A lot of the site feels like it’s been overrun by bots. The more niche communities seem to still be pretty good (and I do still enjoy engaging in them). But the subs like ask Reddit, Aita and the relationships one? Yea, it all feels like bs.
I stay away from any big subs now. The smaller stuff that tends to have 2 to 15 posts a day (like game specific subs) feel like they did before. Although I really feel a lot of those are going to discord as well.
If only the niche communities over here were a bit more active. For instance, I’ve been hyperfixating on Tamagotchi, but there isn’t a Tamagotchi community here yet :(
The worst part is that they’re all really fucking bland questions. The shit you’d see on Facebook.
Why is this a JPEG. I barely can read that text in red.
Needs more JPEG
Maybe your client? Renders clear and legible for me
dark red on grey
I have tried to read that text on my desktop PC, so I was visiting regular site, but I must say that the picture is much clearer on my phone.
I guess it’s mostly because my gaming monitor is not that good at displaying colors or some other shit.
There was some nsfw bots I saw and some.karma farm bots some accounts looked like real users one of them only posted purely on that subreddit
They buy real accounts with established histories and karma. I even had a DM about selling my account for $200 in BTC a few years back. Probably would have if I didn’t like my user name.
makes sense but i remember i saw peoples dms they say wild nsfw stuff and one time someone dmed me a dagger for sale
I never got anything other than spam for DMs.
News flash: it’s not just ask Reddit. It’s Reddit entirely. That place is a shithole of bots.
The only good answers I find to things are 3+ years old.
Yeah. That or niche subreddits that just aren’t popular enough to warrant bots. Like specific game communities. But even some of the big ones are full of bots.
Beep, boop! I am a bot, and this action was performed naturally.
Am I really a bot though?
Ok this red on black contrast is awful on the eyes.
how are people so bad with colors
Using this low of a contrast (dark red on dark background) is criminal. Maybe my eyes are just that bad but good lord those notes are hard to read
This just proves that OP is not a bot, he is a dumb human like us
It’s not even mine, I put the source in the post.
But I agree with the poor colour choice
After this comment I am exactly 27.3% more suspicious of OP being a bot after all.
Not necessarily. Bots can read text equally well on any colour. This might prove he is a bot.
In any case, a crime has been committed. Call the cops.
Yeah it’s awful. My vision is pretty good but this literally hurts to look at
Oh yeah, AskReddit went to shit a while ago. It used to be my favourite subreddit, but it changed about 5 years ago I think.
What’s your favorite Iron Man scene from any of the Marvel Movies?
Fun thing to do is when you realize 99% of the internet is just advertising teams working for these rich fucking A hole’s, is you make them work for their money but posting things that PR companies would hate. Just culture jam the hell out of the dead internet. Its the only way to be. Its what makes places like r/joerogan and r/thefighterandthekid so much fun.
When you start seen memes from the same IP all of sudden…
Can you provide examples?
Examples of what? Marketing teams? Check out a company called bent pixels.
To see it in action, check out r/marvel.
As far as culture jamming it goes, I don’t have many because it gets your account banned pretty fast.
just quote one here, or make one up. I also am curious to know what “culture jamming” even means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming
Because I was also curious. In short, I think it’s essentially saying shit that calls out advertising bullshit in an overt way while using the format that advertisers do.
Kinda like the magic glasses in the old movie “they live” but more colorful. Image for context:
Thank you - but I am somewhat oblivious how the poster that mentioned this term thought that this would “get your account banned” fast.
Site wide ban as well, not just a particular sub.
It’s funny how Reddit is banning more genuine people everyday and letting the bots run wild.
It’ll get worse everywhere in the internet until we return to books and printed media again because we don’t know what’s fake and what’s real
Pissing off all their best users sure was a fantastic idea.
remember when they banned bots on r/mademesmile or something and there were no posts anymore?
Wasn’t that just recently?
Wholesome memes, actually.
How could mods ban all the bots posing as human users?
AskReddit is over run by bots.FTFY
It’s still okay for niche communities, and that’s probably why people still go there
The user volume to support niche communities is the most obvious thing missing in Lemmy. But I have a darker view of the future. Picture LLM bots forging organic-looking conversations that result in a product recommendation. It looks like a genuine human conversation, but it’s actually an advertisement. Maybe it’s mixed with some human comments, but that may only add to the realism of the fraud.
That kind of ”advertising“ could potentially command a lot of money. And it could probably eventually infect just about any text platform. Maybe Lemmy as well someday?
You could deploy it pretty effectively in sufficiently large niche communities.
Picture LLM bots forging organic-looking conversations that result in a product recommendation.
Thanks for the confirmation. Ugh.
Exactly. In specific communities it’s by far the best discussion platform. And I don’t go to a site first discussion second, other way around, so to reddit I go for those.
This for sure. It’s something severely lacking at Lemmy, without the large user base the small communities can’t sustain the way they do on Reddit. Lemmy serves best as a replacement for the biggest subs.
I noticed I’m not even missing the small subs anymore.
4 different meme subs about an obscure Romanian soap opera don’t improve my quality of life.Hobby subs are the big one. If your hobby is anything other than dicking around with Linux, we probably don’t have much of a community for it, if we have one at all.
Truth. RVs and sailboats are not here. But I feel confident I’d get all the discussion I need if I wanted to install Linux on my sailboat.
Have you considered a Framework sailboat? They’re a little more expensive, but they’re designed with repairability in mind, and come with Linux pre-installed
Framework sailboats are overpriced garbage!!
You would be better off with a thinkboat x61s
Memes no, but I’ve found a lot of value in things like my hometown has a pretty active sub on Reddit which is useful for local information or subs around specific TV shows or video games bring a lot of interesting discussion or just asking questions on niche topics I’m much more likely to get an answer from a larger user base.
My home town subreddit has seen at least 1 news years eve orgy organised through it, havent seen anything comparable on lemmy!
In all honesty the lack of super specific and active communities on lemmy has actually improved my quality of life. I spend much, much less time scrolling and reading shit.
It’s a valid point, but it’s kind of like saying it’s great that the restaurant you’ve started going to has such a small menu compared to the old one because you’re not eating as much.
Yep I can confirm, I lived in my tiny reddit bubble a lot of time to care about trending shit and bots stuff.
People go there because they don’t care about interacting with other human beings. They just want an echo chamber and to occasionally feel like they are an Influencer.
And you can see the same at lemmy. Someone posts something someone doesn’t like? Immediate downvote (and, for the more pathetic people, downvoting on a few alts as well) with no comment or even attempt to refute things other than MAYBE an ad hominem. And plenty of “What is your favorite X” spam-engagement posts that just involve repeating whatever marketing schpiel they heard in the past.
There has been a recent tendency for people to reference social media network sites that are nothing but bots and… it is increasingly obvious that that is what most people want. They want to feel like they are the tastemakers. They want to be moistcritical without needing to focus test the most normy of center-right takes.
Someone posts something someone doesn’t like? Immediate downvote
Well, yeah. That is what the button is for.
It’s supposed to be for bad faith posts/comments not just for disagreement
It’s supposed to be for whatever the fuck you want to use it for. There’s no downvote police on lemmy.
Personally, I upvote every reply I get and nothing else.I downvote comments that promote hateful ideologies, whether or no they were posted in bad faith. I also downvote posts that derail the conversation, whether or not I think they were posted in bad faith because it is impossible to know if someone is posting in good faith from an individual post. By the time a pattern is clear the thread is derailed.
Context also matters, because the same post about grilled mushrooms as a substitute for grilled steaks will be posted in good faith to different posts and be a net positive or negative depending on the post. A post about grilling in general? Positive, because it adds to the topic! A post about the best cut of beef for grilling? Negative, because it derails the thread to be about not eating beef.
Sure, people should not be downvoting non-important topics or views that they could just block instead. But a lot of people also assume bad faith when someone disagrees with them, so that isn’t good criteria either.
Those are also good reasons, i.e. more than just “I disagree”
Ultimately, it’s supposed to be used to make post/comments less visible, for whatever reason.
And it doesn’t really have much of an effect on lemmy at all.
Sick burn and true, we have so few comments that we read all of them anyway.
Yes, it’s good to realise that lemmy is just as much an echo chamber as reddit is. Same echoes, differnet voice. But don’t you dare actually having a different voice, that will not be appreciate. People want to have discussions, but only with yes men.
stop saying the truth. it hurts their feelings.
I’ve never understood what anyone gets out of hosting and spamming reddit with bots
Conspiracy hat on:
It’s done by Reddit themselves. They know user visits are dropping. They know power users have slipped. To avoid making it look like a desert, they have bots create content.
Reddit’s origin story is sockpuppeting as users.
They’ll do it again
The 9Gag way…
Conspiracy: Reddit sells bots and bot acquired analytics to high paying corpos, but are losing sales to secondary markets undercutting the reddit sold bots.
My friend still uses reddit
The difference between now and then though, is they were a private company.
Unless they disclose they use bots to post content and make the site look active, any use of user count and engagement for any aspect of the company becomes fraud as its misleading investors.
Oh we have 1 million posts an hour! Fraud.
Oh we have 100 million monthly active users! Fraud!
Investors Q/A - do you use bots? Answer No. Fraud.
They can pay a random LLC to do it for them.
Q&A do you use bots to generate content or have you used any 3rd party that uses bots themselves directly or through another party.
As long as its asked and it gets leaked they lied it’s fraud.
Plausible deniability doesn’t work if proof comes out.
You don’t hire a hitman and get off scott free when proof comes out you hired a hitman.
Fraud doesn’t really stop a big company, if they can get away with it.
Facebook for example.
And whose to say it’s not them directly, but a “third party who Reddit pays for user acquisition” services?
Selling accounts with high karma to people wanting to push an agenda with a seemingly legit account
Mature accounts with some activity are worth money to people looking to AstroTurf political discussions.
Not just political, it helps brands advertise as well
How much can I make with a 10 yo account with average karma? Where can i sell it?
Web queries work best, first two results
https://www.playerup.com/accounts/redditaccount/
https://swapd.co/c/social-media/buy-sell-reddit/99
But look around and see a place that you feel comfortable with
Even ebay works
Huh, even the most “aged” and high-karma accounts seem to top out under $1k, average for a well-used account seems $300-500, and most for way less. Wonder how many sales are actually made.
I haven’t thought about Reddit since the mod ban but aren’t people being paid to make content? So could be mass farming nickels?