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Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

lethain.com

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Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#161

Post by unsupp0rted »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #154
unsupp0rted wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The commonality could be that I am all those things, or the commonality could be that Reddit is pathologically sensitive to all those things. My claim is the latter: it's a Reddit auto-immune disease that was hardly present in the early days and is now impossible to miss after years of gradual decline.

Occam's Razor suggests the former. Here is a perfunctory "I don't know you" - nothing below may be applicable. There are power-hungry mods, no doubt. They can be politically oriented in either direction, or sometimes just like to be the monarch. But I've been around reddit for over 15 years now, and in my view if you're regularly being accused of being toxic, I'm inclined to believe that you're the cause. And it may…

To me Occam's Razor suggests that any giant social network inevitably declines into group-think and mod fiefdoms, barring an active mitigation strategy.

This is the very basis of why HN rules and moderation are structured the way they are: to actively discourage such an anticipated decline.

If a person seems reasonable and thoughtful on one anonymous forum, Occam's Razor suggests they are similarly thoughtful in another anonymous forum.

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#162

Post by unsupp0rted »

mrguyorama wrote: post #136
adamrezich wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"that's just what a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy would say!", basically?

[flagged]

And yet every person who is literally oppressed is not a Nazi, nor am I one.

Not that I’d equate the decline and fall of quality interactions on Reddit with “oppression”.

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#163

Post by replygirl »

mrguyorama wrote: post #144
replygirl wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some recent things I was downvoted to oblivion on: - Mentioning buses in a thread about road wear - Warning people talking about vigilante justice that intentionally tricking/luring someone into committing a crime makes you an accomplice - Telling fellow trans people they can't equate Jim Crow with gendered bathroom stigma - Reminding fellow queer people that Anheuser-Busch are just trying to sell more beer

[flagged]

I don't think any of the positions I listed are contrarian, they were all in response to questions openly posed to the subs, and I felt I gave my comments soberly and in good faith as a member of each community.

On the note about queer communities: I get why queer people are sensitive because I'm a trans woman with a nonbinary streak and I was oversensitive in my first few years after coming out. My experience living out+proud all over the country for the past decade, lining up with the experience of other queer people in my life, is that that sensitivity is largely motivated by self-loathing and fear that our communities reinforce, and that one of the best things you can do as a queer person is learn to love yourself. Once you do learn to love yourself, you can see that life is actually really good for queer people--many less marginalized groups are falling over themselves to support us, our married couples average the highest household income of any other family unit when controlling for other factors, tokenistic representation and marketing are booming, and despite what the news cycle will tell you things are by-and-large improving in the legal domain. Had one bathroom incident in New York a few years back, dealt with sexual assault and groping in the early 2010s, 10 years later I'm still visibly trans and road tripping around the rural South making friends will all sorts of strangers in unexpected places.

You can apply the same logic to all sorts of other social groups and formations, internet conservatives included. The disingenous way to state the truth is that internet communities in all corners of society are full of pedantic snowflakes who need to touch grass.

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#164

Post by HelloMcFly »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #161
HelloMcFly wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occam's Razor suggests the former. Here is a perfunctory "I don't know you" - nothing below may be applicable. There are power-hungry mods, no doubt. They can be politically oriented in either direction, or sometimes just like to be the monarch. But I've been around reddit for over 15 years now, and in my view if you're regularly being accused of being toxic, I'm inclined to believe that you're the cause. And it may…

To me Occam's Razor suggests that any giant social network inevitably declines into group-think and mod fiefdoms, barring an active mitigation strategy. This is the very basis of why HN rules and moderation are structured the way they are: to actively discourage such an anticipated decline. If a person seems reasonable and thoughtful on one anonymous forum, Occam's Razor suggests they are similarly thoughtful in anot…

> To me Occam's Razor suggests that any giant social network inevitably declines into group-think and mod fiefdoms, barring an active mitigation strategy.

And I would argue any giant social network also inevitably declines into troll behavior and bad-faith brigading without active mitigation strategies. It is hard to balance these things.

I certainly think "I'm routinely regarded as an a-hole because I act like one" to be much more plausible than "I'm routinely regarded as an a-hole because this giant social network has a metaphorical auto-immune disease that results in me experiencing this routinely."

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#165

Post by dghlsakjg »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #128
btreecat wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound like the full story.

What else can I add? You've seen my interactions here. Does it seem to you like the kind of person you’re interacting with is reasonable here but unreasonable to the point of group toxicity elsewhere? Or that I'm unreasonable here?

Yes.

Your initial comment here was unsupported by real world examples, and used a lot of rage-bait buzzwords.

When asked to put up a concrete example, no-one called you a fascist/nazi/transphobe in the example. They banned you for, according to you, "just asking questions" on a country specific coronavirus subreddit.

Your tone comes off as "I'm right, they're wrong. I'm the victim here!"

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#166

Post by sfrench »

dmazin wrote: post #2

I seem to recall that, years ago, this article's photo[1] of Digg engineers sitting together for the v4 launch used to get posted every now and then. Usually, the idea was to shock people about how awful open offices were. Only today did I learn that this was a photo of an unusual event, and not how people usually sat at Digg. Or maybe I'm thinking of a different photo? [1] https://lethain.com/static/blog/heroes/digg…

That is the room where all of the eng team worked, but certainly not how it looked on a normal day. If you look, you can spot three clusters of 4 desks around the edges of the room in this picture. There were ~10 clusters of similar size that scattered around a large open space.

The worst part about that room was not the open feeling, but rather the silver walls and ceiling

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#167

Post by myko »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #51
deergomoo wrote: post #18

Good read. Interesting that the author’s takeaway is that folks consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the myriad technical issues. I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.

This is why I’m excited for the Reddit third party apps change. In a few years nobody will remember that this is what precipitated the fall of Reddit. It’s already turned into an echo-chamber of nonsense, ruled by all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy. Even the smaller subs catch the contagion year over year. I’ve been a Redditor since before the narwhal baconed at midnight.…

> all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy.

Weird, I've been put off of reddit because of the prevalence of transphobes, homophobes, and racists who inundate so many threads. I wish there were better mods to remove those folks from the site.

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#168

Post by vore »

TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #130
malfist wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, I'm working on a reddit bot to spam the site/pm users with the truth I hope that is sarcasm. Consent is important, and spamming people with whatever pet theory you've decided is the "truth" is certainly not the actions of a moral person.

[flagged]

Well, good luck with that. Surely this strategy will work great.

Re: Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

#170

Post by echelon »

btreecat wrote: post #118
unsupp0rted wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I’m excited for the Reddit third party apps change. In a few years nobody will remember that this is what precipitated the fall of Reddit. It’s already turned into an echo-chamber of nonsense, ruled by all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy. Even the smaller subs catch the contagion year over year. I’ve been a Redditor since before the narwhal baconed at midnight.…

As someone who used to mod, jfc you're clearly one of the folks who was a problem if that's your opening position. I know that had you stepped up to help out one of your favorite subs, you'd have a different lense. You comment is v clearly just ignorant.

I've been banned from multiple subreddits for describing stock-based compensation, for talking about AI, for defending trans people, and for worrying about crime in my city.

Reddit's moderation system is exactly the kind of world I don't want to live in.

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