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/
@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.
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.
Reddit is deploying millions of bots across the site, most of people on that shit site are interacting with bots.
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.
It shows how bots were there all the time posting adverts and paid posts anyway. One of the reasons to limit API is other companies were using them to advertise (hidden as a comment or post) without paying the piper.
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.”Jeez man … +1 to this person! https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/pics/comments/14puynz/chatgpt_bots_are_spamming_proadmin_astroturf/jql4cka/#c
(After r/programming went private, they sent the u/ModCodeOfConduct modmail to the mods of r/programming - which is modded by reddit admins.)
I guess that message worked as the sub reopened. /s
Ad-free no-money-to-reddit teddit link, https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14q12g7/subreddits_are_starting_to_see_spam_from/
This is hilarious. Reddit resorting to bots…like a new twitch streamer trying to con their way to partner. What a sad, sad outcome for what was once a great website.
Between Reddit and Twitter I hope big tech begins to take notice and realize they don’t control as much as they think they do. They’re much easier to replace than they think, and ultimately they’re just ad companies.
Spez jelly of that Musk burn your company speed run and wants to catch up
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
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.
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.
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.
This article felt a little more relevant, recommended by wiki on the one you linked: Punctuated equilibrium in social theory
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.
It’s like Rome 😭
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.
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.
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.
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…
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?
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.
[Serious] I am sorry, but can someone explain like I’m five what this is about?
Thanks in advance. I pay onise you, I am NOT a Bot. :-)
Someone (presumably at Reddit, but there’s no hard proof of that), has recently begun using a large number of dummy accounts and what appears to be ChatGPT to post pro-admin, anti-protest comments across the site, and give them a lot of upvotes. Someone figured this out and posed evidence of it to /r/programming. Shortly after that thread reached the top of /r/programming, the subreddit was abruptly closed by the site admins, which is extremely suspect to say the least.
Hourly reminder that Spez sucks
What’s astroturfing?
It’s a play on the term “grass root movement”. A grass root movement is one that starts with the people at the bottom, not at the top. So if a bunch of people got together (mostly independent of each other) to promote or protest something, that is a “grass roots” action.
Astroturf is basically fake grass, so “astroturfing” is something that is made to look like a “grass roots” movement but it isn’t.
