If Lemmy were to become a serious major threat to giant cash-cows like Reddit, it would be in their best interest to de-stabilize the communities here. I think it’s best that we think of ways Lemmy could be taken advantage of, so we can best prepare ourselves for potentially what could come.
Reddit could attract users back by doing a 1-2-punch.
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Swarm communities with bots/potentially extremist or hateful content
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Pay news agencies to run stories on the issues with sites like Lemmy and the freedom of the Fediverse
Punch: Offer a safe haven from the chaos, while also promoting that you can now make money with your posts, offer a former apology. Ride the “attention wave” to bring users back in
How could we possibly prevent something like this from happening? Or what are some other methods that could potentially be used?
I’ve already seen number 1 happen. I’ve had a completely unacceptable amount of non-nsfw tagged porn hit my front page being posted to various Lemmy.world communities, all by shitjustworks users. I’m getting pretty close to abandoning the platform myself because I don’t need that shit coming up on my phone when I’m just trying to browse
Edit: that said, I’m not going back to Reddit. I’ll just abandon this type of site altogether and spend more meaningful time with my family and read more books
Really, all that shows up on my all feed is memes. Old. Memes.