Even in regular posts, Reddit has been a hive mind lately. If you scroll through the comments, most of them will have the same opinion over and over, with comments that add nothing to the discussion, like "I agree," getting hundreds of upvotes.
But I agree, since the API thing, it has sucked HARD.
Lots of smart people left to Mastodons, at least.
Anyway, I agree. I used Reddit fairly regularly before the API change, though I was already starting to get disenfranchised by the political hive mind by that point. The death of FOSS third party clients that made the platform bearable to use was the straw that broke the camel's back, for me. I've completely left it behind since.
The sub was working normally, I posted about the Amazon Redshift Serverless PDF, and then Reddit began behaving oddly.
After some investigation, and some guesswork, I concluded my account had been silently shadow-banned, and the sub banned (and then shortly after, deleted).
Two years of posts and the sub disappeared, instantly, abruptly, without warning, reason, appeal process or notification, and Reddit was trying by shadowbanning to lead me into thinking my account was still active.
I used a utility to scramble (you can't delete) all the posts I'd ever made to Reddit, and closed my account.
(There's a bit of a happy ending - about a year later someone who was doing work with Reddit and had an archive of all my poss sent them to me, as a thank you. I processed the JSON and put them up on my Redshift site.)
This didn’t start with the API change drama. The API change protests were their own crusade. The calls to ban Twitter links or AI art are just the next iterations of the same form of protest.
Many of the big subs were thoroughly astroturfed long before the API changes. The famous ones like /r/conservative weren’t even trying to hide the fact that they curated every member and post
The proximate cause IMO is that the protests (ie. moderators shutting down their subreddits) resulted in some moderators being deposed, causing new subreddits and moderators to come in power, which were easier to astroturf or whatever.
That has been the case for over 10 years now. It's absolutely not a new phenomenon.
But I don't think the "crusades" are always bot related. Movements get momentum.
I thought they backed down on the API changes for moderators?
AI art does not exist. There is only slop stolen from artists.
edit: now that I think about it, a public performance where an artist generates "algorithmically created images" in real-time and they and the audience bask in the shit would be fantastic! Maybe coupled with some shitty AI music, narrated in that shitty Attenborough rip-off AI voice.
It could be called "requiem for a techbro".
I was heavily involved in buying/selling spam accounts for years on reddit. If you think it wasn't heavily manipulated, at least the frontpage, then lol you were buying it like everyone else.
This is just practical given you can't see tweet threads (and sometimes even tweets) without an account.
> against banning AI Art
I think you mean to say reddit is pro-banning AI art?
Anyway, banning AI art is absolutely good for curating quality posts. AI art is incredibly low-effort, easily spammable, and has legitimate morality concerns among artist communities (the kind that post high quality content). Same goes for obviously AI-written posts.
I agree content quality on the site has fallen drastically, but those are both measures to try and save it.