Hacker News Reader

Comment by vintagedave | Hacker News Reader

Very much, and good spot. There are theories Reddit is replacing mods on protesting subs. Maybe they are also trying to drive the appearance of traffic. We can speculate that the members of /r/programming are more likely to be people who support the protest and so may not be returning even if the sub is open.

View on HN

I wonder how this practice could affect their IPO... If they aren't properly documenting their content filling tactics, and attributing traffic to real vs. filler content/users, that could be interpreted as misleading shareholders.

> Maybe they are also trying to drive the appearance of traffic.

The only reason traffic went down is because of mods locking/limiting their subreddits. They do not speak for the community at large and if they were indeed removed, traffic would be instantly back to normal. No need to employ conspiracy theories.

I may agree with the reasons for the protest, but I disagree that mods have the right to kill the whole community. /r/firefox for example now only allows images of red pandas. They killed the subreddit just to funnel users to their lemmy instance.

The subreddit does not exist as it does without the work of the mods.

Maybe its not completely justified, but the mods have a significant voice in this argument.

I also doubt bots are driving traffic, but I still find these LLM responses to be very strange.

It's not like the mods owe their community anything. They work for free on a platform that clearly doesn't value them.

Also, if you truly agree with the protest and your main concern is communities closing down, then I don't see the problem with funneling users to the corresponding new community on lemmy/kbin/mastodon/etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com