Reddit is a ghost town
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At this point it's just an automaton factory. Nothing living contributes anything that can ping on a sensor but it continues doing its thing all the same.
I suspect Reddit has been doing this for almost ten years and is way more advanced than a lot of people here would expect.
Story time. I used to post often on a small subreddit about a niche, controversial theory. One day, I received an unsolicited private message from an account I had never seen post in that subreddit. This account would send me unsolicited rambling messages that just happened to include mundane details about my real life, like my pet's name, a place I used to live, etc. It truly felt like some glowie took my real life information, my internet history, fed it all into a prototype AI training program, and sent the AI after me on either a phishing expedition or as a distraction. I know Reddit has a lot of weirdos, but this just didn't feel human. When I started ignoring it, the account started sending me suicidal messages to bait me into chatting with it.
It all got very unsettling, so I stopped using that Reddit account entirely. Just never logged in again. Unfortunately, I was dumbass and had previously tied that account to an email address. This led to all sorts of automatic account email notifications that I'd delete without reading. A few years after abandoning the account, I received an email on my birthday that my Reddit account was permanently banned. I do not believe the timing was coincidental.
Here's the kicker: Reddit is still doing this to me on a banned account that I haven't logged into in many years. How am I still receiving comment reply notifications on an account that Reddit told me they permanently banned? I genuinely don't know, and don't care enough to take their obvious bait to figure it out. Those emails get deleted as soon as they show up in my inbox; I refuse to even read them.
Oh, and here's another anecdote that might be of interest. I strongly suspect that they are testing out AI image production. I lurk my local subreddit for news, and, every few days, some random account posts a blurry, potato-quality picture of a common plant or animal and asks for help identifying it. All of these pictures look "off," and are poor quality even by really low budget cell phone standards. I'm not convinced they are real.
You're probably on a government watch list and they're trying to bait you into doing something. But you're not important enough to warrant an actual fbi person yet.
Is it normal for weirdos who hang outside of seemingly legitimate pizza joints to randomly ask for your political opinions and try to get you to smoke marijuana with them? If not, then I may have encountered the local domestic surveillance.
Sounds like a fed
Reddit admitted that back when they were getting started, and digg was king of the internet, they had employees talking to themselves with multiple accounts to make the place not feel like a ghost town. They absolutely are using bots.