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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’

#601

Post by tps4sale_admin »

post_break wrote: post #182
burger_moon wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually went back and corrected some of those subs which were link aggregators essentially. r/gundeals was reinstated and they have a stickied post describing what needed to be done to be brought back to life. The main takeaway is that there is no p2p transactions allowed, only links from stores/manufacturers.

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

Thinkpads for sale admin here. I think all of the above markets really worried about this rule, but I've already checked to make sure that Reddit is OK with us and they have stated that they plan on taking no actions with our subreddit at the moment.

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

#602

Post by joeyaiello »

kickme444 wrote: post #102
joeyaiello wrote: post #89

Only just getting started reading this, but I had to jump into comments to give a shout-out on how amazing 924 Gilman was for me as a kid growing up in the East Bay. I wasn't there for the glory days of the 80s/90s, and I have no idea to what extent Dan played a role in its founding, but as a space for playing and watching music, I've never found a venue in my life that comes even close to what they were able to achi…

Gilman was a huge part of my life and I played various roles in participating and helping to manage it over the year, though I don't want to take ANY credit for this, it's not my place and no person should. But, the experience I had there showed me what is possible when things are started with good intentions and managed that way going forward. There were and are rocky times at Gilman, but overall it's a model that s…

Oh yeah, it certainly wasn't perfect, but the good far outweighed the bad IMO. Also, I'm now realizing there are probably a lot of parallels in building those sorts of communities with the Eternal September problem: getting too big and people betraying the ethics. It'd be a fun historical analogy to explore...

> I miss that time in my life.

Me too. I'm still in my 20s, but given that I now have a lot more means working in the tech world than I had when I was a teenager, I've been thinking a lot about how I might be able to help foster communities like that for younger generations (opening a venue, starting a small label, patronizing high school bands that want to record, etc.) Curious if you've thought about the same?

EDIT: Holy crap, just realized you're the subject of the article. Definitely didn't mean to imply you didn't play a role, FYI, but I imagine you played a large part given your humility on the matter. ;) Keep up the good fight, man. We're rooting for you.

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

#603

Post by CompanionCuuube »

paulmd wrote: post #114
stochastic_monk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

r/politics said it didn’t make much difference, but they left it that way anyhow. The feedback based ranking implicitly supports echo chambering, but there’s not much of a way around that.

> The feedback based ranking implicitly supports echo chambering, but there’s not much of a way around that. Traditional topic-based forums are better, because you can't suppress unpopular-but-correct opinions by downvoting. Even if you don't care about Fake Internet Points (and the reason they exist is because we do , gamification works), if you state something that goes against the prevailing hivemind your opinion…

Same here. I read all of the gray comments, because it means the comment was something unpopular enough to downvote.

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

#604

Post by lscore720 »

LordHumungous wrote: post #343

>Were there moments in which Reddit chose to double down on something and made it that much harder to work toward a solution? >> I don’t know. I’m trying to think about your question. >Is there something recent that you’re thinking of? >> I can’t remember the specific instances right now, but there was a bunch of press about things that were going on on Reddit and Discord, and they both reacted and banned the subredd…

I agree, but will go further to claim that the entire interview was horrible. So little information was conveyed in soo many words. He either had nothing to say, couldn't articulate what he had to say, or both.

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

#605

Post by mrgill »

md224 wrote: post #265
crazygringo wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what you mean... The official reddit app on iOS show comments as deep as you want, as far as I can tell. They default to collapsed the further you go deep/down in subcomments, but have buttons that say things like "6 more replies". Beyond a certain level they stop indenting , so the actual hierarchy is no longer clear, but that's necessary because there wouldn't be enough horizontal space otherwise…

If you have the mobile app, you can see for yourself. Here's an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskOuija/comments/89rukm/hey_vsauce... If you're not by a desktop, you can verify the missing comments by viewing the link in mobile Safari (in an ironic twist, Reddit's mobile web view is actually more functional than their native app). I wonder how many people are out there, like you, who have no idea this is going on.…

Holy.. didn't knew about that. WTF

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

#606

Post by bromuro »

Bartweiss wrote: post #74
austincheney wrote: post #4

Reddit wouldn't be so toxic if the vote counts were hidden, but echo chamber validation is the ultimate badge of honor there. There is so much in this document that applies to all things Reddit (please note that I wrote it inspired by my time on Reddit) : https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...

I'm not sure hiding vote counts is sufficient, since comments are still displayed based on them. The 'Theory of Reddit' sub did some pretty compelling analyses showing that the first 3-5 votes almost completely predict eventual vote direction, and that the top comments in a thread will consistently be the first handful of upvoted comments. Which also explains complaints of the shape "Reddit hates X one day, but loves…

They should remove comment votes. Why we care so much about what people are thinking? When we had usenet we weren’t so mad about others opinions...

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

#607

Post by rockostrich »

Spooky23 wrote: post #100
rockostrich wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they did get engaged! They banned all subreddits related to the trading/purchasing of firearms and alcohol. /r/beertrade, a subreddit for trading beer, had a strict policy that users were not allowed to sell beer for money (something that's actually illegal) and only allowed people to post about trading beer. Even someone like me, who doesn't ship beer and only trades in-person, is no longer allowed to talk about…

They did after realizing they would be facing lots of regulatory problems. Organizationally, it should be very obvious to anyone who thinks that things like facilitating anonymous gun and alcohol sales, etc is probably not a good idea.

Except they banned trading as well as sales. Trading beer is legal.

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

#608

Post by rockostrich »

pathseeker wrote: post #469
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.

>As for the Russiagate stuff, the front page is riddled with it because it's a very important subject in the US, Not really. Describe how each news articles has impacted your day-to-day life. It's only important in that it keeps readers coming back who are excited about a big conspiracy taking down the president they don't like.

The most recent example? It was revealed in a court testimony that Cohen has Sean Hannity as a client (after Hannity explicitly denied being a client on twitter) which raises a ton of questions regarding Fox News and Hannity as a source of "news" and not just state-run propaganda. It's probably the other way around (media-run state) considering how much Trump watches Fox and Friends, but it's still a pretty big bombshell.

If you go onto subreddits that mostly focus on non-US news whenever Trump comes up it's pretty obvious that the majority of the world views Trump's White House in a negative light.

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

#609

Post by baby »

naasking wrote: post #417
webkike wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason that guns were created was to fire high powered projectiles into people. Cars weren't created to run people over.

> The reason that guns were created was to fire high powered projectiles into people. Cars weren't created to run people over. Except why or how these items were designed or created is not really relevant is it? Knives, clubs/bats, bows and arrows were all designed and used for violent purposes, but we're not talking about banning knife juggling or baseball or archery as a sport. We don't blame the manufacturers when…

> Except why or how these items were designed or created is not really relevant is it?

Oh no it totally is. A gun is for killing, if you sell that to people you can expect them to use it to kill. A car is for transportation, you need a car to go to work in a lot of places or to move around.

That's the difference between a weapon and a necessity. Why do you need the weapon?

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

#610

Post by baby »

TearsInTheRain wrote: post #402
seunosewa wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference is that guns are designed to cause deaths. Cars are not designed to be in accidents.

Imho, I don't think that that matters. Guns have plenty of legitimate, beneficial, and legal uses. Sure it is easy to use them illegally, but similarly it is also easy to use a car illegally, so I think my analogy still stands.

> Guns have plenty of legitimate, beneficial, and legal uses

Completely outweighed by their prime use for killing.

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