If you're trying to sneakily manipulate karma and content, you don't want to be doing it through the API, you want it to look like legitimate users so it doesn't get blocked. This usually means some kind of browser automation.

Of course, reddit does so little to combat it, maybe there really were sleazy astro-turfing botnets just accessing the site through the API.

If cats want to be able to get away with killing native wildlife, they've just got to start a mining or logging company and they're all set.

Unfortunately, they get to decide what counts as corruption.

Unfortunately, that's just not how greed works.

If you give a greedy person $100 in the hope they won't take a $200 bribe, they'll have $300.

Usually, they'll then try and manipulate people into giving them even more. "Well of course I took the $200. You guys only offered me $100. What did you expect?".

So you buckle and offer them $300 to not take the $200 dollars. How much does the greedy person end up with? $500 of course.

What comes next? Manipulating the new lowest bidder of course! "Well of course I took the $300. You guys only offered me $200. What did you expect?".

If they can take it all, they'll take it all. If they can squeeze you for more, they'll squeeze you for more.

There is never a point they will say "no, I already have enough". The closest they ever come is concluding "If I take the $100 now, I won't be able to take the $200 later".

Thats why this stuff needs to be properly regulated and fiercely enforced.

That instance is still out there for you to go and join, if you choose to do so. You could even join another "general purpose" instance that had lost its mind and decided that "advocating genocide to fix the problems of straight white men" was somehow general purpose.

It's just as easy to argue that you are forcing hate groups on to people because you would rather individually block them.

To put it bluntly, I find it difficult to believe that people advocating "just block it" aren't just doing the usual far-right thing of trying to manipulate people into platforming them.

At best, they haven't thought through how inadequate a "just opt out" strategy is.

Should we all start messaging you daily photos of our hairy assholes? You can just block the accounts if you don't want to see them. That way, users who do want daily hairy asshole pics aren't impacted by a "don't send explicit photos to unconsenting people" policy, which apparently makes the platform better.

Should it?

The overwhelming majority of mass shooters currently plaguing America are young, male and far-right. They didn't just wake up one morning as extremists.

The story always reads basically the same. Loneliness, frustration and/or disillusionment made them vulnerable, they stumbled upon the far-right claiming they had answers and were lead down the path of extremism by memes, algorithms and social media groups.

Given that, why should they be platformed at all? Why make the default "if you don't like it, just block it" rather than "if you want to read it, join their shithole servers"?

While we might not be "kindergarten" any more, there's definitely users who are in early highschool and users who are vulnerable to cults.

That said, I don't see hexbear being nearly as dangerous because unlike neo-nazis, state violence isn't the goal.

Take the murder and enslavement out of modern Nazism and there's nothing left, because murder and enslavement was the point. Take the murder out of communism and socialism and you've got a fairer, less exploitative society because a fairer, less exploitative society was the point.

Gamergate was a lot of people's first experience with the far-right infiltrating a vulnerable group then engineering and escalating a culture war.

There was a lot of naivety back then. The alt-right pinkie promising they weren't neo-nazis was enough for thousands to give them the benefit of the doubt. People got swept up in it, believing it really was about "ethics in game journalism" and not just trying to bully feminists and anyone who defended them into suicide.

But that was hundreds of acts of domestic terrorism and melodramatic reactionary outcries ago. Most people shook off the mob mentality and saw it for what it was.

You're seeing the ones who decided to stick with being scumbags.

For most of them, it's probably because they're abusers without anyone in their life to abuse, trying to scratch that itch by hurling slurs at minorities.

Of what's left, they might be so dimwitted and gullible that they still haven't realised they've just been doing the dirty laundry of some of the worst people the modern world can offer.

It would be genuinely pitiful if it wasn't near-certain that one of them will do a mass shooting because someone made a movie that was more appealing to women than the idea of becoming a tradwife-pornstar-mommy-punching bag for a chud.