I agree with all of this. I definitely think at least some of them are astroturfing. The mods from r/adviceanimals got kicked and ever since then, they mostly post memes that say things like “the official app isn’t so bad, you guys!” We all know u/spez isn’t above editing comments for petty reasons and since he got caught, I’m sure he’s more careful about not getting caught editing things to suit him now. I wonder if the voting system is rigged, too, at least in some subs.

I see that the trolls I was talking about are managing to find their way to Lemmy. They never have any actual insightful things to say, it’s just reducing your arguments to the most simplified version and repeating them back in a childish condescending way. It’s almost like…that’s not all the protest is about? Not sure if these are just kids trying to be edgy, or if they’re working for Reddit, or if they’re just u/spez being petty. I try to be an empathetic person, but I have a really hard time understanding thinking it’s fun to belittle people for caring about things. It’s such a waste of energy. If you need attention, learn a skill and impress people with it, I assure you it’s a much more fulfilling way to get people to notice you. I hope these people can get the emotional support they need someday.

The bootlicking on that post (in a PIRACY sub nonetheless) is wild. Lots of “you don’t understand, Reddit is a COMPANY! 😭” I’ve peeked in on Reddit a bit and I’ve been seeing those kinds of “won’t somebody think of the shaaaareholdersss and adminss” comments on a few posts related to the protest. Things like this insightful little nugget:

“Seems all the reddit hate is based solely on reddit doing something similar to twitter, and I’m supposed to be upset cause “Elon man bad”? Tons of APIs cost money to use… build your own platform that freely allows everyone to scrape all “your” content, lead by example please…”

I wonder how many of those are Reddit employees and bots? They can’t all be u/spez alts, can they?

Oh and this is fun too, did you know that we’re all liTeRaLlY extremists over here?

“Lemmy is very far-left. They are literally extremists, I’ll not be part of that shit.”

Guess Reddit is going to be taken over by alt-right trolls too.

Edit: Still figuring out how the formatting works over here.

I figured out yesterday that if you go to the Google cached version, you can still see old posts. If I try it on mobile, the cached option isn’t there, but on my PC I can click the (…) next to the search result, and click the cached option. Trying to figure out how to do that with mobile.

I fully support the blackout and I am trying to keep my Reddit traffic to a minimum, but I was trying to figure out a technical problem yesterday and it was a huge pain to find anything useful. Way too much SEO crap to wade through.