this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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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
They're getting no end of grief from bad/paid actors though.
The amount of whinging and bootlicking from people taking Spez's side was insane before I left for good.
It doesn’t seem organic. Protest posts would get 95% upvotes, then suddenly 12 hours later get slammed with bootlickers and downvotes.
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.
What a weird thing to target with bots.
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.
So much this! TLoU2 was a major setback for me in many ways, but a normal discussion was impossible.
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.
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.
Wasn’t it proven that majority of the positive spez posts are from bots or chatgpt or something?
At least one post defending spez 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?
Is it ironic that ChatGPT is defending spez increasing API costs “to combat LLMs”?
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.
Genuinely curious: how was that shown? How do you know for sure a post is generated by ChatGPT?
One of its answers in a thread was the classic "as a language model, I am not able to (...)"
That's a bit more straightforward than expected, thanks! 😅
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
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.
I hope they don't bend to them. Reddit fully deserves this level of overt trolling at this point.
You just described Reddit in general
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.
The un-moderated right wing shit has been very pronounced on Reddit the last few weeks.
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…
Watch r/ conservative and r/ conspiracy become default subs lol
I don't think anyone would even notice next to the garbage that's already served by default on Reddit.
Going to the front page not logged in is like visiting YouTube outside of your account. It's fucking trash.
.. because Glorious Leader is a far right wing turd.
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
(c) 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
Literally nothing new. - A Reddit Mod. They took away the tools too so it'll be less hidden. 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.