171–180 of 188 posts
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"Oh sweety, I've just gone through your history and read everyone of your Reddit comment and I can't even right now. Science doesn't care about your feelings"
Sorry, didn't get that reference..
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Sorry, didn't get that reference..
It's a mashup of replies that you get on reddit whenever you unluckily stumble into someone with an axe to grind. I think that argument here is that experience on reddit might get negative even when sticking to smaller thematic subreddits.
Maybe my definition of a "niche" subreddit is different, but these just look like broad, generally popular categories. Like click Sports and Games and the top on is... /r/sports? Sure, it's relevant, but is it niche? I don't really see how this is much better than just typing "$myInterest reddit" into a search engine. Unless I'm missing something, I just don't see how this helps my find a subreddit for my niche.
You can find a niche by selecting a category from the left sidebar. Once you select a category, you see tags related to it on the top screen. For sports these are - Board games, billiards, American football martial arts etc to name a few. I guess you didn't explored the category. You may find it useful, try it out :)
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Reddit died when they added post locking to moderator powers. And it only got worse (more authoritarian) from there. A brief history of reddit: >We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. >— Reddit FAQ 2005 >We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content >— u/kn0thing 2008 >A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web…
Reddit was never going to live up to your expectations. I was an avid Redditor for many years, but left not because of containment of free speech, but because I didn't have the controls to shut some of the nonsense off. Free speech is a critical component of ensuring democratic government is held to account, and the constitutional protections afforded some citizens of the World from censorship by governments in this…
>However, it does not mean your favourite website has to grant you or anyone else complete freedom to say or do whatever you want.
You are doing a little bit of a bait and switch here, no?
"Saying" and "doing" (contrary to some more modern political agendas) are two very, very different things.
One (saying) is how ideas (good, bad, conspiratorial, etc) get exchanged.
The other (doing) can quickly run into other people's rights as a human.
It is obvious that physical actions need to be restricted to protect people.
But the idea that words or an ideas need to be restricted, when you can just not listen, or read them, or block them, etc is kind of nonsensical.
It is also implied in the second quoted line above that online speech is different than free speech in general. But in a practical sense because of modern usage and dependence, it is not.
Would you be ok with phone companies scanning your phone calls and blocking people that use "forbidden words or ideas" that they detect from using their phone service or any other phone service? Probably not because you have come to think of phones as a necessary way that people communicate today. You can't really have a job, or relationship, or other social integration without one. And that includes people that you do not agree with or that are legitimately crazy.
Social platforms, due to network effects, are also becoming that way. There is a modern problem of "free speech" that goes something like this:
- One person says something online that others do not like or is not popular at a specific time for a specific reason.
- Others put pressure on the platform to silence that person.
- "Go make your own platform if you want to say those things" ... HN says.
- Except, you can't really.
- Because people will then use social media to get your hosting site to drop you, get your payment processors and banks to drop you, etc. Go make your own hosting platform? Go make your own bank? Go make your own Internet?
It used to be a common refrain in the US, at least, that the proof of how strong our freedom was, was the fact that we let people openly talk about crazy conspiracies, literally preach hate, say disgusting things and our response was to counter them with simple talking points and then as a group shun their ideas or use our speech to make fun of them (or educate them and change their mind!) and things like that. The ACLU famously would protect the speech of Nazis and KKK members.
Now, apparently, we are far too fragile to hear crazy or hateful people say nonsense, even when we have the ability to silence them for ourselves by not clicking on their posts, or blocking them from our view.
No, now we need to make sure that not only do we not hear their speech, but that no one else accidentally hear any speech that we don't like as well.
I am not sure that we are better off this way. Unpalatable speech should be in the open where we can deal with it, not pushed to the edges where the "crazies" need to start innovating ways to communicate out of public view. That seems more dangerous some how.
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Reddit died when they added post locking to moderator powers. And it only got worse (more authoritarian) from there. A brief history of reddit: >We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. >— Reddit FAQ 2005 >We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content >— u/kn0thing 2008 >A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web…
I wonder what kind of community you were hoping to find in Reddit if you think lack of free speech is the problem. To me, the decline is an obvious Eternal September-like effect. The more popular it became, the more it attracted trolls, people with political agendas and other destructive forces. I think that sort of thing is as inevitable as programming languages ending in feature-bloat. I expect the same will happen…
That’s not free speech or effective censorship.
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I think this is the lifecycle of all 'nerd' sites. Slashdot went this way, Digg, Reddit, and we're seeing it here. It starts with insightful stuff, knowledgeable people, real discourse. Reddit may have been special because at the time the community also prided itself on kindness. But then 'nerds' go from people who have insight and opinions on esoteric topics, to people that like Marvel universe movies. Basically it…
> But then 'nerds' go from people who have insight and opinions on esoteric topics, to people that like Marvel universe movies. Basically it gets popular and then it's no longer a niche group. I hate how "nerd" came to mean edgy video gamer teens in popular culture.
It does feel weird though. I don't watch comic book movies (or many movies for that matter), because I'm usually teaching myself about something nerdy: history, electronics, math, systems stuff, a new programming language, etc. It kinda goes back to the original idea of someone oblivious to pop culture because they're buried in pursuits most people find boring.
I stared using 'geek' because I liked the sound of it better, but realized it's just a 'nerd' synonym to most.
I just wish we had a word for folks that get annoyed when people don't use Demorgan's to fix their conditional statements to be more readable, or like to read primary sources, or whatever.
Reddit passed the cultural event horizon some years ago. The dominant form on reddit is the "meme" which (unlike joining a religion or revolutionary party) makes no demand that you understand what you're copying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1LpXN4PO8U People on the Craiglist forum seem to be "there" more than redditors are even if I can't figure out how they bypass the spell checker to mess up simple words like…
> The dominant form on reddit is the "meme" I remember seeing something on the front page a few days ago about a meme being removed from.. some subreddit, it was an area-based one (I think /r/australia?) and the comments were exasperated that they don't allow memes. Excuse the hyperbole, but memes are absolutely ruining the chance of many of these subs (and even other sites) from building substantive communities.
* eating Tide pods
* attaching government buildings
* speculating on financial markets
My son plays games with a lot of meme activity and can demonstrate the act of inserting a small amount of misattributed and false information into a metastable system (game and players) causing a phase transition that changes the community. The people who play along and/or victims usually can't understand what happened, even if you tell them directly.
I have nightmares that are some mix of
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I just mentioned it in another comment but Discord servers are one of the newest types of communities popping up (especially for younger folks, but they can be for people of any age). For example, here’s one about gardening: https://discord.gg/D2kCbGY
This is the worst possible outcome for hobby content. At least forum/reddit threads are searchable on the open web and likely to remain available at least for a while.
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> I guess what I'm try to say is nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards to query some super insightful and awesome 5+ year old forum post on whatever the content is. Better yet, use site:reddit.com Reddit's search really needs some work. It's practically useless for me unless I am using old.reddit.com/. > There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration.…
"site:reddit.com" is significantly more burdensome to type than "reddit", particularly on phone keyboards. I use DDG, which simply doesn't handle just putting "reddit" at the end of things very well compared to google, and no mobile keyboard makes typing "site:reddit.com" easy given the punctuation and the auto-inserted spaces, so I typically just end up doing "reddit g!" to deal with it and just use google.
This is great and I wish this mentality was pushed earlier on reddit. There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. Excellent comments, diverse opinions, and really great back and forth being shared of individual's experiences in almost every single subreddit. Today, it's definitely harder to find good commentary and exchange. It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all th…