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.

    • ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 months ago

      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!”

      • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 months ago

        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.

        • Kaldo@kbin.social
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          6 months ago

          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.

          • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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            6 months ago

            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.

            • nytrixus@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              Can they really fuck up any more than they’ve already fucked up?

              I don’t know about you, but the only thing I can see that Reddit could do that’ll fuck them up is either taking porn away because their shareholders demand it or they fall out of favor with the stock market because Wall St realized how much of an idiot spez really is to them.

              KBin did exist back then last year. The problem with KBin right now is the guy running it is having personal issues and the magazines there are getting swamped by bots and spam. And there’s nobody there to kick them out.

          • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            6 months ago

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

            • ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              6 months ago

              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.

              • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                6 months ago

                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

                • ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  6 months ago

                  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.

                  • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                    6 months ago

                    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.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          6 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.com
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            6 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.world
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              6 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.

              • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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                6 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.world
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                  6 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.

                • eldavi@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  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

                  i became a reddit user on almost the same day and i think i was slower than you to delete my content because i could no longer access my posts older than a few months when i tried; i always wondered if that was intentional and now i have evidence that it was.

                  i switched to reddit because my previous social media platform did the same thing reddit did (also at around a decade plus of using it); i’m still kicking myself for falling into the same cycle again and i really hope the fediverse doesn’t do the same thing.

                  • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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                    6 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.

              • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                6 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.world
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                  6 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.com
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                    6 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.world
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                  6 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.

          • ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            6 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.world
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              6 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.com
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                6 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.

        • nytrixus@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          We don’t need them. If they’ve spent years, shitting on the communities they’ve hogged all this time, what does one think they’ll do when they come here?

          The worst that they can do is run their own instance, but it’ll be away from the rest of us.

      • Clbull@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        As much as I dislike iBleeedBullshit and AssholeTheTurtle, I can respect the fact that they pissed off Spez enough to nuke their accounts from orbit.

      • nytrixus@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        That’s exactly the gesture I gathered when all of the subreddits opened back up. “Please! Please! Don’t take away what little control we have over everyone because we live insufferable lives because we barely control a single thing in it! We’ll comply!”

        Yeah, great little movement you did there, guys…