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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

#91

Post by toastal »

snickerbockers wrote: post #9

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…

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.

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

#92

Post by spamuel »

tux2bsd wrote: post #25
ivraatiems wrote: post #12

I have a different take: The main problem with reddit is in how badly it's bungled its several different redesigns over the last few years, and how it's slowly ruined its users' experience in misguided attempts to drive mobile traffic to its app. Right now, here's the process for browsing a subreddit on mobile without the (ads and tracking loaded) reddit app: 1. Navigate to subreddit. Find out which of two (non-NSFW)…

Quoted post unavailable.

I'm going to disagee (kind of) - Reddit mods aren't woke. I think that reddit mods used the woke moment as a casus belli to consolidate power on the platform.

The same thing is going on right now politically and culturally in the United States. There is an excusable reason to publicly and overtly eject people who do not have allegiances to specific hierarchies of power in institutions. And in this moment those hierarchies are doing what they can to purge their domain of the dissidents. The language of wokeness (and wokeness is very language-driven) is a tribal marker. Its use or rejection signals friend and foe.

Even states are engaging in these purges by passing laws that their loyalists will endure if it means driving out the people not in the tribe. I can state prominent "left" and "right" wing examples of this, but for the sake of civility I will not.

Edit: I say the mods aren't woke but cynical because while they embrace wokeness, they are not like the radical academics that wokeness sprang from. People who did a lot of reading, and have very esoteric knowledge and reasoning for the things wokeness represents. Most of the reddit mods seem to have just adopted that mantle for purposes of friend-enemy distinction.

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

#93

Post by dragonwriter »

unconed wrote: post #80
bawolff wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're basically just calling people names that have no commonly agreed definition. Something something about glass houses and stones.

Why would it not have a definition? Here's one. "Woke": an extreme form of contradictory progressivism popularized in the 2010s, which favors censorship and ostracization over intellectual engagement. The idea that you can't define it is an example of the dynamics at play. The notion that non-woke people know exactly what's going on is unbearable to the woke. It implies that they are not at all "changing the status q…

> “Woke”: an extreme form of contradictory progressivism popularized in the 2010s, which favors censorship and ostracization over intellectual engagement.

Yes, its used by the Right interchangeably with “cancel culture” as an abusive epithet with exactly the sense that the same faction used “political correctness” to communicate right up until they swapped in the new terms, except that the idea that the behavior attributed (falsely) as especially prevalent on the left was was novel in the 1980s in the general use of “political correctness” was updated to target the 2010s in the newer terms.

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

#94

Post by Duwensatzaj »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #73
coffeeblack wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They have only banned extreme political ideologies with vaguely violent leanings, and have done so for both sides of the spectrum

Yeah, that’s a lie.

Try having what used to be the standard opinion about a certain topic less than 10 years ago and expect to be banned. Not just by moderators but by admins.

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

#95

Post by tux2bsd »

watwut wrote: post #75
unconed wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woke refers to an ideology that, among other things, uses manipulative arguments, framing and emotional appeals to hide the fact that it is intellectual quicksand, serving people who want to morally elevate themselves without substance. Exactly like you just did.

This is not true. Woke is used conservatives use when they want to fismiss and insult, but don't have much argument.

Woke is used because we know who we're referring to, as do you.

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

#96

Post by tux2bsd »

bawolff wrote: post #74
tux2bsd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Why? The poster expressed an opinion. Seems like they are living an opinionful life. Don't mistake people disagreeing with you for people failing to hold an opinion. Those are two very different things.

No post body was provided.

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

#97

Post by LewisVerstappen »

bojan wrote: post #10
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #3

It's honestly astonishing to see how poorly the leadership team at Reddit has been executing. People shit on Twitter (Zuck called Twitter "a clown car that fell into a gold mine") but Reddit is so much worse. The fact that Reddit didn't have a decent mobile app until a few years ago is unbelievable. Indie-developers were shipping a better reddit mobile apps than the company.

Why would they need their own app when they have good APIs and enough people to create perfectly good third-party apps for them? The only reason I can see is monetization, with your own app you can control the user engagement better. I specifically don't use their app because I explicitly don't want all the fluff features they've added over the years. That's also why I still use old.reddit.com.

It's incredibly important for so many reasons. Just as a reminder, users have been shifting from desktop to mobile so the world is now mobile-first. Facebook had a bet-the-company shift in the early 2010s from desktop to mobile and the Instagram app is a huge part of why Meta is valuable today.

Reddit makes money through ads. Charging for API access and expecting third-party app developers to build an entire ad platform is not possible. The tech is incredibly difficult to build and then you have to actually get advertisers to use the platform (btw - this is something that Reddit is still failing at versus Facebook/Google/Twitter).

Something like 50% of Reddit's traffic is from mobile users. If Reddit wants to add new features for these users, it's impossible to do so if all the users are using third-party apps.

Bunch of other reasons that I can enumerate in a bit.

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

#98

Post by tux2bsd »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #89
unconed wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it not have a definition? Here's one. "Woke": an extreme form of contradictory progressivism popularized in the 2010s, which favors censorship and ostracization over intellectual engagement. The idea that you can't define it is an example of the dynamics at play. The notion that non-woke people know exactly what's going on is unbearable to the woke. It implies that they are not at all "changing the status q…

The point being that was a definition pulled out of your ass that not everyone shares, and then you got on a soap box of opinion-based nonsense that you "feel" is right. You are speaking from nowhere but an emotional place and trying to dress it up in pseudo-intellectual analyses of the state of the world, and it shows. For some, the term Woke goes no farther than "they cast a black person in this movie."

unconed is correct.

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

#99

Post by Crusoe123 »

thefz wrote: post #90
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have only banned extreme political ideologies with vaguely violent leanings, and have done so for both sides of the spectrum

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

That is not true e.g.https://www.reddit.com/r/chapotraphouse

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

#100

Post by XorNot »

Duwensatzaj wrote: post #94
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have only banned extreme political ideologies with vaguely violent leanings, and have done so for both sides of the spectrum

Yeah, that’s a lie. Try having what used to be the standard opinion about a certain topic less than 10 years ago and expect to be banned. Not just by moderators but by admins.

If you won't write it out directly here, then its not surprising it's banned there.
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