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Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

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Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#471

Post by astrange »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #135
sixothree wrote: post #6

Reddit as a whole is less useful since comment sections were demoted from first class citizens to something barely usable. I think they saw imgur as a threat and wanted to better replicate that experience.

Reddit comments were doomed in the long run, anyway. The fact that most Reddit commenters are on mobile phones, and not proper keyboards, has led to ultra-short comments light on information or nuance, like Twitter. This is true even on special-interest subreddits for various hobbies, where rich discussion is wilting and image posts and memes have taken over. Sure, you yourself can still write a couple of solid parag…

I've noticed some of the popular reddits like /r/interestingasfuck /r/nextfuckinglevel (there's a pattern here) have totally degraded in content. It's supposed to be amazing things like extreme sports but it's entirely Facebook-meme-tier pictures of a guy with some text on top about him recovering from cancer that seems made up.

I can't tell if this is organic or not. If so it might be people leaving Facebook who aren't capable of irony enough to be interesting, but I think it's mobile-optimizing karma farmers.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#472

Post by astrange »

hannasanarion wrote: post #443
luc4sdreyer wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users will switch if there is a viable alternative.

Setting up an alternative to a huge platform is hard to do. It's not the early days of the social internet any more, there aren't really any "killer features" that might attract users that haven't already been integrated into the big platforms, and "better management" is not the kind of thing that inspires mass adoption. And if you don't have a killer feature, then you've just made a clone, and you suffer the fate of…

The problem with those clones is they weren't made with pure intentions. Most of them are "the original site except we hate their admins" or "the original site except you can do crimes on this one". This isn't the kind of mindset you need to have a good mod team.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#473

Post by heterodoxxed »

unethical_ban wrote: post #467
heterodoxxed wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

| for what that is worth. Not much. | That is where to start to trace down the claim. I can't find any link between that user and commondreams.

Just noticed it's L, like /Lrlourpresident (because the I account got banned). And look at the submissions, and the vote count of submissions. I do not have the comments I read several weeks ago available, but in my many years on reddit, I have no doubt there is clear vote manipulation occurring. inb4 "those are different things", I know.

| Lrlourpresident

That's what I looked for. You should have better evidence than a highly active user in a restricted access subreddit before making an assertion like that. Especially considering how wildly popular AOC is, I don't see any evidence of manipulation.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#474

Post by astrange »

akhilpotla wrote: post #445

An interesting question I've been thinking about, though I haven't really gotten anywhere is: At what point does a private platform become a public utility, so that censorship is not permissible on the site? I agree that reddit shouldn't be censoring anyone or certain topics since it feel like a public utility. But if I were to have a blog, I think I should be allowed to block someone or delete certain comments based…

Your platform hasn't been granted a monopoly on anything and has no moat, so why would it ever be a problem?

daringfireball.net is a blog with no comments and at some point someone wrote a browser extension that just adds a comment section the owner of the site has no control over. Bit mean but that could always happen to you.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#475

Post by astrange »

Number157 wrote: post #182
Spivak wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your phrasing could be a lot better but I think your main point holds some truth. Just like the conspiracy equation that models the difficulty of keeping a secret in terms of the number of people involved the same principal applies to online communities that have a significant number of hateful members but try to fly under the radar. It gets harder and harder for the community to moderate their members that /unjerk a…

Reddit was great for a long time even when it was one of the largest most popular sites on the internet. Then it became a political platform for the US democrats.

/r/politics is extremely US "normie Democrat voter" (which does not align with the actual party, it's different and sometimes worse) but the popular financial subs like WSB/investing certainly aren't.

This is just a passing trend though, 10 years ago everyone on the internet was libertarian. Which is how you knew the internet wasn't real. Nobody's actually a libertarian in real life.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#476

Post by astrange »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #290
standardUser wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The subreddits I frequent seem utterly unchanged. Reddit is a big place. I understand that people refer to some ambiguous cross-section of "Reddit" as a shared space we are all aware of and can generalize about. But I don't relate to that concept at all.

I thought this too for a while but ... one small subreddit I read is "DermatologyQuestions". Here is the top post of this month: https://www.reddit.com/r/DermatologyQuestions/comments/m9ndf... And to get a better perspective - read the comments too. Maybe there are some more niche more secluded "better" subreddits. But as far as unpopular goes DermatogoyQuestions is pretty niche, and is oriented towards doctors and p…

Dermatology needs a lot of education and is presumably popular with US women, and the top comment is a normal opinion for a highly educated US minority woman.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#477

Post by jefftk »

fuzxi wrote: post #459
jefftk wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> first to change the content of the comment, then to fix typos in previous edits Does anyone have screenshots showing these various states?

Screenshots have no value here because they're so trivial to fake. A Wayback Machine archive would be much better.

While a screenshot can be fake, most screenshots you see are not, and they're still useful for understanding what's going on.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#478

Post by astrange »

mbesto wrote: post #463
astrange wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone been harmed by losing money in GameStop meme investing? It seems like everyone more or less got what they paid for in entertainment.

Define "harm"? How is losing money not objectively considered harmful to a person?

When you go to Disneyland it involves losing a lot of money but people usually enjoy it. Same thing here. People are not being quoted in the news or testifying to Congress that they lost their retirement and Mr. DFV has not lost his SEC broker registration.

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#479

Post by astrange »

sidlls wrote: post #241
BitwiseFool wrote: post #18

Reddit feels very Soviet lately. Everything is heavily manipulated and it seems like users are aware of that fact but are powerless to change anything.

The politics subreddit is among the worst. It seems like it is essentially run by operatives of the DNC. (I’m entirely non-partisan: I believe both major parties are right-wing parties, and neither serves our public interests well).

If you think the US Democratic party is right-wing you should see literally all European political parties, who all hate immigrants and love economic austerity.

https://twitter.com/mcopelov/status/1374544227300999169

(At one point a Nordic politician asked Bernie to stop calling them socialist.)

Re: Reddit’s most popular subreddits go private in protest against ‘censorship’

#480

Post by Blikkentrekker »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #325
filoleg wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the Greens, Lib Dems, Reddit, or anyone else involved had chosen not to hire her, she could stir up outrage against them for gender discrimination We don't even need to hypothesize this specific "if", because that's exactly what she did[0] after being ousted from Green Party due to all the pedophilia-related concerns. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimee_Challenor

In a rational world, that wouldn't have happened, but we seem to have lost our ability to say behavior A (which has supporting facts) is significantly worse than behavior B (which is alleged). Preying on children, or advocating for those who want to, is a significantly bigger problem than the _accusation_ of bias based on preference.

Do such allegations really hold any real water to achieve political ends?

I find that every time I read about such matters, it is from some Anglo-Saxon place where emotions about such matters seem to run high.

I cannot think of any Dutch occurrence of someone being dismissed from a party alleging any gender discrimination, and I would to what extent such arguments are truly something that sways the Anglo-Saxon, because every time I see them made, publicly or privately, they seem to be coming from an Anglo-Saxon source, in particular the U.S.A., but the U.K. is not very far behind.

But perhaps, it is simply a function of district-based politics where one votes for the man, rather than the party, so the personal life and identity of politicians takes a far grander scale than in other systems.

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