My FU to reddit - Disrupting Substantial Traffic and Rebuilding on Lemmy
For years, I was a very prominent community member on r/vans (different username). I have been a very large content creator there and loved the community, but I'm thru with reddit.
I had the random thought to search google images for the shoes I've posted, searching "vans [model keyword] reddit" and I was surprised to see that my posts were consistently the top image results. Half the time the first image result was one of mine, and the vast majority of the time my images were the 2nd and 3rd image results.
Those are just the tip of the iceberg. I realize now that one user absolutely can make a measurable impact, as I have undoubtedly directed an absurd amount of traffic to reddit and r/vans thru image search engines over the years. Not anymore!
I went thru reddit manually deleting years of posts off of r/vans (admins can undue the script deletion). Now there are 100s of image results on search engines that just go to my deleted reddit posts!
I think the most insulting thing is that reddit wants to monetize off of things like YOUR efforts and YOUR content.
Stuck it to em' and made us proud! Nice work! Hope your new community does well.
Again, the easy way to ruin them would be to sneak a couple of "as an AI language models" into threads, preferably pre-2022, with a large number of posts to poison the data and render the entire thread unusable.
That assumes reddit doesn't version their data, which they probably do. In that case they could revert that too without even having to go through the trouble of restoring the data from backup, which they probably keep as well.
TL;DR you're not gonna manage to make reddit lose your data. They can get it back if they care enough and if it's hosted within their domain.
That's why I didn't delete my account yet, I want to be able to edit my comments when they revert them. I'm just going keep editing and editing, who knows what scripts I'll run this week?
So get this, I've been slowly injecting random characters into my posts. Just every day that I think about it I go through my history and ctrl+shift+9 to get a random string from Bitwarden and plug it in for a page of posts. I figured it might not look like a mass delete/replace as much as a scripted one is, and doesn't take me much time.
Yeah if you had a highly upvoted answer to a question and want to inflict maximum damage, just ask chatGPT to generate a couple paragraphs of SEO terms for the question, replace your answer with that.
i never heard of vans before. Nonetheless, it's good seeing such a niche community on lemmy. Maybe create a post on reddit to ask users to join your community as It's hard for it to be randomly discovered by users as of now.
I tried and was downvoted even when I made an actual contributing post, and limited it to mentioning the lemmy community only in the comments.
The core r/vans community and SamTheKing25 (top mod) is awesome and supported the blackout when voted on. But the overall reddit community has grown so toxic.. And while r/vans may be niche, it is in the top 5% largest subreddits.
So while the most active posters/supportive community members may remain, they are outnumbered by a very toxic mass, many of whom mostly just vote and sometimes comment. And they are solely the community members responsible for the rare hateful comments in r/vans. Sadly I think the user-base of reddit as a whole will only grow more toxic.
Edit: Want to clarify that I made a reddit post that was well received before the blackout happened, in which I did link c/vans. But I made another post sharing a new pair the other day, and was downvoted for mentioning lemmy in the comments.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Reddit admins have it set up to automatically downvote anyone mentioning one of the alternatives. It makes me wonder how often they were messing with the apparent popularity of many posts and comments. Like somethings that were downvoted were just baffling as to why anyone would have a problem with that specific thing being said.
Yeah - I honestly believe the 3PA users were top community contributors and more likely to leave.
I have no hard data to back it up, but it sure seems like the overall quality of content on Reddit has bombed.
Personally I’m no power user or anything but I did have 6 figure comment and post karma. I even gave myself permission to use old.reddit.com after the API change and I’ve just had no urge to contribute. I’ve started to post a couple times and decided it’s just not worth the effort anymore.
Seeing as their valuation has tumbled over the past few years, and all their value is made from user content like this, if they aren't afraid now, they should be. 🤷♂️