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‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

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Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#271

Post by notMick »

glogla wrote: post #131
AimHere wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as if there aren't meme-heavy right-wing subreddits who do something similar. r/the_donald was all over the front page for a long while, and has a notoriously strict moderation policy. It's just that the right wing subs just don't happen to be as popular right now - or they get banned for lack of moderation and for having their members advocating extreme violence (like r/physicalremoval). latestagecapitalism…

[flagged]

Wrong. TD is made up from both genders and many races who are conservatives and support the president. Its style is glossy trolly. They are anti political correctness, against sjws and groups that oppose others free speech. Reddit has site wide rules against racism, and those subs that don't remove it are banned. TD mods remove anything racist quickly - almost exclusively posted by few day old accounts . Also, have a nice day.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#272

Post by dang »

Grue3 wrote: post #177
Synroc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with r/latestagecapitalism?

Um, the fact that it's named after a concept from a failed ideology that caused several at least Holocaust-sized genocides in the span of 20th century?

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. Flamebait should be resisted, not set on fire.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#273

Post by vuln »

fibbery wrote: post #203
post_break wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that's bs. Hardwareswap for example is still there. Thinkpads for sale, GoPro Market...

I don't believe a Thinkpad ever killed anyone, though.

I wouldn't be so sure. It says no injuries in the 'US'

https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2018/lenovo-recalls-thinkpad-la...

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#274

Post by projektir »

gottam wrote: post #256

The comments here have this mentality of "there are people with different opinions from me, why don't these websites deal with these opinions". It's dangerous thinking that can be applied to your opinions. The internet always worked this way. There are the cesspools, maybe things you don't like, but if you don't feel like engaging with these communities you simply keep going. Problem with these social media forum sit…

> The comments here have this mentality of "there are people with different opinions from me, why don't these websites deal with these opinions". It's dangerous thinking that can be applied to your opinions.

It has nothing to do with opinions. It has never been about opinions, and you know it.

It has to do with antisocial behavior. Antisocial behavior is inherently hostile and doesn't deserve a platform, which has been known to anyone who has ever ran any kind of social space for a long time. If you don't moderate antisocial behavior, you create a community where only that behavior thrives.

This is not news, and the real dangerous trend that I'm seeing is that antisocial behavior doesn't matter and should be protected. No, it shouldn't.

> There are the cesspools, maybe things you don't like, but if you don't feel like engaging with these communities you simply keep going.

Yes, except thanks to aggregators all the communities got, well, aggregated, and now there's really nowhere else to go. A cesspool used to compete with other non-cesspools, now we're all in just one big cesspool, because the quality of trash is that it affects everything it's in.

Thank god for programming IRC communities.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#275

Post by eugeniub »

stevenwoo wrote: post #21
Synroc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with r/latestagecapitalism?

I agree with a lot of the jokes/memes posted there that make it to the front page but the actual rules for discussion within the subreddit are kind of far out there. I guess one might call it the (publicly acknowledged) equivalent of the unspoken rules for the r/the_donald subreddit where many things written in opposition to trump are deleted by the moderators.

It's not really an unspoken rule. The 4th rule is "Trump Supporters Only" and pretty much always has been explicit.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#276

Post by jholloway7 »

paulmd wrote: post #130
norealidea wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right, because the rules of the subreddit indicate that. The subreddit has its own mods that follow its own rules. And the Admins of reddit do not get involved unless they're peventing a lawsuit. Which is kind of how the internet should be run. Free and safe from mass control, but communities controlling themselves.

Which would be fine, if the community had a way to control themselves. But moderators are literally chosen by being the first person to squat on a particular subreddit name. There is an incredible amount of inertia to controlling a popular "domain name" (eg popular brand names), and no recourse if the person who squatted it first turns out to be a huge shithead. There have been plenty of instances where someone just…

Maybe one should be able to put a subreddit in 'unmoderated' view and see what's getting moderated out so the community has a little more transparency. Yeah, you'll have to wade through some sewage, but at least you can opt-in on occasion to make sure you're not being unwittingly moderated into an echo chamber.

I think this hits on the underlying problem I see with Reddit and similar forums, though. Look at the evolution of subs like /r/LateStageCapitalism or /r/FatPeopleHate or /r/Incels or T_D or TRP or Flat Earth or Broneyism or whatever. I don't think in all cases the communities started out as extreme as they eventually became.

I'm not defending their original charters by any means, I just think there's some kind of sociological reality or formula these subs are tapping into that allows them to purposefully moderate/evolve into echo chambers and bring a community of followers along with them, to a point where the community even starts to self-moderate to the extreme -- but they don't just start out that way.

It's almost like you can take some ridiculous idea or some interesting but archaic belief system, build some interest in it using humor or shock value, then once you have an audience with critical mass slowly turn it into a cult without anyone noticing, like the boiling frog analogy (hmm, the irony of that comparison just now struck me). I almost want to try this myself with something absurd just to prove the theory.

And I'm sure this isn't a new concept in sociology or anthropology and there are people researching how it works at Internet scale. Can anyone point me to what it's called?

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#277

Post by ianamartin »

Guvante wrote: post #91
colordrops wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to bring up without being attacked, even off of Reddit, but for long-time heavy users it's been obvious for a while that Reddit has purposefully undergone several changes to control the narrative at the behest of advertisers and the powers that be.

What narrative supports The_Donald and the numerous left leaning subreddits both being there? Honestly I hear this a lot and am curious. I believe it is because they are focused on retention numbers which thrive off focused insular communities to be clear.

Extreme polarization is good for page views.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#278

Post by steveeq1 »

stevenwoo wrote: post #21
Synroc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with r/latestagecapitalism?

I agree with a lot of the jokes/memes posted there that make it to the front page but the actual rules for discussion within the subreddit are kind of far out there. I guess one might call it the (publicly acknowledged) equivalent of the unspoken rules for the r/the_donald subreddit where many things written in opposition to trump are deleted by the moderators.

That's true of most political subreddits. Try putting a pro-capitalist comment in /r/socialism .

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#279

Post by Spooky23 »

belorn wrote: post #161
Spooky23 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not really relevant to what the author is trying to say at all. Actually, it’s the opposite. Because of the excess of disinterested capital that only values growth, a thing that could be a positive and productive thing is instead a cancer — it grows and grows without purpose. That’s why Reddit (and Tumblr) have massive porn sections that aren’t spoken about and Reddit is a watering hole for white supremacy and p…

Comparing porn to white supremacy is just that kind of political view that feels completely alien to me. It was not many years ago that Monty Python poked fun at a whole nations conservative view about nudity and porn, and it seems like globally we have taken a few new step backwards toward the 19th century views about those topics. The biggest porn section in reddit is currently ranked 61 of all subreddits. Cat pict…

You’re missing the point, it’s not about being pro/con either topic or prudishness.

Porn and white supremacy constituencies are similar in the context of a VC backed company whose trajectory is tied to an equity event. That is that they drive lots of engagement and probably more time on site.

Reading the article, the author’s point was that pursuit of growth at all costs creates bad situations like echo chambers for racists.

Other sites like Stackoverflow avoiding this sort of situation by being intelligent and strategic about pursuing growth.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#280

Post by vuln »

notMick wrote: post #145
rockostrich wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default/popular subreddits are toxic. The smaller, niche subreddits are rarely toxic and usually good communities. As for the Russiagate stuff, the front page is riddled with it because it's a very important subject in the US, Reddit's user base is primarily people from the US, and there are bombshells dropping every day.

Still a nothing burger, it's paid political propaganda on those default reddits, paid teams pushing bs and noise. Share blue for example was given a budget of 40+ million a year to do just that. (Over 100k a day) The other paid campaign is 'deplatforming' (their term). They do your best to silence opinions which don't match the paid script.

There was also Correct the Record - CTR.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record

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