• @[email protected]
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    1443 months ago

    updoots encourages circlejerk

    I mean, making a post about hating on Reddit, on Lemmy, is pretty circlejerky too at this point.

    • Lvxferre
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      263 months ago

      I mean, making a post about hating on Reddit, on Lemmy, is pretty circlejerky too at this point.

      There’s a key difference, at least when it comes to hating Reddit.

      Most [all?] users here have actual, informed reasons to hate Reddit, from past experiences with the site. They aren’t simply joining some bandwagon due to social expectations to bend to the crowd.

        • Lvxferre
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          3 months ago

          Yes, it is. I don’t disagree with thetreesaysbark and you on that.

          However I think that a circlejerk formed by similar-minded individuals gathering into the same place is far, far more benign than your “typical” circlejerk revolving around social pressure.

          Also, let us [humans in general] not fool ourselves into believing that circlejerks are avoidable. Humanity boils down to “circlejerking hairless chimps” anyway.

    • @[email protected]
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      173 months ago

      Except… it looks like people did start posting. So the users were crowded out by bots before and they’re posting now. That just shows that Reddit isn’t dead, but it does have too many bots.

      I mean, I’m sure many people here wish there was more non-bot content. It’s annoying to see something on Reddit and come back here and see the same thing.

      • @[email protected]
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        33 months ago

        Saw a stat the other day, and I can’t speak to accuracy. But the claim was that like 58% I think of all content online is bots.

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      It’s already dead. r/wholesomememes decided to allow only original content (no bots or reposts), and, after two days the only post was one begging human users to post anything original.

      Asking people to post on their sub is fuckin hilarious to me. Like that’s some major, pressing issue in anyone’s life.

      “Sorry, I can’t hang out today. Wholesome Memes subreddit needs me to post there! I’m doing it for the shareholders! Without them, reddit would never survive!”

      Like… Is this how he expected that to go…???

      • @[email protected]
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        153 months ago

        If you read it, the mod certainly didn’t beg. They just mentioned that they’re still blocking bots and to not be discouraged from posting original content.

        Also I find it highly doubtful that the mods of that subreddit are concerned about shareholders. Why would a mod care about money when they’re not even getting paid? They most likely just care about keeping the community alive.

        Not to take away the point. Which I think is something most Lemmy users have realized ages ago, reddit is so full of repost bots that it makes gallowboob look like a saint. So much in fact that after two days, not a single original post has occurred in a subreddit with a reported 17 million followers.

        • @[email protected]
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          63 months ago

          Why would a mod care about money when they’re not even getting paid?

          Better question, why the hell are they volunteering for free to moderate a paid multimillion dollar publicly traded company? The mods on Reddit have a God complex. They literally think that if they don’t do what they do then the entire website would fall apart. Like a nurse in a hospital. It’s insane

      • @leftzero
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        23 months ago

        It’s tragic, really. Reddit used to be great. Enshittification sucks.

      • @[email protected]
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        393 months ago

        It’s an excellent chat program (except it’s pretty buggy on mobile). But it doesn’t function well as a forum replacement. The lack of discoverability is a big problem.

          • @[email protected]
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            123 months ago

            It’s increasing taking up the role of one. And I’m sad about it.

            I might stop being sad if its forum features become more used and Discord massively improved discoverability, but for now it sucks for people googling problems.

            • @[email protected]
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              143 months ago

              My rule of thumb is, if it says, “Join our Discord,” I move on. I’ll only join a Discord if I want to discuss something, not if I want answers to questions.

              • @[email protected]
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                33 months ago

                Same here, except I won’t go on Discord for discussion either. I really loath the platform. I’d even go back on the dumpster fire that is Telegram before I go back to Discord. Good thing IRC still exists.

                • @[email protected]
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                  63 months ago

                  I just look up YT videos or find a wiki, and 90% of the time I can find my answer that way. It’s a lot nicer than trying to figure out where they stuck something on Discord…

            • @[email protected]
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              43 months ago

              On one hand we have to move away from Google. On the other hand information should be made available to people. Hopefully we are just in a transitional phase and this isn’t just reigning in a internet dark age.

              • @[email protected]
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                33 months ago

                Well I said Google but ideally that would be “a healthy market of several competing quality search engines”.

                Right now I think we only have Google and Bing. (Lots of alternatives like DuckDuckGo ultimately use Google I think)

    • Avieshek
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      93 months ago

      Most toxic moderators of large subreddits does come from discord.

      • @[email protected]
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        3 months ago

        At least Reddit can be searched by google or on site1,2,3

        1 terms and conditions do apply
        2 you need an account for some subreddits
        3 you also need the app for some subreddits

    • @[email protected]
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      53 months ago

      If you’re looking for a discussion board and end up in a chat room, of course you’ll be disappointed. That one’s on the user, not the service.

        • @[email protected]
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          53 months ago

          Just say no. I don’t join any discord groups for crap like that, if it’s not on some public wiki, I don’t bother. Most games don’t need a community anyway, if I can’t find one readily available, I’ll enjoy it for what it is and move on to the next one.

    • @[email protected]
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      53 months ago

      It’s a toss up, for me. Both managed to capture all discussion on major open source projects.

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      Goes to Google and types in a search

      • Reddit

      • Reddit

      • Forum post that links back to Reddit

      • YouTube that’s just a bunch of screenshots of Reddit over an automated voice

      • Reddit again

      Why won’t my ex leave me the fuck alone?

      • atocci
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        153 months ago

        Reddit actually solved that problem for me by blocking themselves from appearing in Bing search results.

      • @[email protected]
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        93 months ago

        Goes to Google and types in a search

        Reddit
        
        Reddit
        
        Forum post that links back to Reddit
        
        YouTube that’s just a bunch of screenshots of Reddit over an automated voice
        
        Reddit again
        

        Why won’t my ex leave me the fuck alone?

        Oh boy… Just wait until they go full into Gemini. They’re starting to use Gemini and AI in general for search capabilities.

      • @[email protected]
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        73 months ago

        Yeah, I’ve long since stopped using Google. Theres not any search engines I’ve found that mimic Google in its height, but many of them are better than what Google is now. Even bing.

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      That’s just the way it is.

      When Reddit was new, it mentioned Digg a lot.
      When Digg was new, it mentioned /. a lot.
      When /. was new (yes, I was there, too), it mentioned Usenet a lot.

      At some points in time, the likes of The WELL, the Facepunch forums and Metafilter got their own mentions, prompting me to check them out.

      • @[email protected]
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        23 months ago

        Yeah, at the core, people cause problems when the group gets too big to be a tight knit one. There are also a not insignificant amount of people, who get together, with antisocial behavior in mind. When you have thousands of people, posting on some community forum, it will be impossible for it not have some serious underlying issues. Not to even think of the scale of places like reddit, where that forum could have millions of users.

        Back in the day, when IRC ruled the social scene of the internet, it was hard to control a channel that had 100+ people on it, forget about crowds orders of magnitude larger.

  • @[email protected]
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    633 months ago

    Whenever I stumble on reddit I make sure to post disinformation or some kind of dumb shit to throw a wrench into the LLM training data they sell to google.

            • @[email protected]
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              3 months ago

              Yeah, usually made a couple, lost those as well, gave them a while, and I’d be able to make one I could keep again. Not sure if they had anyone manually looking at it.

              Haven’t had a main account for years. Never maintained multiple alts either. Just constantly replacing.

              I still engaged a lot in earnest, but I sometimes leaned heavily on sarcasm and became incredibly flippant about the site and all the people on it. Really stopped valuing keeping my account.

              I noticed that every time I commented on anything in r/pcgaming, I think it was, I was banned quickly. I think some subreddits do their own “security” seemed pretty fast and consistent, maybe automatic. Talking about a few hours or so.

      • @[email protected]
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        73 months ago

        I just got another one today for “harassment” of zionism in r/worldnews. Reddit cannot hold a free discussion and they know it. They can’t even let you speak to expose their bullshit, and permaban you when you do.

        I can you show you the comment which got me banned. I was literally asking questions which they know the answer for but censor intentionally because they are bought and controlled by awful groups directly linked to the IDF themselves. They have a division who train and employe teens as stupid Hasbara trolls who don’t know history and unable to hold a discussion.

        • @[email protected]
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          73 months ago

          My first one was in response to some rich cunt who went on air to say more or less that poverty was a good thing because then people had something to strive to avoid, so I said something along the lines of “This guy should be shot, I’m not even exaggerating.”

      • @[email protected]
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        3 months ago

        I hate to ruin this for you, but if you post nonsense, it will get downvoted by humans and excluded from any data set (or included as examples of what to avoid). If it’s not nonsensical enough to be downvoted, it still won’t do well vote wise, and will not realistically poison any data. And if it’s upvoted… it just might be good data. That is why Reddit’s data is valuable to Google. It basically has a built in system for identifying ‘bad’ data.

        • @leftzero
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          13 months ago

          No, you’re missing the point. You make up some credible misinformation to poison AI training with, but you don’t stop there: you get an LLM to rewrite it for you. Retry until you get a text that sounds credible, doesn’t particularly look written by AI, and people will upvote, and post that.

          With this, even if the text looks good, you’re not only poisoning future models with the misinformation you started with; by feeding them a text generated by an LLM (even if you can’t tell the difference at first glance) you’re introducing feedback into the model that will also poison it, not with misinformation, but by reinforcing its biases and errors and reducing the variety of its training data.

          • @[email protected]
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            13 months ago

            I think I got the point just fine… you’re wasting a ton of electricity and potentially your own money on making text that is not bad training data. Which is exactly what I said would happen.

            LLMs are made of billions of lines of text, the last we know is for GPT3 with sources ranging from 570 GB to 45 TB of text. A short reddit comment is quite literally a drop in a swimming pool. It’s word prediction ability isnt going to change for the worse if you just post a readable comment. It will simply reinforce it.

            And sure you can lie in it, but LLM are trained on fiction as well and have to deal with that as well. There are supplementary techniques they apply to make the AI less prone to hallucinations that dont involve the training data, such as RLHF (Reinforcement learning from humans). But honestly speaking the truth is a dumb thing they try to use the AI for anyways. Its primary function has always been to predict words, not truth.

            You would have to do this at such a scale and so succesfully voting wise that by that time you are significantly represented in the data to poison it you are either dead, banned, bankrupt, excluded from the data, or Google will have moved on from Reddit.

            If you hate or dislike LLMs and want to stop them, let your voice be known. Talk to people about it. Convincing one person succesfully will be worth more than a thousand reddit comments. Poisoning the data directly is a thing, but it’s essentially impossible to inflict alone. It’s more a consequence of bad data gathering, bad storage practice, and bad training. None of those are in your control through a reddit comment.

    • @[email protected]
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      13 months ago

      this is an ancient and noble practice known as shitposting, no need to call it something else :)

    • ALoafOfBread
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      3 months ago

      4chan, in part, ruined real life. So much of the initial meme buzz around Trump came directly from 4chan - god emperor, etc. /b/ and /pol/ had large coordinated campaigns to boost Trump for lulz and to fuck with people. These made the news occasionally and were sometimes quite wide-reaching. Edit: not to forget Qanon, pizzagate, etc.

      Additionally, 4chan is responsible for a massive swathe of meme culture more broadly. Most people don’t dredge its depths or even know “the hacker named 4chan” exists, but it has been a massively influential force.

      • @[email protected]
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        3 months ago

        imo redditors and 4channers think too highly of themselves if they believe they have real influence on elections. Most people aren’t online (except for Facebook), and politics are much more readily explained by material causes such as the Dems fcking up the post 2008 economic recovery and going for austerity instead of investment. The biggest proximate cause (non-material/economic) is just that hilldawg ran a bad campaign that didn’t focus enough on swing states (but she won the popular vote, congratulations).

      • @[email protected]
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        63 months ago

        There have been dark corners of the internet for several decades now. 4chan is just one. Trump didn’t achieve popularity because of it. There aren’t enough users, and there certainly aren’t enough politically and economically influential users, for that to be true.

        • @[email protected]
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          53 months ago

          I miss moot. Back when 4channers didn’t take themselves seriously.

          Right now, mainstream internet needs 4chan to deflect their own issues onto even though they all have the exact same people using it.

  • @[email protected]
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    363 months ago

    So many on Reddit bitch and moan about reddit. Just delete your account and use alternatives if you hate it so much.

  • @[email protected]
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    283 months ago

    I miss the IMDB discussions under each film…

    Was great to finish a film and have a question or and ideas and be able to talk about it.

  • @[email protected]
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    243 months ago

    I use it less and less. I only really visit two sub reddit, and one of them has been really declining as it has grown.

  • @[email protected]
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    3 months ago

    Restricting search results to reddit is still a nice way to filter out corporate junk and just get honest end user opinion on things. As much as I hate the management of the platform now, you have to remember that Reddit didn’t always used to be shit. Aaron Swartz was a co-founder.

    • @[email protected]
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      223 months ago

      Aaron Swartz was a co-founder.

      Swartz has been six feet under for longer than some Lemmyites have been alive.

    • @[email protected]
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      153 months ago

      It is rapidly becoming an unviable way to find info these days. I have to specifically ignore anything from the past couple years.

      • @[email protected]
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        53 months ago

        Eh, I still get Reddit results through DDG. They may not be fresh, but they seem to still be in the index, and honestly, that’s fine because I only really care about the older content.

  • jelloeater - Ops Mgr
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    183 months ago

    It’s gonna die like Digg or Fark … Which are still around, but shells of their former selves. TBH most normal folks haven’t even heard of Reddit, let alone Lemmy or Mastodon.

    • @[email protected]
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      323 months ago

      I disagree with you on how well known Reddit is, it’s been mentioned in enough news stories over the years that most people have heard of it, even if they’ve never been there.

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      Since about 2018, I’ve gotten the sense that most internet users know about Reddit, but are embarrassed to admit they know about Reddit.

    • @[email protected]
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      23 months ago

      AI means Reddit will always look alive at a glance.

      Like you still get some people complaining that lemmy isn’t active enough for them to leave Reddit, even though they’re just hanging out with bots all day.