/r/programming is back | Hacker News Reader

/r/programming is back

old.reddit.com

17 pointseatonphil17 comments

Look at this thread.

https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/147i7tc/lemmy_...

...Do ~50% of the comments look like an LLM reply to anyone else? Feels like I am looking at Chirper.

Very much, and good spot. There are theories Reddit is replacing mods on protesting subs. Maybe they are also trying to drive the appearance of traffic. We can speculate that the members of /r/programming are more likely to be people who support the protest and so may not be returning even if the sub is open.

I wonder how this practice could affect their IPO... If they aren't properly documenting their content filling tactics, and attributing traffic to real vs. filler content/users, that could be interpreted as misleading shareholders.

> Maybe they are also trying to drive the appearance of traffic.

The only reason traffic went down is because of mods locking/limiting their subreddits. They do not speak for the community at large and if they were indeed removed, traffic would be instantly back to normal. No need to employ conspiracy theories.

I may agree with the reasons for the protest, but I disagree that mods have the right to kill the whole community. /r/firefox for example now only allows images of red pandas. They killed the subreddit just to funnel users to their lemmy instance.

The subreddit does not exist as it does without the work of the mods.

Maybe its not completely justified, but the mods have a significant voice in this argument.

I also doubt bots are driving traffic, but I still find these LLM responses to be very strange.

It's not like the mods owe their community anything. They work for free on a platform that clearly doesn't value them.

Also, if you truly agree with the protest and your main concern is communities closing down, then I don't see the problem with funneling users to the corresponding new community on lemmy/kbin/mastodon/etc.

https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/147i7tc/lemmy_...

> Challenge accepted! Here's your humorous and sincere reply:

did this one just leak part of the prompt?

looking through the profiles of some of these they spam random subreddits with inane comments, often completely misreading the mood of the original post

Yeah, the profile history for many of the "users" is full of generic comments in a wildly diverse array of subs.

I am normally not very conspiratorial, but all this is just jumping out at me.

I'm fairly certain this either just a joke egged on by the fact that there were suspicious comments right before the shutdown, or it's the more typical variety of ChatGPT spam account, where you grow an account with low-quality activity and then sell the account to whatever cryptocurrency or porn spammer bids the highest. Reddit themselves actually using ChatGPT to fake activity would be too preposterous to be real.

It's such a moot point now. But even when I was still on Reddit I wouldn't touch this sub, it was nothing but people spamming links to their own blogs.

> But even when I was still on Reddit I wouldn't touch this sub, it was nothing but people spamming links to their own blogs.

I have bad news about Hacker News...

Haha yeah I know what you mean.

Is it possible to export the data from a subreddit and import it into a new website (like, say, r-programming.com) and put the reddit.com drama in the past?

Do we know if this is the original group of moderators? I don't see a list on the page, so it's hard to tell. Reddit has been theorised to be replacing mods on popular subreddits.

There is no pinned post explaining the return, as might be expected if the same mods are stopping the protest. That also seems odd.

"is back" on a site that is going downhill fast. No thanks. I'll follow the new programming magazine on kbin.

https://kbin.social/m/programming

Man, that subreddit used to be vital and have tons of comments on everything. Just a pale shadow of itself today.

Looks like it came back 3 hours ago-ish, from being private as a protest.

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