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:
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Reddit…it was once my respite, and now it is a desert of empty words. The admins betrayed their creed: “Remember the human”. They sold it for the Dollar Almighty. Their humanity is lost…let them succumb to that which they so infinitely prize—the towers they built out of their money.
That won't go well either, in the long run. Advertisers will catch on to how many "people" are viewing their ads without ever clicking on anything and put their funds elsewhere.
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.
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.
A campaign by a marketing team to give the false impression of something.
In this case it’s a campaign by reddit to make it look like there are lots of users who are in agreement with reddit instead of the truth where it’s universally hated.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
@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.
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