I used to go to the /r/nfl free talk threads and the day after it opened HUNDREDS of new accounts were posting talking about how the mods were pussies and blah blah.

It felt fucking surreal like 2016 Russian bot astroturfing all over again.

Given how much they have lied about already and the crap Huffman has pulled in the past, I would not doubt it in the least. I am sure they are doing all sorts of mind-games crap like this to try and keep users from fleeing. They have to be freaking out right about now.

All I can do as a user is take my content and time elsewhere. Which is why I'm here. Hoping that like has happened on mastodon, we will slowly move past the "Reddit news" phase and just transition into people contributing to communities and building apps for Lemmy/Kbin.

I've suspected Reddit's ownership of running bots on their own platform for awhile. This feels like confirmation, to me.

There have been screenshots of pro-admin/anti-mod comments that were clearly written by chatGPT (e.g. including the "as a neural network" or whatever boilerplate). They could be fakes or false flags, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were real.

The "Lemmy is too complicated" part I can believe is organic from normie Redittors, though.

i feel like speez is the ultimate reddit troll... a weird embodiment of the negative aspects of the spirit of the site.