Social network Reddit recently began blocking mobile visitors to its website while pushing them to download the official Reddit app, and it's fair to say that the move is not going down well with users. If you visit reddit.com on your iPhone today, you may see a new popup that can't be dismissed, asking you to "get the app to keep using Reddit".
You think there are still redditors around?
I think it’s just troll farms and bots. Every once in a while someone stumbles into the site and says something. THEN there is a whirlwind of answers/speculations/theories/lies.
A.I is running the show. If I use a certain word or phrase I get filtered. If I say the exact same thing without those “catch phrases” then I see a few votes.
I treat the site as a test site for trying language that gets PAST the trolls.
Honestly I find the website borderline unreadable.
On mobile website you haven’t been able to view and replies for a long time. On desktop it’s just so fucking stupid.
Well, there it is. I don’t have a phone.
Clearly my experience is NOT the norm.
(I do have a device at my house that uses VOIP to “act” like a phone)
There’s no objective data to confirm or dispel your suspicion that there are
zerofew human Redditors (your hyperbole aside).There’s definitely tons of bots posting and voting (and likely always has been), but I really doubt a large percentage of commenters are bots.
- A non-bot redditor
You are correct. I have been paying attention to this for a few YEARS now. It is just MY observation of events I have seen. It is NOT my opinion, it is MY direct observation.
Clearly more study is needed. By THIS administration? NEVERMIND!
Why do you think you’re able to detect a bot by their Reddit comments? I strongly suspect you’re assuming low-effort, poorly-written comments are bots, when in reality they’re probably just dumb people.
It really depends on the subreddits I think. It was starting to really go downhill before I was booted, but most of the issues floated around political, news and general subreddits from what I could tell.
Get into interests, like football or music and there seemed to be less rubbish and bot accounts so to speak. I guess this makes sense but that’s what I noticed going out the ban door as I was.
I just left last month, I’d say 30% users and rest bots
One thing I’ve noticed lurking on AITA is that there’s suddenly more people casually talking about being religious. Not like overtly preaching like you’d see in the past, but more people referencing going to church or doing things for religious reasons.
It just seemed out of place and weird. Like the tone of that part of the internet suddenly changed. It’s still more liberal than conservative, though that conflict seems to be mostly just not present, perhaps in part because of their rule against political topics, though even when some slip through, it does seem to lean more liberal or even progressive than conservative. Like plenty of abortion support, no broad support for tribal or hierarchical judgements. But it suddenly seems more religious. Christian, specifically.
While church attendance is NOW declining rapidly?
I suspect a Christian troll farm at work here. They NEED to indoctrinate at an early age to survive.
They can’t use FACTS, their bible doesn’t have any good ones.
It’s mostly the most frequented subreddits that are being brigaded and farmed.
I can guarantee you the Argentina subreddit is heavily brigaded by the extreme right. That’s the case I know, but it’s easy to imagine it happening in a lot of not so popular subreddits
I guess it depends on where you look. All the subs I’ve been visiting where people actually hang out, rather than just a handful of karma farmers spamming, are still flourishing*, so I never fully switched to Lemmy, but use both 🤷 Reddit subs have a magnitude or two more people, so imho they’re better for news, memes and technical advice, while for the past couple years Lemmy feels better for insightful conversations.
* my main subs are for specific games and apps, a few countries/regions, and r/BestofRedditorUpdates, so ymmv
I think the bot percentage is proportional to how big a subreddit is and how profitable influencing people browsing it is.
Niche community about how to proplift (stealing small cuttings to grow your own plants)? Zero or close to zero bots.
Crypto community with thousands of comments a day, where it’s all speculation that can’t be objectively proven so bots stick out like a sore thumb and tons of money flying around? You better believe the bots are all over that.
Of course there are redditors around; I’m another one of them. We frequent the cool subs like the very human /r/FreeGameFindings and ignore the rest of the noise. Milk Reddit for the best of what it has to offer and dismiss the rest. I see nothing wrong with this approach for as long as Lemmy is still budding, relatively speaking.
I haven’t checked how big the ones that I still frequent there (like /r/manybaggers and /r/onebag) but they do still have organic real people posts. Anything news, tech, or politics, anything of that size, I just abandon any hope they’re not troll infested and LLM bots. Not to mention meme subs and themed artwork subs. Just full of vote farming bots. I need the art source, you dinguses!
On the bright side, /r/sbcgaming have a comms here and can also tie into retrogaming
As well as flashlights.
Lemmy world does the same thing, but to a lesser extent. Since they have so much of the users on the fediverse, them controlling their front page really controls the votes and who sees what.
How would that work?
We are all on different instances. With different algorithms, technology, and differing filters. The code doesnt support what your saying.
I know nothing about Lemmy’s architecture, but how does my instance tally votes on a post from another instance?
Does it trust that instance? Does it only take into account votes cast on itself? Does it ask every federated instance for their vote totals?
Good questions. Its been a bit since ive looked at lemmys code so im going to dive in again.
Here is the docs for the votes themselves. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/main/src/users/03-votes-and-ranking.md
You can see this in action here: https://lemvotes.org/ if I recall.
I know the vote model is here . You can see the logic here. It checks to see if the post is actually available in the community with other functions and other such checks. It doesnt ask any lemmy instance for totals (unless theres something im not aware of), it tallies based on real time data. Which can also include fediverse actions(not necessarily lemmy/piefed/mbin/etc… but also mastodon, gotosocial, and other such services).
One of the things piefed does a bit differently is it bunches up votes for sending to other instances. And there is a backfill operation when puling from new communities or users. I would argue its a bit better than lemmys system at least from a technical perspective. But its a VERY minor one. Its nice we have multiple ways of getting to the same result-ish.
Hope that helps! I dont know everything but I know a little bit.
That’s quite interesting, thank you! So for an instance to manipulate votes, they’d have to stream a bunch of fake events.
Essentailly. Theres a couple of peertube instances that had that issue if i recall. Filters started to go up a coupke of years ago. Admins can see it pretty easy in the logs most of the time once its pointed out. Its a timing thing. Some software is beyter at it than others.
If an instance has the most people and blocks those people from seeing your post, delays it from posting, or downgrades it as a source, it could easily be done. They have control over their own instance.
Can you elaborate? Arent blocks public via the admin logs in lemmy? In addition that info can be pulled from the api from any instance/fediverse protocol.
I can reproduce of need be since i have my own lemmy and piefed instance and have over 20 years of software development experience.
They* called it shadow banning on reddit, but I think of it more as shadow curating. I explain it a little more in other comments itt. Reddit does the curating as well.
IMO, you could do this live pretty easily. When I first started posting, the trolls would complain that I wasn’t consistently online, lol.
<lesser extent>
I dont understand. Can you point to where in the code it has this? The algorithm/stack is open to anyone.
You can read the code? I can’t. It wouldn’t even have to be a permanent code. It cold work for say an hour, take the post out of the running for the front page, and then disappear. The effects would be the same.
I know this is happening, I have no idea how.
Yep i can. Ive helped out on both lemmy, piefed, mastodon, gotosocial, peertube and others. Little things mind but yeah its my day job.
Theres a queue that is part of different instances. What can happen is posts/comments get backed up and the queue takes them all in. When an outage or slowdown happens it can bog down certain servers. Threadiverse (piefes/lemmy/mbin/etc…) up/down votes, comments, posts, etc… it gets slower as more instances connect to others. Its unfortunate but its part of the fediverse protocol. Piefed has some advances there, but it can still get bogged down sometimes.
Im not saying thats definitively what it is, but ive been on the other side of this phenomenon a couple of times when my lemmy and then later piefed instance had a new instance sync with it. Lemmy.world has had this issue for a while since its one of the biggest.
The way to test is to sent the instance in quesion a POST request with a comment OR use a known good instance (like piefed) and check the logs. It usually comes back with either a 200 immediately (which is good) or theres a HUGE delay.
Most of these instances are very much volunteer efforts.
So, instead of saying this isn’t happening, why not look into how it could be done? They’re doing it, I have no idea how. Take a look at new and you’ll see that things are being controlled for the all, hot page.
I post almost every work day, I can see the patterns really well from my end. I don’t care about upvotes as well, so I don’t really have any emotion attached to it other than it pisses me off that I’m probably not seeing other things they don’t want me to see. That’s really what I hated about reddit too and why I came here.
They could have someone controlling it real time, yeah? That would explain the inconsistency of when I post out of the norm. I’ve been lightly testing them for years now, which is why I believe I can safely say these things.
It would be VERY difficult. I have no idea what im looking for other than the delay or block. And im not seeing anything today. If you can give me an example, I can check in and reproduce. Otherwise its nettle/haystack.
It might very well be a bug.
I can see it being frustrating. But thats what community software is. The good news is that even just reporting the issue can help us all out!