They did last year as well. I recall there being some racy stuff that was being blocked out by black boxes placed by the admins, and people were able to track admin and mod accounts (like spez) that were placing pixels instantly with no cooldown. People were pissed then already, and the admin/mod response was basically “get wrecked we too smort lulz”
Place even last year was blatantly a ploy to give reddit more free and controllable content.
Get me a Millenium Falcon-sized interstellar freighter and a stable supply line, and I’ll never set foot planetside again.
Quality has been dramatically better here than Reddit has been for many years. Finding people actually discussing the post in the comments is rare on Reddit, you have to sift through endless lines of off topic puns and memes being promoted by bots for karma farming. The goal of comments on Reddit is to be funny, not interesting or useful. The fediverse is more like Reddit eight or nine years ago, when they were figuring out their control algorithms, building their own bot network to game their own site (remember the subreddit where the reddit-built bots used to exclusively talk with each other for practice? I wonder what those bots are doing today…), and learning how to control the flow of information on their page while also finally making some things more stable.
I’m really curious if any parts of the fediverse can avoid the same pitfalls that Reddit eagerly jumped into. It’s probably doubtful since once the advertisers get here, greed will win. It always does. But maybe.
For a moment, I thought this was a cryptid instance and briefly wondered what level of crazy believes that Bigfoot will put you in the ground if you don’t believe in him.