Yeah, no idea whether this is spammers trying to stake turf or someone trying to inflate the user count to stick it to reddit (or something) but the numbers from the 18th on are clearly inauthentic.
Hell, fake it till you make it isn’t that bad a strategy to attract new users.
Of course, you also need content. I hope people start making bots which steal content from reddit, which bots on reddit steal from twitter/insta/tiktok/snapchat. That way we can all cut out the middle-man.
On a side note, I think it’s really cool that I’m on kbin and commenting on something on lemmy.
Conspiracy theory: what if Reddit is using it’s not army to make a bunch of dead/spam accounts to try to make Lemmy instances more expensive solely to try to price them out of their space so they can then turn and point to how “Reddit alternatives aren’t viable/stable.”
On one hand, that’s obviously stupid and not true. On the other hand, I can see Huffman being petty and malicious enough to do something like that.
Inactive accounts don’t really add any expense. Creating a bot farm to create large amounts of artificial traffic to crush competitors would risk antitrust lawsuits that would actually cripple the company.
Yeah, no idea whether this is spammers trying to stake turf or someone trying to inflate the user count to stick it to reddit (or something) but the numbers from the 18th on are clearly inauthentic.
TBF reddit’s numbers are also inauthentic.
Hell, fake it till you make it isn’t that bad a strategy to attract new users.
Of course, you also need content. I hope people start making bots which steal content from reddit, which bots on reddit steal from twitter/insta/tiktok/snapchat. That way we can all cut out the middle-man.
On a side note, I think it’s really cool that I’m on kbin and commenting on something on lemmy.
Conspiracy theory: what if Reddit is using it’s not army to make a bunch of dead/spam accounts to try to make Lemmy instances more expensive solely to try to price them out of their space so they can then turn and point to how “Reddit alternatives aren’t viable/stable.”
On one hand, that’s obviously stupid and not true. On the other hand, I can see Huffman being petty and malicious enough to do something like that.
Inactive accounts don’t really add any expense. Creating a bot farm to create large amounts of artificial traffic to crush competitors would risk antitrust lawsuits that would actually cripple the company.