$10 says the "special surprise" is a shout out/recruitment post from something like "truth social" (or wherever they hangout nowadays) to go takeover what's left of Reddit.
Oh my gosh, someone needs to contact tech news orgs
This is a cool idea! Is there anyway to point it at a specific community? /r/nosleep was my favorite.
At least the messaging is clear by the CEO: f*ck you, reddit users
It's amazing what companies can get away with that a real person can't...
I agree with @Pliny@lemmy.fmhy.ml about it having the capacity to make older adults feel less lonely. At the same time, however, I think it seems very dystopian. If someone was feeling sad or depressed we wouldn't say "oh, just chat with this AI until you feel better". So why is it okay to suggest this for older lonely people who are especially vulnerable?
Hell, given what ChatGPT has told people already it might do more harm than good. It's akin to the whole of humanity saying "Yeah, we know you're lonely but getting an actual person to talk to you is too hard. Chat with this bot."
For many years, even Tiktok's critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see.
I never could get into Tiktok, but this is definitely true. It's interesting to see that even communist-bound companies are still companies at the end of the day and will eventually go through the process the opinion post describes.
What I wonder now is if these federated communities are immune to this. For example, can I host an instance that publishes ads to subscribers feeds once I reach a critical mass of users? I would imagine, as the admin of this hypothetical instance, I could. So this "ensh*tification" process could happen even here. (I doubt it will though... for a while at least)
Excellent! I'm looking forward to seeing what the result will be
Excellent! They're probably the biggest one so far, I imagine. The idea of this catching on has got to have the reddit admins sweating....
And nothing of value to the Reddit community was gained.
I'm liking it here
There is literally nothing.... I just used Reddit for r/nosleep. I'll live without it. It's permanently erased any goodwill it had with me.
I'm hoping I never encounter those communities that reddit was known for before they had to purge them all.