It’s really weird to me how literally anything they say or do is immediately interpreted in the worst possible way here, on Lemmy.
Let’s get real for a second.
Is there a bot problem on the Internet in general? That’s a resounding “yes”.
Do we want to do something about it?
According to OP - no, not at all.
I mean, if OP considers malicious everything that Spez listed, the only remaining course of action is inaction and hoping for the best.
You’re right in theory, but it’s Spez we’re talking about. I tend to consider that the following is a rational reaction to Spez preparing to take any action about anything in any context:
The only thing I miss from reddit is my favorite small niche subs.
Invisible bicycles.
Where people take photos of people on bicycles and Photoshop out the bicycle. You can request or do the edits.
Forbiddensnacks
Photos of stuff that looks like delicious food but is not food.
There was another with short videos of animals in sync. Like chickens or dogs .
Oh and another that was photos of cats, sitting on clear glass. The photos were from the underside.
There was another photoshop battle one. Where there was a prompt and then everyone would submit a photoshopped mash of the prompt.
But I bet AI has ruined that one.
What is this. People posted pictures of stuff that the community tried to figure out what it was
Retro futurism. Just posts about that.
I think I miss forbidden snacks the most.
Im also someone with a million hobbies. So I really miss those. Some are here too. Bigger ones like 3d printing and photography but not stained glass. Not sure if there is one for Blender. I should check.
Subs for specific games like remedy games, zelda. Animal crossing.
Honestly I’m from the time where there used to be forums for these things and I liked forums just fine.
I get that smaller population means less niche communities.
I’m okay with it. But I will be honest and say I miss my niche indie subs. I hate that it’s been ruined. And that it’s dead.
Facebook groups still exist though and many are acceptable. Especially for the indie games and hobbies.
I miss r/fitness. It was big enough but good enough to learn a lot and get motivation.
I miss the TV episode discussions. Even if I wasn’t following live, I could go read the thread and feel the shared excitement and read the theories and there was always something I hadn’t noticed that someone else had.
I miss those the most.
The good news is that if the fediverse gets an influx of Redditors, maybe we’ll see some of those niches pop up here too. Reddit’s impending identity theft coupled with the insane enforcement of rule 1 they’ve been doing lately is what got me to make my account here.
my little hometown somehow had a subreddit. i don’t know how
Psst ,we humans left reddit in 2023
5 more users. I assume that’s the number of users still stupid enough to still be using reddit. I profoundly apologize to the stupid community who are not using reddit.
I wouldn’t say users are stupid to still be using Reddit. There’s still alot more activity there and alot of subs still haven’t switched over yet. But if they start requiring identity verification, I think we’ll see alot more switching. Right now, I do both to get the best of both worlds. If I have to give them my identity, they get cut out.
I profoundly apologize to the stupid community who are not using reddit.
apology accepted
I think people should experience smaller communities, they are often much higher quality in terms of the actual social interactions (though, we’re starting to get our share of trolls and toxic people).
I think there was a big shift for reddit in 2016 after they bought (and then shut down…) AlienBlue and then launch their official app. That moment it felt like when the number of users just exploded, but with that, the quality of posts (and average age of the user) dropped.
Lemmy/the fediverse reminds me of 2010-2015 reddit (which is a good thing!)
I remember when Reddit was run out of spez’s Somerville apartment on a little PC. No subreddits, just one top page. Terrible performance and no users. Everyone was at either Slashdot or Digg. Even Kuro5hin by then was dead. Reddit beat Digg because Digg got stupid and abused their community. Reddit is a million times worse now than Digg ever was.
Back when Reddit was funny and not a bot hive
I remember /r/AskReddit being THE spot, and it was great to read on the go since it was just text. All the novelty accounts were awesome, RamblesOffTopic being a favorite of mine haha.
…and r/conspiracy was 80% stuff like birds ain’t real and the rest I always assumed was people posting ironically… now I’m not so sure that that was an accurate assessment.
and r/F7U12. It wasn’t just a meme it was an entire meme language, kids these days with their gifs and their template sites… smhing my head
I use user tags pretty heavily, and it is amazing how small Lemmy truly is. I recognize a lot of individual users, and the tag even links back ti whatever post/comment I originally used to tag them.
That’s how the OG Internet communities were. There would be like 500 total people maybe and you’d see them randomly throughout the week as they were online. You don’t know everyone but you recognize most of the names/pfps.
It cuts down on a lot of toxicity when you can actually know who is a jerk and who is probably just having a bad day. It makes the community a bit more empathic and less reactionary.
Indeed!!
As a side tangent, I used to get so mad on old forums when someone would update their avatar lol I didn’t recognize names, I recognized their picture. So if they changed they might as well be a new user until I recognized we’ve spoken before, haha.
I know! I paid an artist, from the forums, to draw my avatar and paid them to update it for holidays and stuff so it was consistent.
Also, you gotta have a good signature. Why not a live updating image of what is playing in your media player, that could not possibly end badly.
Are you getting user tags from a third-party Lemmy app? I don’t see that feature in the web interface.
I think they must be - though I can’t figure out which one, haha.
I can’t figure out how to do it via the website, or Voyager / Mlem on iOS.
In Voyager, you need to enable the feature under Settings -> User Tags.
Voyager implements it entirely on the client; it’s not a feature of Lemmy. Therefore it isn’t available via the Lemmy website.
However, PieFed does have backend support for user tagging. On a PieFed account, you can tag users through the website or through Mlem.
This is going to move the bots to places that don’t check.
Without bots their most popular text based subs like AITAH or TwoHotTakes would be empty.
“Am I The Asshole for doing what I want with my own life?”
99.99% of posts in that sub
Accounts that are suspected of being bots would be required to verify.
And none of them will know about fediverse girl
Spez is a spaz that can’t spell. Fuck posting anything CEOs say they all suck, take their voice.
Everyone other website:
Websites should copy VKontakte and make the user line-up several words in Cyrillic. It’s the hardest one I’ve ever had to pass, it has to be exactly in the right place 😂
Like a sliding puzzle from Hell.
Doesn’t that make it a bad test? It should be easy for humans and hard for machines.
Or Cloudflare.
I’m not sure I understand how cloud flare is supposed to help? It clearly doesn’t actually work. My Arr stack has an automated cloud flare bypass that seems to have a decent success rate.
My body is ready.
All the bots will just come to Fedi. I’ve already seen some.
Funny how this ties nicely into Meta’s lobbying for age verification and how it’s suddenly a conversation we keep seeing crop up. The pattern recognition tools in my brain see nothing but constant red flags these days.
They flooded the web with bots, advertisers are backing out because of it, and now both Spez and Zuck are panicking.
I’m totally with you, I would also add that recently meta said that they wanted to add facial recognition to their “smart” glasses.
they said that “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns”
Source:
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-facial-recognition-distracted-2026-2?op=1
They flooded it with bots, what do you mean?
I think like Bitcoins creation hardwares technological advancement made it inevitable. Google made the tech, basic AI research, which became modern AI when they threw more compute at it.
Bitcoin was made inevitable by the Great Financial Crisis, not by hardware advancement. Its proof-of-work is based on hashcash from the 1990s. The computing power spent is arbitrary, a consequence of its creator underestimating how quickly Bitcoin would catch on.
These waves usually turn out better quality users than the lulls when we’re otherwise mostly getting the people who’ve been permabanned from Reddit. So, hopefully we get some good ones!
Hey. I’m high quality and I came from a permaban!
Personally offended !
Jk.
You’re banned!
