Holy fucking shit that’s insane. What’s wild is, if I understand it correctly, that’s basically linear with how many users have joined, meaning people are posting more than ever before (on a per user basis).
After moderating a bigger subreddit and seeing just how much spam there was in the comments and just how many people spend time replying to these bots I basically stopped reading them. Here I haven’t see bots yet and at least my home instance watches out that it stays that way.
Haven’t seen any identifiable bots here either, on redshit they were everywhere, comment stealers and just plain weird agenda having bots. I hope it doesn’t turn into that here, maybe since we haven’t really been saturated with bots yet some type of preventative protocol could be put in place? No idea what that would be but it would make sense
I think instance admins will just have to make sure they don’t have bots on their platform and block instances that do a bad job at it leading to others getting invaded.
The captcha and text prompt to join definitely helps. Having those types of simple security measures prevents people from automatically making hundreds of bot accounts, and I think is just as if not more worthwhile than verified emails for making sure that the people here are actual people.
My home instance requires you to submit proof that you are human by either posting on an existing social media account or anonymously by sending 0.01 XMR (about 1.5€), that system is really hard to game (i guess you could spend a bunch of money on accounts but those would get banned and the funds would just pay for hosting lol).
What’s funny is I’ve been getting 10x more replies since the announced api changes which is odd. Before they were announced I would comment many times a day but rarely ever get many replies. Since the api change announcement? I’ve been staying off mostly bc fuck that place but when I have checked my account there have been 10-20 replies a day to older comments. Weird. Tin-foil-hat me feels like maybe there was a reduction of interaction after he screwed everyone over and maybe he’s using bots to make it seem lively. Definitely seen an increase in bot comments
It makes sense, I mean consider that these big social media platforms started making sweeping changes the moment the technology to accurately emulate humans became available for mass integration. Changes that would Inevitably lead to an exodus of a significant number of users.
Now you can trick the real users by claiming you’re still operating just the same as before when in reality half the website is just GPT bots and the population has taken a massive hit.
There’s no way they’d have been this confident in their choices without a backup plan like subsidizing with generative AI, which means their timing is either coincidental as fuck or exactly where you’d expect it to be based on the invention of the technology they need to ensure longevity.
It’s like a scam isn’t it, use chat bots to make your site look huge to sell high dollar add space and get big money from investors. It’s almost kind of comical, spending all that money to advertise to a bunch of bots.
I think the hot algorithm here is weighted better. It pulls up brand new comments on a similar weight to older comments with hundreds of points, which makes people more likely to see and interact with new comments. The Activity and New Comments post sorts also prioritize ongoing discussions, which I think is pretty cool.
You can tell there are more users by the number of the top up voted threads. Some are in the 1000s votes and a lot in the 100s. Wasn’t that high before.
It’s really starting to feel like a legitimately good Reddit alternative around here, not just “Reddit like” or “Reddit light” and that’s really awesome 😊
The change has been super pronounced in the last week or so. The meme quality has almost gone too damn high. All the news subs / pol subs / game subs I subscribed to on reddit are showing up here which makes the switch easy.
The live quali discussion for Formula 1 yesterday felt like a big indicator for me. Still nothing like the massive Reddit sub (but that one is honestly too big) but it ended up with several hundred comments and people were present and chatting all the way through in a way that felt lively.
Also, check out the communities page on lemmy.world. A couple of weeks ago, the biggest communities had 1-2k subscribers and now many are over 10k 20k…
I’d say probably the users leaving reddit due to the api changes. Iirc around the 20th was when spez did an AMA about the changes and made PR exponentially worse by using canned responses, throwing subtle insults here and there and ignoring the big questions in favor of what he’d already had his PR team write a response for. It was more rage inducing than the initial api change announcement.
I could be completely wrong though maybe that wasn’t on the 20th but feels like it was in my head canon
Wow, im sorry you have to deal with this. I finally got the point across to my ex a few months ago and it was like 2 years at that point, and i also moved to the other side of Canada for work in this span. It wasnt this bad, but consistent.
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