Sometime, probably close to 20 years ago, but perhaps more recently, you heard a dial tone for the last time and you didn’t even realize it would be.
Sometime, probably close to 20 years ago, but perhaps more recently, you heard a dial tone for the last time and you didn’t even realize it would be.
Oh. I came here a month ago because reddit took their IPO public, and within about 2 months, I had 3 different bans for 3 different comments. None of which were remotely offensive. This on a 10+ year old account that never had issues before the talks of IPO. In 2021 they even awarded me as being the 1% of top karma earners for the whole site.
One of the comments on reddit that I got banned for 3 days was “Awwwww, what a cute kitty!!!” on /r/aww. It was flagged for “Bullying and harassment” by a bot, and supposedly reviewed by a human on appeal who still agreed with the bot. Which is how I know that humans are not reviewing the human reviewed appeals.
And they were all similar to that in different subreddits… With the 3rd one banning me outright a month ago.
You know what WAS all over my account though? Absurdist humor. Probably 90% of my account was nothing but absurdist humor. You know, the kind of comments that a HUMAN would have no offense over, but an AI bot may not be able to identify as not being serious.
The kind of comments that would result in glue as a pizza topping. Not that I’m responsible for that exact fiasco, but my comments might cause an AI to create a similar situation. I’m sure before all these bans came, my name was predesignated for ban as my account would muddy their whole plans of selling real people’s comments to google for AI training.
I mean one of my comments was “WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH WAH! WAH! WAH!” because somebody had mentioned Wario (from nintendo). What’s an AI supposed to do with that? What are you, the Lemmy user reading this, supposed to do with that comment without context? But in regards to that exact post? It made sense and was a funny joke…well, I thought it was funny anyways. It only got 10 upvotes.
So as they try to turn a profit on reddit, they will absolutely alienate their audience. This is ALREADY a disaster…but it kind of feels like 8:48am on 9/11. The second plane hadn’t hit yet. There was already one disaster, but there was still a bunch more disasters to come that would continue to keep happening for years to come. That’s where reddit is right now. 8:48am. If they kill old.reddit.com, that will be 8:56am (I think?).
And the worst part is, it’s all self inflicted. Selling reddit user data to train AIs is just immediately the worst idea I can think of. It’s reddit. Have you SEEN what gets talked about there??? Do you know what a cum shoebox is? I do. I wish I didn’t. But I look forward to the day it’s somehow misused by AI and reccomends people buy Nike for their own cum shoebox. It’ll be especially funny because while 90% of the reddit userbase knows what a cum shoebox is, I’d say only 10% of society does. Coincidently enough, that 10% are also reddit users. I cannot WAIT for the news stories, where they have to dance around what happened, and how to report it without saying the word “cum”.
(a) a cum shoebox seems an awesome name for an alt account btw…😵
(b) though I’ve never heard of that phrase before - life is better here, without Reddit. Obligatory “fuck spez”.
(c) abso-fucking-lutely everything else. The mods and app devs and highest-contributors saw all of that coming, more so than the regular userbase, as too did the techie Linux crowd who actually knew about AI stuff. More than 9/11 (where at the time we legit did not know about the other plane) it’s like a tough guy walks into a bar and stares another tough guy in one of those movie scenes, and the music starts playing - the best time to have left was 5 minutes ago, the second best time is NOW, and if you wait for the whole area to erupt in violence, then it’s too late for you, who will get caught up in the crossfire.
Spez was trying to follow in Elon Musk’s footsteps, except even as dumb as Elon is, some of that actually made sense… for Twitter/X, which was a publicly traded company going private at the time (which it did succeed at), but then spez pulled a double stupidity by trying to do the same, for a private company trying to go public - it’s not the same at all, especially in reverse like that!!?! Elon totally played his rival spez, who fell for it hook, line, & sinker - and took all of Reddit along for the ride. Now, spez will never become a billionaire like he planned, but also, the hard work of people who built up Reddit - people who created those subs, and filled it with content, is gone. Some of it came here, some went to Mastodon or X, most of it seemed to go literally nowhere as people are just swearing off “social media” altogether now. So all their knowledge, all those skills, all the shitposts and jokes, they say it to their irl family but we no longer get to hear it too. spez killed it all.
We have our mass-comnunity-banning Nazis here too but they are few and far between, mostly only in the political communities (in Reddit it’s “subs”, here it’s “communities” -> ngl I still have to stop myself from saying the former:-P), and at least are humans rather than actual fucking bots. Bots wouldn’t even be so bad, if they actually worked, and if they were honest about using them - “bot overlords” should become a phrase, it might even already be!:-P
The Fediverse is different here than there - e.g. you end up not in niche communities so much as generic ones, just to get enough content - but virtually all of us like it better. You can always use both for awhile if you aren’t sure, but people mostly tend to be friendlier here (some very noticeable exceptions aside - btw you may want to block the instances hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml - unless you want to troll them and that can be fun too I guess:-P), and importantly the people here are actual human beings! (I guess you’ve heard the thing where Reddit posts the identical posts, with every comment inside of it word for word, to try to fake higher traffic stats) There are bots here too but clearly labeled as such.
Enjoy! I for one look forward to seeing shitposts from you!:-D
I’m waiting for the day that Gemini shittymorphs me.