Apologies if this is a repost. They’re scared lol.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14q12g7/subreddits_are_starting_to_see_spam_from/
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
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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.
What a bummer.
I’m doing ok without it though. I didn’t load old.reddit once today.
I probably won’t tomorrow.
I used to look at Reddit in almost all of my downtime at work. Now I’m trying to write when I see nothing new is coming up on Lemmy.
Still though. 15 years on Reddit. Goddamn. It definitely bums me out. I mean, it’s just a website, but it has helped shape so much of who I am.
I’m an atheist in the Bible Belt for example, and atheism being a default sub back in the day really helped me out a lot.
All things must pass.
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 spend my work downtime the 1 day I have to be in office writing dnd campaign material to save my prep time at home.
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
It’s truly amazing. Even people who knew that Reddit was destined to fail someday, wouldn’t have predict it happening so fast.
Most people expect gradual change when many things in life are more like punctuated equilibrium.
Stable state despite gradual change in underlying conditions.
Then rapid change to new stable state.
There’s also the Ernest Hemmingway quote from The Sun Also Rises:
“How did you go bankrupt?"
“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
You’ve now put a fear in me about my life that I wasn’t ready for…
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.
This article felt a little more relevant, recommended by wiki on the one you linked: Punctuated equilibrium in social theory
It’s like Rome 😭
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.
Shut down, you say? Every subreddit should post such truths, you say? Reddit will atomize itself instantly, you say?
Okay, maybe not but it’s a fun thought, no?
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.
Wow. Just checked. The newest post in that sub is 3 weeks old.
Hello i hope you dont mind if i post that post, in case someone does not want to go onto reddit:
r/Save3rdPartyApps
u/attackofmilkSubreddits 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:
Ycombinator thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36361247
Top-voted post from /r/Programming before it closed: https://web.archive.org/web/20230611210834/https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/146wn9s/meta_who_is_astroturfing_rprogramming_and_why/
(I would have just crossposted the top thread directly, but this sub forbids crossposting NSFW posts (which is now everything on /r/Pics )
Good idea, thank you
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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
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Weekend at Spez’s
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.
That’s also a fantastic way to end up in jail, which I wouldn’t be opposed to spez getting familiar with
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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.
Just gotta make it look good for the IPO, then what does Spez care?
Ad-free no-money-to-reddit teddit link, https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14q12g7/subreddits_are_starting_to_see_spam_from/
Jesus Christ, do we have a good reason to believe that this was the admins and not some other random third-party group just deciding to do this for shits and giggles?
Because on one hand yeah I could totally see red it doing this after all of their other stupid mistakes so far.
On the other hand this seems really strange to me and it just seems so insane to think that Reddit would even think of doing this.
On the other hand this seems really strange to me and it just seems so insane to think that Reddit would even think of doing this.
Have you read about any of Spez’s interviews? This feels entirely like something they would do. Don’t forget, reddit was originally populated with bots.
I haven’t heard about that (being originally populated by bots) but I would love to read something about it if you know of anything.
“Huffman […] together with Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005. Embarrassed by an empty-looking site, the founders created hundreds of fake users for their posts to make it look more populated” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#History
This is the main issue here. This whole narrative sprung from one comment in one thread that was made without any real evidence other than ‘this account is obviously a bot’. Did the admin do it? Maybe. Did someone else do it? Maybe. On one hand, we know that everyone on the internet is a good honest person and if anyone is trolling it could only be the self-serving admin and absolutely no one else would ever try to troll people on reddit, on the other hand the site is run by and full of a bunch of absolutely assholes. So really it could go either way.
I’ve always had problems with mob justice, bandwagons, etc. though, and don’t go in for witchhunts and claims made without any real evidence to back them up.
It’s also insane to stealthy edit user comments but he did and “apologized” for it
Jeez man … +1 to this person! https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/pics/comments/14puynz/chatgpt_bots_are_spamming_proadmin_astroturf/jql4cka/#c
(After r/programming went private, they sent the u/ModCodeOfConduct modmail to the mods of r/programming - which is modded by reddit admins.)
I guess that message worked as the sub reopened. /s
Ozymandias
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEYI met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”Hourly reminder that Spez sucks
They found a bot on Reddit!? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you… well okay, not that shocked :-). \s
(yes I know, there’s more to it than that, I just wanted to say the meme text, and also take this opportunity to BOW DOWN BEFORE OUR NEW OVERLORDS)
I already knew they didn’t want moderators to have better anti-spam tools since it would decrease the apparent activity to attract advertisers.
When people tell you who they are, better to believe them the first time.
Huffman said he didn’t need no stinking meatsacks… so now he must be happy with the way the site is working now… right!? :-P
Reddit admins have apparently used bots to populate content the way they want before as well: https://reddit.moe.ngo/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/reddit_admins_were_just_caught_using_bots_or_fake/
Gees, the Admins aren’t very smart. Least they could have done is go buy some karma farmed accounts and use those self-respecting bot spammers do.
Wow, so would mods of r/programming get another threat asking them to open the sub again? :D
isnt that the sub where spez and bunch of other admins are head mods lol
Even better lol
I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to comment on this.
/joke
@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.
The downgrade isn’t due to protests, it’s been happening for some time.
@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.
They really are just bungling this completely.
If they were competent, we’d all still be on Reddit.
You make a very good point.
That’s really all on Steve Huffman. He had years to prepare Reddit for profitability and an IPO. He was caught swimming naked when the proverbial music stopped, and he went for the low-hanging fruit (killing the costly API) with nothing but scorn for the dissenting voices.
The board should have fired him after the stealth edits debacle. This guy has no business being a CEO.
I really just do not get why he thinks Elon Musk has it right idea, only isn’t going far enough. And it’s the board has just decided in for a penny, in for a pound and are determined to stick with him even if Reddit burns to the ground. I wonder what metrics they’re seeing that we aren’t, besides dollar signs.
