Yeah. Those keys on the piano are E and F. You can see those notes in the sheet music for the title track. Those long rows of notes are a bunch of E’s and F’s.

If you hit the play button in the bottom left corner, you can hear a computer-generated version of the song. Real version here.

They have been for a while now. It started before the API thing with subreddits that were basically mirrors of English ones. But (badly) auto translated into German.

A few weeks ago, the Google results got flooded with auto translations. You can still find stuff that was written in German, but you have to limit the search to German subs (site:reddit.com/r/de, for example).

Or check the sub name in the search results. If it’s in German, you should be good. If it’s in English, or if it doesn’t show up at all, it’s usually a machine translation.

Here’s a link to the original song. The part the meme comes from starts around 0:45. It was a hit in 2004.

I haven’t been on since June, but I noticed it for the last 1-2 years or so. Especially on the smaller subs where any given comment would only get a handful of upvotes. Someone would write a long helpful explanation, I upvote, and nothing happens. The score would stay at 1 or whatever.

It’s not like I was spamming votes either. I would make a point of only voting on one comment per post so my vote would count. But it was still usually 50/50. Vote fuzzing was there for years, but this was different. The comments that were less popular seemed to be affected the most.

I think part of it is because of pricing software like RealPage.

On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants.

“Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?

“I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”

I lived in a building that used this software. In 6-7 years, rent went from around $1200 to about $2,000. More and more apartments stayed empty. They kept raising prices during the pandemic. Surprise surprise, a tent city popped up down the street. A couple people died there.

It sounds like a poor attempt at money grubbing and a ham-handed way to try to keep subs from doing a repeat of John Oliver, red pandas, and Christian minecraft servers.

If you have shill mods and users who have to spend corporate bucks to get a say in what the sub is about…that’s totally not putting your thumb on the scale or anything.

Trying to put a bandaid on a gash, maybe. Also you can only use place on new Reddit or the official app. And you have to verify your email. So they could try to show off to investors that they have this many verified users, or this much increase in users even after the fiasco.