Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed
arstechnica.com
Reddit says its "communities are naturally commercial."

Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed

#For sale: Ads that look like legit Reddit user posts

“We highly recommend only mentioning the brand name of your product since mentioning links in posts makes the post more likely to be reported as spam and hidden. We find that humans don’t usually type out full URLs in natural conversation and plus, most Internet users are happy to do a quick Google Search,” ReplyGuy’s website reads.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    But that would have been to assume the blackout would fail, and I think a lot of people didn’t think it would. I was dubious, but I think I was in the minority there.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      3·
      7 months ago

      Not really, I started moving /r/piracy when I saw spez doubling down. By that point the writing was on the wall.

        • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          7 months ago

          surprisingly, it’s still up. I got demodded under suspicious circumstances and now some of the remaining mods keep doing the unpaid janitorial duties for spez to make couple hundel mil per year.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        I think you’re really underestimating how people are pulled in by sunk cost. I think many people, especially mods, earnestly believed that because they had invested a lot of time and effort into Reddit, Reddit would listen to them if they protested.

        That’s not their fault, that’s just human nature. You were able to overcome that, which is good, but I don’t blame anyone for not being able to at the time. A year later is another matter.

    • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      7 months ago

      It was obvious that Reddit wasn’t changing course at all. Especially with how they handled communication with Christian Selig and other 3rd party devs.

      I came here during the blackout and deleted all my content on my account. The last day Apollo worked was the last day I used Reddit and I was a Reddittor since 3/10/2011

      If there was better mod organization we could have better translations for the non tech and piracy related communities but I’m overall happy how we ended up.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        It might have been obvious to you, but I really don’t think it was obvious to everyone and I don’t think you should assume that. I saw plenty of talk from people before it happened that were absolutely convinced it would change things.

      • eldavi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        I came here during the blackout and deleted all my content on my account. The last day Apollo worked was the last day I used Reddit and I was a Reddittor since 3/10/2011

        i became a reddit user on almost the same day and i think i was slower than you to delete my content because i could no longer access my posts older than a few months when i tried; i always wondered if that was intentional and now i have evidence that it was.

        i switched to reddit because my previous social media platform did the same thing reddit did (also at around a decade plus of using it); i’m still kicking myself for falling into the same cycle again and i really hope the fediverse doesn’t do the same thing.

        • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          7 months ago

          It took me months to delete all my content, as the API tools I was using (power delete suite) can’t access subs that are still dark. It took a bunch of manual deletions, additional scans with the tools and occasional googling of my username but I think I’ve got it all now.

          I came to Reddit initially for the human conversation. The fediverse will benefit in that it’s never going to be a commercial product and so the human conversation will be the number one priority. Even as corporate entities like meta try to join, users can just tune them out by blocking threads.net on their account, or switching to instances that have defed from them.