this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 197 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The amount of whinging and bootlicking from people taking Spez's side was insane before I left for good.

[–] claymedia 162 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It doesn’t seem organic. Protest posts would get 95% upvotes, then suddenly 12 hours later get slammed with bootlickers and downvotes.

[–] [email protected] 84 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit felt really astroturfed for years now. Start mentioning Neill Druckman in any capacity and your post immediately got flooded with copy paste hate centered on TLoU2. It seemed organic at the time, but when the TV series came out it was very sus, as if somebody had forgotten to turn off their bot army.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What a weird thing to target with bots.

[–] assassin_aragorn 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Transphobes came out of the woodwork for it. And not only were they annoying for the obvious reasons, but they've also poisoned the well for criticism. I loathed the plot, but I have to be careful with my criticism so I don't get lumped in with them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

So much this! TLoU2 was a major setback for me in many ways, but a normal discussion was impossible.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago

I've talked to a few that seemed organic, but those were basically people who wanted Reddit to get back to normal and not waste time on bullshit that didn't affect them personally.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

i did check in a few communities that i was engaging with before, and honestly, it seemed organic, but it was always lurkers/semi-lurkers who don't post and only comment like once every two months. accounts for the delay as well, because they don't check reddit that often (before everything went to shit posts would usually be gathering views for a good 24 hours)

but reddit also started using chatgpt to prop itself up lately (which afaik is against chatgpt's tos, so that's nice for the future lawsuit if they wanna cash in), so idk. that does put a damper on their legitimacy.

[–] ThatGirlKylie 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wasn’t it proven that majority of the positive spez posts are from bots or chatgpt or something?

[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

At least one post was defending reddit in r/programming has been shown to be chatGPT, that's for sure. If they have one bot, who's to say they don't have thousands?

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago

I can't tell you how many 1-2 year old accounts I saw with little to no post history that popped out of the woodwork to defend reddit/spez. It was crazy.

Same for spam/ shill accounts on iPhone/ Google play reviews.

They're definitely trying to plug the holes with bubble gum instead of fixing/ addressing the problem which is spez and the 3rd party app/api ban.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is it ironic that ChatGPT is defending spez increasing API costs “to combat LLMs”?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Only if you don't consider the core tenants of capitalism. Clear cut it all burn the rest to the ground. What you missed, steal from its owner to sell it back to them at the highest possible markup. Move on rinse repeat. Fuck sustainability. Most of the LLMs have what they want. Reddit could burn tomorrow for all they care. It being around for others to use and train on only makes competitors to them which they absolutely do not want. Destroying Reddit is a win-win-win for them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Using the Reddit users to destroy the Reddit users I guess.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Genuinely curious: how was that shown? How do you know for sure a post is generated by ChatGPT?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One of its answers in a thread was the classic "as a language model, I am not able to (...)"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That's a bit more straightforward than expected, thanks! 😅

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm curious about this as well, because the lurkers in the montreal sub sure are quick to come out of the woodwork whenever the protest is mentioned. I can't see how it's not bots, but I'm curious about how that would work exactly and how you determine that

[–] ultranaut 35 points 1 year ago

Before I left I tried engaging with some of them, the only one to have a discussion was either a very fast typist or was doing a copy/paste. Their arguments weren't really consistent and only made sense independently, they claimed to have read transcripts of the Apollo dev interview with the Verge and various other sources but completely misrepresented or ignored basically every detail that made Reddit look bad. It did not feel like a genuine discussion with someone who actually believed their own arguments or was interested in anything other than muddying the waters in defense of Reddit management.