Reddit today is the opposite of what it was in the beginning. Unsurprising that they’d write out Swartz in their quest to be a friendly corporate face. Alas, a new competitor will replace it soon. Virtually no one has brand loyalty to Reddit and their audience is becoming narrower and narrower.
I think this is wishful thinking. Reddit at its inception was sock puppet-boosted discussion of atheism and coding. Every choice its leaders have been made have been in support of further growth, not some philosophical ideal. It’s now one of the most vibrant discussion forums on the internet. It’s been growing faster than it can manage, but that’s been the case for years. Hostage to a brittle moderation model that do…
Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder
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Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder
#252Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about religious people who believe gay marriage/abortion should be illegal? Should they be shut down as well?
Depends on what they're doing. They definitely shouldn't be allowed to harass gay weddings and health centers that perform abortions.
Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
So they are technically correct. It shows though that --given the near martyr status Aaron has-- he is left out of the picture. Reddit are no rebbels, at least not anymore or "less so nowadays". I have most hopes for Lemmy[0] as a place for the more rebbel Redditors to seek refuge. Really cool project, advancing really nicely. [0]: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
Chapo.chat linked by someone else uses Lemmy. As a product, Lemmy seems pretty good.
Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm definitely not denying the Holodomor or any of Stalin's crimes. But unfortunately some of the people who are most adamant about spreading information about the Holdomor are not doing so to spread information about the atrocity, but rather to spread their own anti-semitic propaganda. u/soccer was a moderator of r/911truth and, according to archived versions of their user page, posted quite a lot of links to "Israe…
I'm going to take your claims at face value. Let's say this is all 100% correct. Maybe then the prudent action is not to ban a subreddit that is a valid topic, but instead to ban users who have a history of behavior that's not acceptable? In fact, Reddit does ban users including u/soccer. To conflate r/911truth and r/Holodomor isn't fully honest. Edit: Meanwhile this exists - http://reddit.com/r/stalindidnothingwrong
Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it also on a wide scale leads to silos being formed where you only share content with people you know that will upvote it this is why reddit gets a subreddit on every subject and even then those communities tend to split over and over until they get their perfect echochamber. Heck there are two primary subreddits for the Labour party in the UK - Labour and LabourUK. A year ago someone asked what's the difference…
I think it was Jess Phillips (I could be wrong) who, in an interview during the last election, claimed something along the lines of 'Labour are winning the social media war'. They really have no idea how social media works. (For non-UK, Jess Phillips is a Labour MP who went to see her party suffer one of the biggest defeats in their history)
Targeted ads and bespoke feed algorithms are bad enough, but when you combine it with political campaigns it's just a recipe for disaster.
And this isn't a problem that is easy to solve and honestly I don't know how and if it can be solved. Targeted ads are arguably the easy one but even then how you define targeting, as well as what is clearly a political ad (e.g. a corporation making an ad that exploits a given event such as BLM, OW or anything remotely political), the feed is oh boy... People want their feeds curated for them, at this point these platforms know their users better than the users know themselves they know what content keeps them engaged and what drives them away and that's the problem. The content that may be relevant for a given user isn't necessarily a content that would have a positive effect on that user and "what is good for X" is the tricky part because it's inherently political and manipulative and any way you look at it it is social engineering.
I don't know what you can do and if you can put the genie back into the bottle if 10 years ago someone told me that social media could escalate civil war and genocide I would looked at them weirdly at this point I'm honestly not going to discount the possibility of some sort of butlerian jihad against social media in a decade or two.
Silicon valley (et al.) is now trading in humans, at its core it's essentially a slave market in which companies sell your attention and most importantly your moldable perception of reality to the highest bidder. And at least I personally don't see a way out of it, regulating it to death might be worse since it would grant political institutions control over the same shit that is happening right now and for the most part I rather Coca Cola and Nike molding my beliefs than any given political party and I don't care if their values align with mine or not, at this point I see nice obedient corporate drones being the lesser evil in all this. Any business model that with outlaw the current practices likely won't be sustainable and would be near impossible to enforce, these companies are worth billions because they give anyone with a credit card and and idea the ability to shift what some people think and this isn't going to go away.
Shutting down completely well, I don't use social media other than reddit (and I rotate my reddit accounts) and HN, I don't have Facebook and I don't have a twitter account (I read tweets that are linked but don't log-in), nearly everyone around me uses 3-5 social media platforms daily.
Social media run amok combined with the overgrowing distrust and disillusion in democracy in the west really scares the shit out of me, especially in the US I really cannot rule out major civil disorder to a borderline civil war in some areas, and TBH Europe isn't much better it's just not as well armed. Civil wars don't have to be fought with guns and tanks to be deadly nations can be brought to a halt with enough small scale violence too (just look at France for example).
Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s true, just until when it’s no longer true. Just like Digg, MySpace and many networks before them.
The problem is that such an open-ended prediction has absolutely no value whatsoever... I'm sure Reddit will die someday, but people have been saying this for at least 10 years or more. When non-technical users started using it, when violentacrez et al were banned, with every layout change big or small, staff changes... People said the same thing about Facebook when it opened to non-edu users or when it launched the…
Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder
#258Reddit today is the opposite of what it was in the beginning. Unsurprising that they’d write out Swartz in their quest to be a friendly corporate face. Alas, a new competitor will replace it soon. Virtually no one has brand loyalty to Reddit and their audience is becoming narrower and narrower.
I don't think so. If anything, Reddit is getting bigger. In my circle nobody knew what it was five years ago. Now it has effectively become mainstream, and is being (positively) quoted on TV, etc. This is actually the second time it happens. Ten years ago people also claimed that "Reddit is dying". It wasn't, it was just changing its core audience of technical users to a broader one. And now it is doing it again.
Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shootings that the contemporary liberal media highlight. We can't recall mass violence that target Asian, Romani, or global south communities because our media doesn't think it's notable enough.
and yet there's nothing on the anniversary of the Las Vegas shooting this year (most likely because the media needs to memory hole what was really a failed assassination attempt)
Re: Reddit’s About page doesn't include Aaron Swartz as a founder
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't in good faith make the argument that t_D was a positive sub. It loved Trump, yes, but it also frequently called for the execution of Muslims [1], immigrants [2], Planned Parenthood employees [3], Hillary Clinton [4], etc. [5] [1] https://archive.is/Kfl86 https://archive.is/DwlAc [2] https://archive.is/oOqOR [3] https://archive.is/LGH19 [4] https://archive.is/0uCjr https://archive.ph/LPuGH https://archive.fo…
If I cared to waste my time doing so, I could find plenty of objectionable comments in just about any Reddit sub. You seem to believe tough conversations about whether Muslim culture is compatible with Western culture, or whether the US should begin mass deportations of illegal aliens should not occur. I’d have to disagree with you there. If we can’t discuss complex topics like this on the internet, then where can we…