The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos • Hacker News Board

Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#271

Post by winternett » Sun, Jun 26, 2022, 1:12 PM UTC

jimjimjim wrote: post #162

places need limits. they really really do. They do in real life, they do in online. Should someone be able to go to a bar and shout insults at the owner. depending on where the bar is this will end with you in an alley. Why should a private company allow things that affects their bottom line?

Why should anyone contribute their time, content, thoughts, and often money into a company's platform when the company doesn't care about anything but protecting it's bottom line, and then severing you from and taking control of your already spent time, content, thoughts, and often money?

The other big problem is that Reddit hides the fact that it takes every step possible to limit users in order to protect it's bottom line... That's textbook bad business.

Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#272

Post by leereeves » Sun, Jun 26, 2022, 1:16 PM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #266

leereeves wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have people forgotten 2016 so quickly? The left had a nationwide movement named "Occupy" and the Democrats and most media approved. The right did it once and the same people all lost their minds.

> Have people forgotten 2016 so quickly? Occupy Wall Street was 2011. The crucial difference between January 6 and Occupy Wall Street is that the members of Congress and the Vice President were inside the Capitol Building on January 6, whereas no elected officials were in Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street. If the break-in of the Capitol had occurred while it was empty, that would have been a different matter, s…

Fair point. I shouldn't have made a silly joke about the name of that group when my real point was about the much bigger left-wing protest movement that peaked in 2016.

The best example is perhaps the occupation of the Wisconsin state capital:

> Thousands of protesters rushed to the … Capitol Wednesday night, forcing their way through doors, crawling through windows and jamming corridors...thousands of pro-union activists — many bused in from out of state — rampaged through the historic building in an effort to stop a vote on collective bargaining reform legislation.

...

> during the course of the occupation, Walker received a steady stream of death threats against him and his wife, including one that promised to “gut her like a deer” and one threatening to kill his sons. Police found dozens of .22-caliber bullets scattered across the Capitol grounds. The occupiers drew chalk outlines of fake dead bodies etched with Walker’s name on the floor, and carried signs that read “Death to tyrants,” “The only good Republican is a dead Republican” and one with picture of him in crosshairs with the words, “Don’t retreat, Reload.”

...

> House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) praised the occupiers for an “impressive show of democracy in action” and tweeted as they assaulted the Capitol that she continued “to stand in solidarity” with the union activists. In other words, Democrats were for occupying capitols before they were against it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/14/democrats...

Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#273

Post by swat535 » Sun, Jun 26, 2022, 1:16 PM UTC

multjoy wrote: post #185

thefz wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Reddit is that they banned unilaterally the right wing.

Because the right wing were organising insurrections?

And yet the violent BLM mobs that literally set on fire and looted businesses and shops that had nothing to do with the actual cause were not only not condemned but also glorified and celebrated.

You will not convince me that stealing TVs from target during riots that let to many unjustified injuries and deaths is about seeking justice.

I’m not even American and this was completely obvious.

Please let’s not pretend we don’t have extremism on both sides of the political compass.

I have witness this behaviour on HN many times as well since this website leans overwhelmingly left; try saying anything remotely controversial and watch the downvotes ensue. I intentionally avoid speaking about my own views openly here out of fear of repercussion; especially because many users on this website run businesses and have the power to ruin my career and my livelihood.

If it weren’t for dang, this place would descend to chaos just as well.

Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#274

Post by snickerbockers » Sun, Jun 26, 2022, 1:16 PM UTC

winternett wrote: post #253

toastal wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean sooo many things are centralizing around Discord now which is just as bad—except its worse since it can't be indexed by search engines. I appreciate that most big-enough programming language communities offer a Discourse which is self-hosted and you can choose to subscribe and reply in many manners.

Discord is madness, just the captcha process not working repeatedly reminds me that I can be severed at any time from everything I post there. I stopped logging on when TFA became arbitrary on there, I already get far too many spam calls. At least the slack channels I check on don't require it, but I'm done with walled gardens.. I just chose to cultivate my own site as the primary source of my content, no more social…

> I stopped logging on when TFA became arbitrary on there

Did they do this for everybody or only certain people? In my experience Discord is one of the few apps that doesn't constantly make me dig up my phone or help train some dumb AI image recognition every time I use it.

Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#275

Post by rhaksw » Sun, Jun 26, 2022, 1:17 PM UTC

matthewdgreen wrote: post #269

Noumenon72 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the sticky on the /r/atheism Roe thread?[1] The moderation team states that "there is no non-bigoted way of advocating" against abortion, that any argument you have "has already been addressed and thoroughly refuted", and that speaking up "will result in an immediate, permanent ban." The mods are absolutely opposed to freedom of expression. Nobody was shutting down discourse like this when I was growing up.…

The Internet has always been full of private fora where people limit the range of discussion. There are plenty of subreddits where you can express your views, should they happen to fall on the opposing side of the issue. The freedom to have discussions on topics you want in restricted spaces is not censorship, folks. And it’s (unfortunately) a thing that happens when your space is open to the entire global Internet.

> The Internet has always been full of private fora where people limit the range of discussion.

That's fine, but Reddit shows users their removed comments as if they're not removed [1]. Users don't have a chance to migrate to another group or platform if they don't know they're being censored.

> The freedom to have discussions on topics you want in restricted spaces is not censorship, folks.

I would agree with you if the platform were upfront with users about what gets removed. Unfortunately at this point it isn't.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky

Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#276

Post by shuntress » Sun, Jun 26, 2022, 1:18 PM UTC

coffeeblack wrote: post #54

labrador wrote: post #13

People complaining about Reddit remind me of that quote from Bjarne Stroustrup about computer languages: “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” A lot of people use Reddit. I've been on since nearly the beginning and seen it go through various phases. They started getting serious about moderation after Gamergate and they're still serious about it since they wa…

My critique of Reddit isn’t so much about moderation per se, as it is about one-sided moderation. The ban of anything that opposes “the message”. It started around 2015/16 and it was very clearly visible in all subs.

I have not noticed this. What is "the message"?

Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#277

Post by snickerbockers » Sun, Jun 26, 2022, 1:18 PM UTC

richbell wrote: post #200

multjoy wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't just get permabanned with extreme prejudice. The author is leaving out a huuuuge chunk of the story.

Yeah... usually the 'worst' that could happen is their specific account being shaddow-banned. Being _permabanned_ suggests that they've done something particularly egregious. Either that, or their behavior is indistinguishable from a spam bot.

It could also be something as innocuous as software piracy. Not sure about reddit specifically but a lot of websites will immediately nuke anybody who tries to link to pirated content because they're terrified of getting sued.

Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#278

Post by xg15 » Sun, Jun 26, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

mjr00 wrote: post #18

As someone who was involved with many internet communities long before reddit, it sounds like the author is just experiencing the eternal September[0]. Pretty much since the day I found out about reddit in... 2008-ish?, everyone in the online communities I knew thought it was filled with awful pseudointellectual teenagers and college students, that the upvote/downvote system was horrible and encouraged people to post…

> lack of individual identifiers beyond usernames, like avatars and signatures from a typical internet forum of the day.

I wonder if this is done on purpose, to nudge people into thinking of individual users not as people but as voices of a "hivemind".

Even today, usernames are de-emphasized in the UI in contrast to names of threads or subreddits. That's most prominent on the front-page ("r/all") where posts don't show the usernames at all, only the names of subreddits - producing the odd impression that the subreddits are authoring the posts and not individual users within the subreddit.

HN's UI is sort of similar on the first half: Users are de-emphasized here as well, but there are no subreddits to emphasize instead. Though I think it would be interesting if someone made an alternative frontend for HN that presented threads in the style of an old web forum, with user identities shown prominently

I think it works frightenly well sometimes. Ask yourself:

- How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year?

- How many people do you know on HN?

Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#279

Post by snickerbockers » Sun, Jun 26, 2022, 1:25 PM UTC

winternett wrote: post #259

huimang wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'm not sure if anyone is really interested in advice from someone who somehow managed to get permabanned on reddit.

Maybe one day when a bank permabans you after you've put years of money into it, and then they just reclaim all of your credits, and the reason they give you is only that "you promoted your business in a sub and that's not allowed on this tiny part of reddit" and that is against "Rule #12" on a random subreddit that didn't even publish the rule... You probably still won't understand the ideal of how people regularly…

That's going to be a huge problem going forward. The whole parler thing from last year has me afraid because it showed how corporate america can collude together to remove you from society if you piss them off. In this specific case it happened to a bunch of assholes who probably deserved it, but in general this is extremely dangerous because of how much power is vested in private entities that have no public accountability.

I'm personally of the opinion that, with respect to net neutrality, "service provider" should be interpreted as liberally as possible so that CDNs, hosts and SaaS platforms are subject to it instead of just companies that provide layer-3 internet access. And maybe the law should even be expanded so that it applies to financial institutions.

Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#280

Post by jpindar » Sun, Jun 26, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

winternett wrote: post #240

Dma54rhs wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TikTok recommendation algo is creepy but strange enough it's community is much more kinder and less angry than Reddit. If you give it a day or two train and get past the dancing videos its excellent (unless dancing videos are your thing of course).

It's quite possibly not the algo anymore running TikTok ... It's likely now all just a random assortment of content from whoever pays the most for ad promotions on their posts, without violating community standards and policy, and occasional celeb posts here and there... of course. The algo likely only does light duty when something bad on the platform makes the news... They have to make sure paid ads run as promised…

Its not random. I always see content related to my specific interests (as indicated by the videos I've liked, and I never see celebrity posts.

In fact TikTok is widely said to have the best algorithm for determining someone's interests.