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Reddit Starts Blocking Mobile Website, Pushing Users to App Instead
(www.macrumors.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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Technology
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You think there are still redditors around?
I think it's just troll farms and bots. Every once in a while someone stumbles into the site and says something. THEN there is a whirlwind of answers/speculations/theories/lies.
A.I is running the show. If I use a certain word or phrase I get filtered. If I say the exact same thing without those "catch phrases" then I see a few votes.
I treat the site as a test site for trying language that gets PAST the trolls.
I guess it depends on where you look. All the subs I've been visiting where people actually hang out, rather than just a handful of karma farmers spamming, are still flourishing*, so I never fully switched to Lemmy, but use both 🤷 Reddit subs have a magnitude or two more people, so imho they're better for news, memes and technical advice, while for the past couple years Lemmy feels better for insightful conversations.
* my main subs are for specific games and apps, a few countries/regions, and r/BestofRedditorUpdates, so ymmv
I think the bot percentage is proportional to how big a subreddit is and how profitable influencing people browsing it is.
Niche community about how to proplift (stealing small cuttings to grow your own plants)? Zero or close to zero bots.
Crypto community with thousands of comments a day, where it's all speculation that can't be objectively disproven* so bots stick out like a sore thumb and tons of money flying around? You better believe the bots are all over that.
One thing I've noticed lurking on AITA is that there's suddenly more people casually talking about being religious. Not like overtly preaching like you'd see in the past, but more people referencing going to church or doing things for religious reasons.
It just seemed out of place and weird. Like the tone of that part of the internet suddenly changed. It's still more liberal than conservative, though that conflict seems to be mostly just not present, perhaps in part because of their rule against political topics, though even when some slip through, it does seem to lean more liberal or even progressive than conservative. Like plenty of abortion support, no broad support for tribal or hierarchical judgements. But it suddenly seems more religious. Christian, specifically.
While church attendance is NOW declining rapidly?
I suspect a Christian troll farm at work here. They NEED to indoctrinate at an early age to survive.
They can't use FACTS, their bible doesn't have any good ones.
It's mostly the most frequented subreddits that are being brigaded and farmed.
I can guarantee you the Argentina subreddit is heavily brigaded by the extreme right. That's the case I know, but it's easy to imagine it happening in a lot of not so popular subreddits
I haven't checked how big the ones that I still frequent there (like /r/manybaggers and /r/onebag) but they do still have organic real people posts. Anything news, tech, or politics, anything of that size, I just abandon any hope they're not troll infested and LLM bots. Not to mention meme subs and themed artwork subs. Just full of vote farming bots. I need the art source, you dinguses!
On the bright side, /r/sbcgaming have a comms here and can also tie into retrogaming
As well as flashlights.
It really depends on the subreddits I think. It was starting to really go downhill before I was booted, but most of the issues floated around political, news and general subreddits from what I could tell.
Get into interests, like football or music and there seemed to be less rubbish and bot accounts so to speak. I guess this makes sense but that’s what I noticed going out the ban door as I was.
Idk the nish communities are really helpful, 3d printing, Photoshop help, all that kind of stuff. Hell I even was able to have my Dad's memorial pic photoshopped by somebody. It turned out good too
I just left last month, I'd say 30% users and rest bots
Lemmy world does the same thing, but to a lesser extent. Since they have so much of the users on the fediverse, them controlling their front page really controls the votes and who sees what.
How would that work?
We are all on different instances. With different algorithms, technology, and differing filters. The code doesnt support what your saying.
I know nothing about Lemmy's architecture, but how does my instance tally votes on a post from another instance?
Does it trust that instance? Does it only take into account votes cast on itself? Does it ask every federated instance for their vote totals?
Good questions. Its been a bit since ive looked at lemmys code so im going to dive in again.
Here is the docs for the votes themselves. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/main/src/users/03-votes-and-ranking.md
You can see this in action here: https://lemvotes.org/ if I recall.
I know the vote model is here . You can see the logic here. It checks to see if the post is actually available in the community with other functions and other such checks. It doesnt ask any lemmy instance for totals (unless theres something im not aware of), it tallies based on real time data. Which can also include fediverse actions(not necessarily lemmy/piefed/mbin/etc... but also mastodon, gotosocial, and other such services).
One of the things piefed does a bit differently is it bunches up votes for sending to other instances. And there is a backfill operation when puling from new communities or users. I would argue its a bit better than lemmys system at least from a technical perspective. But its a VERY minor one. Its nice we have multiple ways of getting to the same result-ish.
Hope that helps! I dont know everything but I know a little bit.
That's quite interesting, thank you! So for an instance to manipulate votes, they'd have to stream a bunch of fake events.
Essentailly. Theres a couple of peertube instances that had that issue if i recall. Filters started to go up a coupke of years ago. Admins can see it pretty easy in the logs most of the time once its pointed out. Its a timing thing. Some software is beyter at it than others.
If an instance has the most people and blocks those people from seeing your post, delays it from posting, or downgrades it as a source, it could easily be done. They have control over their own instance.