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Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

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521–530 of 632 posts

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#521
post #33

It's kindof astonishing what is happening over at reddit right now. "The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it. It honestly feels like it got taken over by silicon valley middle management marketing types or something, and now they just can't seem to figure out why the users ke…

Reddit management is somewhat between a rock and a hard place. They have a very free-for-all culture now, with the norms of the site driven largely by the community. As expected, these norms do not drive a lot of monetization -- the community is not constantly pushing for ways to make Reddit profitable. So management is trying to wrest control over the huge community in order to take it towards some more profitable territory, but at least to date they don't seem to be able to do so in a way that doesn't trigger a strong immune response.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#522
post #180

I'm going to offer a wild suggestion - What if reddit is being purposefully dismantled to break up the social hive it represents? Is it possible that current events are he fruition of a purposeful strategy?

If that is what is happening, is that what the owners want? Or is that what leadership wants? The leadership has very little money sunk into reedit, but the owners have a lot more. I'm sure leadership is willing to gamble that they can disrupt the hive without killing it. But will the owners continue to go down that road?

With billions (and billions) of dollars being poured into this year's election cycle, it makes sense for the string-pullers to dismantle any vestige of true grassroots organizing. It seems like the "real" money would be invested in disrupting organic organization and favoring controlled and curated organization that favors their whim. I just can't get this damn tinfoil cap off my head.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#523
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is what is happening, is that what the owners want? Or is that what leadership wants? The leadership has very little money sunk into reedit, but the owners have a lot more. I'm sure leadership is willing to gamble that they can disrupt the hive without killing it. But will the owners continue to go down that road?

With billions (and billions) of dollars being poured into this year's election cycle, it makes sense for the string-pullers to dismantle any vestige of true grassroots organizing. It seems like the "real" money would be invested in disrupting organic organization and favoring controlled and curated organization that favors their whim. I just can't get this damn tinfoil cap off my head.

Reddit is not meaningfully organized, at least not any more than your average stampede.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#524
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say I love Reddit, but I'm certainly an active user. But I'm not subscribed to any of the subreddits that were affected, and I wouldn't have noticed if it weren't for this thread. There are lots of little communities that work well, with their own things they value. (There was a particular thread over on /r/OrthodoxChristianity, now removed, that would have been hilarious if it wasn't sad: a member of the…

I'd suggest directed acyclic graph comments, too, so that a comment can reply to more than one other comment. Potentially super nice, but I haven't seen anyone implement them yet.

You mean "Bring back Usenet".

Because that is what Reddit is serving, as well as the previous board sites the people came from.

Usenet was decentralized, no logins, and some were moderated. But this is what the people want, yet they do not know the name.

Most NG servers are shut down.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#525
post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The internet" has it's own culture, and the people running reddit right now (one of the places where this culture is the strongest, imo), seem to have no idea how to interface with it. The first rule of the internet is you don't censor the internet.

The thing is that as a user I want some control over what I see. I do not want NSFW content in my feed, or to accidentally see things that are illegal/NSFL. I want to avoid the worse of the troll and hatey people. Reddit does not have freedom of speech, it has admin controlled thiefdoms. This works well, but if a particular community jepardises the whole it should go elsewhere.

> thiefdoms

That's a pretty cool respelling of fiefdom!

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#526
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't. But see this exchange in the archive ( https://archive.is/jouWQ#selection-17025.0-17025.134 ) 'Have you felt regretful for rushing to judgement after condemning the "perpetrators" of the Duke lacrosse rape scandal during 2006-07?' 'No, the pattern is consistent. And we never want injustice to occur. But the pattern is fairly obvious, and a very obvious pattern that must be ended.' The Reverend isn't intere…

Maybe this is a stupid question, but I'm not sure I see how that relates to the departure of a Reddit employee facilitating that AMA. He answered the question, right? Whether the answer is terrible maybe impacts what you think of him , but not what you think of the person making the AMA happen (either as a person or as an employee), right? Or did he not actually answer the question, and did someone else answer in his…

It is a demonstration that the Reverend doesn't much care about fairness to individuals, and so would not feel qualms about insisting someone be fired because he was embarrassed.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've seen this happen time and time again : USENET, Compuserve, to some degree .. AOL .. slashdot .. kuro5hin .. etc. etc. Those who fail to study their Internet history are doomed to repeat it, it seems. I've never been content with the centralized nature of Reddit as an Internet forum - for me this moment of truth has been bound to occur.

>We've seen this happen time and time again : USENET, Compuserve, to some degree .. AOL .. slashdot .. kuro5hin What exactly is the same about what happened to those forums? All I can think of is that they declined in popularity, but maybe I'm missing some history.

Usenet died because the ISPs no longer offer newsgroup access. Back in the dialup days, services like this were standard, and they made the internet truly awesome.

Once high speed (DSL, cable) took over they axed all Usenet servers. Unless you had Hampster continuously scouring for insecure and open servers, you had to pay for a SuperNews account.

That's how Usenet died.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#528
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spare us, Reddit's been mismanaged for long before Ms Pao started there. Just look at Alexis Ohanian's (kn0thing) comments[0]. Not to mention the celeb nudes debacle, which was allowed then disallowed and announced by a sysadmin [1]. And the then CEO Yishan Wong publicly fighting with a former employee [2]. Then we can go way back to /r/jailbait and the Violentacrez affair, the only mod to be awarded a golden trophy…

The tide changed with Pao. All of those were roadblocks, but never had the community turned so swiftly against the admins until Pao arrived. There's an entire subreddit dedicated to denigrating Pao. kn0thing has had missteps but generally has had the respect of the community. The community largely does not respect Pao.

There's an entire subreddit dedicated to denigrating Yishan Wong as well. Name some of the concrete things Ellen Pao has done at Reddit to be the cause of all of this, or any of this.

Re: Front Page Subreddits Go Private in Response to Firing of Reddit Admin

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is an "exploitative relationship", unless you also define your relationship with a supermarket chain or netflix to be "exploitative". You give money for a service. Said service tries to extract money as efficiently as possible. It's a capitalistic relationship, certainly. But it's very different. reddit volunteers provide their efforts to improve reddit's brand, for free, generally just for personal…

Except that I don't go out of my way to 'help' the supermarket. I don't give them free passes and give them a look of "Oh you!" when they screw up. Twitch has also many volunteers. Just look at this guide on how to become a Twitch admin: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/2f77aw/how_to_becom... "That means that being a Global Moderator is not something you get paid for."

Wow, I didn't know twitch admins were volunteers. Scratch most of what I said then.
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