Reddit mods fear spam overload as BotDefense leaves “antagonistic” Reddit

HLMenckenFan@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 700 points –
Reddit mods fear spam overload as BotDefense leaves “antagonistic” Reddit
arstechnica.com
82

I’m all for watching Reddit reap what it sowed. They absolutely should be considered damaged goods at this point. But the ones that are really going to suffer are the mods that moderate critical subs such as r/suicide r/stopdrinking and r/auntienetwork. Spez didn’t even give one brain cell to think about the consequences of subs that provide valuable support to struggle people.

Really grinds my gears on that part alone.

r/stopdrinking is the sub that really gave me the motivation to stop drinking. I went from binge drinking once or twice a week to nearly completely cutting out alcohol of my life.

Maybe lemmy users should do their part in reaching out to them and offering the fediverse as an alternative?

Ribbit

I’ve been looking for the community here too. It’s nice to see one of my people here :)

Guess what, a fediversal bot works across the whole fediverse! we're truly no longer locked into one site, the new tools can work anywhere and everywhere!

A few people the other day were catching site wide bans for suggesting fediverse. Others have had no problem. I think it depends on the mood of newly installed mods or if a pissed off admin sees you. Obviously also your tone.

I surmise Threads being somewhat part of the fediverse actually might have made it easier to get away with telling people about Lemmy/kbin but I haven't been over to reddit to test this out due to trying to quit cold turkey.

I think putting direct links to lemmy/kbin is what triggers bans the most, avoiding links should be fine enough.

I feel like any mention of lemmy or other competing platforms is suppressed on reddit. At least I saw no activity on any of my posts nor have I saw such posts from others.

Well said. It’s easy to say “let that shithole burn” for me, as a person who just used it for entertainment and mild education. But there are integral support communities that I hate seeing suffer.

The fact that reddit is now built into the infrastructure of supporting suffering people is literally so fucked.
And that it is something WE have to worry about. Is anyone else worried? Any governments? No.

Yea it’s honestly stupid how bad it’s turned out. They could have turned back so many times…

Fuck Around >-------->------->---[Reddit]-->Find Out

It's dying. An event that was literally unthingkable a few months ago and was probably unachievable a few weeks ago.

Little by little, reddit is crumbling. The number of userbase doesn't matter now. If the spam bots overtake reddit, then it's over for them.

Yeah, people going "hurr durr the protests don't matter" aren't seeing the bigger picture. True, the protests were ineffective at best in changing Spez's mind, but the thing they're protesting will end up destroying Reddit because crippling mod tools is going to cause spam to explode on the platform.

I believe 90% of those "hurr durrs" were bots by Spez trying to psyops the protests and failing like the dipship that he is.

Yeah, I had some suspicions on a few subreddits where suddenly the Spez Defense Force was out en masse to shit on normal users & moderators alike. SubredditDrama as a specific example felt super off compared to the vibe there I was used to as a long time lurker, like you're telling me the most upvoted comments on like every post are suddenly all people whining about the protests and how entitled moderators are, not users enjoying the popcorn and chaos? Hmmmm.

The government in my country are going to collapse, things what live under rocks know it, and it's basically the same thing. They have managed to dilute themselves into believing that they're all right that they're fine that they don't need to change anything that they will succeed.

Basically everyone else is watching from the sidelines, with popcorn, because we all given up trying to convince them to change.

He is truly a brainless prat.

This was my last comments on reddit. We aren't just protesting the changes because we support 3rd party and mods - we protest so the community can stay there.

I'm genuinely surprised how quickly they managed to fuck up reddit this bad. How long did it take, a month?

yeah, more or less. but I appreciate them speeding it up, since, you know, taking into account our short attention span.

My guesstimate is that Reddit — with BotDefense up and running — was at least 20% bots posting articles and then bots having conversations about those bot-posted articles. Without BotDefense? Yikes.

Man the bots aren't even good at hiding they are bots anymore.

Bots

That was just spammed in a news article over and over for hours.

Hey mods I have a message for you: you don't have to do unpaid labor just so a ceo can get rich.

we need to send this to every community

The problem is that some mods are in it for the power. It probably attracts a disproportionate number of power hungry people than normal people just like police.

I know that's commonly said but I think most want to create a community for their interest.

Even if they were to revert every single poor decision in the last 6 months right now, the damage is done.

They showed their true colours, and everyone is done with the platform.

Long live Lemmy.

We're done with the platform but there are a lot of real people still using it. I do think the quality is going to tank and they'll continue bleeding users though.

Yeah, its the tech-aware who have dumped Reddit. Unfortunately part of the magic was that it had grown to the point that if you went looking you could end up talking to anybody from a diesel engine mechanic to a paragliding instructor, not just a bunch of tech nerds. I think this'll be the sticking point, lemmy/kbin is still 95%+ tech nerds.

I think this wave just gave us enough of a userbase to start establishing the infrastructure for general communities here, not even really specialized ones yet. But those will provide escape areas whenever the next wave occurs.

It's 2010 all over again. We all used Digg and reddit was mostly for the techies. But as Digg kept digging its heels in, reddit become more and more palatable over time. Eventually it reached a critical mass and we all jumped ship and never looked back.

And a baseline of techies means a ton of people making the platform better which is why Reddit had so many people doing their job for free and they completely took that for granted and exploited that free work which every other tech company has to pay for itself.

It’s the beginning of the end if you catch my drift.

There’s no way Reddit can recover from this.

Lemmy needs to hit critical mass and the talented devs making Reddit better as a hobby will come here and make it even better. Reddit's dev team got lazy and complacent because outside devs were doing their job for them better and for free which is pretty ridiculous. If you put a monetary value on the bot defence teams work it would in the millions. Other companies have a team of full time employees fighting spam, Reddit was getting it for free.

Here here!

Now if only the guy who made Apollo would make a Lemmy app it’d be perfect! Memmy works but Apollo for Lemmy would just be the icing on the cake!

If your not using wefwef already, try it out.

Closest thing to Apollo right now.

Will check it out. Hopefully I can get it through TestFlight and not side loading.

Further down the rabbit hole. Seems like they're doing everything they can to get to the bottom as fast as possible.

It's almost like it would be easier to just walk away, I feel for the people that are forced to stay and continue to mod.

Nobody is forced to mod for free on Reddit

Exactly, it was kind of a facetious comment, but it is kind of sad there's mods that feel a sense of obligation to run a corporate social media site and that the reddit leadership is banking on the social currency of being a mod keeping any sort of value.

Perhaps op was thinking of mods for subs like r/suicide

I feel that mods in those types of subs genuinely care about the community and would probably feel that if they walked away, they’ll lose the chance to help someone in need.

The joke was that the only people making mods be mods is themselves, and some will never let go of the power trip even if the site is dead. Less dramatic but I saw the same sentiment on sysadmim. Like their sub is their own repo of curated information that they don't feel anybody else is capable of maintaining. But now there's like 20 sysadmin communities on Lemmy so hopefully anybody who still thinks that can find the motivation to move on.

9 more...

serves u/spez right. got too greedy and now earns Karma for it

Reddit drama has been like when city sanitation worker strike. For 2-4 weeks, no one cares. Then everything start to smell like shit...