Can Reddit corporate executives hurt Lemmy ?
Let's assume the top executives of Reddit are worried about Lemmy.
Lemmy is taking away users and attention. The ressources that Reddit is desperately attempting to sell to advertisers.
In a meeting, Steve Huffman, Jen Wong, Drew Vollero and Jim Squires decide to spend $1 million dollars on a secret project called Cobra.
Their goal is simple : to destroy Lemmy. Apart from the top management, no Reddit employee is aware of project Cobra, because it must not leak in the media.
How could they actually sabotage Lemmy?
They make a post asking Lemmy users a hypothetical question as to how they would go about doing it
They could create 6 accounts that post nothing but old memes all day every day
wait
Those “avatars” reek of the metaverse.
I swear it’s where the idea came from.
Source: my ass
Meep moop.
Source: my neck, my back, my pussy and my ass
They could undo some of the enshittification that Reddit has undergone over the past few years.
Yes, but stock market.
These people can't climb back up their shit slide out of their shithole.
man I miss the open internet; these walled gardens suck ass
The only one that really pisses me off is Discord. I bet there's TBs of valuable hype-specific tech support in there that will never be findable via search engines
I’d wager it’ll be used to train some AI or something of that nature..
His eyes look so weird in this pic.
Yep I thought that. He looks like a serial killer
Step one, appoint a Cobra Commander.
Also appoint a rural SE Asian snake handler, the kind that performs for tourists, as their CFO.
Yes, but I think Lemmy is too busy hurting itself to really notice.
A few thoughts:
Offer the folks running the largest instances a full-time, salaried position. Make them feel like kings/queens. (You will eventually fire them/try to destroy them.)
Now Steve Huffman uploads the special folder on his desktop labeled PRIVATE GOONING MATERIAL and leaks to media that Lemmy is a haven of CP, so that eventually government gets involved and targets Lemmy as a left-wing radical organization allied with Antifa.
Introduce a Reddit fediverse instance and aggressively federate with the remaining major instances while also encouraging the federation of Facebook, Google, etc...
They for sure would federate with lemmy, claiming reddit to be the main hub for Lemmy.
But after a good while start randomly dropping/blocking different lemmy instances and just try to stop content being shared across lemmy itself.
It's also right in the ballpark for a zuckerberg stunt as well...
You are speaking hypothetically, correct? Otherwise, source?
Their best strategy would be to poison the content with bot accounts, spam, and morally tasteless voices. Sullying the public perception of the content and services would stigmatize users. Since servers are funded by users and other donors, corporate lobbying or DDoS attacking to make it more expensive to host servers would also be an underhanded strategy.
You mean, make the Fediverse even more like Reddit?
The worst parts of Reddit and 4Chan combined and push it to the forefront
Of course it was hypothetical. Cmon man
I figured it was hypothetical but there wasn’t any lead-in and it was said with such certainty
The lead in was "let's assume".
I understood that to be referring to only that sentence, and it’s not even something that needs to be assumed since it is known.
Lemmy does that all by itself. I spent the first two weeks stamping out barely disguised anime loli porn and furry porn. Shit still pops up like herpes.
I…can’t say I have the same experience. I haven’t had this problem.
Honestly, they should focus on actively moderating their content. I just deleted that app again, its full of ai generated content, full of agitprop, bots commenting walls and walls of engagement, everything and anything is an occasion for culture war bullshit...
Its insane how much the product has degraded, its like one good post for 20 scrolled down, and like half of them are reposts of the same goddamn content from months ago.
I think we should cherish lemmy, and hope to hell that it doesnt become that.
Sorting by new for me on any of the bigger subreddits shows me there being only a few posts a day yet each post will have insane amounts of botted responses. Only thing keeping me on there are the local subreddits and r/standupcomedy. Even r/news sucks there. 5.8 million subscribers but 7 posts within 24 hours (that are at least visible). How would there be almost no discussion when there's more than a small country of people allegedly viewing this
my motiviation for using lemmy isn't that I like lemmy, it's that I hate reddit. so yeah, go for it spaz, i'll just use the next clone.
AI bot spam everywhere.
The server would probably just get defederated.
They already blocked the lemmy subreddit. Pretty sure they're already doing anything that they can get away with.
Those snoo avatars for the execs look like the most soulless looking art styles possible, sort of like how Chuck E Cheese got rebranded. Pretty gross.
I wonder why gaysian man has no avatar?
Nice try, spez. Your empire is crumbling.
This is all hypothetical of course.
But when actually you think about it, it sounds realistic. Many corporations operate like organized crime.
Wasn’t the lemmy sub recently banned?
http://reddit.com/r/lemmy2
The countdown is on. How long until banned?
Which one killed Aaron?
They'd have to pay out the $1M to consultants to forward for any actually-effective hands-on gruntwork of trying to influence the social media user market, or technical attacks on the code infrastructure or federated service provider resources. It would show somewhere in their financials.
They could literally just have 3 interns make hundreds of fake accounts on various instances, and flood the network with low-grade but ultimately harmless content.
My guess is that it is either that, or else bribing people who have existing positions of trust on the network (admins or moderators or powerusers) to undertake some kind of destructive action.
The first is cheaper and much more effective (and won't get detected instantly), the second is more in line with reddit-exec-brained thinking. So kind of a toss-up. Something along the lines of those ideas would be my guess though. I thought about some kind of "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy like Facebook with Threads, but I think even Reddit isn't stupid enough to try something like that (which would only result in a massive increase in the exodus of users from Reddit to Lemmy).
Edit: Well... something occurred to me. "Low-grade but ultimately harmless content" is exactly what they have been pushing Reddit towards, because they think it is better because it traps people in dopamine loops more effectively. Flooding Lemmy with that stuff (more so than it already is organically) would fuck it up from my point of view, but maybe from their point of view, something like really emotionally toxic random hatred in all directions. Maybe. Anyway, I think flooding Lemmy with content that turns people off via sockpuppet accounts is probably the easiest and most effective way, and I don't see much way to prevent it.
Lemmy posts with low grade but harmless content?
So... Business as usual, then?
The hypothesis stipulates "Apart from the top management, no employee is aware of project Cobra". So the hypothetical interns are handled by a consulting third party, not Reddit itself.
Nice try reddit execs!
why do they have to turn everyone into these weird funko pops
I mean, all they gotta do is make a rule stating that talking about any alternative platforms is against TOS, so probably just that, assuming they can actually enforce it.
Otherwise, all they'd probably need to do is co-opt one of the morbidly obese, chronically online, single digit IQ power mods on there. In other words, any mod on that platform will do. All that bootlicker has to do is ban any and all free speech about Lemmy, as long as it's positive.
Damn, the photographer did one hell of a job to not make Spez look like the creepy little pedophile he is.
All the need to do is go back to 2010 Reddit when it was focused in content aggregation and had open API access.
The most logical approach I can think of would be starting up an instance, flooding it with bots, and using those bots to spread to other instances.
However I don't use Lemmy super often but from what I understand intance admins can block other instances so it wouldn't kill Lemmy entirely, it would just make it worse to use, which is a detriment because the most-cited reason I see for not getting involved in fediverse apps seems to be the learning curve upon entry. Open instances would be flooded with bots and all actively maintained instances would need to start isolating themselves from other instances and heavily screen who gets in
The instance would just get defederated within 24 hours by 90% of the fediverse.
Nice try Huffman, Wong, Vallejo and Squires!
You think we are stupid? No! There are people who know what Linux is on this site!
Nice try!
I would be more interested in some theories about why that is possible. The feds have been proactive here, with private intelligence contractors advertising their ability to bore into every nook and cranny of social media, specifically mentioning the fediverse. Open source is under control by nature of the management of the time economy of programmers by capital. There is never enough time to keep up with what people need to be paid to do to live in the hours leftover afterwards they need to cook and clean and hypothetically woo their beloved
I doubt they give a shit. As much as I wish there was an alternative, Lemmy is inferior in almost every way still. Started off as a noble endeavor but now it's just full not only users that are bots but entire instances that are just spam bots.
What? What instances?