91–100 of 609 posts
Now the NSA will collect data from Reddit.
You'd have to be very naive to believe the intelligence agencies haven't been tapped into Reddit for a very long time already.
If JTRIG is active on Flickr[0], you can be damned sure they're all over Reddit.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig...
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It means different things in different contexts. For instance in r/southafrica there is a majority of Afrikaaners on the subreddit despite being a minority (10%) of the country. Any anti-Afrikaaner content is quickly dismissed and downvoted. In r/TwoXChromosome engaging in any discussion on the wage gap as a function of anything other than sexism is met with downvotes. In any majority US subreddit conservative posts…
Well, there is quite a bit of free expression still. Anyone is empowered to make a subreddit and moderate how they please. What more do you want?
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> Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Reddit is none of those now. It's not anonymous ( they track your identity and feed it to the government ). You may be "anonymous" to fellow users, but not anonymous to authorities. It isn't information dense. It's propaganda dense. Almost all the content there now is government, media, ngo, etc propaganda. As for ads, check out the vide…
> Reddit is 80% government, politics and news propaganda and 20% ads ( movies, music, etc ). I am a heavy Reddit user and I don't notice any of these things, except when I specifically go looking for them. Curate your subreddit list and unsubscribe from all the default subs - they are all garbage, and that isn't even Reddit's fault, it's just inevitable once they reach a certain size.
You don't see politics related content on reddit daily? I used reddit since reddit was days old ( years before the digg migration ) so maybe we visited different websites.
> Curate your subreddit list and unsubscribe from all the default subs
That defeats the point of reddit doesn't it? Or what made reddit great. I never used reddit to be part of a bubble. Not only are default subs a bubble today, reddit itself is a bubble.
> and that isn't even Reddit's fault, it's just inevitable once they reach a certain size.
Actually it is reddit's fault. When they allowed and encouraged censorship, it allowed a small faction of political and news media/ngo affiliated mods to turn subreddits into their propaganda platform.
Let's say a new TV show starts airing, and you really like it and want to discuss it more. You can probably bet there's a subreddit for it, and in that community, a ton of people interested in it. You can bet there are threads for discussing it in other parts of Reddit too. Worst case, you can make one yourself.
This is something that everyone has in common. Everyone has a community they want to "be apart of" and Reddit lets you express yourself to those communities without having an identity tied to that community. There are groups on Facebook, but it's so tied to you that it's hard to just be a part of a community. On Twitter, people tend to congregate around others in their interest domain, but by default, all posts go everywhere. Someone into a show on Twitter is going to dilute their feed and have a similarly diluted feed if they discuss it. In contrast, a subreddit is a concentrated mass of people around a topic.
I don't really get much value outside of this centralization. The default subreddits are too general for my taste, so I don't subscribe to many. But for the 80-90 different topics and communities I like to see, it's great.
I’m really surprised Yahoo is #7, I thought Yahoo was all but dead.
The moment Verizon bought them they immediately started spamming targeted ads based on the content of my email - so long, and thanks for all the fish yahoo!
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I think the focus on the toxic user base is an artifact of the idea of one-dimensionally categorizing people based on their political ideology. That is such a hot button right now that it completely overshadows all other contributions to society in most forums. Reddit, by allowing some bad behavior and anonymity diffuses that ever present political aspect of modern life.
The kind of toxic people we are talking about on Reddit are not toxic for their politics. Racism, bigotry, and misogyny are not political topics. It isn't like tax policy or any other topic that can be debated. There is one clear side that is wrong.
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I think the focus on the toxic user base is an artifact of the idea of one-dimensionally categorizing people based on their political ideology. That is such a hot button right now that it completely overshadows all other contributions to society in most forums. Reddit, by allowing some bad behavior and anonymity diffuses that ever present political aspect of modern life.
The kind of toxic people we are talking about on Reddit are not toxic for their politics. Racism, bigotry, and misogyny are not political topics. It isn't like tax policy or any other topic that can be debated. There is one clear side that is wrong.
Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you. It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom. Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects. I’m still skeptical of Reddi…
> Reddit works because it’s anonymous Are you sure there? Anonymity doesn't really exist anymore on the internet for the average person. Reddit has the illusion of anonymity which gives its users a false sense of privacy so they can act the way they truly are (parallels to Westworld if you watch the show). It would be incredibly easy for Reddit to de-anonymize its user base, the same way Facebook was trying to do wit…
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Facebook effectively sells data. It simply doesn't sell raw dumps. The distinction isn't a minor one, but in this context it doesn't much matter. Reddit is unlikely to have the kind of quality data that facebook has to sell - directly, or indirectly.
I would say there are huge privacy differences between selling data and selling the right to advertise to their private data. The latter is quite a bit more privacy secure. (Note, the Cambridge Analytica stuff happened in 2013 when Facebook was much more open with APIs using their data, since popular demand at the time was for FB to be less of a walled garden)
Reddit is quickly becoming a tool for the majority on the site to suppress minority on the site's opinions. Until a viable solution is created to promote diversity of thought it will always suffer from this problem. Reddit is just as bad of an echo chamber as facebook. Please everyone who read stuff posted on reddit, engage in critical thinking after each article you read.
In a nutshell, one of key aspects of the reddit system is that an upvote arrow affects everybody equally, so the majorities affect whether something is negative or positively rated. When you take that into account for where and whether you show a post, the net effect is that at scale you pretty much guarantee that the majority within a given community can suppress the minority. The majority may not even have to necessarily try; it's something built in to the system, even before we get into matters of people deliberately trying to game the system.
Systems like Slashdot, HN, and Reddit try to fix that either with human moderation or a variety of heuristics to try to minimize the impact ("that looks like a voting ring, let's make its votes worth less", etc.), but another alternative is to make the upvotes not be universal anymore. Instead of an upvote meaning "I think everybody should see this more", it could be rewritten to mean "I think I want to see more of this poster". It's more math, but we have bigger computers now. As a side effect, it's robust against a lot more attacks, though I don't guarantee it wouldn't have other weaknesses.