Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed
arstechnica.com
Reddit says its "communities are naturally commercial."

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.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      10·
      7 months ago

      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.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        7 months ago

        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.

        • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          7 months ago

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

          • nytrixus@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            7 months ago

            From all of the times I had spent in your subreddit, the admins were always rubbing their hands together to find any and all excuses to nuke your subreddit. Every other moderator announcement it was always about trying to meet admin demand after admin demand but it was never enough. It’ll never be enough.

            • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              3·
              7 months ago

              surprisingly, it’s still up. I got demodded under suspicious circumstances and now some of the remaining mods keep doing the unpaid janitorial duties for spez to make couple hundel mil per year.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            7 months 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.

        • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          7 months ago

          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.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            7 months 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.

            • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              7 months 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.

    • ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      3·
      7 months ago

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

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        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.

        • ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          7 months ago

          They kept sending their IPO shit to me with no way to opt out. I reported them to the FTC for not having an unsubscribe on their email.