The ebike subreddit is modded by the owners of Lunacycle. They actively remove posts about bad customer service/other issues from Lunacycle. I witnessed them name and shame some random redditor and accuse them of fraud because they posted screenshots of email correspondence that pointed out shady dealings on Luna’s part.
They use the general subreddit for electric bikes to funnel everyone into ordering from them.
during the massive purge of rebellious mods, there was a huge opening for corporate shills to move into places where previous mods had kept them out. this phenomenon was widespread in many fan and specialty subs. Reddit admins were more than happy to let this happen, as corporate shills were also more than happy to be cooperative with Reddit admins.
Everything about Reddit’s most recent changes has been openly about cracking the place wide open for corporate marketing. Everything good about it was because of how genuine it was, and it was genuine because for a very long time, the attitude was to shield it against corporate influence.
That’s the only reason it became such a valuable place for search results: as the forums and blogs around the Internet went silent and corporations ravaged individual websites, reddit was a bubble of genuine interaction. It’s not just Google’s shitty algorithm, it’s also because the Internet itself got injected with shit, and reddit was a safe haven. A deeply flawed one, but still, notably less fake and corporate than the web pages around it.
That’s what gave it value.
Spez knows this. The admins have known this the whole damn time. That’s why there used to be rules against self-posting content. That’s why celebrities were only allowed to promote things in AMAS. To head off attention seeking, marketing, and corporate influence.
But the time came to make money, and they’re burning it all down to accomplish that.
I will never not share this blog because it hits the nail so cleanly on the head it sails straight down to the core of the earth:
Stop talking to each other and start buying things
It’s not just about ads, it’s about the corruption of public spaces. The death of social media is when someone tries to start making money off it at the expense of its genuine human interaction, which can not exist in that environment unmolested, and will cascade into the platform’s collapse over time. it’s enshitification, yes, but it’s also something else: “dehumanation”. The drowning of the human element of your social platform through profit seeking.
I’ve been through too many exodus, this post hits hard and true. Been using the net since 95 and have been a community refuge too many times. I’m really hoping federation takes off because I’m tired of rebuilding. Not sure I’ll try again if this doesn’t pan out.
Informational tragedy. Really is.
This hurts us as consumers, patients, thinkers, feelers. :(
I’m calling 1 year on the over/under for the introduction of blue check marks.
You mean Reddit gold check marks
You mean narwhal bacon badges.
Since before the exodus or after?
Before and worse after
I had no idea. I am well aware of Lunacycle’s toxicity from endless-sphere.com.
I’m not used to seeing this with so many pixels.
I find it has a nice understated impact
It’s so much worse than 15%.
Member-only story
Medium wants me to pay them to read a story from “Homeless Romantic” who is listed as a “Ph.D. Rocket Surgeon & Aspiring Troglodyte”?
Are they fucking high?
well, whomever describes themselves in such a manner clearly is.
It’s been a wonder that site ever got traction as something credible to get info from and not just a weird mesh of editorial, blogging, and long winded shitposts…
edit: That being said, fuck reddit.
I’ve always seen it as a site for random people to shitpost. Who takes Medium seriously as a credible source?
I popped over to Reddit for the first time since third party apps were cruelly shut down. It’s clear that Reddit has sunk to new lows. Obviously trolling and a marked decrease in the quality of content
what I noticed is that posts have huge amounts of upvotes, even from small communities, and often no comments or when it does have comments its often very basic stuff, almost AI like
They aren’t even trying with those usernames, lazy.
I can’t believe 8 people had the exact same idea for a post at the same time, that’s crazy
/s
Well, if you’re going to defraud investors by pumping up your numbers before your IPO, you might as well go all out.
Is that recent? I haven’t used Reddit since a few months and that phenomena was previously only on promoted posts (read, ads)
like 2 months ago
You know what else is random and probably related to their paid content? Their sorting doesn’t work right anymore. Posts in “hot” are regularly like more than a day old but then also some are brand new like minutes old. But if you sort by top 24 hours…same posts. Sometimes the order is different but easily 75% of the posts are the same. A 24 hour old post with no new comments is “hot”? A one hour old post with 20 comments is in the top posts of the past day?..OKAY
It could be incompetence. Lemmy.world has similar and significant issues with sorting as well and I presume you’re not also implying that paid content has anything to do with lemmy sorting.
Go back to Reddit astroturfer.
Fellow lemmings, I, for one, am glad that there are no corporate trolls trying to manipulate public opinions on Lemmy, it is the same warm, fuzzy feeling I get when I was watching multiple time Golden Globe nominated summer blockbuster, Barbie, now available on Blu-Ray and select streaming services.
I don’t know about you, but I sure hope Barbie sweeps the Golden Globes next month (and then the Oscars next year.)
Et tu, Barbie?
I can’t believe THE Margot Robbie is on the fediverse.
Good for you, girl!
I know, I can hardly believe it either!
Wait, no, now my astorturfing cover is blown. 😭
And a significant part of the remainder are repost bots recycling old popular posts and comments in order to farm karma, which will eventually be sold to OnlyFans spammers, political ops, and corporate shills.
I’ll see the same post on 2 or 3 subs and it will just be something I saw a year or more ago.
deleted by creator
FYI there is also scribe qnd 12ft.io for medium links
It’s not like one of the six biggest power janitors of Reddit has been caught multiple times wrongfully deleting posts, using bot armies to manipulate votes and accepting money from marketing agencies for “consultancy” in social media guerilla marketing.
It’s almost like the company doesn’t give a fuck what their unpaid help does to the userbase or content because they still gets investments regardless.
Fuck spez, fuck GallowBoob, fuck awkwardtheturtle and fuck Sam Altman.
It’s amazing how quickly the admins came down on some subs after the trench titty drama broke. He was basically reddit’s MrBabyMan. And he’s probably not the only one.
Trench ritty drama? Dare I even
Google thatDuckDuckGo that…
How is Sam Altman related to Reddit?
The studies are from 2018 and 2020, “new study” in the post title is a complete lie
Corpreddit.
Lemmy feels very much like the old, old Reddit. When it was mostly IT folk and tech savvy people (talking about 2005-2010).
I think reddit peaked around 2015 or so. A much broader audience had found it. There was interesting content from a lot of people.
Now, it still has a lot of good content. But it is definitely past its peak
Downvoted for medium article.
I shouldn’t have to make an account to view news.
Am I blind? I don’t even see where it names the study. It just says Pew, who publishes many studies. Does medium expect me to search for their sources?
Reddit feels less genuine for sure, than it would have even as far back as 3 years ago. The mod purge probably accelerated things greatly but in general it’s felt like Reddit was going corporate astroturfing route for a while. Real discussions are very sparse compared to the amount of people telling you “to solve problem, buy this expensive thing!”
At this point the only thing Reddit has is a numbers advantage. The videos are no huge loss because at this point since you’re forced to use their (god awful) mobile app they either autoplay obnoxiously or automatically popup obscuring the comments (discussion is 90% of why I go to a forum why make it harder to see comments?).
The desktop experience is still okay but the constant pushing to get you to enable notifications is very irritating.
Man. I zapped all my cookies the other day, and when I re-loaded reddit, it forced me into a new new version of the mobile site.
Now almost every single comment that isn’t top level is hidden behind the ‘more comments’ button. When I click it, the whole page reloads, with the top comment and the one response. And a button for the next reply. And so on.
I’ve noticed since this change, almost no posts have any discussion any more at all. Which honestly. Why would you bother?
Just the other day I thought about my old porn account and remembered the password! So I thought I’d check out the official app since I wouldn’t be giving them ad revenue. Holy cow, it really is as terrible as everyone says! The app and the site! Every third post on the scroll is an ad, until you show NSFW posts, then every third post is a random post from a random sub. The three times I’ve been there I get a notification from some random comment on a random sub. And some banana thing that pops up and won’t go away. All of it is so terrible, including the porn. It’s like going back to your hometown and seeing they bulldozed your old school and turned it into a meat rendering plant.
Reddit is clearly trying to make its mobile site as user-unfriendly and goddamn terrible as possible to direct people to use the official app instead. There’s no other explanation for a top 10 in the world site
Actually, looking at the rest of the top 10 sites, the only two with good mobile interfaces are the ones without apps: Google and pornhub lol
The pop-iver video player is an infuriating choice. I watched the video, scroll down and the fucking thing follows me?! Wtf?! Why?? Am I going to forget that I just watched that video two seconds ago?! Argh!
And people want Meta involved in the Fediverse, like reddit wasn’t bad enough.
If the fediverse gets a lot of traction, this sort of “spam” will be difficult to moderate and every instance will need to have sophisticated systems to prevent it.
It’s okay Meta is totally great at removing spam and fake accounts.
Well, I see your point. All I’m saying is spam is difficult when you are a large target.
Which is why I WANT lemmy to stay “small to medium”
We should all calm down, buy a Twix and look forward to christmas.
I went to the mall because I wished to experience Christmas undignified, to front only the essential facts of capitalism, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to New Years, discover that I had not contributed.
🥲 Beautifully written tale of a mortal peril swerved.
Not calm? Eat a snickers.
Yeah but we just got 8" of rain and 70 mph winds during a freak December storm that took out half our power grid, how will Amazon-Clause find my house?!? 80 degrees warmer than it should be here and our snowman holding up the mail box melted!!!
This part was written about a study from a 2020 study:
The results were alarming, with 15% of the top 100 subreddits found to have content that was likely posted by bots or corporate trolls, specifically aimed at promoting certain companies or organizations. One of the most concerning findings of the study was that corporate trolls were not only promoting products and services, but they were also strategically leveraging positive news articles to influence public opinion.
IMO, I left at the great exodus and I thought it was at least double that before I left. We are not free from the shills here though. I don’t know how you get around it tbh.
[redacted]
