Reddit just auto removed my comment with a link to Lemmy.ml

lowleveldata@programming.dev to Technology@beehaw.org – 162 points –

I was commenting on a Japanese sub to guide them to Lemmy and my comment becomes "[ Removed by Reddit ]" after a few seconds. Was this always the case?

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Ah, the free speech, how beautiful

Granted to us by the guy who believed in jailbait as an expression of free speech

Reddit admins are just protecting lemmy.ml from being further overloaded!

In all seriousness, it's best to direct people to https://join-lemmy.org rather than any specific instance - the list of instances there is constantly being updated and can be used to spread out the load between different instances. Even so, your post would most likely still have been removed from Reddit, regardless of what specific Lemmy url you're posting.

https://join-lemmy.org

Unfortunately according to my own experience that page is not exactly welcoming for new users. It's just not very clear what it is all about and confusing. The community list page on the other hand is easy to understand and the "Subscribers" stat is convincing.

A lot of people feel the same way. The good news is that there is work underway to imporve https://join-lemmy.org as we speak, hopefully new users will start seeing some improvements there soon!

I wosh we had an alternative site together, so as to avoid newcomers immediately seeing a) lemmygrad and b) that one NSFW instance that bills itself as "shota/loli/cub friendly". That turns people away, understandably, especially because it's not clear from the outset how easy you can avoid interacting with those instances at all, or that the rules and culture between instances can be totally different.

Downfall to the fediverse: You know what your friends see when they look into this stuff? Oh, wow, they use that site that has the pedos on it.

It's a serious issue. Most people don't and won't understand the decentralized thing. When these come to light in the media, and stuff like this ALWAYS comes to light in the media, someone is gonna say at some point "Hey didn't pigeon suggest that site to me once?"

I agree, that web page is awful and even as a generally tech-savvy person it steered me away from Lemmy. Only joined kbin after reddit banned it and I had a clear "join this thing, reddit doesn’t like it" sign.

While the ideal may be spreading users out across instances and federating, I think the fact is that reddit refugees probably just want to be directed to something popular they can join and get content from without hassle.

I imagine they are in damage control mode and are hoping to stem the outflow of users' attention spans to the Lemmyverse while their current actions are the Current Thing.

I reckon they are budgeting for a 1-2 week martial law period to try and stabilise and will probably force open all the closed subs and make use of repost and chatGPT bots to simulate decent engagement, possibly even paying for comments too.

It would also be very interesting if they roll back on their censorship of open discussion of certain topics to attract back previously "resettled" users.

Imma be real, this sounds like you're massively overestimating the amount of people that actually care about this whole thing. Yes, you'll probably get less content, but not enough to really matter for many people.

The casual reddit user would be back once their favorite subs are back online and will go about their day like before.

Maybe once the third party apps shut down and people really don't want to move to the official app you might get something.

I got no idea what would happen if enough mods quit, and a lot of subs couldn't run properly anymore. For the biggest subs you might get paid mods from reddit themselves, but no idea what will happen to the smaller subs.

Agreed. I'm definitely waiting in anticipation of the end of the month to see what happens. Regardless, lemmy is my new home. Fediverse is just a great concept, looking forward to it maturing.

Depending on how everything works out, I don't think I can move over to lemmy completely just yet. There are a ton of smaller communities, that are still missing here and might never move over.

For a lot of topics, especially specific games, there's often some Discord server, but I really don't like using Discord.

What I definitely try to change is stop the mindless doomscrolling I did too much on Reddit, and just check specific subs occasionally.

The casual reddit user just lurks though. If the active users move, the quality of the site will go down (even more).

The % of people who care might be small, but it is that same tiny percentage who have the largest impact, and who are crucial to the smooth functioning of reddit.

If they all leave or get booted, reddit will noticeably change for the worse and a larger % of users will leave with them. I can only hope that the number of users fleeing to new platforms like Lemmy is sufficient to make them viable and strong alternatives.

If all the cool kids leave and set up shop elsewhere, reddit will be seen as outdated and people will start to leave it behind. Especially if Lemmy goes enough to gain unique new features/communities/traditions/memes/etc. Digg was abandoned so quickly in part because reddit was already there, complete with its own community, in-jokes, and sense of community for people to join in with and feel part of. Lemmy isn't there yet, but fingers crossed there are enough people involved now to have reached a critical mass that drives increased adoption.

I reckon they are budgeting for a 1-2 week martial law period to try and stabilise and will probably force open all the closed subs and make use of repost and chatGPT bots to simulate decent engagement, possibly even paying for comments too.

This is such a strange and surreal idea. Martial Law in the Internet. but I can see that actually happen.

I wouldn’t put it past them in an attempt to protect their IPO. It’ll be exposed almost immediately, but it’s not like an idea being terrible has stopped spez before.

AITA for wishing their IPO to be a complete failure ? Like, the stock dropping 90% on the first day ?

NTA. They’ve tried to screw us all for money and if there’s any justice in the world they’re about to find out what made their site so attractive to investors the hard way. Fuck ‘em.

/r/WallStreetBets will probably find a way to lay it to waste in the first ten minutes.

feeling like an asshole for wishing corporate douchbags to fail is your capitalistic conditioning acting up. If their IPO makes reddit and their portfolio take a nosedive, then that's on them. They took the risk, they can live with the consequences. Gosh, perhaps some of them will be forced to work a normal job again, like the rest of us

Only people I feel for is the workers at Reddit. Not their fault their boss is an asshole.

Thing is, the only people that lose at that point at the buyers, not reddit itself

It's funny, I used to be on BestofRedditorUpdates where almost any "good" story that got reposted was subject to arguments about whether it actually happened or if the OP made it up. Now with ChatGPT it can all be made up. /s

I'm convinced that the vast majority of r/askreddit threads, including the comments, have been copy/pasted for years

I've seen threads that are the same replies in the same order as they were in previous years. I know a lot of this is just people posting what they know will get them comment karma, but I have a hard time believing that sub is for real. It's such low quality, predictable content

Bots that repost comments definitely are a thing on Reddit, there evenwads a counter-bot (/u/replyguyboy) that exposed them.

I remember that. There were some people really dedicated to exposing bots, and almost every thread in r/all had some harmful bots

In the last couple months, every sub I was in got noticeably more spammy. Scrolling through and just "repost, repost, repost..." or obvious AI generated garbage. I'm very new to Lemmy (today is my, uh, cakeday(?)), but it doesn't seem to have these issues to the same degree.

I've noticed that, too. The flow of content here is slower, but it seems like much better quality overall, and real humans.

Happy whatever day we call it here!

I wouldn't say "martial law", but if they're gearing up for their IPO then I wouldn't be surprised if they take "harsh" measures to kick out uncooperative mods and force subs to reopen.

They banned the RedditAlternatives sub a few days ago. If it wasn’t the case before, it is now. This situation must be rattling some cages at Reddit redgardless of what Spez said.

It's not banned now (for what that's worth)

Interesting, I wonder if they’ve decided that the negative publicity of appearing to censor alternative platforms wouldn’t be worth it.

A very fitting Quote by JFK:

Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.

I wasn't too interested with what happens to reddit, but if this is the path they choose, I wish them a very fun streisand effect.

You might be able to circumvent an automatic filter by writing ‮lm.ymmel‬ - that should be rendered as ‮lm.ymmel‬

Care to explain for the uninitiated? I assume the code at the front and back are some sort of indicators to reverse the text?

Similar things happened when Twitter screwed the pooch and you'd mention Mastodon to people.

It's clear that /u/spez is playing by Fellon Muskolini's playbook. The problem (for them) is the existence of something called "Streisand effect". Or, as Mahatma Gandhi said, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win"

Reddit would be better if they just ignored posts pointing to Fediverse instances, but since they won't, well... Their loss is our gain.

Use a URL shortener like bitly.

https://bit.ly/3CqHoSB

As a mod of a few big subs, that doesn't really work either. Lots of us ban those on sight because of those stupid t-shirt bots.

Will emol.ink work? :D

URL shorteners are generally blocked and for good reason. They obscure the target, which in this case is intentional, but pretty much the only value on a site like this or reddit is to obscure.

URL shorteners are generally blocked and for good reason.

How so? I can get bit.ly being blocked in general as it's commonly known but emol.ink for example is not. For all an unsuspecting reader knows that (emol.ink) could be an alternative to emojipedia.

Can any URL shortener be detected by Automod automatically with technical means, by checking for permanent redirects e.g.?

Or is some poor fella forced to maintain a static list of know URL shorteners the Automod uses? :D

I'm not saying Reddit knows about emol.ink, I've certainly never heard of it. But if Reddit admins realize that it is a URL shortener, they will throw it on the blocked domains list too.

If they actually do wind up forcibly reopening the dark subs and replacing the mods, good luck having to police "Lemmy" or "Tildes" spam on top of all the usual bot nonsense and trolling that goes on. Metal and Motorhead subs are about to get nuked as collateral damage.

The thing to do now is post it in an image. They can't autodetect the text in the image . its possible for sure but they're not spending money on that

Or just use an url shortener

Some people are rightly skeptical of shortened URLs due to malware etc. Also the point would be to show the name of the site. Probably users won't click the link and scroll on but they will see the image.

Link them to lemmyverse.net so they can VISUALIZE their options

It's possible they setup bots to scan links to lemmy and automatically remove them, if they're really doing that, it means they're scared.

going to grab more popcorn

Twitter did the same with Mastodon links originally.

Just noticed those fuckers actually banned pushshift, spez and his band of lowlifes sure don't want people to be able to see their meddling.

Same. They shadow deleted a comment I made with a link to lemmy, I can still see it if I'm logged in though.

shadow deleting and banning is such an asocial thing to do, equal to shunning, a terrible practice.

Sad. Ummm, I just figured out how to link gifs...

Sad.

To link a gif:

![](url)

I’m sure the automation just looks for keywords so pass the link through a url shortener and not say lemmy or beehaw in main text.

Can you still see the text of the original post? I mean, the text containing the link to lemmy

No, it just says "[ Removed by Reddit]". link

So we cannot screenshot it, clever... We need to document this and make sure everyone knows what reddit is doing. Perhaps screenshotting the post before posting it, making sure to include the permalink can be an idea to demonstrate their censorship

We need to document this and make sure everyone knows what reddit is doing.

There's been a lot of posts both here and on reddit saying that mentions of kbin and/or lemmy get deleted or the users/subs get outright banned, like /r/redditMigration, which had 2 posts and got banned for spam.

Regardless of the outcome of the strike, Reddit already has died. The users that matter won't go back. The users that stay will be media and a large pool of lurkers with no value to the community.

Reddit as we knew it, already died.

Did you insert the actual hyperlink or just had Lemmy.ml as text?

4 more...

Great stuff! I image they will have a hard time banning all instances.

join-lemmy.org might be better link to post, so people dont all go to one instance and might understand better how lemmy works

This is crazy. Can someone reproduce this behaviour?