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‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

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Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#341

Post by irrational »

jamiegreen wrote: post #64
abnry wrote: post #17

I think there is a very important distinction that needs to be made. The popular reddit experience is vastly worse than the customized reddit. It took me a while to realize that my reddit experience was vastly improved once I was very picky about which subreddits I follow.

Favourite subs you would recommend?

What are your interests? If you're into fitness, take a look at r/fitness.

If you're into woodworking, take a look at r/woodworking

r/hiking if you like hiking

r/campinggear for gear

r/baking if you like baking

etc. Just do a search for your hobbies and see what subreddits show up.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#342

Post by acdha »

ryanmerket wrote: post #255
acdha wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the site leaks in a way which doesn’t have a real world analog. Your favorite coffee shop doesn’t have random skinheads show up as soon as someone starts talking about e.g. sexism or racism. If it did they’d be limited to who lives nearby and the manager could kick them out when they started bothering people. None of that happens on reddit and while intense moderation works (I love /r/AskHistorian…

Reddit user for 10 years. I have never seen a random skinhead pop into the comments. And if they were to do so, they would get downvoted to oblivion...

Anecdotally, I’ve also been there for 10 years and have seen that. Beyond e.g. GamerGate one really annoying group used to spam city subreddits with stories about black people committing crimes (not even in that city) and the usual “some people are just more criminal” racism talk. They’d get a few downvotes but also had their buddies upvote them enough to show why that’s not an effective solution.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#343

Post by LordHumungous »

>Were there moments in which Reddit chose to double down on something and made it that much harder to work toward a solution?

>> I don’t know. I’m trying to think about your question.

>Is there something recent that you’re thinking of?

>> I can’t remember the specific instances right now, but there was a bunch of press about things that were going on on Reddit and Discord, and they both reacted and banned the subreddit.

>> I’ve got a lot of advice for start-ups, and it’s not very fucking complicated. It’s just: Think about the impact that you want to have on your users and on the people consuming your content and do the right thing. They know what the right thing is.

Sounds like this guy has a lot of vague complaints but not much in the way of concrete solutions, other than "do the right thing" which in his mind is extremely obvious and yet undefined.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#344

Post by spamizbad »

stale2002 wrote: post #328
komali2 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is "right wing" and there is "far right nationalism." Reddit has an issue with the latter. I have talked with many conservatives lamenting the loss of their given subreddits to trolls and /r/t_d devotees. Furthermore, it is the internet - I've never been convinced by any argument that HN or reddit or even facebook has any obligation to give "fair time" to far-right nationalism. For as long as Fox News exists an…

"Why doesn't the far-right just "pull itself up by its boostraps"" Umm, why would they do that when they can instead use reddit? Reddit sells itself as being a strong supporter of free speech. THEY SELF-identify as being a neutral platform. If the censorship supporters want to interact in a censored forum, then they can make their own subreddit and moderate it how ever they feel like, or make their own website. The r…

The far-right/neo-fash has numerous platforms that never censor them and will gladly embrace their content: gab, voat, 4chan/8chan to name a few.

I honestly don't see what the big deal is. For example, lots of lefty subs have banished "Tankies", communists who think Stalin did nothing wrong, from their communities.

Ultimately, neither a fascist nor communist can oppose such a purge/restriction without being a hypocrite. Such actions are well within either group's ideological wheelhouse and therefore they should stop complaining.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#345

Post by pascalxus »

lghh wrote: post #288
rhizome wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that a majority of people are just absolutely manipulated by their emotions and dive head first into the feedback loop designed by social media to provide an addictive stream of never-ending engagement. Wow, harsh. My sense is that the problem is that these other sites are simply not very findable, and Google search results have been getting steadily and measurably worse over the last several years.

> Google search results have been getting steadily and measurably worse over the last several years I have an inclination to agree, but how is that measurable?

Someone needs to build a search engine that does'nt depend on page rank. Page rank is the thing that filters out 99.9% of the internet: it's the millions of pages you don't see that could potentially have better answers in it. Now, surely, there's a lot of junk in that 99%, but I'd be willing to bet there's a lot of gold nuggets in there too.

Google's fundamental assumption and it's biggest weakness is that: Excellent content will always have an excellent source to upvote it with links. This isn't always true. If ever another search engine were to supplant google, it would probably take advantage of this weakness. This weakness is even bigger in niche areas that google AI is not able to recognize.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#346

Post by [deleted] »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #251
SeanLuke wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally the problem, I think is anonymity. On the Internet no one knows you're a dog. I have both pseudonymous handles on reddit and also I go by my own name. On Hacker News I only go by my own name. And I have found that it made me a much, MUCH better person when posting. So now I post on reddit about 95% of the time under my own name as well. When you have no skin in the game -- such as your reputation to uph…

As a thought experiment - would slavery in the US have ended sooner or later if we had anonymous internet from the 18th century on? I'm not implying there is any clear answer, but I think it is a simple way of immediately seeing much of the nuance of this issue that you might miss at a cursory consideration. Self censorship due to social pressure certainly keeps some people (as has been mentioned Facebook shows clear…

[deleted]

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#347

Post by pfarnsworth »

reddit is probably one of the best social sites on the internet. You need to pick and choose the best ones though. Like everything, there are shitty ones and great one. The great ones have great mods with a very precise focus.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#348

Post by ThrustVectoring »

projektir wrote: post #274
gottam wrote: post #256

The comments here have this mentality of "there are people with different opinions from me, why don't these websites deal with these opinions". It's dangerous thinking that can be applied to your opinions. The internet always worked this way. There are the cesspools, maybe things you don't like, but if you don't feel like engaging with these communities you simply keep going. Problem with these social media forum sit…

> The comments here have this mentality of "there are people with different opinions from me, why don't these websites deal with these opinions". It's dangerous thinking that can be applied to your opinions. It has nothing to do with opinions. It has never been about opinions, and you know it. It has to do with antisocial behavior . Antisocial behavior is inherently hostile and doesn't deserve a platform, which has b…

How do you deal with anti-social behavior that uses "stamping out anti-social behavior" as its justification?

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#349

Post by rightos »

notMick wrote: post #312
rightos wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'll admit to that to some extent, but it's a toxic environment when a subreddit like that regularly appears on the front page yet disallows any sort of significant discussion. For similar toxicity reasons they hid The_Donald from the front page, which I'd say is about equally as toxic. So why's the treatment different here?

Toxic means, they don't agree with me? Toxic and hate speech are recently invented terms to curtail free speech. If I said anyone who wanted communism were hateful (they hate capitalists) and supporting a historically violent ideology, I'd be as right/wrong as people on the left doing the same. Anti free speech are a means to an end really, power.

I generally agree with you here actually, I wouldn't want any of this to be used to completely suppress speech, but I don't think it's unreasonable to hide by default communities which are higher friction to some degree.

I can definitely see a completely open alternative viewpoint, but reddit has already gone in a very different direction.

Re: ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

#350

Post by naasking »

projektir wrote: post #274
gottam wrote: post #256

The comments here have this mentality of "there are people with different opinions from me, why don't these websites deal with these opinions". It's dangerous thinking that can be applied to your opinions. The internet always worked this way. There are the cesspools, maybe things you don't like, but if you don't feel like engaging with these communities you simply keep going. Problem with these social media forum sit…

> The comments here have this mentality of "there are people with different opinions from me, why don't these websites deal with these opinions". It's dangerous thinking that can be applied to your opinions. It has nothing to do with opinions. It has never been about opinions, and you know it. It has to do with antisocial behavior . Antisocial behavior is inherently hostile and doesn't deserve a platform, which has b…

> It has to do with antisocial behavior. Antisocial behavior is inherently hostile and doesn't deserve a platform

Can you define "antisocial behaviour"?

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