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

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

#321

Reddit is still one of the best place to find relevant and accurate information, compared to say Facebook, Twitter or some random website. Depends on the subreddit of course, but at least healthy communities can be created and moderated. Of course you’ll also find terrible and toxic communities and users, like The_Donald, which has fortunately been banned. Why is the author only focusing on bad aspects? What’s the pu…

Sounds like you clearly have an agenda, which comes down to "it's okay to ban anything I don't agree with". And that's exactly what the article is talking about.

If someone doesn’t like a forum’s moderation policies, they’re free to find a different forum. This has been true since BBSes. It’s been true since the days of newspapers. It’s been true since the days of people speechifying in taverns.

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

#322
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://globalnews.ca/news/8902503/us-capitol-riot-jan-6-cha... "More than 250 people have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement who were trying to protect the Capitol, including more than 85 accused of using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer. Others have been accused of assaulting members of the media, including one Associated Press photographer, or destro…

Typical deceptive article. It says “inside the Capitol or outside” and many paragraphs later concludes that none of the guns were actually taken inside. Also interesting that a handful of bad people carrying guns make everybody else a criminal. Is that the world you want to live in?

That is the world we live in.

Every movement or protest has people who resort to violence. Whether actual protesters, or whether infiltrated by someone looking to discredit the movement.

Law enforcement is famous for it, and there are quite a few vidoes of them trying to 'start shit' so they can escalate.

I don't know whether guns were used at Capitol Hill, I don't really care. It was an attempted violent coup. By the protesters, not infiltrators.

I think the world has lost its marbles.

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

#323
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I first started using reddit in around 2015, so I never experienced the old reddit design when it was default. I tried old.reddit.com the other day, but I found it almost unbearable. not being used to it, I found it ugly and messy and overloaded with text. it loads twice as fast, though, and doesn't prioritise images over information, so I see the upside, but I do think a lot of the commentary here is nostalgia and j…

The redesign was in 2018 so I'm not sure about that timeline

the first few years I used the app

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

#324
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's true. When American democracy is no more, and a republican administration has denied any other political party from holding political office, remember that no one cleaned house in the American right wing, and let everyone slowly turn into the fascists.

Quoted post unavailable.

Did you intend to be racist and inflammatory, or just inflammatory?

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

#325
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny that you say that. I found the comments on that hacker news thread predictably awful, like all even slightly political discussion on hnews. People trying to one up each other with edgy comments on why the ruling is actually a good thing and how smart they are. A display of privilege and of a real lack of empathy

Hacker news is one of the worst communities on the internet but the headlines are better than most aggregating sites. Though I see more and more postings that also came across my Google news feed so HN is losing a lot of its utility for me. But it's a good place to see where the wind is blowing in terms of the ongoing radicalization of white men.

You are all over this thread being racist and sexist. Not everyone here is white, or men, nor are all the people in the US.

You keep crying about white men and fascists while being a complete dick. You even called someone with a good point an FSB employee. Half your comments are flamebait.

If you hate it so very much why are you here, much less participating?

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

#326

I hate how many online communities have centralized themselves around reddit and discord. I'm involved a lot of communities and fandoms where everybody congregates on those two platforms, and those two platforms alone. Things were a lot better in the 00s when these sorts of communities existed primarily on webforums. That said, I'm not sure how many of the problems are problems with reddit itself vs how many of the p…

One thing I noticed the other day on Reddit is some subreddits will now ban you by proxy. On my main account I subscribe to alot of subs. While I won't say which one, there was a controversial sub I left a comment on, the comment was benign, I think I was explaining some tech concept. Almost immediately though I got banned from ~20 subreddits, the wording was basically: "we see that you have participated in this sub, take down your comment or else you're banned here".

It really put a bad taste in my mouth, basically the mods saying: "you're only welcome here if you also agree with our political theory on stuff over there".

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

#327
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my real point was about the much bigger left-wing protest movement that peaked in 2016. I'm not sure why you keep mentioning 2016? The Wisconsin protests were also in 2011. Anyway, in Wisconsin they were protesting a proposed bill. It wasn't a coup attempt. I'm actually a Wisconsinite, so I'm very familiar with this. If you read the linked Wisconsin State Journal article, you'll see that the protests were peaceful.…

That article includes quite a few quotes from union leaders and protestors, none from supporters of the bill. The same journal published several articles opposing the bill. Its bias is obvious and undeniable. And that bias is probably why it fails to mention the death threats, violent rhetoric, chalk outlines, forcing lawmakers to flee, etc. All that in order to stop , not merely protest, passage of the bill. If we'r…

> That article includes quite a few quotes from union leaders and protestors, none from supporters of the bill. Its bias is obvious and undeniable.

> And that bias is probably why it fails to mention the death threats, violent rhetoric, chalk outlines

Heh. It was an article published Thursday morning about the events that happened Wednesday evening. Of course it doesn't mention everything in the grand context. Do you not understand how news works?

I would also note that this is the article linked from the Washington Post article that you linked.

> forcing lawmakers to flee

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Democratic lawmakers voluntarily, intentionally left Wisconsin for Illinois in order to prevent a quorum.

> All that in order to stop, not merely protest, passage of the bill.

Heh, this is just a bizarre statement. Why would you protest a bill if you weren't trying to stop its passage? Of course they were trying to stop its passage. Aren't there bills that you don't want passed?

> If we're to believe that lawmakers in Washington were in danger on January 6th, despite the complete absence of any violence against lawmakers

Another bizarre statement. There was no violence against lawmakers because the lawmakers were evacuated from the building while the Capitol police were trying to hold back the crowd.

> we should also believe the lawmakers in Madison were in danger for the same reason

No, because protesters were actually in the Wisconsin Capitol when the bill was passed. There was booing, but no violence.

> Death threats should be taken seriously regardless of partisanship.

Agreed, and the police do investigate them. But a lot of politicians of both parties get death threats, and most of them are just rhetoric. There were no assassination attempts on Scott Walker, and he personally wasn't even in the Capitol, as he was the Governor and not a legislator.

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

#328
post #278
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 sh…

Yep, I actively have to fight both services to get the most value from the service, much more similar to how Twitter does it. I find having both views is a good idea, I'm not sure why these services tend to focus on only one view.

On HN when I like a users comment I will go through their post history, and if enough of their comments are of good quality, I add their comments to my RSS reader through hnrss. Reddit does this slightly better, where you can add users to your 'friend's list' and then they give you an option to see the latest comments from all of your friends. Both ways do context of the comment poorly.

The other thing I do on Reddit is have thousands of sub-reddits filtered out through RES. Basically anything bigger than a million subscribers is useless, and often even 100k is to much.

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

#329

I cannot buy into a wholesale generalization that mods are power tripping people who deserve our contempt because they are lonely. There’s all kinds of motivations for being a mod. I rarely find a sub where mods aren’t dealing with far more BS than they are putting out. If I don’t agree with how mods handle a channel, I leave. I think it’s important that we question the usefulness of blaming society for the lack of q…

> This is where I do wholeheartedly agree with author - the loss of Aaron and RSS feeds was the end of the cyberpunk movement in the browser based web.

Aside from not calling it a "cyberpunk movement", the people who work on such tech are still around. See: Mastodon, Pleroma.

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

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give an example - you can do that here.

One word: transgender. Any light criticism or joke results in a subreddit and site wide ban.

You're being downvoted but even as a progressive liberal I do think that pushing political correctness too hard and too fast has resulted in this conservative backlash we're now seeing across our country. Change needs to be iterative and sensible. I was amazed at how quickly public sentiment opened up to gay marriage and legal marijuana for example, but now equally dismayed by how quickly the conservative backlash is happening across the country. The social version of agile rather than waterfall development I suppose…
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