• fivezero@lemmy.worldOP
    4·
    1 year ago

    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

      • Hypx@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        It’s truly amazing. Even people who knew that Reddit was destined to fail someday, wouldn’t have predict it happening so fast.

            • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
              1·
              1 year ago

              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.

              • Neato@kbin.social
                1·
                1 year ago

                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.

      • fivezero@lemmy.worldOP
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • theangryseal@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • Razputinsgirth@kbin.social
          1·
          1 year ago

          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

    • BarbecueCowboy@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • RiikkaTheIcePrincess@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      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?

  • May@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    Hello i hope you dont mind if i post that post, in case someone does not want to go onto reddit:

    r/Save3rdPartyApps
    u/attackofmilk

    Subreddits are starting to see spam from anti-protest, pro-admin ChatGPT bots
    Thread on /r/Pics discussing bot spam. (Pics is now NSFW, but this thread is only profanity / vulgarity.)
    /r/pics/comments/14puynz/chatgpt_bots_are_spamming_proadmin_astroturf/

    ​

    /r/Programming closed (by admins?) after community recognition of bot spam:

    Ycombinator thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36361247

    Top-voted post from /r/Programming before it closed: https://web.archive.org/web/20230611210834/https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/146wn9s/meta_who_is_astroturfing_rprogramming_and_why/

    ​

    (I would have just crossposted the top thread directly, but this sub forbids crossposting NSFW posts (which is now everything on /r/Pics )

  • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    The perfect site for reddit admins would be endless bots posting, commenting and viewing adds while said advertisers are oblivious to the con.

    The first two have been going on at some level for years. The last? Well, it will be interesting to see the official reddit app’s adoption numbers in the coming months.

    • fivezero@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      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

  • imaqtpie@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Echo71Niner@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    Reddit is deploying millions of bots across the site, most of people on that shit site are interacting with bots.

  • bioemerl@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • HeinousTugboat@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • Paesan@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • OpenStars@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    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)

    • brianshatchet@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      I already knew they didn’t want moderators to have better anti-spam tools since it would decrease the apparent activity to attract advertisers.

      • OpenStars@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        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

  • chairman@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    [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. :-)

    • AtomicPurple@kbin.social
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.