• @[email protected]
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    62011 months ago

    I’m glad to be totally off of Reddit now but I have to say, props to the mods doing this kind of stuff. It’s pretty hilarious

    • db2
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      21111 months ago

      They’re getting no end of grief from bad/paid actors though.

      • @[email protected]
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        19611 months ago

        The amount of whinging and bootlicking from people taking Spez’s side was insane before I left for good.

        • claymedia
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          16111 months ago

          It doesn’t seem organic. Protest posts would get 95% upvotes, then suddenly 12 hours later get slammed with bootlickers and downvotes.

          • @[email protected]
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            8311 months ago

            Reddit felt really astroturfed for years now. Start mentioning Neill Druckman in any capacity and your post immediately got flooded with copy paste hate centered on TLoU2. It seemed organic at the time, but when the TV series came out it was very sus, as if somebody had forgotten to turn off their bot army.

            • prole
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              311 months ago

              What a weird thing to target with bots.

              • @assassin_aragorn
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                611 months ago

                Transphobes came out of the woodwork for it. And not only were they annoying for the obvious reasons, but they’ve also poisoned the well for criticism. I loathed the plot, but I have to be careful with my criticism so I don’t get lumped in with them.

                • @[email protected]
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                  511 months ago

                  So much this! TLoU2 was a major setback for me in many ways, but a normal discussion was impossible.

          • HobbitFoot
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            4711 months ago

            I’ve talked to a few that seemed organic, but those were basically people who wanted Reddit to get back to normal and not waste time on bullshit that didn’t affect them personally.

          • b3nsn0w
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            2611 months ago

            i did check in a few communities that i was engaging with before, and honestly, it seemed organic, but it was always lurkers/semi-lurkers who don’t post and only comment like once every two months. accounts for the delay as well, because they don’t check reddit that often (before everything went to shit posts would usually be gathering views for a good 24 hours)

            but reddit also started using chatgpt to prop itself up lately (which afaik is against chatgpt’s tos, so that’s nice for the future lawsuit if they wanna cash in), so idk. that does put a damper on their legitimacy.

        • @ThatGirlKylie
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          4511 months ago

          Wasn’t it proven that majority of the positive spez posts are from bots or chatgpt or something?

          • @[email protected]
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            11 months ago

            At least one post was defending reddit in r/programming has been shown to be chatGPT, that’s for sure. If they have one bot, who’s to say they don’t have thousands?

            • @[email protected]
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              3211 months ago

              I can’t tell you how many 1-2 year old accounts I saw with little to no post history that popped out of the woodwork to defend reddit/spez. It was crazy.

              Same for spam/ shill accounts on iPhone/ Google play reviews.

              They’re definitely trying to plug the holes with bubble gum instead of fixing/ addressing the problem which is spez and the 3rd party app/api ban.

              • @[email protected]
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                111 months ago

                Only if you don’t consider the core tenants of capitalism. Clear cut it all burn the rest to the ground. What you missed, steal from its owner to sell it back to them at the highest possible markup. Move on rinse repeat. Fuck sustainability. Most of the LLMs have what they want. Reddit could burn tomorrow for all they care. It being around for others to use and train on only makes competitors to them which they absolutely do not want. Destroying Reddit is a win-win-win for them.

            • @[email protected]
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              211 months ago

              Genuinely curious: how was that shown? How do you know for sure a post is generated by ChatGPT?

              • @[email protected]
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                711 months ago

                One of its answers in a thread was the classic “as a language model, I am not able to (…)”

              • @[email protected]
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                211 months ago

                I’m curious about this as well, because the lurkers in the montreal sub sure are quick to come out of the woodwork whenever the protest is mentioned. I can’t see how it’s not bots, but I’m curious about how that would work exactly and how you determine that

        • @ultranaut
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          3511 months ago

          Before I left I tried engaging with some of them, the only one to have a discussion was either a very fast typist or was doing a copy/paste. Their arguments weren’t really consistent and only made sense independently, they claimed to have read transcripts of the Apollo dev interview with the Verge and various other sources but completely misrepresented or ignored basically every detail that made Reddit look bad. It did not feel like a genuine discussion with someone who actually believed their own arguments or was interested in anything other than muddying the waters in defense of Reddit management.

      • @Vorrash
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        6711 months ago

        You just described Reddit in general

        • db2
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          5111 months ago

          No doubt, but they’ve really ramped up lately. It’s like all the manchildren from t_D suddenly saw their chance to be assholes again without consequence.

          • @TheAmorphous
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            3611 months ago

            The un-moderated right wing shit has been very pronounced on Reddit the last few weeks.

            • db2
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              1811 months ago

              … because Glorious Leader is a far right wing turd.

              • @TechnoBabble
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                1011 months ago

                I don’t think anyone would even notice next to the garbage that’s already served by default on Reddit.

                • @[email protected]
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                  1411 months ago

                  Going to the front page not logged in is like visiting YouTube outside of your account. It’s fucking trash.

            • @[email protected]
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              1011 months ago

              It’s almost as if making changes that are blatantly hostile to the unpaid group of people who literally keep your site from devolving into a cesspool on a daily basis isn’t the best of ideas…

          • @graphite
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            1911 months ago

            I look at it this way: it sucks, but it’s not surprising - it’s expected. There’s no reason for them to cater to the users, because that’s not how these things work. The people who made this decision

            (a) mostly care about money

            (b) were obviously willing to lose the favor of Reddit’s users for money

            © have built a platform who’s monetization model has become somewhat at odds with what made Reddit good in the first place

            (d) are probably going to succeed in making money from Reddit

            It’s sad, it really sucks. But, there’s nothing we can really do about it, apart from things like post memes mocking Spez or making subreddits go “dark”.

            Neither of those are long term solutions.

            I’d rather we moved on and let it go, tbh. We could be doing a lot more

        • @[email protected]
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          611 months ago

          Exactly. Depending on what time you posted, you could get two totally different responses to a post.

      • @TheGoldenGod
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        3811 months ago

        Yup, before the 1st I was getting mass harassed by what were clearly new accounts for pointing out the responders were clearly copying/pasting from a script.

        But once that was pointed out, only 12 year old accounts with little posting history showed up lol, which seemed bizarre.

        • @Redsven
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          1711 months ago

          I had a guy try to justify the latter type of account as “I’m just not very active on reddit”. My man, you made one post, commented on one other post a few weeks later, then complete radio silence for 9 years, just to pop up spreading anti-trans propaganda on post after post?

          • TheSaneWriter
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            711 months ago

            I’ve heard before that in the early days of Reddit u/spez had hundreds of alts he would use to reply to posts to make Reddit seem more popular. I wonder if he occasionally resurrects them to support political arguments he likes or to defend Reddit admins.

            • @Redsven
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              511 months ago

              I think this guy was just someone who’s defunct account had been hacked and used to troll. All of his comments from that day featured a ton of both sides arguments and misrepresented statistics, which to me looked like someone who was given talking points and tried to fix any conversation he could into conforming to them.

              It was obviously propaganda, and I guess previously I would have thought someone who ran something ad large as reddit wouldn’t be so stupid and oblivious…but here I am on lemmy a few months later, so who knows. It’s now apparent that spez is that stupid.

            • @TheGoldenGod
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              211 months ago

              That was the rumor, and oddly one he himself confirmed in Reddit comments years back, but he’s since swept that under the rug while he’s trying to sell Reddit, again.

              But there have always been so many trolls since IRC and the AOL days, it’s like dealing with flies. Dealing with them usually ends up harming everyone in the long run, but you have to clean it up eventually. The dead giveaway with spez, should’ve been that he defending the trolls.

          • @TheGoldenGod
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            211 months ago

            It sounds like one of the many of spez’ alts he openly admitted to having years back, since he seems to laud him self as a troll.

      • Woedenaz
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        10 months ago

        I hope they don’t bend to them. Reddit fully deserves this level of overt trolling at this point.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 months ago

        Literally nothing new. - A Reddit Mod. There’s a lot of power tripping shitty mods, but a lot don’t deserve half the grief they get. Some people tend to take out a lot of negativity on mods when they cannot see the human.

        The griefing doesn’t look good for Reddit either. Harassing your unpaid volunteers = excellent investment, probably, I guess. Maybe it does, controversy keeps people engaged.

    • @Chailles
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      711 months ago

      It’s very much inline with how wine makers pivoted during the US alcohol prohibition era by instead selling concentrated blocks of grape juice and a nice little pamphlet with a warning on how to avoid turning said grape juice into wine.

  • @Onlytanner
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    32511 months ago

    I honestly expected after the API changes rolled out that the backlash on Reddit would stop but I’m glad to see the shenanigans continue.

    • @[email protected]
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      12811 months ago

      Same, as much as I hope lemmy succeeds, I simultaneously hope that the API changes get reversed. Good job to those fighting for this over there

      • @puppy
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        7911 months ago

        I am afraid the two might be mutually exclusive. Lemmy is like old Reddit and still on early adopters. We get more and more newcomers only because Reddit is going downhill.

      • Silverseren
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        3011 months ago

        Though it’s not like it matters to most of us if they do reverse course. I already deleted everything on my Reddit account. It’s all gone permanently.

      • Dr. Santa
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        11 months ago

        I think Lemmy’s biggest challenges are server stability, increased complexity to use (most don’t understand things like instances), and low awareness from others. I only learned about it a day or two ago. Signed up out of curiosity.

        But if Lemmy gets even more popular then the various popular instances are going to be stressed. It looks unstable to newcomers who go back to Reddit.

        I signed up for lemmy.world originally, constantly had Gateway errors. Lemm.ee seems more stable due to lower traffic.

        But others may not be able to recognize that. Even if they did, might not want to create new accounts for several instances and go back to starting from 0.

        • TheSaneWriter
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          511 months ago

          Lemmy.world just finished pushing significant stability and performance improvements to the Lemmy codebase and to their own server, and from what I’ve heard it’s lead to significant improvements. I agree that Lemmy is unstable, but it’s also beta software undergoing rapid improvement, and I’m optimistic on where it will be by the end of the year.

          • Dr. Santa
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            211 months ago

            I feel like most of the problem would be physical hardware. Costly servers that would need to be able to meet Lemmy’s growing demands.

            I’m not sure how much optimization from the software side can be done to reduce resource requirements. There’s certainly things that can be done to improve user experience though.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 months ago

          Agreed. Also joined Lemmy a couple days ago and don’t yet fully understand how everything works. I’m hoping that lemmy apps add features to make it easier for people who aren’t very tech-savvy, like automatically assigning people to a general purpose instance (one that isn’t too full preferably) unless they wish to choose a specific one.

          Another thing is that I believe links to posts are somehow instance specific and you have to “convert” them to point to your instance’s version of said post, or something like that, in order to see comments and interact. That seems clunky and should probably be made easier somehow, maybe apps could automatically convert links? Or maybe there is a way to make links instance-agnostic from the get go.

          Just some things I’ve noticed in my time here. Very much enjoying the experience though!

          • Dr. Santa
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            811 months ago

            One aspect I’d love (and is apparently in the works) is swapping instances while keeping your history. A migration tool of sorts. Would help.

            Still the roughness is sorta endearing in its own way. But I don’t think it’d be endearing to most people.

      • Proko
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        2311 months ago

        At this point even if the API changes are reversed I’m don’t with Reddit.

      • @[email protected]
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        2011 months ago

        I’m liking Lemmy a lot. I rolled my own instance so performance is great. The only issue is delayed federation of new posts, but comments seem to go through instantly.

        • @grozzle
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          611 months ago

          How long of a delay? Do you known if the delay is on your end, taking a while to load from every other instance, or from the other ones being slow to “tell” yours about new posts?

          • @[email protected]
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            811 months ago

            I think the delay is due to syncing historic backlog on the community. Not 100% sure though.

            On my instance it says that some communities are fully synced so it looks like there is zero delay. So long as lemmy.world or lemmy.ml are working on their end.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 months ago

      I believe the failed Twitter-to-Mastodon exodus made spez and his yesmen cocky. I hope they underestimated how much more tech savvy the average redditor is - especially the nexus poster, who keep the community afloat.

      • @Countess425
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        3211 months ago

        I think they overestimated how much engagement the average reditter provides. Most people are consuming content, but not contributing any or posting comments or clicking ads or anything. 90% of engagement is driven by like 20% of users or some shit like that.

        • @[email protected]
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          1311 months ago

          I suspect twitter is similar. But a difference between Reddit and twitter is how easily power users can migrate.

          On twitter, you follow people. Power users were often cautious cause they didn’t want to lose their followers and non power users wanted to be where the power users are.

          But on Reddit, you follow communities. For power users, there’s few direct followers to lose and for non power users, as long as there’s enough content, it doesn’t matter much who created it.

          • @[email protected]
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            611 months ago

            Another important difference is that reddit concepts map better onto lemmy than twitter onto mastodon. Additionally, one important aspect of twitter is the proximity to journalists, celebrities and politicians. Reddit doesn’t really have that (except for /r/iama).

        • @[email protected]
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          311 months ago

          I personally have left for Mastodon and never looked back. Ivory is making it so easy and beautiful. But I’m not following sassy quipsters, c-tier celebrities and outrage farmers, so I’m not really anything that stayed on Twitter. But a lot of these “nexus posters” haven’t done the switch and/or had done it but returned to Twitter.

      • TheSaneWriter
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        211 months ago

        Indeed, which of course communicates a fundamental misunderstanding about how people use Reddit vs. Twitter. On Twitter/Mastodon people primarily follow other users, so Twitter remains dominant due to the large number of celebrities, influencers, and politicians that use it. On Reddit/Lemmy, people follow communities, and as such as long as both are active a given community on Lemmy is just as good as a community on Reddit. This also of course impacts federation. With individual user federation discovery can be challenging and small instances will have relatively barren all feeds, but with community federation even instances with a few dozen users will federate with enough communities to fill the all feed. Reddit was also famous for the multitude of very nice features implemented by third party developers, all of which they just ejected, which means now those nice features will be available to Lemmy users. Apps are capable of abstracting and improving the user experience by suggesting instances to sign up to and presenting a unified feed of all of the instance feeds that the app has connected to, making everything feel far more connected. In a way I’m grateful to u/spez, his awfulness as a CEO pushed people here and made a lot of this possible.

      • @StumblingHunter
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        111 months ago

        Eh. They_were_ until about 4(?) years ago. I noticed there was a big shift when all of a sudden nobody cared about spelling and grammar mistakes anymore, and Reddit itself started changing to be more average-person minded. But in the beginning absolutely yes, that’s why the format was the way it was

    • HobbitFoot
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      2411 months ago

      No, I figured this would go on a lot longer than just the blackout. There has been a lot of built up resentment in the mod community that the admins never really addressed. Now that the admins ripped away most mod tools, a lot of mods are pissed.

    • @kras
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      2211 months ago

      I hope they can manage to tank reddit’s IPO

    • @someguy3
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      1311 months ago

      This has exposed the incompatibility of a company wanting to make $$$$, when it relies on volunteers. Mods aren’t eager to do unpaid work just so spez can get rich.

  • @popemichael
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    21211 months ago

    So long as it hurts Reddit, all the better.

    This whole API issue is a lost cause, so the only thing that can be done now is to make Reddit lose big.

    • @scarabic
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      9311 months ago

      Yep the fight for Reddit is lost. All we can do is make an example of them.

        • @scarabic
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          411 months ago

          Man… I forgot what even happened to Digg. The homepage algorithm was highly gameable… then what?

    • @Polydextrous
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      8411 months ago

      I’m really fuckin loving getting to watch this war being waged on Reddit from Lemmy. I was really worried that, on the first, all of the protests would peter and those of us pissed about it would be gone and things would just even out for the company. Love to see it still being fought, and more dirty than ever.

  • @DragonAce
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    20511 months ago

    I wish more of the larger subs were still protesting and didn’t roll over so easily. But regardless the site has taken a massive hit to its reputation and one can only hope that recovery won’t be possible moving forward and it screws them out of their chance to go public.

    • Reef
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      11 months ago

      I think most of the larger ones were forced to reopen by the admins

        • @WhiskyTangoFoxtrot
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          4111 months ago

          The thing is, Reddit doesn’t allow subs to run unmoderated, so IIRC there were instances where they’d kick out the moderators for not re-opening and then have to close the sub again for being unmoderated.

          • @Chocrates
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            2911 months ago

            They are already finding scabs to come in and moderate. The quality will be shitty but they don’t care.

            • @Buddahriffic
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              711 months ago

              The quality started out shitty on some subs. Fuck spez, but he’s not completely wrong about the mods. Some are people who never have and never will have more power in their lives and it goes right to their brain. Where he’s completely wrong is blaming this situation on the mods when they are just the group of users who can frustrate him the most. I bet he thought he could throw the mods under the bus because they were already generally unpopular (though some subs were bad and others were fine) before all of this.

              Something nice about the fediverse is that instances can be dedicated to mod evaluation. They don’t have to honour deletion requests; they could specifically highlight them instead to see what kind of posts specific mods are suppressing. Hopefully that can be used to check their power and reduce how much of it goes to their heads.

            • @GamingChairModel
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              511 months ago

              I’d love to volunteer as a scab. Problem is, what’s stopping me from running any given subreddit in a way that destroys the community further, like arbitrarily removing posts or banning users while simultaneously allowing clear spam/bots/scams to persist?

          • WideEyedStupid
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            2111 months ago

            r/interestingasfuck has been without mods for 2 weeks now. It’s just so idiotic. They remove all the mods and then… don’t replace them? Now there hasn’t been a post in 2 weeks on a sub with 11+mil members.

            I wonder if they just forgot about that particular sub?

            • TheSaneWriter
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              411 months ago

              Maybe it’s to make an example of them? Let the zombie subreddits stand as an example of “This is what happens when you cross the admins.”

              • WideEyedStupid
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                711 months ago

                I guess it’s possible, but what good would that do reddit? That’s millions people who aren’t going to be browsing that subreddit anymore, and presumably at least some of them aren’t using any ad blockers, so they’d be losing revenue…

                • TheSaneWriter
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                  711 months ago

                  I’m honestly not sure. Reddit’s decision making here has been so stupid I’m just guessing their motivations.

    • @scarabic
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      6711 months ago

      The article mentions r/pics, r/vids, and r/funny

      These are large subs.

      • @bittabet
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        7111 months ago

        Don’t worry, doordash_drivers is now a recommended sub for everyone 💀

        • @Yhmg
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          2411 months ago

          I knew it was over when my feed was plastered with various subreddits for food delivery workers

        • @[email protected]
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          1311 months ago

          I was wondering why I saw some much of that and shittytattoos my final last few weeks.

          • @ChickenLadyLovesLife
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            1611 months ago

            /r/truerateme is a lot funnier than shittytattoos. A chance for basement-dwelling incels to rate pretty girls who wouldn’t give them the time of day 5.5.

      • @Anders429
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        1111 months ago

        Right, I’m pretty positive r/funny was the largest sub to participate in the original protest.

    • @[email protected]
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      3711 months ago

      Give it 3 months and it’s all forgotten about. New users won’t know the difference.

      • @scarabic
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        5811 months ago

        The difference is right here, all of us being here instead of there.

        • @Yhmg
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          Part of me, and I think everyone else here, wants some level of vindication in the form of Reddit taking a hit. Likely most of the current users won’t notice any big changes and most of it will be back to the content they’re used to in a few months. But as someone else here pointed out it’s likely Reddit will survive as Facebook has, shitty recycled content from other platforms and zero decent discussion. Which again, 90% of their current user base won’t notice or care about. I’m just glad we’ve got a new place where the discussion seems to be a bit more on par with old Reddit

          • @scarabic
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            The weird thing is that my experience of Reddit probably didn’t resemble 95% of what was going on there, ever. I had my slice of subs and things I followed and that was great for me. Every so often I would view it logged out and it seemed like a different site, full of garbage viral shite. I assume it will continue to be that. Gallowboob or whatever will still post crap for eyeballs.

            • @BOMBbejaan
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              811 months ago

              Now that’s a name I haven’t seen in ages!

          • @Buddahriffic
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            511 months ago

            While I can relate to wanting to see some sort of vindication for my position in this issue and to see Reddit punished for their choices, I do think it would be better if Reddit stuck around and attracted a lot of the lowest common denominator traffic. Average quality seemed to go down as popularity increased (though the extremes also got more extreme, so good stuff improved while the bad stuff did get worse and some ended up banned entirely).

            On subs like AITA, there were so many replies that misunderstood very basic and fundamental stuff from the main post. Also plenty of replies that just made something up entirely and ran with it, frequently highly upvoted and spawning other replies agreeing completely and also running with the baseless assumptions. It got to the point a long time ago where I realized the judgements themselves were useless and the sub’s only real value was for entertainment and seeing other perspectives, but it wasn’t very useful for its stated purpose: determining if you’re an asshole for something you did.

            And the mods were so frustrating there, too. Shutting down active and interesting discussion because some arbitrary rule wasn’t followed or because the topic itself attracted a lot of dipshits.

            Anyways, what I’m trying to say is that there’s benefits to having a more popular alternative. It means that lemmy has to continue competing to attract users but it mostly means that low effort users will end up just going to the more popular site until they have a reason to look for something else.

            • @Yhmg
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              Completely agree. Back in the day I used to just scroll through /r/all and constantly stumble across cool stuff, now it’s devoid of any decent content. Whenever I read any of those millions of aita posts they’d always be clear fiction, and then full of comments as if they were absolutely true. The general quality of content on that site is at absolute rock bottom.

              I am glad Lemmy has a small barrier to entry. It’s easy enough that you don’t need any sort of technical knowledge to sign up and use but it requires a little more effort than most social media, which hopefully acts as something of a filter. Reddit now kind of reminds me of usenets “eternal September”.

      • Ghostalmedia
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        5311 months ago

        You’ll see the user experience difference. Janky ass Reddit will look lame compared to the cool Lemmy apps that are in development now.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 months ago

        I followed mostly games and tech related stuff and they mostly rolled over quick or didn’t even participate. So figured it was a lost cause from the get go. When I was subbed there was not much difference in usual activity , since I did not sub to the main subs. In a lot of cases I actually had blocked them long ago.

        On the plus side those communities have had good activity on lemmy without need for the reddit mods to bother migrating.

      • @Polydextrous
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        11 months ago

        I think we’re going to see a figurehead change before the IPO if things continue this way. Spiz will “step down” (he’ll probably be bought out, which might be what he’s angling for at this point, talking about wanting to emulate Elon? The most obvious and egregious example of massively and publicly fucking up a social media site??) and the company will put out a statement of “changing course,” basically just muddying the waters about what’s actually happening (while most likely nothing will actually change), say that they’re going to try to fix this fiasco.

        It would kill the protests. And that way they can either run out the clock and settle things down before the IPO, or they can put out some vague change that would figuratively make the API more accessible/affordable. But nothing would actually change in the latter scenario, they’d just make a lot of noise about being reasonable while not actually changing anything. Their value could inflate again, protests are quelled due to loss of momentum/loss of popularity, pizzle gets a golden parachute, the company goes public and banks, VCs roll in piles of money, etc. etc.

        • Seraphin 🐬
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          3311 months ago

          And the IPO itself is a bad sign no matter who’s in charge. It means the company will be shareholder-driven, and so aiming for maximum profit (or just straight up not operating at a loss to start with). Line must always go up, so when things start to stagnate, or they reach saturation, more and more bold anti-consumer decisions will be made to extract higher profits. See Netflix and their crackdown on password-sharing.

          It may not happen straight away, but it will eventually.

          • @Mayoman68
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            911 months ago

            Perhaps my opinions are different from others but I feel like these websites are forgetting that they’re an optional part of people’s lives. There are plenty of things I can spend my time on besides reddit and YouTube, and Netflix is forgetting that it’s marginally more convenient than piracy.

            • Mkengine
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              111 months ago

              Considering Plexshares exist, the margin is really only taking the 30 mins to set things up while having a library 5 times as big for half the price.

      • @ChickenLadyLovesLife
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        3011 months ago

        I logged out of my account at the start of all this, but occasionally I go back and check out reddit as an unlogged lurker. It’s astonishing how low-quality the front page is when it’s not filtered by subjects you’re actually interested in. And good lord is new reddit ever a terrible user experience.

      • @[email protected]
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        611 months ago

        I’ve noticed a change too and I’ve tried to keep that separate from my feelings about Reddit. It just doesn’t seem all that entertaining or novel as it was a couple months back.

        Perhaps when you piss off that tiny slice of your users that actually produces the content everyone else wants to see and the moderators who ensure they see that quality content, you’re going to have problems.

        It wasn’t a perfect system for sure, but it was holding it together for quite a few years.

  • @paddirn
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    14911 months ago

    I’m happy that they’re keeping it up, but I’ve already moved on to the point that even if Reddit were to completely go back on the API change, I wouldn’t come back. Personally I’ve already moved the goal post to where Steve Huffman needs to go before I’d consider ever going back. Reddit is dead for all I care.

  • @[email protected]
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    14311 months ago

    As much as I’d love to log into Reddit and see this go down, I’m happy just not using Reddit. How much longer do you think they’ll hold out?

      • @kezza596
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        3711 months ago

        I just saw someone on one of my fb groups saying she’s heard a lot about reddit lately and wanting to make an account and asking how it works.

        I tried to ward her off but the negative press just seems to be enticing new users.

        • @[email protected]
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          5911 months ago

          My guess ist that if she still is on fb in 2023 she might actually love it on Reddit now and in the future…

        • @Shartacus
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          4311 months ago

          That’s fine, they’re the people we don’t want over here. They’re part of Reddits problem.

      • @tburkhol
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        2211 months ago

        You can train mice or pigeons to hit a button for reward, but the button has to dispense reward pretty much 100%. Once they’re trained, you can dial down the reward - 50%, 25%…1% - and they’ll keep mashing that button, doing work for free. Human buttons and rewards may be more complicated, but it’s the same thing.

      • @[email protected]
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        1311 months ago

        It’s the mods leaving that are going to doom the site. The users will follow soon after

        • @SulaymanF
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          511 months ago

          Define “doom.” Reddit will lose its power users, its trendiness, and just become another forum for recycled content like 9gag or limp along like Digg or MySpace for years, but I don’t see it shutting down.

      • @[email protected]
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        1011 months ago

        Yeah, pretty much. The sad reality is that only the most outspoken will actually make a switch. The vast majority will simply accept it as the new norm, because they don’t care enough to bother with a new platform.

        • b3nsn0w
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          2211 months ago

          for now. switches like this don’t happen one day to the next. reddit has broken a lot of trust with its core users and put things in motion that cannot be stopped, at least without extraordinary action that they’re clearly unwilling of. these processes will take years to play out but they’re happening.

          same thing is going on with twitter. the easier mastodon becomes to use and the more twitter falls apart, the more the flow of users from one platform to the next will pick up the pace.

        • NaibofTabr
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          5011 months ago

          It doesn’t matter, at this point. Lemmy is already a good-enough replacement for reddit, with better core principles, and it’s just getting better.

          Get some popcorn and watch the drama, and expect nothing.

          • Marxine
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            1411 months ago

            It’s okay to expect more drama though, right?

            • @WindyRebel
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              711 months ago

              Second drama? I don’t know if they know about second drama.

              • Marxine
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                411 months ago

                I trust in spez to commit to even more enraging changes to Reddit. When it’ll happen idk, but it most definitely will

        • @not_woody_shaw
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          411 months ago

          I heard some people still use …Twitter!

      • @itsJoelleScott
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        411 months ago

        Yeah, for now people are still going to incidentally use reddit for human-written non-seo optimized text.

        Heck, I needed it last night for help with my computer.

      • @[email protected]
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        4311 months ago

        The apps are going to be a game changer. If they can make it easier and intuitive to sign up, manage your accounts, find communities, and eventually group communities together and filter your feed, casual users will start flocking. It’s all about the UX and UI.

        I hope to see the apps even accept donations and distribute part of it to the Lemmy devs and server hosts to help keep things sustainable.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 months ago

          As an Apollo user, switched to wefwef and suddenly its like Reddit 10 years ago. Lots of interesting and weird content with great UX.

          • @didnt_readit
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            211 months ago

            Same! Also I just installed the Mlem beta and while it’s a bit buggy, it already works pretty well and it seems to work better for me than Wefwef (and it’s native which for me is a plus)

        • @[email protected]
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          1311 months ago

          That and hopefully each app will create their own federations. It will be a refreshing to see the developers become the leaders

      • claymedia
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        1111 months ago

        For those waiting, definitely try out Memmy for iOS. Right now it is in Test Flight, but should be releasing any day now. The dev seems super passionate and the app has gotten exponentially better in just a couple weeks.

        • @[email protected]
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          711 months ago

          I’m keen to give it a go but the beta is full. Am keeping an eye out for the app store release! In the meantime Wefwef is excellent and I may end up sticking with it anyway (no harm in shopping around though!)

        • @[email protected]
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          711 months ago

          I’ve been switching between Memmy and Mlem. Both have their share of missing features right now, I’m usually sticking with one until I hit a need to switch.

          Both are great, Memmy is the winner so far.

    • b3nsn0w
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      2611 months ago

      you’re talking about the 0.1 of the 1/9/90 rule resisting the clearly telegraphed decay of the platform they poured 5-15 years into on average. they built that place, do not underestimate the lengths they will go to keep it up.

      assuming one more round of further threats, my prediction is that about half the currently protesting communities will either switch to a new form of protest, stop, or be made an example of, by about the end of july. but for a proper “end” of the protests, spez would be lucky if it happened by the end of the summer, and their negative impact on the platform is already severe and permanent. i honestly don’t know if the admins are stupid and/or out of touch enough to not notice the drop in content quality or are just bold enough to lie about it, but this spells the beginning of a long and inevitable process of people leaving to better sites as those who gave reddit its unique value stop contributing and giving lurkers a reason to stay.

      reddit will never feel the same again, but it will feel about the best it ever will again around the end of the year, before the decay truly sets in. unless the admins choose that time for the next round of killing off old reddit, of course.

      • @AtheistComic
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        1111 months ago

        reddit will never feel the same again

        It really doesn’t seem like the cool place it once was. They took the vibe away with these API changes.

    • @Anders429
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      2311 months ago

      lol without an app on my phone, I tried opening r/pics on my mobile browser to see the damage, only to be met with a “you must view NSFW communities in our app” page.

      • b3nsn0w
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        611 months ago

        you can use old reddit but it’s a pain and a half on mobile

    • @[email protected]
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      611 months ago

      Its going to be a while. Most content creators especially comic artists, streamers and youtubers are still on reddit. Their fans are there, and its unlikely they’ll budge until the comic artists post here too, or the mods of the youtube communities announce a migration.

      • @SulaymanF
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        211 months ago

        I disagree. I know and follow a bunch of creators on social media and twitch, but even as a Reddit power user I knew so few specific users. Influencers may post links to their content but their Reddit account is hardly relevant.

  • Seperis
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    13311 months ago

    Okay, hear me out:

    I get the argument that most of these protests are meaningless/if you REALLY want to change you’re going to have to do this this this. whatever (I usually stop reading there). I understand, but I don’t agree.

    Sure, it’s nice when a protest can actually enact real changes but lets face it; that’s not common and sometimes not going to happen: fine. The decision to make a protest shouldn’t be decided on the basis of ‘can I win’; a much less restrictive–and very deeply fun–philosophy should be "is this worth taking time out of my day just to annoy/frustrate/irritate those who are doing this?’ If yes (it should always be yes), "So lets find out how many ways me and anyone else I can recruit can make this happen’.

    In other words: every time a subreddit finds a new and interesting and stupid and ridiculous and just weird way to be irritating and embarrassing af…I am living for this.

    • @[email protected]
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      8111 months ago

      Very refreshing take on it. The cynicism about whether the protests were ‘worth it’ because we didn’t see massive results felt like it missed all the fun of giving the greedy corporation the collective finger.

      • Seperis
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        4511 months ago

        If the only reason you’ll fight is because you think you can win, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Win or lose or both or nothing at all, you do it because it’s worth fighting for. Sometimes this ends with Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell v. Hodges, but mostly, it won’t, so if the best I can do right now is give some people a very, very bad day, well, I’m in: let’s go.

    • Techpriest
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      10 months ago

      deleted by creator

    • @[email protected]
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      5711 months ago

      turns out it’s not a good idea to piss off the unpaid people put in charge of front page subreddits

    • redcalcium
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      3511 months ago

      Meanwhile redditors on /r/piracy kicked their own mod for continuing the protest. I think their Lemmy migration to lemmy.dbzer0.com is a bit too effective and now only loyal redditors left at that sub.

      • TalkingCat-
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        2111 months ago

        On the flipside [email protected] has a lot better content and discussion than /r/piracy where it’s mostly the same memes reposted every few weeks.

          • TheSaneWriter
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            211 months ago

            Lemmy is infinitely better for piracy discussions anyhow. Reddit is bound by legality and piracy is grey-legal at best, so while a Lemmy instance is bound by the laws of where it is hosted and is far less likely to see a government crackdown, Reddit feels auch stronger pressure to control the piracy discussions.

  • @chackl
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    11111 months ago

    Can’t wait for the Reddit IPO to fail

    • NaibofTabr
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      6811 months ago

      Fidelity has been dropping the valuation of its stake in reddit, and that’s only as of May 31st. We don’t know yet how the value will respond to all this drama, but I suspect it will go down more.

      The IPO might not fail, but they probably won’t get what they wanted out of it.

      Unfortunately this probably means that the platform will sell to people who expect to get use out of it for direct public influence of some kind (marketing/politics).

      • @[email protected]
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        1711 months ago

        Sadly they’ll still get rich as shit if valuation drops a lot so there isn’t much incentive to treat the community better.

      • @beibiddybibo
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        1111 months ago

        I invest in quite a few tech companies and I was considering investing in Reddit, but there’s no way in hell I would now. I can’t be the only potential investor they have alienated.

  • @KidDogDad
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    10711 months ago

    I just went and looked at r/videos and I gotta admit that the text-only descriptions of videos and enforcing swearing in every post title is pretty funny.

  • Digester
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    11 months ago

    No point in protesting, we already have a better alternative.

  • @[email protected]
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    8911 months ago

    It’s so weird to see all the people still fighting on Reddit when I’ve already moved on

  • @Naura
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    8311 months ago

    I agree.

    Also when we’re all being fucked over no one has a right to say how we (in general) should be protesting. People get to show their anger in whatever way they want. It’s like people asking for civility so they don’t have to deal with uncomfortable messages. Um fuck no. NSFW all the way if that’s what one decides.

    Thanks for agitating

  • @[email protected]
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    11 months ago

    For for how much heavy handed their initial reaction was, I’m surprised that Reddit doesn’t take more aggressive actions. Spez has the loudest voice on highest pole, yet so far he only managed to anger everyone.

    Fuck Spez.

    • @shashi154263
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      4211 months ago

      It can be easily concluded from his AMA that he is a fool. Big mouth with small brain.

      • Kofu
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        1711 months ago

        And he was a mod for a very disgusting sub back when it was active.

        • @ofak
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          811 months ago

          Although I dislike him as much as anyone, I read that in the early days you could add users as mods without the need for users to accept.

          • @MercuryUprising
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            1511 months ago

            He was supposedly posting on the sub as well. Plus you can remove yourself as a mod, especially if you’re an admin.

            • @ofak
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              311 months ago

              Ah, yeah that makes things even worse. Jesus Christ, us sheep of reddit that hailed him when he took over as ceo after that woman who’s name I don’t remember.

                • @ofak
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                  111 months ago

                  Yeah, that’s the one.

        • @Timou
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          611 months ago

          What sub was that?

          • @[email protected]
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            1111 months ago

            Jailbait. There’s a bit more to the story though…mod invites were auto-approved at the time. But he seemingly embraced it, even if he didn’t directly acknowledge it.

            • littleblue✨
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              11 months ago

              “Seemingly”? He sent a physical Reddit trophy to the lead perv of that sub and bragged about it in different subs (along with other mods), and that doesn’t even begin to touch on the barely-veiled alts he was known to use in that sub and elsewhere to circumvent rules, alter votes, and massage narratives. The guy’s a festering moron with a mic.

              source: OG Redditor who stood up to that clique back when.

              • @[email protected]
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                211 months ago

                Thanks, I had forgotten the details.

                Kind of wonder if this adds any merit to the /u/maxwellhill conspiracy.

    • @[email protected]
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      1911 months ago

      I’m not sure they can. What can they do? I doubt they’ll replace moderators with paid Reddit workers. The alternative is to replace them with other power hungry moderators who will bend a knee to the Reddit admins. That might work on some major subreddits but the PR of that might cause more damage.

      I think the admins hoped it would have blown over by now. If it’s still going on by September I bet they’ll need to do something.

      • @Nogami
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        -1511 months ago

        And the problem is that people who are power hungry and only doing it to scratch that itch can’t be trusted to maintain a valuable community. That’s not the type of people they are.

        And people who create the content are moving to other platforms. I’ve deleted all of my reddit links and apps to reduce the likeyhood I’ll stumble across a reddit post. Also starting to take some of my better reddit posts and edit them to remove any valuable content, and post on Lemmy instead.

        • @gunslingerfry
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          411 months ago

          Question: can lemmy content be found in a Google search?

          • @Kuma
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            211 months ago

            Google is at it with indexing. You can also use: https://fedi-search.com/ https://www.search-lemmy.com/

            I haven’t really tried them out for real tho. I think the search in lemmy works pretty well especially in instances like world because they are connected to so many communities. But you are maybe a lot more advanced with your searches

            • @gunslingerfry
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              111 months ago

              No, it’s not that I need more advanced search. It’s that currently reddit is the best source for information on the Internet. I still want people to be able to find the information they need from well meaning people. Even if that means some douchey company crawls all the lemmy posts to feed to its AI.