Apparently engagement on that other site’s r/conservative dropped by 2/3 when Russian data centers went down due to drone strikes.

  • saarth@lemmy.world
    8·
    1 day ago

    There could be multiple reasons for this.

    1. The bots are used only for generating engagement and not posting. So engagements went down, posts didn’t.
    2. The bots are used on Twitter and not on Reddit so twitter was impacted but reddit wasn’t. Kinda likely considering twitter loves bots and reddit has been cracking down on them.
    3. Engagement is not a very transparent metric, and depends on a lot of factors like when content is posted, the quality of the content, seasknality, etc. There can be multiple things affecting engagement.
    • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      I also heard that on Threads there is now a strange silence around anything “culture wars”-related btw, while Facebook doesn’t seem to be fazed at all. So the Yandex infrastructure seems to have been the staging area for specific platforms, while others are being manipulated from other sites.

      • saarth@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 day ago

        I have yet to see credible evidence that any kind of social media activity went down in the last 2-3 days. To me this seems like journalists and politicians capitalising on what people want to hear.

        • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          The Twitter numbers seem pretty solid for me - most engagement numbers are achieved in the first 24 hours of posting content on twitter (there are outliers, but it’s a valid assumption). The next weeks will tell how much this perceived drop is really from Yandex going down.