Obligatory Fuck Spez
I think he might’ve misunderstood a message and thinks there’s really that many people who want to have sex with him…
Fuck Spez
Don’t fuck Spez actually, there’s no doubt in my mind he’s a terrible shag.
Greedy little pigboy
Fuck that twat. He did get me off of reddit, so credit there.
Reddit never gave a shit about bots. To them it’s something that pumps up their active users numbers to woo their investors. They’re only doing this so they can force people to view their ads that are designed to look like posts.
Who goes on Reddit nowadays anyway?
I still go on reddit often since that’s where most of the game communities I want to hear from are.
Same, Lenny isn’t mature enough to have some of the very niche communities yet
It’s not even mature enough to support some mainstream interests, like sports.
no laundry community on Llemmy either…
That’s the problem with changing social networks.
People goes where people are. So it takes some major scew up from the current networks. Or a newcomer that have some killer feature everybody will want / need.
And lemmy lacks that “killer feature”
Lemmy/Piefed/Etc has a killer feature (or maybe characteristic), but one that only a fraction of users find appealing. Being decentralized makes the network more resistant to many of the problems we see on Reddit and other networks, or at least, reduces their impact.
Yeah, it’s not something lots of people will care about. And some eventually stops at “choosing in instance”.
I think what there users who mostly post and users that mostly comment (I belong to the later). Lemmy could try to bootstrap some of those communities (note: to not make it to specific) by just reposting the same posts that are posted in Reddit and see if that could increase activity.
there are plenty of empty communities where the only posters are bots that mirror reddit. it’s clear that doesnt do anything except earn a block
Yeah, if I want yoyo stuff, I have to go visit r\throwers.
Pretty much the same if I need mechanic info.
It’s not even mature enough to have an active Minecraft community, imagine how’s the situation with smaller or indie games…
There isnt even an intactivism community here bruh!!!
Heck there isnt even LAUNDRY community on Lemmy!?! How yall existed for this long with no laundry community yall?!?
Lemmy never will be big enough without a change in thinking from the feudal nature to a more liberal democracy, alas.
Can you expand a bit? What do you mean “feudal nature” and “liberal democracy”? Do you mean society as a whole or Lemmy in general?
Yes I would be pleased to expand thank you for asking.
Lemmy is a mini reddit, moderators own the space, like a feudal lord. To take off, as an alternative to the feudal spaces of big social media, we need to offer a better alternative.
To that effect, a clear set of moderation rules would help, and for that set of rules to end in a jury trial of members.
But Lemmy is just software. Anyone can throw up an instance with whatever rules they want lol. So why not spin up your own instance with these rules and jury members?
Ah, I see. Thanks for explaining
Booo
You should start a community for those games. Or contribute to an existing one. Be the change
I mostly stick to Lemmy but there are times when I have a question to ask and the larger number of eyes on it does feel better even if it’s just a placebo
i had to ask very specific questions, that Reddit has the niche subs for, that lemmy doesnt have recently.
I go on Reddit read-only fairly often, but these days it’s quite rare that I’ll post or comment. And when I do I always take the opportunity to promote the fediverse.
What, they’re not on neoseeker?
I joke, but really why not try going back to bulletin boards again? Neoseeker was made for games and it always had plenty of users. It’s at least better than reddit.
ew
Unfortunately a good chunk of linux distro resources and troubleshooting, and also many hobby stuff is over there.
This one is surprising to me. If there’s one thing that Lemmy has a lot of, its Linux enthusiasts
Back to stackoverflow!
They’re concerned about AI scraping. They want to sell access to users’ content for training, not let the AI in for free.
Exactly. They definitely care. They want the AI companies coughing up dough for all that data.
Thankfully redlib still works
Thankfully redlib still works
For now
Yeah definitely not optimistic it’ll keep working
It could also be to make things difficult for redlib, which uses the reddit API.
I think the issue is also related to how Reddit makes money. Reddit makes money from selling advertisement. I would guess they are charging a certain fee based off subreddit activity the ads are shown in. When most of that Reddit activity is bots and fake clicks on advertisement then the company won’t see the return on their investment because they thought a million people would see their ad but only 100k real people actually saw it.
You guys see ads on reddit? I laugh in ublock
the problem with uBlock there is thst sometimes on reddit they post like ‘Advertisement Posts’ …Like actual posts that are not about that niche community in anyway but are nothing more than an advertisement for a comoany and uBlack obviously cant block that.
Ive seen it a few times in the past but its been like 4 years since Ive been on reddit so I dont know if theyve stopped doing that.
I’m banned
Permanently
You are banned for this comment which you can’t see
Bastards!
they never ever did anything to propaganda bots at least not recently, and since trumps 2nd win in the WH it was clear they were banning.
I use Red Reader to look at reddit for a few specific subs but I prefer hanging out here.
ublockorigin prevents those fake posts from my screen.
Reddit is slowly dying. It will eventually be 100% bots.
When I left Reddit years ago I was already convinced than more than half the accounts were bots.
During the exodus, it felt like 20-30%
Anything with an even mildly AI-adjacent topic is a solid 75% bots right now…
/r/nvidia, /r/amd, /r/hardware, etc, etc…
the “meat” is where all the propaganda can target like the front page subs.
Absolutely. Frontpage stuff like /r/politics has been mostly bots & trolls farms since well-before the AIpocalypse. AI just took much of the burden off the human hand on that rudder.
They ruined r/foss and on a track to finish off r/selfhosted, my beloved. S/selfhosted used to be mega cool place to be. Today it is plain depressing. And an actual user activity there dropped to almost zero.
thats whats FB has become.
FB is really garbage.
I’d like to believe it is but I also know that the majority of people online do not give a damn about user experience and things getting shittier. I do not understand these people, but its because of them this shit is still happening. If they all left sites like reddit there’d be no incentive to become shittier and shittier.
Not trying to shift blame though, in the first place its companies like reddit even coming up with strategy who are to blame.
I was chased out by admin in 2024, after a long line of accounts were violated for abuses that were falsely alleged. Because Israel I suspect.
It will be Facebook 2.0. A place where boomers and bots dwell.
See my Reddit alternative: Zyke Design was inspired by piefed. Had 3k hits last month
Ok…? This is such an odd comment, it’s like you’re not aware of lemmy and piefed etc. being alternatives while using one of them.
because of AI bots
We all know they really were just looking for any excuse
They’ll still allow AI bots. Only the ones they authorize though. Without them their paying customers will realize how many people have left.
It’s technically true. They want those bots to pay for that access.
I’m glad to hear that from someone that’s as anti-ai as you
Honestly like I hate AI but I still use it
there are some very narrow uses where AI is actually useful. Most of what it’s used for is junk though. The early internet was the same way, but at least that was charming about it. I doubt that a website comprised of 1200 clipart hamster gifs and a pitch toned clip of a song from Disney’s Robin Hood is going to hack a competing Sites mainframe looking for ways to inflate its page veiws.
The AI bubble will burst, companies will actually sit down, pull their heads out of their asses, and actually apply it to something useful, as it was originally conceived.
They killed access to old Reddit without an account a couple months ago. Also i saw some people can’t access the new one without an account but i guess they are rolling out that one slowly.
They’re making the website viewable only with an account.
Sooo Reddit is doing this to get rid of bots… except the only users they have left are bots… weird.
Their automated filters seem to be designed to ban people and leave bots. 🤭
That feeling when you get banned from a community cause you typed in “Im a Black man” and the auto mod banned you for the world “Black”…
spammer bots, and propaganda bots, utilizing AI posting or using hundreds of account at once by 1 entity.
Because israel primaralily, but now expanded to protect all power players, because fuck you (me especially,) that’s why.
They own those bots though most likely.
Just like the same endless crap keeps showing up on my meta feeds from bot accounts because it gains traction
they also allow propaganda bots from russia, israel , and palantir to run free to astroturf comments.
Next: reddit is killing its HTTP interface to stop AI bots
I’ve been wondering about something like this for years. Websites have been aggressively enshittifying for a long time now. Everything defends against accessing their content via any unapproved means. Getting a full resolution image from anywhere via image search becomes more difficult every day. If a search engine lands you on a site, the site deliberately withholds the content that brought you there and dangles the carrot to keep you using the site for as long as possible, always making sure you fall just short of what you’re after so you keep looking. Most links that you share directly from your URL bar are littered with telemetry data so that unless you first sanitize the link, sharing it on social media means that now the site is able to link your session to the account that shared the link and map your social connections on platforms they don’t even own.
I have a foreboding of a future internet where everything, even the structure of URLs themselves is obscured behind a layer that is opaque to the end user. People will be completely locked in to only using the site in an approved manner from an active account in “good standing” with the platform. You can use the site as normal as long as you’re logged in, but the URL itself would only ever be something like website.com/sU6ecjejfE32Jy7w94. You could share that link as normal and people could click it and be directed to the thing you want to share, but they can’t view the content without logging in, and even if they don’t log in, the mere fact that they clicked it still links the two of you together in the user map. Nothing ever escapes the sandbox and nobody is able to share content from the site unless they accessed it from approved means, and they can only share it to others who are also using approved means. The more websites adopt this model, the more user-mapping takes place until eventually anonymity on the internet is completely dead. Every single site knows exactly who everyone is and every social connection that they have. Everyone who refuses to submit to this new paradigm is blocked from accessing the site at all, yet they are still mapped all the same. Making a new website that’s this restrictive would probably mean that it never gets off the ground, but making that change on a platform where users are already dependent and tolerating increasing levels of enshittification just might work. If one major platform pulls it off, others will follow.
The world wide web a legacy platform at this point. It’s treated as such by both the tech industry and average people. Most people use social media through apps. All the government organizations and banks are consolidating their services to apps. Nobody makes their own websites anymore.
The reality hasn’t sunk in yet for the rest of us, but it’s happening. We assumed it would be a forever thing once it was created. It turns out the world wide web is going to be brief historical period at the turn of the century that you tell your grandkids about.
Maybe some day the PC will go back to being a novelty appliance found in few living rooms. Where you have to power it up, sign on, and browse the few handful of websites in existence. When you’re done, you turn it off and go about your day again.
apps are so much more terrible to use than the browser, much more limited ui and features. like your bank and healthcare apps is so not intuitive.
This seems likely? I’ve had several services that I used to use, which deprecated their website in favour of their app 🤮
That would be one way to force people to use their shitty app.
I mean yeah they literally will and force everyone onto the app.
the APP gives them more data, like your components, and whatever else they are getting on your phone.
No, they aren’t. The headline is just a giant lie. Why would anyone pretend to believe it?
Reddit was destroyed by bots years ago. So that’s nonsense. But they have two strong reasons to pull public access. First, if the public has access to the data, then companies won’t buy it for AI training. Second, if the public has access to the data, they can prove (as we already knew) that Reddit is full of bots, so there is no reason you would want to buy training data from it.
It’s both. The LLM scrapers are now relentless. They are also closing the door so they can sell the data to Google.
I thought google didn’t want renew the contract since they already scraped everything useful? That’s why reddit is panicking
Ah I didn’t realize that had ended.
Welp I’m sure there will be others trying to get into the game but none likely as lucrative.
and people who buy ads on Reddit thinking it’s going to get a certain amount of views but they don’t know most of those views are bots until after they paid for the ads. Then they have to prove to Reddit they were tricked and good luck with that unless your a corporation Reddit wants to have a good relationship with.
reddit also wants GENUINE human generated content, not AI-generated posts or comments that poisons thier data, thats why the forced logins. im in another forum where the spammers, have to "make genuine’ content to evade thier spam/bot filters.
How sad that Aaron Swartz was there for the creation of RSS and Reddit. Like spitting on his grave by removing access to data and putting up walls.
I often think about Swartz, and I wonder if he did what he did because he saw where we were heading and knew that they were never going to let him near a computer to fight it. I hope that he’s at peace.
only to have the alien hybrid spez to thirst for musk and destroy reddit.
A mild realization just hit me. Reddit used to come up in daily conversation, even with randos. Now when I mention it nobody even knows what it is, and those that do remember it… speak of it only as this vague place they used to go years ago. “Oh yeah I remember reddit”
E: fyi I’m talking roughly circa 2008-2013 when every last bricklayer, sewer technician, and 7-Eleven worker “found” the platform
The only time it comes up in conversations is because my buddy discovered reddit only like 3 years ago, when I had just moved to lemmy. He still sends me reddit links several times a week.
Then there is the tech support side, because name it and it’s been posted on reddit, usually with the solution, but now everybody just AI’s the shit out of that so that has become less relevant.
And that’s it. Everyone else that I knew that used reddit has moved on years ago.
Reddit never came up in daily conversation for me. It came up only occasionally, and it actually seemed to do so more often after it went public.
It was a weird coincidence
Extra hilarious because they just invested so much in ads to try and rope in every day people.
Really? Wow. I have no way of really knowing for sure but I am pretty convinced that they reached maximum saturation of their user base 10 years ago… That’s why there was this sudden whiplash pivot to forcing Indian, Pakistani, and the European content to the front page.
I saw that as the indicator that the North American market had been penetrated as far as they were going to penetrate, and they were looking abroad.
Now with what you’re telling me it’s making me question reality, I don’t think there’s a person on the planet that isn’t aware of reddit, I think people just don’t want to use it anymore!
Question, where have you noticed these advertisements?
They were on network TV over the holidays. My family has disney+ and they had ads when I went over their house. I also saw ads on YouTube. It was quite a bit so it was a strong push in advertising.
I posted on a food sub, saying "that looks incredible* something innocuous like that.
Bot removes my post, contact mode team because I cannot quite believe what I read. Auto mod, (cannot believe it was a human), tells me the same thing. Reddit has profiled me as being disruptive & I can post once I have “improved my standing”
Things like this are a red rag to me, always have been. Anyway, the food sub is muted, & reddit can get fucked, I’ll post my opinions whether any bot likes it or not till I’m inevitably banned for failure to “conform” to their disgusting agenda.
I was in a discussion on the post election political situation in Sweden right now and from nowhere my five year old account got flagged as “suspicious” and locked until verified. For whatever reason it refused to hit me with CAPTCHA and the likes. I had no email registered previously and could not verify. I tried a couple of temp email but got no verification sent there. So I registered a throw away at a legitimate email provider and changed it there. Nothing there either.
But I also have mods and at least one admin that doesn’t like me from long ago because I make fun of Nazis. So maybe I am “suspicious”.
There is something new they’re doing. They say you’re a bot, or are spamming, this seems a catch all to shadow ban people anyone that says anything the admin considers contrary to the reddit agenda. You could try contacting the site mods…I got a “bot” ban lifted that way once.
on the shadowban sub, the only way you can actually post every 10minutes, most people dont get a response on why they get banned or thier appeals heard.
I had a very similar experience. I had a reddit account from before they required email addresses. It got flagged as “suspicious”, it forced me to reset the password in order to continue, and the password reset required me to provide an email address, which I refused to do. I asked an AI agent what might have caused the flag. At the moment my account got flagged, I was arguing on reddit with some pro-China people, and I was posting links to the genocide of the Uyghurs. The agent told me that hackers probably made multiple failed attempts to log in to my account and this triggered the flag. Sounds like something similar could have been done to you by people who opposed your political views.
i wonder if reddit accounts to get stolen,.
I wondered the same. As far as I can tell, in my case, hackers (presumably pro-China activists) simply made multiple failed attempts to log in to my account. They probably had no chance of getting access, but they knew that it would cause the account to be flagged. They probably did not know 1) that reddit did not have my email address, and 2) that reddit required that for a password reset, and 3) that I was not willing to provide it - so effectively they locked me out of my account.
that flagging your account as suspicious happened the moment i was using a different browser. its really mean they were already going to ban you.
Reddit has become unusable. It has moderaters that are censorious, sactimonious, petty and do not care about. free speech. Adverts are becoming unbearable and the riculous time limits drive me mad! The inane Avartars are imbecilic too.
Eventually, all these tech companies scale up to a size where they don’t have to give a shit about people anymore. They only care if you’re a celebrity or somehow manage to create a big PR show that they have to respond to. But at this point, regular people are just like blades of grass that will eventually get mowed down somehow and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Now it’s dead and time to move on.
“platform decay” aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Horribly accurate. I remember the good old days when imgur was to all intents & purposes a porn site, now it’s some sort of self help horror show where the appearance of a nipple is tantamount to a crime against humanity.
on reddit, BILL gates was on the sites for a few years, and then he vanished around epstein getting arrested, hmm guessing epstein news was potentially going to out him too, thats why he stopped. even his “covid vaccine” philantropy was a vaneer of what he wanted.
now another celebrity, GARY sinise suddenly was on reddit alot, starting right before trumps 2nd election, suspicious i think not. providing military propaganda for conservatives on the site, he also seems like he acts as he was a vet himself. then on youtube saw his “im leaving hollywood” interview, he said it was his SON that was the cause, but im thinking the winds were changing and his republican whom he announced publically on election year was going to cause him to lose roles in hollywood. hes has a wierd obsession with vets.
large subs are too infested with moderation and bots.
It’s ridiculous. The bots ban and then they guard the mods (humans), who could review the case(-s). Support is pretty much non-existent.
A Call for a Freer Web
Aaron Swartz’s legacy is a stark reminder of the ongoing battle for information freedom. His story indicts legal systems that can be weaponized and highlights the corporate enclosure of the digital commons.
Key Takeaways:
- The CFAA can be a tool for disproportionate prosecution and intimidation.
- Corporate imperatives can transform open platforms into controlled, monetized spaces.
- The “transfer” of concern was one of control and vision, not physical assets.
- Algorithmic curation can subtly shape discourse and limit exposure to diverse views
Swartz’s life compels us to critically interrogate the forces shaping our online world. We must advocate for digital infrastructure as a public utility, renew commitment to information freedom, and collectively imagine and build digital spaces for authentic democratic participation, transcending the logic of profit and control.
Full text
Thats like nice and all and thanks for saying the truth but my question ks what can we actually do?
(And you better not say ‘just write to your representatives’ please)
What we can do:
. Stop contributing to our collective demise by avoiding companies / groups that are enforcing slavery ( i.e.: Reddit, blackrock group, CCP, etc…)
. Vote everyday with your choices ( wallet, travel, etc…)
. Lead by example: Make excellence an habit!
. Support Free & Open Source Software which is privacy respecting
because of AI bots
Is it because they want it to be only a.i. bots, because that seems to be where it’s heading by making it more and more hostile to humans.
I mean, “because of AI bots” is technically correct, but it’s more because they want to control the sale of their own users’ data rather than letting other bots scrape to sell.
That also means there’s a strong incentive for the remaining human users with two brain cells to rub together to not provide anything for the scraping bots to use. Certainly not for free.
hence the lurking.
Lol Reddit
I actually forgot about Reddit in the same way I forgot about Friendster… Which I want to point out is also still around and being used by real people, somehow.
I wish Lemmy was more popular. I still use Reddit for niche things; for example, I’m getting a new Pebble watch and I want to see posts about that. Here, the whole community has a small handful of posts. On Reddit there are new posts every day. Sigh!
I’m finding that Lemmy and the Fediverse in general isn’t good enough for normie stuff, like TV and movies. Frankly, i think videogames too now that i think about it. I’ve seen news about videogames, but never people talking about a videogame. Even anime and manga is very limited.
I don’t think that’s inherently a platform limitation though. Maybe an initial hurdle for people to join, but once you’re on here, you’re free to talk about whatever you want.
The real issue is that AI fucking scans everything you ever post, so most people don’t want to give out anything real anymore because - surprise - people like privacy.
That huge chunk of people who are aware of what’s going on in the world (weird conservative global takeover) and are tech literature is basically a circle, so you don’t get a ton of people on here divulging their hearts out.
Tldr basically, conservatives ruin everything.
tv and movies used to be a larger community, until the last big instance shut down. people decided to scatter to different platforms or instances, thus diluting how much topic we get on entertainment.
And the types of anime/manga you’re allowed to like on Lemmy is also very narrow.
A lot of the subreddits i used to frequent have virtually dead (less than one post a month on average) mirrors here, or none at all.
It’ll get there just in time for the IPO
Lemmy won’t ever become bigger than what it currently is. I’ve been waiting for years but the reality is that Lemmy will forever be a niche platform for left wing politics that’s banned on Reddit and tech bros.
There’s right wing politics too. Don’t be weird bro.
On here? Where?
There are a few communities. One example: !conservative2@lemmy.today
Bruh, it’s dead. The last post was made over a year ago
I’m sure there are others. That’s just the one I thought of off the top of my head.
Yeah…
AI bots….
That’s why.
its clearly a combination of shitty decisions frrom the executives at reddit, the mods, the massive invasionn of bot users and restricting API access.
I do not miss Reddit at all.
The only thing I miss about reddit is access to the comments. There was often valuable troubleshooting advice in the comments for a myriad of issues. It’s a real shame that they’ve taken this stance. Just another mistake in a long line of mistakes that is going to result in the death of the platform.
It’s true. One of the things I miss was subscribing to the subreddit related to the car I bought because I was going to get a lot of valuable info about maintaining and fixing that car.
if someone else would please make an instance focusing on the 2008 nissan Xterra preferably maintaining one over 200k miles thank you
I do. But not in the way you might think. I was on reddit since nearly the beginning. It was such a great place. But then spez ruined it :(
It’s like this: fuck spez.
spez decided to run his mouth, that he liked MUSK and money more. and has heeded to every MUsk’s concerned about when reddit is making musk look bad.
You do. It lives in your head rent free.