Reddit felt really astroturfed for years now. Start mentioning Neill Druckman in any capacity and your post immediately got flooded with copy paste hate centered on TLoU2. It seemed organic at the time, but when the TV series came out it was very sus, as if somebody had forgotten to turn off their bot army.

I’ve talked to a few that seemed organic, but those were basically people who wanted Reddit to get back to normal and not waste time on bullshit that didn’t affect them personally.

i did check in a few communities that i was engaging with before, and honestly, it seemed organic, but it was always lurkers/semi-lurkers who don’t post and only comment like once every two months. accounts for the delay as well, because they don’t check reddit that often (before everything went to shit posts would usually be gathering views for a good 24 hours)

but reddit also started using chatgpt to prop itself up lately (which afaik is against chatgpt’s tos, so that’s nice for the future lawsuit if they wanna cash in), so idk. that does put a damper on their legitimacy.

At least one post was defending reddit in r/programming has been shown to be chatGPT, that’s for sure. If they have one bot, who’s to say they don’t have thousands?

The un-moderated right wing shit has been very pronounced on Reddit the last few weeks.

This is how the playbook for Fascism works.

I look at it this way: it sucks, but it’s not surprising - it’s expected. There’s no reason for them to cater to the users, because that’s not how these things work. The people who made this decision

(a) mostly care about money

(b) were obviously willing to lose the favor of Reddit’s users for money

© have built a platform who’s monetization model has become somewhat at odds with what made Reddit good in the first place

(d) are probably going to succeed in making money from Reddit

It’s sad, it really sucks. But, there’s nothing we can really do about it, apart from things like post memes mocking Spez or making subreddits go “dark”.

Neither of those are long term solutions.

I’d rather we moved on and let it go, tbh. We could be doing a lot more

Almost like they’re being paid to do it.

I’ve heard before that in the early days of Reddit u/spez had hundreds of alts he would use to reply to posts to make Reddit seem more popular. I wonder if he occasionally resurrects them to support political arguments he likes or to defend Reddit admins.

It sounds like one of the many of spez’ alts he openly admitted to having years back, since he seems to laud him self as a troll.