the internet is a good honest person and if anyone is trolling it could only be the self-serving admin and absolutely no one else would ever try to troll people on reddit, on the other hand the site is run by and full of a bunch of absolutely assholes. So really it could go either way.
I’ve always had problems with mob justice, bandwagons, etc. though, and don’t go in for witchhunts and claims made without any real evidence to back them up.
On the other hand this seems really strange to me and it just seems so insane to think that Reddit would even think of doing this.
Have you read about any of Spez’s interviews? This feels entirely like something they would do. Don’t forget, reddit was originally populated with bots.
I haven’t heard about that (being originally populated by bots) but I would love to read something about it if you know of anything.
“Huffman […] together with Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005. Embarrassed by an empty-looking site, the founders created hundreds of fake users for their posts to make it look more populated” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#History
It’s also insane to stealthy edit user comments but he did and “apologized” for it
Reddit is deploying millions of bots across the site, most of people on that shit site are interacting with bots.
Hourly reminder that Spez sucks
Reddit admins have apparently used bots to populate content the way they want before as well: https://reddit.moe.ngo/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/reddit_admins_were_just_caught_using_bots_or_fake/
Gees, the Admins aren’t very smart. Least they could have done is go buy some karma farmed accounts and use those self-respecting bot spammers do.
They found a bot on Reddit!? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you… well okay, not that shocked :-). \s
(yes I know, there’s more to it than that, I just wanted to say the meme text, and also take this opportunity to BOW DOWN BEFORE OUR NEW OVERLORDS)
I already knew they didn’t want moderators to have better anti-spam tools since it would decrease the apparent activity to attract advertisers.
When people tell you who they are, better to believe them the first time.
Huffman said he didn’t need no stinking meatsacks… so now he must be happy with the way the site is working now… right!? :-P
PSA regarding federation (copied from previous comment)
I also want to continue spreading the word about federation issues. I’ve been on Lemmy for a month now and it’s going great. But that whole time, it’s essentially been impossible to comment on kbin magazines. The comments simply don’t show up. I’m not seeing most of your comments when browsing here from Lemmy, but I am seeing Lemmy comments.
I obviously have this account, but its annoying to keep switching between accounts, plus I haven’t really gotten the hang of the kbin interface yet.
Point being, I suspect much of the sluggishness of organic growth is not due to a small userbase, but rather due to the fact nobody can actually find the threads and comment on them efficiently. We need to remain steadfast and trust that the developers will fix this stuff up soon. I really feel that simply making Lemmy and kbin federate perfectly would immediately make this platform 10 times more active. We have plenty of people but right now we are fragmented into parallel communities. This isn’t even getting into the server overload at a number of Lemmy instances.
I just don’t want people to write off the platform before we can see how it’s actually meant to work. I’ve seen a ton of brilliant comments on kbin and I haven’t even had the chance to really mix it up with you guys yet.
Here was the Lemmy post about this story that somebody actually posted here a couple days before this thread. But it doesn’t show up here and none of you can see it.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/706681
I really don’t want people to get discouraged by this bug because it’s very disconcerting when you make a high value comment or post and the response is crickets. Its not because the platform is empty, it’s because federation is fucked and your post is invisible to everyone not on your local server.
Ad-free no-money-to-reddit teddit link, https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14q12g7/subreddits_are_starting_to_see_spam_from/
They really are just bungling this completely.
If they were competent, we’d all still be on Reddit.
You make a very good point.
That’s really all on Steve Huffman. He had years to prepare Reddit for profitability and an IPO. He was caught swimming naked when the proverbial music stopped, and he went for the low-hanging fruit (killing the costly API) with nothing but scorn for the dissenting voices.
The board should have fired him after the stealth edits debacle. This guy has no business being a CEO.
I really just do not get why he thinks Elon Musk has it right idea, only isn’t going far enough. And it’s the board has just decided in for a penny, in for a pound and are determined to stick with him even if Reddit burns to the ground. I wonder what metrics they’re seeing that we aren’t, besides dollar signs.
