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.
we users aren’t the priority.
You know what they say. If you’re using a service for free, then you’re not the customer, you’re the product. They don’t care about what we think in the same way a farmer doesn’t care about the opinions of his cows. It’s just never really been this glaringly obvious before.
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.
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.