Stay away, it’s easy.
I’ve returned lately to my local sub and found it to be a complete cesspool.
What I was surprised to see though was that since I left last year, posts have been getting comments in the hundreds. Which is very surprising because it wasn’t that popular of a sub. I could go on there and basically recognize the majority of the users as they were mostly the usual same users I got to know over time. Posts would get maybe 20-30 comments top in average. Now it’s like 100-200 comments with the usuals not even showing up anymore.
I really doubt that my old provincial sub got that popular over night. And if it has, I wonder how the mods, who were working as volunteers, are dealing with this.
Bots
I’m surprised because it’s the Quebec sub, which has a peculiar French language with a peculiar way of writing in French that’s not like normal French or European French.
I think bots are infecting everything in Reddit to boost post numbers since they’re going, or have gone, public and inflate their stock price. Reddit is such a dumpster fire. I’m so glad I deleted my accounts and moved on.
Tabarnak
I suspect it would only take a few clicks of a mouse to get an LLM to only draw from a specified part of its data. For example, they could set parameters that make it heavily favor content from r/Quebec in it’s algorithm.
I pop into the metalcore and women’s subs and that’s about it. The niche community/shared experience is still a net positive in those two places. I peeked into the main subs once a while ago, and I can’t tell if it’s worse or if it was always that bad. Lemmy is nice. After Reddit though, I have limited overall social media. Feels better, honestly.
I appreciate that the Lemmy one is not as bad as the Reddit one, but still slightly worried and uncomfortable