My colleagues having a chat about their favourite tv shows in the operations channel at 7am have entered the chat.

Reddit has long paid mods to be “Community Builders”. Ostensibly they’re there to help other mods build their subreddits, but actually what seems to happen is they spam low effort posts like the ones described (the “question style” post is very popular) in lots of subreddits.

I’ve posted this before but here’s more info:

Have a look at this user’s posts prior to the blackouts: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/ Lots and lots of low-effort posts in various UK subreddits.

And read this (which was posted after he got accused of being a karma farming bot), note the admin comment confirming it: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/comments/130zbw6/i_am_a_community_builder_for_reddit/

This link confirms that Community Builders are “vetted and paid by Reddit for their time”: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418715794324-What-is-the-Community-Builders-Program-

Despite claiming they work with mods, the mods of those subreddits don’t seem to be aware of this, as evidenced by this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leeds/comments/138gi40/reddit_community_builders_please_read_details/

I mean I’m still out here rawdogging usenet without a vpn. I keep waiting for the great crackdown on usenet but it never comes… Surely that comes before any VPN crackdown.

So Reddit is now a camgirl site, but instead of weird simps paying girls to show their tits it’s weird simps paying other weird simps to… post shit?

This seems like a bad idea.

Holy shit that’s too real. I come here to get away from work!

Fair enough. But devil’s advocate: presumably they’re still selling it there at a profit?

I mean there a number of big publishers who don’t seem to give two fucks about their image if there’s profit in it…

Ok. So. That doesn’t seem so bad to me.

I do not understand why publishers don’t cancel the keys. Why do they allow that parasitic industry to exist? Surely they know which key corresponds to a chargeback?

Sure!

That’s the first decent bit of PR from Reddit in a looong time.

I wrote about this elsewhere. Every post about Reddit or place has tons of comments like yours insisting that any engagement is good for Reddit. I disagree.

Reddit want dissenting users to leave! They have no interest in retaining it’s traditional userbase of cynical, lefty, tech-savvy users. They’re incredibly intolerant of advertising and difficult to monetise, and much of the reason why Reddit hasn’t made as much money as some of its competition.

They’d rather we all went elsewhere and left them with doomscrollng cryptobro memelords that don’t care if a post is a corporate shill or not, as long as it’s entertaining.

Sure, not engaging with their site reduced their numbers and thus value. But the number of users on Lemmy is a tiny fraction that I guarantee they’d be happy to lose if it made their userbase more tolerant of corporate bullshittery.

My goal isn’t to knock a fraction off their IPO valuation, it’s to bring other users and communities over to better platforms like this one. Or, perhaps, for Reddit to realise they done fucked up and roll back some of those user-hostile changes. That takes advocacy and reminding people of the failings of the platform’s admins.

This form of protest is valid and I support it.

That’s incredibly awesome. What a fantastic way to end it!

Sorry I’m not picking on you specifically, but every post about Reddit or r/place has someone saying something like “just leave” “any engagement helps them”, etc.

I think that’s exactly what they want.

They want the intelligent-but-cynical, hard-to-influence, infamously difficult-to-monetise dissenting mob to fuck off elsewhere, and leave them with the doomscrolling, passive users who are willing to use their app and happy to just look at whatever content is in front of them as long as sometimes there is a kitty.

The problem we have is that that mob of vocal users isn’t everybody. It probably isn’t even most users. I think they’d willingly lose us if it means the dissent goes with us.

So I don’t think this negative engagement is necessarily bad - it keeps their mismanagement in the news, and it opens users eyes to alternatives. And for me, that is the goal - to bring some of those awesome communities over to federated alternatives where no one corporate entity can take it away.

Plus it’s certainly going to be amusing if their flagship community engagement event (the output of which has been widely shared by the media in the past) has a giant “fuck spez” banner in it.

It depends on the movie and how they market it. Usually once it hits streaming services good rips will be available very quickly.

Personally I don’t bother with CAMs or TSs, I’d rather wait until there’s a good rip.

Use Radarr, set the quality you want, watch stuff when it shows up.

Pi with Kodi on it is pretty good.

Pretty sure they’re just gambling that this’ll give them a bump in installs/logins with their mobile app that they can use to boost their figures for IPO.

There’s a osu-ish purple blob appearing bottom right (colours are limited this year so no pink)

Lmao the header image on their modnews post about it appears to have a pixelated dumpster fire.

10000% a play to get people to install their mobile app. They don’t care that it’s just so they can contribute one pixel to a giant “fuck spez” banner, all that matters is their app metrics will grow a bit.