I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but threads or comments about Lemmy or the Fediverse get downvoted a lot on Reddit and trolls who claim that it’s “dogshit” and “not going anywhere” get systematically upvoted.
Some of those trolls get then exposed when you ask them what Lemmy instance they tried and one of them with whom I had a surreal exchange answered with something like “yeah ofc I used Lemmy, this is the instance: join-lemmy.org” 🤦♂️
It’s frustrating that these trolls keep contributing to the big lie that “Lemmy is not ready yet” and that there’s “no viable alternative to Reddit”.
This and the overwhelming number of comments being “against the mod protests” just prompts me to question whether there isn’t some brigading being organized straight from the Reddit HQ.
Which is fking insane since one of Steve’s excuses for upping API pricing so high is to fight LLM from training on “their” dataset! Fucking LOL
it does make sense as a business strategy, since they probably have plans how to analyze the data themselves and sell that as a service or sell a more curated access than the current api.
it’s certainly not about protecting the users data, but how to monetize it best.
I also doubt them to have done the whole chatgpt bots just this week. Providing organic marketing where users are unsure if its just a regular comment of someone super happy with product xy or a bot.
Shilling for certain products or political views is already sold as a service by quite a few companies. I think reddit just wants to take in that business.