Wolf Link 🐺

That’s an interesting zero-effort way to farm clicks… I guess coming up with some actual clickbait to boost engagement was too much work?

…and even if it loads, it’ll be grainy and ugly and consists of eight or so pixels - maybe nine if your connection is top tier. Before I nuked my account, I redownloaded all videos I had uploaded over the course of the last couple of years, but then decided against reuploading them to youtube because all of them look like sh*t now. I’d be embarrassed to put something like that into my YT account.

… and it is defo reddit’s fault, because when I uploaded the videos back in the day I often struggled to keep the file size under 1GB, whereas the same videos downloaded later now have 87 MB on average … less than a tenth of the original data, still the same lenght and content, but the quality took a huge, very noticable nosedive.

The wrong people pick up the communities and just abandon them or completely mismanage them. Can’t be helped though.

That’s already happening, but the ability to “adopt” communities helps to combat that. You can go to [email protected] and request to take over abandoned communities created by others, provided the original creator has been inactive and the community really IS abandoned / unmoderated. That way, someone who is actually interested in doing something for / with the community gets put in charge for a second chance (instead of the community name squatter being allowed to block the community name forever).

I adopted [email protected] a couple of months ago for xample. It didn’t have a sidebar, rules, banner, icon, and the original creator had contributed zero content, so even tho that game is popular at the moment, there was barely anything interesting in there (plus some offtopic posts that were simply never removed). Now it has 2.6k subscribers and a steady stream of content, and offtopic stuff / insulting comments and the like actually get removed.

I also adopted [email protected] yesterday by the way, so the above comment that this community is “abandoned and devoid of content” is no longer true ;) maybe I should edit that … hm.

Long story short, I still think adopting abandoned communities is a good thing. provided the “adopter” is active enough themselves to make the community thrive.

Minor addition: Lemmy needs more active users. A lot of redditfugees seem to have created their own instances the moment they arrived here, only to expect other people to fill the communities with content and then abandon the site once they realised they would have to put actual work into their communities instead of just being squatters with mod rights. There are a lot of gaming-related communities here that I personally would be interested in joining if they weren’t abandoned and devoid of content (like Cult of the Lamb or Spiritfarer for example).

It would be really nice if active Lemmy users would “adopt” a few of those abandoned communities to add content and pull in more subscribers. “Only” having more people overall on the site doesn’t do much if this does not lead to more content / discussions / interaction.

I was trying to unlock a dragon-type safari in Pokémon Y and you can’t just enter a random code for that - you need to find another player who has such a safari in their own game already, share codes with them, and then you both need to be online at the same time at least once. After lots of googling I found a person on reddit, but didn’t have an account at the time so I created one just for that dumb safari.

I didn’t even plan to keep the account in the first place, so I didn’t care for a proper name - that’s the reason I was named “justlookingfordragon” back then. I tried “just_looking_for_a_dragon_type_safari_THX” first but it exceeded the character limit.

After that, I didn’t touch the account again for a few months but eventually started using it proper for giveawys of Pokémon breedjects, and then later Zelda-related stuff. Still never bothered to find a better name and it’s become somewhat of a running gag for me to use that awkward username elsewhere (like for youtube and lemmy for example).

Holy Denial Batman.

This sounds like the digital equivalent to a pizza party.

Exactly this. And looking at the sheer amount of locally sourced, all-natural bullshit reddit does day in, day out, we really don’t need to fabricate reasons to roll our eyes at them, like pretending a joke ban was somehow a real, unironic mod action. I mean, even if the sub name wasn’t THAT clear, the message itself oozes sarcasm on a level that one can’t possibly take it seriously. No idea what message the OP is trying to convey here other than not getting what sarcasm is.

Every time I think it can’t possibly get any dumber … reddit proves me wrong. I have been a redditor for nearly ten years before I jumped ship and switched to Lemmy, and during that almost-decade I have used reddit’s own search function for all of fifteen minutes before giving up and using google with the keyword “reddit + whatever I wanted to find” instead. It simply sucks.

sustained level of activity over the last ~3 months

Gee, I wonder what happened roughly 3 months ago that might have led to them picking this exact time frame …

I have occasionally checked my former favorite sub since leaving - the stats are still the same (~900k users) but the content has gone downhill in a very obvious way. Each time I checked, the sub was filled to the brim with lazy, unfunny shitposts, extremely obvious t-shirt scammers and repost bots, offtopic content, conterfeit merch and sometimes an actually interesting post with like 12 upvotes or so, and you would have to dig quite deep to reach it.

And the sub creator seems to have abandoned it entirely. The description still says that the sub has gone private due to spez’ decisions and that you need to use discord instead (the sub has been public again since the initial protest, just the description was never updated) and they haven’t touched their own sub in 3+ months.

PS: I just checked again and they have a 2 day old screenshot of a dead frog with 2k upvotes as the current top post.

Go for it. Even if you don’t know much about science; there are other things a mod can do to improve a community. Deleting troll posts and spam and advertisements, creating and maintaining community rules, adding a nice banner and icon, featuring posts, keeping an eye on possible harassment, fix broken/decayed links … you don’t need scientific knowledge for these, and it may still help the other mods. You can leave the actually scientific discussions to the community members, as long as you manage provide a safe environment to enable these discussions ;)

Karma isn’t the goal - clicks are. The more people (or bots) interact with the site, the more traffic is generated, and the less it looks as if reddit is dying. Spez is trying to forge engagement with/on reddit.

Even if a post gets half a million downvotes and dozens of reports, does that only mean that it generated more than half a million clicks.

(That’s also the reason most clickbait is such a huge heap of bullshit. An outrageously dumb/wrong statement right in the title and lots of bullshit in the article = people get angry, leave comments, argue, share the article with likeminded people to show them how dumb/wrong it is … and the author gets paid per click in ad revenue. The writers know they’re wrong, but a factually correct article doesn’t generate nearly as much traffic.)

I read about a similar situation recently … a thread where people were joking around about NSFW stuff and someone commented “that guy must be hung” (as in “big member”) and got suspended for hate speech / inciting violence because the mod apparently thought they meant “go hang that guy” (as in execute).

So yes, context matters greatly, especially when dealing with snarky comments and reactions to shitposts, where people usually aren’t as serious.

Imagine you’re at a convention or something similar. A huge building with lots of rooms, inside those rooms lots of tables, and at those tables, lots of people. You enter a room: At table A they are playing a board game, at table B they’re discussing a rulebook, at table C they’re in a heated argument about spaceships. You like it here, so you dump your backpack and jacket at one of the tables - this is your seat now.

But you’re not confined to that room - you’re free to wander the entire convention scene, regardless of which room you use as your “base”, and other people are free to do the same. You can join discussions at any table in any room for as long as you like, and people who dumped their stuff into other rooms are free to visit yours.

The tables are communities (“subreddits”), the rooms are instances, and the building is the Federation. It doesn’t matter much which “room”/instance you want to take as your base, since you’ll have access to the same content in the entire building anyway.

The room / instance mostly doesn’t matter for the site content, but might matter when something doesn’t work as intended - if lemmy.world is down for maintenance for example, people are temporarily unable to access that instance, but can still browse the rest of the Federation. For the convention example, it’s like someone dropped a bottle in the room and everyone has to stay outside for a while until the janitor has mopped it all up. You can still visit all tables in other rooms in the meantime, since a temporarily inaccessible room is no reason to shut down the entire convention.

Plus, if you’re unhappy with your room for any reason, noone is stopping you from taking your backpack to a different room and find a new chair to leave it on. There is no limit on how often you can create new accounts on different instances if you like their site layout better (content is still the same tho) or something similar.

To compare it all to reddit: Reddit is a convention held inside a gym. Still a building full of tables, but they’re technically all in the same room, so if something goes wrong inside that room, EVERYONE has to stay outside of the building, no matter where your seat is.

…at least that’s how I understand it ;) I’ve been here for 2 months now, also ex-redditor. And yes, I’ve been super confused about it all for the first two weeks or so as well, but it gets better on its own the more you interact with the site. Support is super helpful and friendly, too.

I just took a peek at my formerly favorite sub and was immediatly greeted with 3 dumb shitposts, a scammer trying to sell counterfeit merch, and a repost right on the first page - all upvoted by the thousands. That sh*tshow is almost comical by now.

It won’t die. It will just hollow out.

The result is still basically the same IMHO. It’s like saying “it won’t die, it will just turn into a zombie” … sure it’ll still move, but it’s dead inside and rotting on the outside either way, devoid of the life and soul it once had.

That’s some really "spez"ial thinking process right here.

1. Realize that Reddit needs more traffic and users ASAP

2. Randomly block access to content

3. ???

4. Profit!

… seriously … any site that greets me with pop-ups like “we noticed you’re using an adblocker” and stupid captchas and the like gets closed immediatly, and if I need to subscribe / join just to read what some rando on the internet wrote 6 years ago then I’m just going to look for that info elsewhere. Does spez really think that reddit is so incredible and awesome that people would WANT to log in / create an account when confronted with this bullsh*t?

The community wasn’t set to private anymore during that time tho: r/breath_of_the_wild reopened immediatly after the protests.

I am talking about comments that I manually deleted tho. I saved certain comments first before deleting so I know that they’re the same ones that I manually nuked.

Just an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Breath_of_the_Wild/comments/mzcqja/comment/gw13ppt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

The answer to that post is mine, and I saved that comment because I wanted to use it for a guide later. It was definitely DELETED the day I closed my account, and it is the 1:1 same text as the saved comment, so I defo didn’t just confuse it with a different / similar comment.

Please ELI5 to me how it is “just a limitation of their database” that this comment exists, even tho it did originally pop up in the comment list AND was deleted.

PS: this is just one example of many many others - a whole lot of my longer in-depth comments are simply back again. And that sub was no longer set to “private” during that time.

I manually deleted everything reddit chose to show in my profile over the course of a week. I only stopped once absolutely NO comments or posts were shown in “new” reddit, old.reddit, and all types of sorting (old,new,top,hot,controversial). Waited an additional day and then checked again, just to make sure I really got everything. There simply was nothing left in my profile anymore.

Afterwards(!) I used “shreddit” and it found nearly a thousand effing more things to delete (981 comments to be precise). Ran it twice, and the second go didn’t find any more comments or posts.

My account is deleted now, and I can STILL find comments that are definitely mine but no longer attributed to my account (it says [deleted] where the username originally was) but since the account no longer exists, I can not edit/delete them again.

There is definitely something fishy with that site.