Did Reddit get massive because of Digg users making a beeline towards them or were they already big before that?

  • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Reddit has 450 million active users.

    Yes, but how many are bots? Trolls? Bigots? Spammers? Antivaxxers? There is some content that lemmy is better without.

    I’m wondering if it’s possible to get the same level of broad esoteric discussion without also welcoming the same toxicity that made reddit the superfund site it is today. Is toxicity a function of size, or is it a function of an environment in which toxicity is encouraged?

    • Hubi@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      I used to moderate a fairly large subreddit and I think I can answer the bots question. There are millions. We’d get hit with multiple spam campaigns with thousands of bot accounts that were seemingly prepared for months in advance to get around our account age restrictions. Most users would never see any of it because we managed to catch most of them. It also happened under almost every post that hit /r/all.

      • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I wish more subs were run like how you described yours. In my experience, too many mods were willing to overlook obvious bot accounts (new to the sub, just older than the account age cutoff, no history, all showing up to the sub for the first time on a given thread and saying the same thing) as long as the bots were sayin’ stuff they liked.

        It’s why I was so happy when lemmy became popular enough to sustain conversation. I hope the mods here and on other instances don’t engage in the behavior I described, as I consider it principally responsible for the toxicity that ate reddit.

        • Hubi@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          The bots we had were mostly karma-farming to appear legitimate in other subs or were spamming links to phishing sites and such. Lately we’ve had some that were trying to write actual comments but due to our subreddit language being German, it just came out as garbled english-german nonsense. It was a humor/meme-based sub, so we were an easy community to target.

    • Dark_Blade@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Is toxicity a function of size, or is it a function of an environment in which toxicity is encouraged?

      Both.