Experience, mainly.
I used to run a phpbb forum, on average the bot signups outnumbered the real people 10 or 20 times. And that was with some fairly robust anti spam measures in place - something I think this platform is too new to have properly sorted out yet.
I may be wrong, I don’t know how the back end here works, but any place where people can post publicly will be infested with bot signups very quickly. The only real variable is how good the anti spam measures are.
It’s the one thing that all (or most of us, I guess) have in common; we’re all here because of what’s going on there. It’s natural to want to talk about it.
It’ll pass; I’m already seeing a lot of non-reddit content on my home feed now, whereas day 1 it was probably 95% posts of the sort you’re talking about.
I saw the same. I was just about tempted to slide back and browse quickly on my lunch break, then I saw that and just noped out of there. This place is building up quickly and strongly enough that I probably won’t bother going back to reddit if he’s going to keep up with this nonsense; I don’t really need that sort of BS negativity.
If you have the best UX possible and no content creators (that people care about), you won’t get users and without users you won’t get content creators that people care about.
This. I have a small yt channel, my videos regularly get 10k+ views there. In the early days, I also uploaded to a couple of other sites (dailymotion was one, can’t remember the other). Where I was getting hundreds if not thousands of views on yt, I was getting maybe half a dozen on the other sites. My most popular video got nearly 100k views on yt, and last I looked on dailymotion it had something like 8 views. Needless to say, I didn’t bother uploading to other sites after that and just stayed on yt.
That said, I’m willing to start uploading to peertube once I’ve had a chance to look into it.
Visually, I actually quite like the look of the redesign (on desktop at least; mobile’s a whole other story). But it’s so bloated that on my old laptop I could get maybe 10-15 minutes of browsing time before it used up all my ram and dragged my whole computer to a crawl. And it has a whole mess of bugs that make it almost unusable - it feels like someone’s CS project rather than the front end of one of the largest sites on the web.
In my particular case (as was the case with most forums in the day), it was really just about spamming boards with links to whatever shitty ED pills or crypto scam they were trying to sell.
They were never really sophisticated, but never really had to be either. A spammer could spend a few minutes writing a script for a bot to crawl the web looking for phpbb signup pages, then try to create an account on any it could find and immediately post the links. They could post hundreds of links on dozens of different forums with just a few minutes work - and then do it all again tomorrow with a bunch of new signups.