Let’s assume the top executives of Reddit are worried about Lemmy.
Lemmy is taking away users and attention. The ressources that Reddit is desperately attempting to sell to advertisers.
In a meeting, Steve Huffman, Jen Wong, Drew Vollero and Jim Squires decide to spend $1 million dollars on a secret project called Cobra.
Their goal is simple : to destroy Lemmy. Apart from the top management, no Reddit employee is aware of project Cobra, because it must not leak in the media.
How could they actually sabotage Lemmy?
How could they actually sabotage Lemmy
The most logical approach I can think of would be starting up an instance, flooding it with bots, and using those bots to spread to other instances.
However I don’t use Lemmy super often but from what I understand intance admins can block other instances so it wouldn’t kill Lemmy entirely, it would just make it worse to use, which is a detriment because the most-cited reason I see for not getting involved in fediverse apps seems to be the learning curve upon entry. Open instances would be flooded with bots and all actively maintained instances would need to start isolating themselves from other instances and heavily screen who gets in
The instance would just get defederated within 24 hours by 90% of the fediverse.
This is all hypothetical of course.
But when you think about it, it could become very realistic. Huge corporations are ruthless.
Yes, but I think Lemmy is too busy hurting itself to really notice.
A few thoughts:
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Offer the folks running the largest instances a full-time, salaried position. Make them feel like kings/queens. (You will eventually fire them/try to destroy them.)
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Now Steve Huffman uploads the special folder on his desktop labeled PRIVATE GOONING MATERIAL and leaks to media that Lemmy is a haven of CP, so that eventually government gets involved and targets Lemmy as a left-wing radical organization allied with Antifa.
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Introduce a Reddit fediverse instance and aggressively federate with the remaining major instances while also encouraging the federation of Facebook, Google, etc…
They for sure would federate with lemmy, claiming reddit to be the main hub for Lemmy.
But after a good while start randomly dropping/blocking different lemmy instances and just try to stop content being shared across lemmy itself.
It’s also right in the ballpark for a zuckerberg stunt as well…
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AI bot spam everywhere.
The server would probably just get defederated.
Nice try, spez. Your empire is crumbling.
They could create 6 accounts that post nothing but old memes all day every day
wait
Those “avatars” reek of the metaverse.
I swear it’s where the idea came from.
Source: my ass
Meep moop.
Source: my neck, my back, my pussy and my ass
Step one, appoint a Cobra Commander.
Also appoint a rural SE Asian snake handler, the kind that performs for tourists, as their CFO.
They make a post asking Lemmy users a hypothetical question as to how they would go about doing it
In a meeting, Steve Huffman, Jen Wong, Drew Vollero and Jim Squires decide to spend $1 million dollars on a secret project called Cobra.
The goal is simple. Try to destroy Lemmy. Apart from the top management, no employee is aware of project Cobra, because it must not leak.
You are speaking hypothetically, correct? Otherwise, source?
Their best strategy would be to poison the content with bot accounts, spam, and morally tasteless voices. Sullying the public perception of the content and services would stigmatize users. Since servers are funded by users and other donors, corporate lobbying or DDoS attacking to make it more expensive to host servers would also be an underhanded strategy.
Of course it was hypothetical. Cmon man
I figured it was hypothetical but there wasn’t any lead-in and it was said with such certainty
The lead in was “let’s assume”.
I understood that to be referring to only that sentence, and it’s not even something that needs to be assumed since it is known.
Their best strategy would be to poison the content with bot accounts, spam, and morally tasteless voices
You mean, make the Fediverse even more like Reddit?
The worst parts of Reddit and 4Chan combined and push it to the forefront
Sullying the public perception of the content
Lemmy does that all by itself. I spent the first two weeks stamping out barely disguised anime loli porn and furry porn. Shit still pops up like herpes.
I…can’t say I have the same experience. I haven’t had this problem.
They’d have to pay out the $1M to consultants to forward for any actually-effective hands-on gruntwork of trying to influence the social media user market, or technical attacks on the code infrastructure or federated service provider resources. It would show somewhere in their financials.
They could literally just have 3 interns make hundreds of fake accounts on various instances, and flood the network with low-grade but ultimately harmless content.
My guess is that it is either that, or else bribing people who have existing positions of trust on the network (admins or moderators or powerusers) to undertake some kind of destructive action.
The first is cheaper and much more effective (and won’t get detected instantly), the second is more in line with reddit-exec-brained thinking. So kind of a toss-up. Something along the lines of those ideas would be my guess though. I thought about some kind of “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy like Facebook with Threads, but I think even Reddit isn’t stupid enough to try something like that (which would only result in a massive increase in the exodus of users from Reddit to Lemmy).
Edit: Well… something occurred to me. “Low-grade but ultimately harmless content” is exactly what they have been pushing Reddit towards, because they think it is better because it traps people in dopamine loops more effectively. Flooding Lemmy with that stuff (more so than it already is organically) would fuck it up from my point of view, but maybe from their point of view, something like really emotionally toxic random hatred in all directions. Maybe. Anyway, I think flooding Lemmy with content that turns people off via sockpuppet accounts is probably the easiest and most effective way, and I don’t see much way to prevent it.
Lemmy posts with low grade but harmless content?
So… Business as usual, then?
why do they have to turn everyone into these weird funko pops
Damn, the photographer did one hell of a job to not make Spez look like the creepy little pedophile he is.
Wasn’t the lemmy sub recently banned?
Now i have the urge to create a new account to increase this subscriber number. Don’t worry i won’t use the account for other purposes.
The countdown is on. How long until banned?
Nice try reddit execs!
