Just curious if anyone else has noticed (I'm sure some have) posts that some accounts make across an enormous number of subreddits lately.

I stopped using Reddit for most of things when I joined Lemmy but my partner posts NSFW stuff there still since the community for that in Lemmy is still quite small, and occasionally we see accounts making thousands or more posts across an ungodly number of nsfw subreddits. It's almost always promotional spam (OF, etc) and more often than not it's blindly posted and either doesn't follow the rules of the subreddit or is outright inappropriate for it (e.g. posting to specific kink subreddits while the post has literally nothing to do with that kink). Some of these accounts even seem to automatically reply to some comments with what appears to be chat-gpt type comments and usually it's super obvious it's a bot.

In my mind I figure this is just some shady service paying for reddit's API access and charging these clueless "creators" to promote their stuff across the entire site. How effective that actually is in generating leads for their OF, etc I would be very interested to know but it's probably minimal, maybe not, I dunno.

Anyway, I did a very brief search online for services offering this sort of thing but didn't come across anything. Just curious if anyone knows about it or how people are getting onto these braindead posting services. Not looking for links or anything just thought it was interesting (if not frustrating spam) for a discussion.

Hey, just curious if anyone's had any experience saving the subtitles from max.com recently? I can only find old info about it being an xml file when it was HBO Max and that no longer seems to apply.

I've tried a couple random utilities (Subtitle-Downloader, ttml2ssa) and can't seem to make any progress. If you can point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it!

edit: Like with most things I seem to do, as soon as I post about it I actually start digging into it more and figure it out. So anyway, here's how I figured it out:

I used The Stream Detector extension in firefox, start the stream up on max.com with subtitles enabled, then monitor the extension until it shows a vtt file. Then I download the vtt file using the extension and can convert it to srt using ttml2ssa and use it normally.

edit 2: alas I discovered that downloading them this way will only download up to a certain time in the video. I haven't explored further but I imagine I'd have to go either play or seek through the video to get it to trigger the next vtt file which I could download (I haven't confirmed as of yet). May update again if I figure out a better process for this

(final hopefully) edit 3: doesn't seem to be an easy way to automate this but what I ended up doing is using the stream detector extension in firefox, configured to automatically download vtt file extensions from streams, then just open the video on max, scrub through roughly every 9-11 minutes to get the each piece of the vtt file, they're named sequentially at least. Sometimes it will grab duplicates so I just wrote a quick powershell script to delete the duplicates, and rename the files based on the episode name. Then I convert the vtt to srt, and finally I use Subtitle Edit to join the srt files into a single one since the time stamps are all correct. Then I've finally got a usable full subtitle file to use.. yay..

If this is the wrong place to post please direct me elsewhere of course.

I've been less active in torrents etc for a the last couple years so I think I'm probably out of the loop on this tbh.

I have a couple of TV series/versions of series I'd like to share occasionally but it seems so few of the public torrent sites accept submissions (or require you to be a big name or upload a certain quota per month etc), I'm not sure where to post the torrents. In the past I had anonymously uploaded at TPB but that doesn't seem to be a thing anymore.

Any advice/suggestions?