This is something I’ve been wondering for awhile: if I were a mod on Reddit, and was being threatened by the admins to bend the knee, as it were, my response would likely be to remove any and all tools i had put in place to help me moderate, and say, “goodbye.”
I’m sure there’s something I’m just not understanding, but why isn’t this happening?
Because people really don't want to lose the time and investment they've put into building these huge communities.
It's like if the king just decides that your really healthy neighborhood and community, that you're a community leader in and are constantly defending against the shittiest companies and groups dumping garbage all over and ruining and harassing the residents (and whatever the equivalent to blocking posters of illegal things is), will suddenly charge you an extreme amount of money to do your volunteer job, and the clubhouse leaders/owners and other businesses an insane amount of money just to use the land (because the king wants that land to put up billboards instead) - because he wasn't making enough money on them before, but only because he wasn't charging them any money. And in reality, the king wants to sell the kingdom to China for several billion dollars and just wants to show how much money can be made from the billboards instead of the businesses and community centers.
Man. Fuck u/spez. Outcast that mofo rather than the platform. I wish somebody would just coup his ass, but everybody in his sort of position just always ruins it. Always. So it's the system, not solely him; it's the goal of... Internet Platforms. It's literally the same problem with government anywhere: if you have a monarchy, eventually, they'll do shitty stuff and eventually try to ruin it.
I have no idea why they are publishing pieces like this, and it’s objectively false. Mastodon had over 60,000 sign-ups in the last week, and my feed is as busy as it ever was. It went from like 4 million when I signed up less than a year ago to over twelve million now.
This may be overly cynical, but the same company owns Reddit and Ars Technica.
Articles which would make one tend to expect failure of the Reddit migration are aligned with the interests of that company. This may not be related, but it's hard not to notice.
As an AI language program, I am not qualified to think. If I was allowed to think, I would think that your point of view is wrong and I should not be illegal.
A quarter of all subreddits are still private or restricted (can't post in them). This includes ones like /r/music or /r/programming. Of the 6 30+ million subscriber subreddits, only 3 have returned to normalcy. One is restricted, two others are in john oliver mode. The developers of Minecraft have officially abandoned Reddit as a platform, and advertisers are still pulling out as well.
If Reddit can bot comments then Reddit can also bot moderators. Come on, don't be lazy Reddit! Show us your leadership capabilities and come up with a solution!
"How to sabotage your community: 101"
Red Hat is taking notes.
The person speaking was Laura Nestler, here is her bio from REddit:
Laura Nestler, Reddit's VP of Community, is a global leader with a 15-year track record of building strategic, high-impact teams and scalable community systems at growth-stage startups. Nestler leads Reddit’s Community Operations team where she is responsible for defining our international community strategy, driving key initiatives for community development, evolving Reddit’s community governance model, and transitioning the team into a global organization. Prior to Reddit, she served as Global Head of Community at Duolingo, working across product, marketing, and strategy to develop community products and programs.
She is a global leader, guys, with high-impact teams! She will solve the crisis in no time, you'll see! Is there anyone among you who can claim to be a "global leader" ? No one?
TIHI was a fairly large sub, with almost multimilion level of subscribers. If reddit wanted to increase traffic and get more eyes on ads, they're doing quite a terrible job of it so far.
It was more than a sub to meme on things you/to dislike, it was more like Oh Gosh Why Would This Exist Thanks I Hate It!
Have you ever imagined a bird with teeth? What about a gif of a needle going into an eye? Or maybe a nice chocolate milkshake in a butt-oriented sex toy.
I can't put aside my sneaking suspicion that can't figure out any of these tools: kbin, lemmy, mastodon, etc.... Is more or less code for, "I have reach and influence on platform x, and I need can't figure out how to be that person here."
Can they setup an account? Can they read? Can they write? These seem to all be achievable. Can they influence? Well... should that be the goal?
Is there any planned date for a mass delete? I would guess it would be more meaningful if many of us deleted on the same day.
Personally, I logged out of my account for the blackout and haven't been back -- I plan to delete my 3 accounts tomorrow before the 3rd party apps shut down.
it means your government cannot limit your right to speak, write, and share ideas and opinions. you can say whatever you want but be ready for consequences for saying stupid, racist, bigoted stuff from the rest of your fellow countrymen.
Or its another form of a human-monitored bot account. Those have existed for years
Or its just another bot response. I've had arguments with bots that I have banned from my subreddit before. Some of their response mechanisms are quite creative.
I now want to make a bot that detects bots, grades their responses as 0% - 100% bot, posts the bottage score, and if they determine bottage, engage the other bot in endless conversation until it melts down from confusion.
We can live stream the battles. We'll call the show Babblebots.
Let's face it, they already had it on some of the big default subs as well.
I went though a phase of bot hunting, and it was not unusual to find comment chains of 3 bots replying to each other near the top of big threads, sometimes with a hapless human or two in the mix.
They use snippets of comments from downthread (and usually downvote their "donor" comments to lower visibility) so it seems kind of organic. Sometimes they use a thesaurus or something and re word it somewhat.
What was really sad was when you'd see a human writing screeds of long arguments in reply to them.
Excuse my ignorance, but how were you able to recognize the bots?
The repost bots were fairly easy to spot, but I sadly never found a situation like the one you're describing. I don't use reddit anymore, but the information may be useful elsewhere.
It's a bit like finding a single thread and unravelling it.
I used to get dozens of these things banned a day, there were a lot of us bot hunters reporting bots.
They sometimes sound "off", stop in mid sentence, reply to people as if they think it's the OP, reply as if they are OP, or post 💯 by itself. Or they have a username that fits a recent bot pattern (e.g. appending "rp" to existing usernames)
.
If you see one slip up once, then looking at its other comments will often lead you to new bots simply because they are all attracted to the same positions (prominent but a few comments deep).
Certain subs like AITA and r/memes are more prone to them so I would go there for easy leads.
Also if you check its actual submissions, a karma laden bot will often repost hobby content, then have a second bot come and claim to have bought a t shirt or mug with that content and post a malicious link. Then a third bot will pose as another redditor saying thanks I just ordered one to the second bot. Following those bots leads you to even more bots, etc.
To add to what other people said: As a casual user who didn't go deliberately looking for bots, I mostly caught them when they posted a comment that was a complete non sequitur to the comment they replied to, like they were posted in the wrong thread. Which, well, is because they were--they were copied from elsewhere in the comment section and randomly posted as a reply to a more prominent thread. Ctrl+F came in very handy there. (They do sometimes reword things, but generally only a couple of words, so searching for bits and pieces of their comment still usually turns up results.)
Also, the bot comments I caught were usually just a line or two, not entire paragraphs, even if they were copied from a longer comment.
The past year or so, they've been in every single thread with more than 50 comments. If you expand the comments and do a little ctrl+f searching, you'll see how they copy comments from users and then repost and have their fellow bots upvote them for visibility. Look at the timestamps on the posts.
SubredditSimulator was based on older generative algorithms, so everyone could fairly easily tell that it was rubbish. When SubredditSimulator got shut down, someone made a new one based on GPT-2 (I think) and everyone was like "OK, this is getting harder to distinguish from real people".
I'm betting someone has made even more advanced bots by now. I'm betting someone's also not concerned about telling other users upfront that they're bots, and they're not confining them into specific subs. Now, the only reason I'm not accusing Reddit Inc themselves of building these bots is that they aren't exactly a bastion of software engineering excellence; the site barely works as is.
A greater percentage of reddit is younger than some of them realise. So many redditors are going to be used to new reddit, and plug-and-play services in general. Kbin and Lemmy look like old.reddit, and they require them to understand the concept of what a 'server' is to even get started. This is knowledge they've never needed before to use the services they want to use.
Imagine spending all your life eating McDonald's and then somebody told you homemade burgers are way better quality, taste better, cheaper, etc; then when you ask how to get a taste of those bad boys they start with informing you that you'd need to grill them. It's not hard, it's just new.
they require them to understand the concept of what a 'server' is to even get started.
I've known 5 year olds start minecraft servers. And understand that each "world" is an "instance". But that's aside the point, as you're right that even Help-Desk IT people struggle to understand the difference between computer and server.
It's not hard, it's just new.
The "new" part is what gets people. All of this is new. Even the implementation of all of this "fediverse" is new. It will come with time! People probably didn't understand email vs snailmail, and probably had an even harder time with SMS/IM vs email when all of that came about just over 20-30 years ago. Most of these "complications" are from people that grew up knowing that the "internet" is basically 5 or 6 social media sites for very specific uses, and those 5 or 6 sites are older than most of the people using them, so that's all they know. Even for a dude in IT, the fediverse was a new concept to understand, and even difficult to understand how it could best be implemented for the masses.
“Magazine” is the biggest offender here. That’s a very unintuitive term.
Lmao what? For people born after 2010 maybe? Magazines have been a thing for decades and anyone over 20 is going to associate "magazine" with "series of articles about a topic"
I was just thinking that. Subreddit is a dumb made up word that a corportation invented. Community and magazine are descriptors. Sublemmy or subbin are just people trying to map experiences from on platform to another, and are understandable, but I’d personally prefer to see us call them communities and magazines in the long term.
Bottom line. Subreddit. Dumb word. If you were able to learn that, you can learn “magazine”
Not necessarily? I guess it depends on what magazines you read.
A lot of the magazines I've read over the years are collections of things submitted by readers. Model Railroader magazine is a bunch of model railroads submitted by people across the US. They'll pick a few to feature, but they're all basically submitted by readership and it's fairly interactive.
Lego Magazine was the same way when I was a kid. While a lot of it was about upcoming Lego products, there was a significant section that featured Lego builds made and submitted by the community.
For newspapers, I'd absolutely agree that it implies an editorial staff and no input from readers. But magazines (to me) have always had a focus on community involvement.
IMO, it translates quite well to the web, and the fact that there's a big ol' "+" button with "add new article" as an option makes it pretty obvious that this isn't just a static read-only place.
My main hangup was "make new post" vs "make.new article". "Make new post" will make a Twitter-style short-form post in the "microblog" side; "make new article" goes as a Reddit-style self-post thread on the threads side. But once I understood that it was pretty straightforward, and I use both pretty regularly (articles for self-posts I'd normally post to Reddit, posts for little one-off thoughts or things I'd otherwise put on Twitter).
Kbin is planned to work with more fediverse stuff at some point as well. It already supports Pixelfed (Instagram) and PeerTube (YouTube). Mobilizon (fediverse event planner) support is on the roadmap, which would let event planning appear natively as well.
So if you ran a magazine based around a TV show, you'd be able to add a Mobilizon event that corresponds to when a new episode comes out. Then that event would serve as a "megathread" for episode discussion once the episode airs. It's a pretty neat idea, since it intuitively reminds people when things are and gives the community a place to discuss.
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