No wonder Reddit has turned to shit
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Gross.
I continue to have my own little cognitive dissonance about the Fediverse:
The world needs more FOSS and information needs to flow in a decentralized, democratic kind of way.
Howeverrrrr.... Lemmy is awesome for we few that it clicks with. For the good of the users and especially the volunteer admins who run our instances, I am glad Lemmy is not the big glowing target that reddit is.
Maybe we just hang out and keep the lights on no matter whether it's for occasional lost Linux users or for when mainstream folks decide to ditch oligarch-tech en masse.
This sounds bad, but once the teens and grandparents find lemmy, then its game over. It happened to facebook and it happened to reddit. The masses cause a sort of averaging out of content.
How do we keep the fediverse niche?
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Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
This person is late to the game. Reddit has been like this for years.
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This sounds bad, but once the teens and grandparents find lemmy, then its game over. It happened to facebook and it happened to reddit. The masses cause a sort of averaging out of content.
How do we keep the fediverse niche?
How do we keep the fediverse niche?
Selective federation with servers that only give accounts to humans?
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This sounds bad, but once the teens and grandparents find lemmy, then its game over. It happened to facebook and it happened to reddit. The masses cause a sort of averaging out of content.
How do we keep the fediverse niche?
The decentralized model gives it a good head start against financial interest and populist mass adoption.
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Lemmy has the feel to me that reddit did back in the day. I can only imagine as lemmy gets more popular and becomes big enough for big tech to take notice, that it will become consumed by the same garbage reddit has. Lemmy just isnt big enough yet for them to try and consume.
So for now Lemmy is great, but its only a matter of time before the turds find us here too.
The federation will make lemmy a slippery target because as threads has shown us you can add a compromised server and people will block the instance or if it gets annoying enough admins will defederate it.
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We are all rats. When this ship sinks, we will float to the next, or (decide to) drop off.
All things considered, how much would actually be lost?
The alternative being.............
The benefit of the fediverse is that it's trivially "forkable". If lemmy.world and other big instances get overwhelmed with bullshit, I fully expect that many smaller chill/focused instances will defederate and keep on doing their own things, chatting only with each other - no need to jump any ships. Perhaps there would also be some in-between, instances which are federated with both worlds, and where you can get a combination of tons of niche information/entertainment but with bots, and a small amount of genuine human interaction. I hope if that ever happens, lemmy-the-software gets sorting algorithms to deal with these situations.
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Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
In line of SEO, it makes me think, with how the fediverse works, it could end up being a search engine of its own. Including, I may add, for external contents as tracking bots are made. Quite an interesting realization.
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Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
reddit banned me, so i upvoted this post
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Oh, this is great.
Users noticed that Google had too much bad results because of SEO and spam flooded search results.
Users added "reddit" to their search terms, so they get results from reddit, where spam and astroturfing were... there but manageable.
Now the SEO people and advertisers target reddit with AI tools, until it is so enshitificated that we have to find something else (rinse and repeat)
"No, don't leave, we just finished saturating the space with ads!"
"Why do you think we leave?"
I mean astroturfing reddit was never new. It's why /r/HailCorporate existed and tools tried to disenfranchise that sub so much.
It's just 10 times worse because of the phenomenon you described. It also doesn't help that reddit and walled garden social media killed traditional forums so you don't have those to index anymore either. You either have SEO garbage sites trying to bombard you with ads and referral links, links to a walled garden you can't actually see, or reddit posts.
It's a cycle that's bound to repeat, especially with AI. Because that's how MBAs and snake oil salesmen get money, by ruining communal spaces.
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Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
If AI floods every single comment section, to the point the humaness of social media has been completely removed (which it is reaching that imo), how would it effect our consumption of it?
Looking at instagram, my feed is mostly meaningless garbage (which might be my fault to an extent), but what it has meant I simply don't find any reason to go onto it at all. Would this happen on mass if/when AI is so prevalent (lets say a 9:1 bot commenter to human commenter ratio), that we simply have no interest in it anymore?
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karma is meaningless to seo outside of account restrictions. the people doing this as a job aren't doing it for imaginary internet points
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it doesn't matter what individual instances do as long as the largest ones have open signups
Yet you didn't respond to the point that makes the difference:
reddit is actively encouraging this kind behaviour to inflate their user statistics and there is no incentive to tolerate this kind of spam for a fediverse server admin
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There are cooperatives and I haven't seen any of them so such spamming. The fediverse is an example of it too.
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In fact, it doesn't matter if there's no internal incentive. If it's being indexed and shows in searches it will have all the incentive needed to maximise SEO for profit.
Google will never rank fediverse posts high. Said otherwise, the external incentives are not there either.
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That's discord model.
Fediverse needs to have a layer which traps AI in a never-ending maze.
Fortunately AI is taking care of that on its own
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y -
Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
Didn't it start right as Helen Pao left?
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If AI floods every single comment section, to the point the humaness of social media has been completely removed (which it is reaching that imo), how would it effect our consumption of it?
Looking at instagram, my feed is mostly meaningless garbage (which might be my fault to an extent), but what it has meant I simply don't find any reason to go onto it at all. Would this happen on mass if/when AI is so prevalent (lets say a 9:1 bot commenter to human commenter ratio), that we simply have no interest in it anymore?
Either that or folks will happily shovel the slop into their eyeballs and lose all critical thinking ability. It's a toss-up.
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Either that or folks will happily shovel the slop into their eyeballs and lose all critical thinking ability. It's a toss-up.
lose all critical thinking ability
Are we already at this point?
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It'll happen in the Fediverse too.
I know fediverse. Weds users and visibility but with all happening I wish it was disable to every crawler/bot
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The federation will make lemmy a slippery target because as threads has shown us you can add a compromised server and people will block the instance or if it gets annoying enough admins will defederate it.
but how will we discover the compromised servers when the company running it did not announce it loudly?
and even then the bigger problem could be the advertiser users. lots of moderation capacity would be needed, or some kind of flagging automatism, but as we seen with Piefed people are hating even just milder such things.
