It's probably a whole set of bots and the responses to "this needs to be a coffee mug" are some other account saying "I found one!" and that's the whole point of the comment chain. Someone has a crappy mug to sell and constructs scenarios that seem natural ish to introduce it.
There used to be a big issue on Tumblr years ago with bots trolling for comments like that and then stealing whatever picture that comment was on to sell crappy t-shirts of it or whatever. People started fighting back by posting those comments specifically on Disney stuff.
That was cringe but I think a better reason NOT to return to reddit is the fact that they just sold out their users to an AI company that hasn't even been named.
Yeah, all these bots replies is copied from other comment, and there's shit tons of r/confidentlyincorrect comment that is outright factually wrong, which then get regurgitated by other user and copied by bots, so good luck to the AI company filtering those.
AFAIK, there’s nothing stopping any company from scraping Lemmy either. The whole point pf reddit limiting API usage was so they could make money like this.
Outside of morals, there is nothing to stop anybody from training on data from Lemmy just like there’s nothing stopping me from using Wikipedia. Most conferences nowadays require a paragraph on ethics in the submission, but I and many of my colleagues would have no qualms saying we scraped our data from open source internet forums and blogs.
You're right, anyone can scrape Lemmy. But that's not the issue (to me anyway) - Reddit have sold user data - user generated content. None of what they're profiting from was generated or created by them. Are Reddit users who did generate all this content getting a slice of the profits?
When I post on here I know it's all open for anyone to access but that's true of any non walled garden space. I've accepted the fact that it's going to get fed into the hungry maw of some AI behemoth or two.
What Reddit have done is make money for doing absolutely nothing based on content others have created like some sort of technological tapeworm feeding second hand. And along the way they killed off a lot of tools that users loved, moderators found made their jobs easier and people with a visual disability found vital. And all this so u/spez can live out his mini-Musk fantasies.
Fuck Reddit, but why does this matter? Them selling internal analytics and profile information isn't going to be nearly as valuable as post/comment history which has already been public and scraped continuously since the site's foundings. Practically every LLM is already has already scraped the entire site! Whatever company is buying their info is probably the only ones doing it legitimately. You can also assume Lemmy is no different, it's all public and scrapable for LLMs to freely feast on.
I think the fewer number of people, compared to reddit, on Lemmy combined with the fact that it's not nearly as well known, plays a huge advantage to the quality of the comments. Not that there aren't people like that here either, but I feel like the more popular a platform, is, the more it gets filled, proportionally, with people trying to make witty, shitty, pointless remarks that are often clickkbaity and avoid actual discussion, all in the interest of just getting more imaginary points.
Also the process of "enshitification" (not a term I made up, look it up if you hadn't heard of it) has already started taking place on reddit due to its popularity.
But no, I don't think shitposts by themselves are actually the problem. I think the problem is when when there's so many people dedicated to making shitposts that serious communities with serious discussions start getting overwhelmed with shitposts, and when there's so many people who are only interested in shitposts that they upvote those shitposts to the top, often downvoting anyone who might offer a contrarian non-funny opinion.
or IDK, I'm mostly speculating based on personal experience.
At least there are dedicated spaces for that and most Lemmings are respecting that, if it doesn't spill out too much to more serious communities then at least there isn't too much noise to have a good discussion.
I do hope that lemmy continues to grow into non-tech demographics. I'm somewhat into tech myself, but I also like a lot of other stuff and I miss that influence from reddit. Lemmy is VERY tech focused right now and we need some other voices in here.
Also the process of "enshitification" has already started taking place on reddit due to its popularity.
I started using reddit in 2011. Trust me when I say this isn't a new trend. Reddit's has been noticeably and actively getting shittier since at least 2015 as it continued to get more and more popular
Shitty changes Reddit made that I can name off the top of my head:
New Reddit
Reddit Live
Anything beyond Reddit gold (the concept of paying for Reddit gold was, by itself, not a terrible idea back when we thought Reddit was a decent company)
Instant chat feature, when DMs already existed
Pay for API
Fired their only popular employee, the AMA assistant
You could argue creating a comments section was also a dick move, but that was before my time and it's fair to say Reddit never would have caught on without it.
They also populated the site with fake accounts in the early days to make it look more popular than it really was. I would be zero percent surprised to find out that they still had fake accounts floating around for purposes I don't feel like speculating about.
There's also a big issue of the sheer mass of comments in a post simply drowning out any chance of discussion because only the first few most upvoted ones will usually get seen, so people generally just respond to those to get any interaction on their comments. It's why the frontpage stuff is always so much worse than smaller subs - because by the time people see it, there's already 1,000+ comments there.
I think this is a huge problem with democracy as well. The larger a country, the worse democracy works. Any apparatus of power or wealth attracts parasites only interested in exploiting it. And the larger the lever, the more profit from manipulating it. And the larger the potential gain the more investment costs can you justify.
This isn't necessarily an argument for "states rights" or federation though, with "divide and conquer" strategies you can copy and paste the same strategy to multiple instances. If there is monetary gain to be had, there will always be an unrelenting force trying to exploit it.
Eh, am from a country with 9mil people, and this society simply doesn't get democracy. So being smaller is hardly any indicator that democracy will work better.
All I see is cherry picking random dumb comment thread and trying to spin it as if it defines the whole use base / experience and thinking Lemmy is used by the most sophisticated intellectuals.
Not to mention that amitheasshole is the biggest collection of validation seeking goobers on reddit. We really aren't better than redditors, we are the same people, we just have principles that led us to seek the same experience uncompromised elsewhere.
Yeah my guess is that these are accounts currently being farmed. I actually bought a reddit account once and its history was full of this kind of stuff
A self driving car pulls around .. window opens ... sign says to just throw the food inside ... auto pay through NFC on the door ... car drives away ... dumps food into a waiting auto trash compactor ... car drives away to next town to order food again ... AI powering the car generates another $10,000 worth of bitcoin to start the food ordering cycle again.
(But like, for real, though.) I certainly don't feel bad for Reddit when the CEO says he intends to use that forum's users to train AIs, and then every comment turns into some "please upvote me" catchphrasey nonsense. Hopefully, whoever buys training data from them receives nothing of value.
It’s actually kind of crazy how like… stupid Reddit got over the past 2 years.
Like don’t get me wrong Lemmy isn’t exactly an intellectual powerhouse either, but especially on the front page of Reddit it truly feels like you’ve gathered a few thousand of the dumbest people ever and made them high five. Browsing the science and dataisbeautiful subs is insane
I haven't been to Reddit r/popular in months but... yeah, all the best people got booted out. What is left are the scabs, and the bots. So it makes total sense.
Before that, it was a different cause. Reddit itself drove a lot of it, imho, like actively making it easier to make a post while making it harder to read the rules of a community first, i.e. they promoted talking rather than listening. Oh, guess which one gives more ad revenue? Yeah, it's the former, plus more posts are better than more comments inside megathreads, especially at the time. Places like r/Android would just devolve into almost unusability as every post was just "which phone should I get?", despite that exact post being triplicated with practically an identical title already that very same day. The amount of human moderation required to keep that at least somewhat in check was insane, so ofc Reddit took away the ability of mods to use the tools they had developed over many years.
And now? FAAFO, we are in the "find out" stage. Well, they are:-P.
Oh absolutely. I was on Reddit a long time and you really did see when they started to “Astro turf” the website a lot. And it was never… nefarious imo. They realize the website was overwhelmingly geeky white guys so they sprung up a lot of subreddits targeting women and minority groups. And that’s good! I think that was a good move. But they just… kept finding ways of drawing people in. And they kept drawing more and more in until the website had essentially no “culture”, and it just became Facebook where you browse through and can read top posts about entitled old ladies talking about how fucking angry she is because her door dasher asked if there would be a tip or whatever.
So yunno, I’m sure profits are at an all time high. It’s just kind of a shame that the site is basically Facebook sludge now.
Hacker news works because it has a specific perspective. You basically just get the capitalist tech crowd and unapologetically so.
It's not perfect, but I like that it's roughly apolitical (as in, free of world events, politics, and X slammed for Y articles). I understand that capitalist tech is inherently political, but it's not where to go to talk politics.
For general purpose discussion? I don’t think so. The internet being so open and accessible means that the only ways to find more educated discussion on various topics is typically through more specialized websites (like Hacker news for computing), and even then it’s kind of a crap shoot.
Ehhh.. kind of. Even more “mid range” interests are kind of co-opted and you need to do odd bends and twists to find good discussion. Subs like the chemistry subreddit are very obviously not made up of majority “chemists” (even student chemists), so you have to seek out the “chemistry professionals” subreddit which is more hidden to actually discuss the topic.
That’s an example where there is a “good version”. For many topics, especially pop culture related and such, you might have one “main” sub, but then the “alternative” sub is just the racist one.
Then you have things like dataisbeautiful which doesn’t really have an alternative and it’s all terrible despite the concept being good
Maybe they are dogs! Maybe they are robot dogs! You Don't KNOW!
BTW it's less scary if you think most of these comments are written by morons. A "smart" bot comment (like an informative one) is still way better than a comment written by a human idiot.
These low effort and low quality comments used to be the norm when reddit was new. Eventually the community kinda wised up a bit and realized that you don't need a "when does the narwhal bacon?" comment chain in every thread and heavily downvoted this sort of thing. Then the reverse happened and reddit become known for housing the internet's most insufferable know-it-alls, contrarians, and pedants. I think it kinda still has that reputation a little bit, but maybe the metaphorical boomerang is swinging back around again? Either that, or like you said, bot infestation.
I have gone back a while ago. Some subs are bad but most I frequent are the same as before. I now use lemmy on my phone and reddit on the PC. At least on reddit the Linux cult doesnt try to convert you everytime you say the word windows.
To be fair, if you make a decentralized, leftist answer to Reddit's inherent structural flaws, you're going to attract leftists and people who are fans of decentralization.
What I find weird, is why people would comment that kind of worthless stuff when they could just give an upvote. It doesn't add anything to the discussion. It is just worthless fluff.
And writing responses like that comes close to that. I understand it, kinda, because I use to do the same. When somebody writes me some message or sth, I often reply with a short (but still unnecessarily long) text. I even do this when I wasn't directly talked to. So that's a habit.
I got a free beer. But I literally smelled the atmosphere, and realized it was gonna be a Magic the gathering/nerd expo but filled with angry drunken weirdos and I left.
The next day, the organizers sent a mass email asking for people to chip in. Someone broke the pool table. Someone ripped pages out of a manual. Someone stole name plaques from a managers office.
They complained about having to clean up vomit and we can "do better redditors!"
Even more than a decade later, that stupid meme still reminds me of one of the worst social events I ever had the mispleasure of attending. Can't have been later than 2012.
I was making small talk, and I referenced an interesting article that had been on the Reddit front page the day before. "Oh, I was reading an article yesterday about blah bla-". This nerdy, but until this point socially concious guy interrupts everything for that stupid meme. "gasp DO YOU KNOW WHEN THE NARWHAL BACONS?!?!" "Yes. So as I was saying-" "But. Do you know. When the narwhal BACONS?" Everyone is looking at me like I'm responsible for whatever the fuck is going on now. "Yes, I found the article on Reddit. It was-" The man cuts me off again, "WHEN DOES IT BACON?" You motherfucker I attended the goddamn Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity and have the Reddit and Colbert complimentary T-Shirt only handed out on-site to prove it and now is not the time I am attempting to be a normal human being with more diverse hobbies than staring at a screen all day don't you take this from me.
Also, the degree of banning now is at another level. My friend got banned site wide for three days because she used the word moron to describe a mail carried that fucked up real bad. I guess she doesn't spend much time on reddit so she wasn't aware what a shithole that place became
Thats been a thing since a shirt while before the api meltdown. I went through like 5 accounts getting banned for things like telling a TERF to fuck off or saying I hope someone assassinated Putin.
And their "appeal" system just automatically denies you.
Yeah, I stopped making new accounts there, cause they survive only for a couple of weeks or so until admins decide that morons are a protected group, or that answering calls to genocide with appropriate wishes is calling to violence (the other side usually doesn't get banned), etc.
I like it here - at least bans for being rude are mostly egalitarian not depending on political positions (if you don't try to teach tankies economics and history on their own instances, which is stupid in at least two dimensions).
I left in the big exodus and never considered going back. There's really only one community (r/Fantasy, because so many actual authors regularly post) I am really missing, but life continues without it.
I'm still reading (mostly for r/ukraine), but I haven't posted anything since the great exodus.
Also the old UI finally helped me in overwriting all my posts and comments to my own posts the other day. Now I try to overwrite & delete a few comments every day that I made to not-my-own posts.
Leaving was a blessing for me, I'm using all that time I used to spend doom scrolling to learn guitar. I only use it now when I'm looking up something obscure and the answer is in a reddit thread from like 8 years ago lol.
it’s cringe but equaly cringy is posting it to here and the comments pretending you couldn’t find a dozen similar examples on lemmy lol, like the demographic is not that different.
heaven forbid some cringey individuals spread some positive energy online! they should be more toxic and debate lord-ey with every comment.
reddit always had an incredible individuality, not-like-other-girls complex and it’s truly wonderful to see that that mindset has immediately migrated here. never change, reddit circlejerk brainrot, my love. 😍
There’s a Dutch “media company” that scrapes socials for quotable things, puts them on a black background with white letters, and puts periods after every word. Also mugs, t-shirts, you name it.
They made it their whole brand identity to WRITE. LIKE. THIS.
Insufferable, really.
The usernames are not pertinent to the sentiment. However, they could cause a hassle. So blanking makes sense.
If there were dangerous or responses that merit a response, ok, but for trying to make a point of "comments are full of vacuous crap", it doesn't matter even in theory.
Maybe if the post were making a point that people didn't agree with, it warrants some clues like a citation to back up the claims, but this is just a circle jerk sort of post, so no one's about to say "no, Reddit only has deep and meaningful commentary, you need to prove that comments like this exist".
I remember the last post I saw on reddit before I switched to lemmy full time. It was the day after they removed 3rd party app support. I clicked on a video where 2 people were fighting, normally when something like that was posted I'd be able to go into the comments and find a source of some kind, be it a news article, someone who had seen it before knowing the context, or even a link to the original post. But as I kept scrolling I saw none of that. Just post after post of low effort shit like "got em" or, even worse, racist whistles (one of the people involved where black). I looked at every single comment, I could not believe that there was no source. Once I reached the end I un-installed RiF (it still worked the next day just not while logged in) and never looked back.
Reddit is bloodthirsty and quite often rejects reason, especially if you’re in subs like justiceporn or similar. People DGAF if the solution to a problem was “just walk away” that was available for the entirety of the lead-up to an incident, they just want to see massive retaliation for a slight, perceived or real. FAFO. can’t fix stupid. Etc.
Bunch of angry drunks looking for a fight for any reason.
That, and Reddit is all about reactions and retreads in all the popular subs, just like TikTok and the like.
The conversations happen in the small subs. Sometimes.
I still participate in a few small subs that Lemmy doesn't have the critical mass to replicate, and even in many of those there has been a marked decline in the quality of posts and discussion. It's painfully clear that the mods who left during the API protest were putting in serious effort, and the scabs that replaced them aren't up to the prior standard. Makes it a lot easier to leave most of Reddit behind, at least.
lol .... this is like the trash can problem they had in national parks that had to design bear proof trash cans
They had to design trash cans to trick the smartest bears yet be easy enough to use for the dumbest humans ... the problem became in realizing that there was a small segment where the two groups overlap.
The same thing is happening online ... we can no longer tell who the smartest AI are or who dumbest humans are.
I'm going to block you just for posting this. You've wasted everybody's time who had to scroll past this, and we are all now dumber. May god have mercy on your soul.
I'm going to be pretty mad when it turns out the reason NCD isn't full of bot trash is because it actually was a CIA psyop and they've got better bots.
Made a post on a subreddit basically saying how I had been trying to get a gameboy then scalpers jumped in and rose the price well past anything I could spend. It got some attention, basically a bunch of advice only useful for people making 8888888K a year. Then, overnight, a fuckton of mostly american scalpers spam downvoted me.
Reddit is the new facebook imho, even people who I somewhat agree with frame their comments in such a way that I wanna punch them in the face, and a source for whatever they say? Lol trust me bro! I have seen that here even if someone says something that I don’t agree with, they at-least provide something that shows how they arrived at some point/conclusion, which opens a door for healthy discussions, I don’t think we as a community are much better, there are different flaws, but the environment is certainly different and better
Seven or eight years ago I thought linking to sources was a rule/ettiquite, I learned it from how a lot of comments were back then and how I still format a good chunk of my answers.
Once the account is a bit older and has enough karma points, it will be either sold, post spam, or Post/comment on an product or topic the owner wants to push, or down vote opposing opinions.
yeah most people came here because of the third party app bs from reddit, theyd probably be perfectly fine in reddit if the api changes didnt happen or were reverted
Once lemmy got popular, I just decided next time I get banned I won't make a new reddit account. Sure enough, I got banned without breaking any rules. Good riddance.
Just before the API drama, the instance r/Mexico started censoring insults to politicians and mostly to the president. They started trying to monetize something (I'm not sure how) and they didn't want people screwing things up. They started censoring a lot of content and I abandoned that subreddit. The alternative was a trash place, with racism and general LGBTfobia. Then the API drama started and I just left.