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.
The lack of societal solidarity for the betterment of everyone is sad.
But that’s ok, reddit was never going to die after this protest.
I think what took place was a successful test of what alternatives exist out in the wild.
Now it’s up to those of us who migrated to post through the highs and lows of early adoption in order to encourage others to come and stick around when the next shitty move by Spez takes place.
For example, I migrated to Mastodon in late 2018 during an initial surge. And over the years tried to keep posting content so that when the next migration took place when Elon took the reigns, people were able to possibly feel more at home.
This shit takes time. A lot of time. But the internet is a big place and there’s plenty of opportunity for things to be better. We just can expect things to rush themselves
It’s funny reading posts that say something along the lines of “I’ve always used the reddit app and it’s fine, I didn’t even know there were third-party apps”. I get this might be astroturfing or bots but if not, congrats on not having a clue, I guess.
It’s probably not purely bots. My girlfriend is one of those people lol
She isn’t tech literate and doesn’t get things like FOSS or 3rd party. To her, the Official Reddit™ App is a mark of trust and safety. She doesn’t use an adblocker (despite my protests) and just avoids services like Youtube where ads are unavoidable.
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.
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 Hail Corporate crowd will stay.
People have been saying it but were being ignored for weeks: this blackout thing will not work. And we were correct. It was a useless attempt to try and win over the majority.
Plenty of people use the main app and are the majority of users, and it is what it is. The ones who care about the Reddit API fiasco should move away. That’s the only valid move.
I’ve done it, and everyone else who care should. Leave the ones who are fine with Reddit on Reddit.
I see the blackout as a nudge to overcome addiction. A few days or weeks without content, and people start looking around. The the network effect (downward) will make the rest.
I want to specify that I have no interest in all the userbase of reddit moving to Lemmy, but just an initial influx of people who care will help making it reach a critical mass. After that, reddit can even reopen fully, at that point it won’t matter.
Except those people went to twitter, Instagram, and tiktok for their memes, news, and funny moments. All the major subs that I subscribed to are back on and people are back as usual there. The blackout was useless and another lazy version of internet activism, and it made people hate the mods instead of Reddit for “power tripping.” Literally made people side with Reddit because of that lol.
I had a different experience, to be honest. The sub I am more active in, /r/Italy is open, but it has still a ridiculous activity, and most of the active users wanted an indefinite blackout. A sibling sub, italyinformatica is even more desert (yesterday last post was 4 days ago). I think that in principle the blackout is a very effective way to protest, it worked like a charm to keep me off the site, at least, but I agree that saying “we do it for 2 days” undermines the whole thing.
a lot of them are chatgpt accounts approved by Reddit. Same Reason r/programming went down since many people took notice of it
Funny yet sad that it’s come to reddit botting their own platform to try and shore up support for themselves.
I’m sure advertisers are lining up to market to entirely scripted customers!
Actually now that you’ve brought up the idea, how would advertiser’s even know that they’re hitting real people when they’re looking to pay money for exposure?
I don’t think they can really know. Even if reddit provides proof that they are not doing stuff server-side they could still use regular bots with accounts. Also they need a good moderation quality to minimize third party bots.
This can harm their reputation heavily and it is almost impossible to rebuild that.
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!
This may just an old interwebz man talking, but I’d say “Don’t worry.”
It’s not a 1:1, but this is similar to what happened with Digg in the mid 2000s. I was there. I migrated from there to Reddit - specifically because Digg had decided to ignore its vocal user base and fundamentally change what the site was.
It ultimately resulted in this :
The scale is so much larger now. Reddit could lose 1m users and its a blip.
Not if the redditors that leave are the ones that do the majority of the moderating and quality posting. If the quality goes way down, people will look elsewhere. Also, I have a feeling we’ll see a much bigger migration once the third party apps all die on the 30th.
Well, “unfortunately” some of them will stay up since they are classified as open-source and non-profit by reddit. So, while I’m glad that these projects live on, it will certainly soften the blow for Reddit on 30th.
I mean, is it out of the realm of possibility that bootlicking comments are those made by Reddit themselves? Comment sections can quickly become echo chambers, I’m sure reddit knows this and uses that to their advantage.
Not to say that there aren’t plenty of addicts and general idiots all over reddit.
They can’t admit they’re addicted. I was a daily Reddit user. Stopped going there once the blackout hits. And now, the subs I care about are still private. Good.
And somehow, I turned out fine.
Addicted to reading comments, I can’t say I’m any better lol
But I do my best to contribute in a positive manner, share bits and pieces of my journey or what I observe in others that I find funny or imagine would inspire good 👍
Same. It’s like a moment of clarity from detoxification. I don’t miss Reddit as much as I thought I would. I just read subs like news and worldnews through an RSS app now.
I actually comment a lot, at least one a day. Presumably these are lurkers who think they are owed content.
Surprisingly I don’t miss it. I have Discord and Kbin. I’ll probably cease browsing Reddit on mobile once RiF dies.
I’ve been on reddit for almost a decade and a half. Never have I seen so many users gilding pro corporate reddit/pro spez comments. It is almost always the former. It’s very unusual and makes me a tad suspicious. I’m not sure if reddit has evolved into a platform overflowing with users that I truly don’t synchronize with, or perhaps reddit is virtually augmenting these posts/comments, increasing bot posts to augment activity, etc. I accept either or and for that and many other reasons I have contently moved on from the platform. It’s just not for me anymore and has been fracturing into an environment that lost its luster. Too many common folk have saturated the platform, too many bots, too much corporate shenanigans, too many miserable users, too little civility, too much ignorance and a lack of analytical literacy. The fediverse has given a breath of fresh air and something of nostalgia from the early days of reddit. I do think this is the way forward with time and I’m here for it.
Scary thing is, if AI can take over Reddit, AI can also take over Lemmy.
I can litterally copy and paste this post, and then you comment, as well as other people’s comments and instruct ChatGPT to reply in accordance. Then, if I feel like the comment seems obviously AI written, I can tell it to write it in the style of a redditor with a few spelling mistakes and it I’ll do just that.
Now uses some script, and the prompt, and let the algorithm do all the work for you.
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.
Don’t worry too much about it. There’s still going to be people using Reddit. You’re never going to convince everybody about everything. My parents still use Facebook.
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.
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.
Personally I think Spez and his staff are currently glued to the screen and handing out votes and gold for whatever isn’t about the protest.
It’s peek, not peak.
This is not reddit… Lol
I realized that after I posted it. I was able to fix it in the title even! This is so much better than Reddit.
It’s great that you can edit titles here.
This is not reddit… Lol
You know what, reddit was filled with people who got upset when others tried to help them improve. Let’s not take that with us here.
I, for one, am grateful when others point out a mistake because it helps me to become better. That’s the mentality we should encourage here.
I agree with you, I was mainly just making a joke. It’s when people point out a spelling mistake, without actually commenting on what’s being said as well. But at the same time feedback is feedback, it’s great building material.
