People finding out the internet never forgets, and never forgives.

It's the new form of marketing really. Ads aren't super effective anymore as they've reached saturation and are showing severely diminished returns, so the next thing you can do is to create bot posts in the form of 'product testimonials' similar to what a person would see on amazon reviews, but from a source they're more likely to trust such as a subreddit comment chain.
Ie. Initial: I use [product], going on 15 years etc.
Reponse: I use it too works great.
Alt response: I use [diff. product], its cheaper but works the same.

The "buy it for life" subreddit was full of them.

Of course it gets a little more inisidious when it's not just used for pushing products, but instead pushing ideas or propaganda. It's commonly referred to as psyops, and they try to maintain a steady presence on any popular online forum. It was a big problem on Tumblr for a long time before Reddit.

Also news post bots are super common, they want to generate traffic to their news sites, as that is their source of ad revenue. Lots of ad revenue related bots making posts to generate site traffic. Some of it's not the worst thing to have, creates something of a newsfeed and a lot of it is already present here or on Mastodon.

It becomes problematic when you have very biased news organizations and they're allowed to use bots to upvote their news articles with impunity so all you see is biased news, it circles right back around to psyops.

Also ad revenue fraud is something that happens a lot. Ad engagement with a bot that is meant to simulate a user browsing the site and clicking on an ad so that the person hosting the ads gets paid by the person who put the ad up. Sometimes it happens on entirely fake websites with entirely fake traffic, its much easier when you dont have to fake all the traffic and just the ad engaging traffic, as it adds legitimacy to the website. I wouldnt be surprised if a good portion of Reddits revenue is from ad fraud. It would go a long way to explaining why traffic was down only 6% during blackouts, if a large portion of the 94% remaining traffic was ad engagement bots.

I guess there's the idea that all press is good press. People who didn't know reddit existed now likely do and they might just check it out to see what the hullabaloo is about. They might not even be internet savvy enough to suspect bot conversations are a real thing.

It's a website that gets paid in traffic, and we're giving people a reason to continue being traffic, and potentially increasing their traffic. We just fed the machine.

The best thing we can do is just stop using it. Making the protests fun is only going to help reddit. They're not negotiating, they've made their decision already, they're not going to back down on it and even if they did some decisions have consequences.

But is he... earnestly working on it?

It's marketing, it's propaganda, it's psyops. Influencing what posts make it to the front page, what posts stay in hot, what opinions get upvoted or downvoted just to make them look popular or unpopular. Mass reporting for posts that offend them. Having entirely fake, scripted conversations to convey points in a more trusted manner in order to influence the reader.

Remember, nobody is immune propaganda.

So uhh, step one: get cholera (it lives on shellfish, and plankton do with this what you will, lick some shells or something)
Step two: ingest cholera
Step three: try not to die

The infamous nipple bot. Boldly finding nipples where no nipples were found before.

Ok but how do we put ads on it?

I personally like the roulette every time I make a risky click. Am I going to get some horrific medical gore that doctors use to desensitize themselves, or am I going to get cock and ball torture, maybe it's a sports illustrated calendar girl, or bread nailed to a tree. Who knows? It's the internet. A terrible place where you can't trust someone didn't intentionally mislabel something just to trick you into watching Rick Astley busting some sick dance moves to a catchy song.
I suppose they could make differentiating nsfw types an optional thing though.

Finally a war they can win!

The problem for me is that I'm always trying to read shit that is boring as fuck, for like self betterment or something. Like I try to read non-fiction history, or a textbook, or some award winning abstract cerebral literature shit. Y'know, to learn something or get a different perspective and generally be a better person.

My brain doesn't like that shit. My brain wants to read about emotionally repressed wizards shooting red lightning and werewolves that have too much sex. Way too much sex.

Maybe you have a similar problem as I do. You're trying to read based on what you think is logical to read. You only have so many hours in a day so you want your reading to have a purpose or a benefit, but the books you enjoy reading don't make you think or teach you a skill. They're emotional fluff, but they're what you actually enjoy reading. Does that sound like you? That's me in a nutshell. Logically at odds with what I enjoy.

If I want to actually get through that other boring crap I have to set a schedule, read like 3 pages a day and put it down. I have to stick to the schedule, like working out. It takes forever to get through a book. It works though.

I think this is a case of people doing both at the same time.

You see things like this a lot, on the internet and in politics, the framing of a situation as a binary choice, the idea that we only have the option to do one thing or the other. It's bullshit. We can do as many things as we're damn well capable of doing. Sometimes even at the same goddamm time.

I have no doubt that there are reddit mods currently migrating to whatever alternative they're going with while also simultaneously trolling the shit out of reddit on their way out.

Good for them, the more attention they raise, the more fun people have, the more it'll be noticed when they get the boot.

Lol, if the valuations low, more people can afford it!
-Spez probably

Lol, shitty business man does shitty at business, blames it on his not-customers. Sell me a product bitch. I ain't fuckin sold on an overpriced pillow. Let alone his overpriced pillow. How many competitors this mother fucker have? It's a goddamn saturated ass market of fucking pricy pillows. Where's his marketing? Where's his diversification? How often are people buying pillows?
This asshole made a fucking niche ass product for a niche ass market and then went on a fucking midlife crisis rant bender about some conspiracy bullshit.
Maybe that was his hair brained idea of marketing. He wanted to sell his pillow to crazy tinfoil hat fuckers. Mother fucker made his niche market even nicher. Maybe he mistook niche for Nietzsche.

NCBI's GenBank has some and they're trying to get more.

Here's an article about why it's hard. Spoiler alert, it's poverty.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8795520/

Also I suggest checking out GenBank and BLAST, whether you're working in biology or not they're fun to play around with.

I think there's something to be said for accepting that we're old and what our kids get excited for and enjoy isn't going to and doesn't need to make sense to us.

It would be nice if they used more practical effects though.

Me too, I tried to make a lemmy account and it wouldn't work at first, and then when it did work it wouldn't let me log in. I can't imagine how much more of a pain in the ass it would be if it was one of the instances that required an essay to apply for membership.

I tried kbin and it worked first try, no problems at all. I figured I would run into the same problem I had trying to join lemmy but didn't have a problem at all.

I can't imagine how many more people would be signing up to the federation if it just worked first try.

I'm sure the economy will turn around once WW3 starts, wars always fix economic problems!

I wish I was joking.

It'll be interesting to see how much of the "content" is just bots farming headlines from newspapers, or recycling old content on a schedule. How much traffic is actually user traffic vs bot traffic? Makes me think of the dead internet theory.

I'm not a memer but can someone spin up the scene from team america, i feel it would be very fitting