I still have my reddit account to look up local news. Over my time on reddit I joined several chat groups and over the past week I’ve noticed that people are being mass added to these groups. Even ones that have been dead for years suddenly have people posting and commenting on them. It’s very obvious that this is been done by bots to drive up reddits activity in the wake of the blackout.

  • key@lemmy.keychat.org
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    1 year ago

    People actually use that stupid chat feature? I thought it was just there for bots to send spam.

    • eh@nerdbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I have no idea if there was a native setting to disable it or if it was RES’s doing but I completely forgot chat even existed.

      • T156@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So did Reddit, apparently. There’s now two chat functions, “Legacy chat”, and their new “Chat”.

        Why they need that many remains a mystery, considering that they had a perfectly good messaging system before, that hasn’t been superseded by anything yet.

  • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Wasn’t even aware of this feature, hadn’t noticed - I’m also 100% off of that shit hole so I suppose that makes sense

  • tarjeezy@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Even ones that have been dead for years

    “I am happy to announce that Robin Williams is indeed alive and well. We’ve been arguing about which Linux distro is better for the past few hours.”

  • Lunyan@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Wait reddit has chat groups? I didn’t even know that was a think
    I’ve never used anything other than old.reddit though so maybe that’s why

    • Striker@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Such a poorly designed feature if large swaths of the site aren’t even aware of its existence.

      • niktemadur@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        And such transparently astroturfed activity spike in a feature that no one was using… until suddenly now.
        This is sad.

  • Zerlyna@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I did notice the few weeks before the blackout that I was getting several invites to message/chat a day, I shut that down.

    • ChrisLicht@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, there were loads of complaints in May and June that people with popular comments on r/all threads were getting pinged multiple times/day with requests.