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Reddit embracing all out enshittification (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago* by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed

#For sale: Ads that look like legit Reddit user posts

"We highly recommend only mentioning the brand name of your product since mentioning links in posts makes the post more likely to be reported as spam and hidden. We find that humans don't usually type out full URLs in natural conversation and plus, most Internet users are happy to do a quick Google Search," ReplyGuy's website reads.

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[–] 102 points 2 years ago (32 children)

I wish I could get all the mods from the subreddits that rolled over in June/July in a room and slap each and every one upside the head.

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  • [+] -7 points 2 years ago (31 children)

    why?

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  • [–] 70 points 2 years ago (30 children)

    Because they thought if they just folded to the site admins that everything would be okay in the end. "Oh, we built a community! We don't want to lose it, so we're opening back up so daddy Spez doesn't take away our power!"

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (26 children)

    Most facepalm reaction tbh. If only they had some spine they would have switched immediately to lemmy, but most were just doing it to go along and never had any intentions of doing anything significant.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    Even as someone that's still active here, this would never happen. Neither lemmy or Kbin were ready to replace reddit in either features, stability or support, not then and not even today. It's unfortunate but reddit is not going to go down when there is no actual competition available.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    When reddit fuck up again, the alternatives are already pretty mature, at least compared to last year. Back then the only app we have was jerboa (and it was pretty shitty back then too, unlike now). Now we have gazillion of lemmy apps that can suit everyone taste.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    lemmy is to reddit right now is what reddit was to digg when reddit first started. Eventually reddit will go a step too far.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Except instead of having an evangelizing atheist neckbeard problem, we have tankie problem. A lot of people that see unfiltered discourse on instances outside LW will think it's Voat 2.0.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (4 children)

    yea because not accepting US propaganda and trying to uplift marginalized people and help workers not be trodded upon, is about the same as open fascism, bigotry and constant hate speech /s

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    It's just replaced with propaganda from nations that "tried" communism. I've seen plenty of people from tankie instances saying shit about how Ukraine should just roll over to Russia so that they solve their Nazi problem, how the Uyghur people aren't being ethnically cleansed, and other such wonderful talking points coming from the Russian and Chinese governments.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Claiming that you see these comments everywhere on lemmy, at the scale you see bigotry on Voat, is laughably preposterous. And that is aside the point that these comments are not even as bad as open fascism and hate speech.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Genocide denial and equating those fighting in a defensive war to Nazis is just as bad as hate speech. These people are just following fascist ideals, but replacing every instance of the phrase "right-wing" in fascism's definition with "left-wing." Flying a hammer and sickle doesn't make it any less authoritarian, regardless of what they're calling it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    Genocide denial and equating those fighting in a defensive war to Nazis is just as bad as hate speech.

    I assure you it is not. One causes active harm to people in online communities and pushes the world toward normalizing fascist tactics, and the other is some terminally online tankie LARPing with no great effect to anything.

    USA ignores the worst genocide ever commuted on the world, theirs, and nothing really changes. The rest of the world knows about it. Israel is committing one right now with the backing of the USA and it this denial is publicized everywhere, whereas hate speech is clearly banned.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (13 children)

    I wasn't a mod, but I did participate in the blackout as a user and I did not immediately switch to Lemmy when it was over. It took about two weeks to get over the whole 'FOMO if I leave Reddit' and 'I've spent over a decade here' sunk cost issues.

    So I don't blame anyone for not immediately switching to Lemmy, but if you haven't jumped ship from Reddit by now, especially if you're doing thankless mod work for people who don't appreciate you, I have little respect for you at this point.

    And let me take this opportunity as someone who mods several lemmy.world communities to say that I do not feel that the .world admin are unappreciative at all. In fact, exactly the opposite. And they're working for free just like I am, so it is a whole different scenario anyway.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    As someone who moved a million-users community to lemmy successfully, if those mods had already started moving their communities to lemmy during the blackout, many many more users would have moved already. But they never planned for that, so it was just a weak bluff that reddit called.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    But that would have been to assume the blackout would fail, and I think a lot of people didn't think it would. I was dubious, but I think I was in the minority there.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    It was obvious that Reddit wasn’t changing course at all. Especially with how they handled communication with Christian Selig and other 3rd party devs.

    I came here during the blackout and deleted all my content on my account. The last day Apollo worked was the last day I used Reddit and I was a Reddittor since 3/10/2011

    If there was better mod organization we could have better translations for the non tech and piracy related communities but I’m overall happy how we ended up.

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  • [+] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    It took me months to delete all my content, as the API tools I was using (power delete suite) can’t access subs that are still dark. It took a bunch of manual deletions, additional scans with the tools and occasional googling of my username but I think I’ve got it all now.

    I came to Reddit initially for the human conversation. The fediverse will benefit in that it’s never going to be a commercial product and so the human conversation will be the number one priority. Even as corporate entities like meta try to join, users can just tune them out by blocking threads.net on their account, or switching to instances that have defed from them.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    It might have been obvious to you, but I really don't think it was obvious to everyone and I don't think you should assume that. I saw plenty of talk from people before it happened that were absolutely convinced it would change things.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Not really, I started moving /r/piracy when I saw spez doubling down. By that point the writing was on the wall.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I think you're really underestimating how people are pulled in by sunk cost. I think many people, especially mods, earnestly believed that because they had invested a lot of time and effort into Reddit, Reddit would listen to them if they protested.

    That's not their fault, that's just human nature. You were able to overcome that, which is good, but I don't blame anyone for not being able to at the time. A year later is another matter.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I tried to get other people off the site before I left, but the mods decided to be douchebags about user retention.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    If anyone looks up my profile there, it says something like 'Fuck Reddit! Reddit sucks! Go to Lemmy!' but that's the best I can do at this point.

    I'm pretty sure it's why I didn't get an IPO buy-in offer despite having super high post and comment karma too.

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