Let’s assume the top executives of Reddit are worried about Lemmy.

Lemmy is taking away users and attention. The ressources that Reddit is desperately attempting to sell to advertisers.

In a meeting, Steve Huffman, Jen Wong, Drew Vollero and Jim Squires decide to spend $1 million dollars on a secret project called Cobra.

Their goal is simple : to destroy Lemmy. Apart from the top management, no Reddit employee is aware of project Cobra, because it must not leak in the media.

How could they actually sabotage Lemmy?

    • Etterra@discuss.onlineEnglish
      0·
      14 days ago

      Also appoint a rural SE Asian snake handler, the kind that performs for tourists, as their CFO.

  • brax@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    13 days ago

    All the need to do is go back to 2010 Reddit when it was focused in content aggregation and had open API access.

  • potoooooooo ☑️@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    14 days ago

    A few thoughts:

    • Offer the folks running the largest instances a full-time, salaried position. Make them feel like kings/queens. (You will eventually fire them/try to destroy them.)

    • Now Steve Huffman uploads the special folder on his desktop labeled PRIVATE GOONING MATERIAL and leaks to media that Lemmy is a haven of CP, so that eventually government gets involved and targets Lemmy as a left-wing radical organization allied with Antifa.

    • Introduce a Reddit fediverse instance and aggressively federate with the remaining major instances while also encouraging the federation of Facebook, Google, etc…

    • Dragomus@lemmy.world
      0·
      14 days ago

      They for sure would federate with lemmy, claiming reddit to be the main hub for Lemmy.
      But after a good while start randomly dropping/blocking different lemmy instances and just try to stop content being shared across lemmy itself.
      It’s also right in the ballpark for a zuckerberg stunt as well…

  • Severus_Snape@lemmy.worldOP
    0·
    13 days ago

    This is all hypothetical of course.

    But when actually you think about it, it sounds realistic. Many corporations operate like organized crime.

  • Romkslrqusz@lemmy.zip
    0·
    14 days ago

    They make a post asking Lemmy users a hypothetical question as to how they would go about doing it

  • s@piefed.worldEnglish
    0·
    14 days ago

    In a meeting, Steve Huffman, Jen Wong, Drew Vollero and Jim Squires decide to spend $1 million dollars on a secret project called Cobra.

    The goal is simple. Try to destroy Lemmy. Apart from the top management, no employee is aware of project Cobra, because it must not leak.

    You are speaking hypothetically, correct? Otherwise, source?

    Their best strategy would be to poison the content with bot accounts, spam, and morally tasteless voices. Sullying the public perception of the content and services would stigmatize users. Since servers are funded by users and other donors, corporate lobbying or DDoS attacking to make it more expensive to host servers would also be an underhanded strategy.

  • modernangel@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    14 days ago

    They’d have to pay out the $1M to consultants to forward for any actually-effective hands-on gruntwork of trying to influence the social media user market, or technical attacks on the code infrastructure or federated service provider resources. It would show somewhere in their financials.

    • PhilipTheBucket@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      14 days ago

      They could literally just have 3 interns make hundreds of fake accounts on various instances, and flood the network with low-grade but ultimately harmless content.

      My guess is that it is either that, or else bribing people who have existing positions of trust on the network (admins or moderators or powerusers) to undertake some kind of destructive action.

      The first is cheaper and much more effective (and won’t get detected instantly), the second is more in line with reddit-exec-brained thinking. So kind of a toss-up. Something along the lines of those ideas would be my guess though. I thought about some kind of “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy like Facebook with Threads, but I think even Reddit isn’t stupid enough to try something like that (which would only result in a massive increase in the exodus of users from Reddit to Lemmy).

      Edit: Well… something occurred to me. “Low-grade but ultimately harmless content” is exactly what they have been pushing Reddit towards, because they think it is better because it traps people in dopamine loops more effectively. Flooding Lemmy with that stuff (more so than it already is organically) would fuck it up from my point of view, but maybe from their point of view, something like really emotionally toxic random hatred in all directions. Maybe. Anyway, I think flooding Lemmy with content that turns people off via sockpuppet accounts is probably the easiest and most effective way, and I don’t see much way to prevent it.