this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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### About Community Tracking and helping #redditmigration to Kbin and the Fediverse. Say hello to the decentralized and open future. To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/
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This is already happening.
Bots are being used to astroturf the protests on Reddit. You can see at the bottom how this so-called "user" responds "as an AI language program..."
I never fully trust users with automated usernames and this just proves my paranoia.
Then again someone who calls subreddits "subReddit" is automagically a bot in my eyes anyways.
Glad it wasn't just me. It wasn't often I paid attention to usernames on the big subs, but it seemed like at some point they were absolutely flooded with "Adjective_Noun_1234" users, and I couldn't stop seeing it once I noticed. Those and the comment-reposting bots (which probably won't be called out by other bots anymore without a usable API) made me wonder how many actual humans I was interacting with.
There was also some very good and valid reasons why real people wound up with those usernames - mainly, that the signup process (from the App I think? maybe also in New Reddit?) both downplayed, and obstructed changing, the default username during the process - and instead led the user to believe that only the "display name" selected later would appear to other users on the site.
Completely omitting the fact that anyone on old reddit or accessing through an app would only see the username, as "display names" don't seem to have ever been served via the API.
To many of those users, they had no clue that what people were seeing attached to their comments or submissions was "extravagant_mustard_924" and not "Cool Dude Brian" or whatever they'd put in as their display name. They were led to believe that the latter was all that would display, and that signing up with a default account name would only determine what they entered in the top box while logging in.
This is me learning display names were even a thing. I didn't stray much from the Apollo app.
It’s amazing how half-assed everything about Reddit is.
TIL Reddit has display names. Why on earth would I know them is beyond me, but thanks for restricting your API ig ¯\(ツ)/¯
It would have helped Reddit, or at least the user experience on Reddit, majorly if they had just disabled API access for all but a select few bots (Like automod for example).
Also on the NSFW side of Reddit those automated username "users" are the ones spamming their, or someones, OF on every NSFW subreddit, even unrelated ones to the content they're posting. Or so a friend told me, of course.