MerylasFalguard

Well yea, they don’t mention the fediverse because none of the oligarchs that fund their employer own it, so they have no reason to promote it at all.

Probably because it’s historically generated a ton of traffic and they’re trying to fluff up their numbers to hide the aftermath of their mistakes.

Shit like this is why I switched to a third party app a while ago. I used to have the official app on my phone because iOS and everything I remembered seeing as far as 3PAs went was all for Android before I heard of Apollo. But the fact that I was seeing “posts” like this every three-or-so posts, and the fact that they were all over the comments as well was just way too much.

It’s exactly why I will not go back. I have like three niche subreddits saved that have no real equivalent in the Fediverse and I’ll only check in on occasion. Through Old.Reddit. With a browser that has an ad blocker built in.

I imagine it does. You’re still signing in and interacting with the platform, so it still likely counts.

I feel like “traffic” is also easy to fake. People can drum up an army of new bots and suddenly the “traffic” is back, even if actual people aren’t.

Kinda like how Apple often makes terrible decisions that everyone hates, and then every other company follows suit because it actually worked and it’s been normalized now. Musk made all sorts of garbage decisions and didn’t lose critical mass of users, so now every other social media company is gonna follow suit now that the terrible ideas have been “normalized” by one of them.