Its not just awful mods, its awful paid admins. It was a step in the right direction to ban hate speech. The people they hired have decided that being mean to racists is “hate speech”, while ignoring actual hate speech and letting racist spaces thrive. This is not what people meant when they asked reddit to do something about hate speech.
That's another reason, indeed. I get that moderation is hard, but the way reddit handles it is awful. There are so many, potentially conflicting interests among reddit stakeholders, but the admins seem to be single-minded and narrow-minded. Recently, they closed "tumblr in action", which now has moved to another site, a reddit clone called saidit.net. However, don't even try to visit that site: it is a truly pestilent rat nest. The net effect is that the echo chamber becomes stronger for all sides. Great outcome for no reason at all. Well, there is a reason: reddit wants free moderators. Paying would lower their dreamt IPO value.
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.
APIs are fundamentally at odds with an ad-based revenue model.
If you let third-party apps provide a UX for your data, the app developer will naturally try to make the bext experience they can for users. The first step to doing that is to ditch all the ads. Now you're paying all the cost to host and serve the data, but the third-party app is killing your income.
He's obviously not referring those subreddits. If you read the piece he's talking about subs like r/news, r/politics, r/worldnews, etc.
If you don't think r/politics is an echochamber then I don't know what to tell you.
r/fatFIRE was a great subreddit I used to visit frequently but it grew very quickly over the past few months and the mods haven't scaled accordingly. The moderation has gotten really, really bad over the past few months and the sub is now just filled with dumb posts like "what handbag do rich people buy"? It used to be far more technical, interesting discussions around real estate investing, taxes, etc.
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 problems would still exist on other platforms even if reddit didn't. Forum moderators have always had a reputation for being napoleonic idiots who abuse their power for extremely petty purposes. The problem of corporations and wealthy celebrities buying out moderators and admins to push their narratives and silence criticisms of their products[1] could easily have happened on webforums.
There's an unfortunate drive towards centralization in online communities these days that we'd all be better without. I personally think fediverse is the best solution to this as it centralizes communities without centralizing the actual platform, but I'm not so confident it will succeed when it's up against well-funded and well-established platforms like facebook, reddit, etc.
[1] i don't have any real proof there's a monetary interest involved, but I'm perma-banned from /r/startrek for saying that the creators behind "Star Trek: Picard" and "Star Trek Discovery" probably aren't even fans of Star Trek based on the shows' many discontinuities with their predecessors, and it makes me wonder if the mods are on paramount's payroll or something. This should not be a controversial statement after how terrible the most recent season of Picard was.
I think centralization is just a byproduct of the ease of setting up a community on such sites/apps. I lurk in a few subreddits these days, but I almost never feel the pull to chime in or contribute because it kind of feels like my contribution just goes out into a vast universe, and I just think 'why bother?'. I feel like the days of personalized forums truly felt like a little tight community in the very wide web.
> I lurk in a few subreddits these days, but I almost never feel the pull to chime in or contribute because it kind of feels like my contribution just goes out into a vast universe, and I just think 'why bother?'
Definitely resonates with me as mostly a life-long lurker. HN is on a very, very short list of online communities I actually post on and engage with. Never got into reddit, left social media long ago.
I'm permabanned from Reddit, as in all my accounts (yes, I let it get so bad I had multiple accounts) and any new accounts (yep... tried making more) are banned based on previous logins and IPs (they're actually pretty thorough with it).
Some mods are power tripping, but also the value of a user is now near-zero. As long as you don't piss off too many, your subreddit will be fine. Especially for popular keywords - it's like owning "startrek.com", people will find it.
Subreddit owners can't actually make money in most traditional ways (so yeah, they may be paid behind the scenes), and there's a strong anti-monetization culture among Redditors, which is hilarious given that it's a for profit company that makes money off everyone's content. They still see it as an underdog online community. Newsflash, Facebook users also think they're enlightened on an exclusive platform/group.
Setting up a forum has never been easier - even security wise. Yet even that is too hard for people, so centralization is what we get. Hell, it's too much of a pain even for companies (for different reasons) - I still can't believe they shut down NotebookReview Forums - I was a long time active contributor. Surely no one in their right mind does that? Surely the decent Google traffic is worth something? Apparently not! Now I look suspiciously at TechPowerUp and Level1techs Forums...
I hope Reddit's asinine Facebook inspired user acquisition strategies will lead to its downfall, but I don't know... too many people have/make accounts. Hell, people make Facebook/Instagram and even Pinterest accounts, so clearly gating works. Maybe once they decide to disallow indexing by search engines? But then again Facebook is doing fine...
Discord is even worse - contributing unique information publicly (apparently that's what users believe, that it's "public"!) on chat platforms? I don't even know why people started doing that.
Yes, being permabanned on some Internet discussion forum is the single defining characteristic of a human being! Off to the Gulag with him and shame him whenever he speaks up! /s
It could also be something as innocuous as software piracy. Not sure about reddit specifically but a lot of websites will immediately nuke anybody who tries to link to pirated content because they're terrified of getting sued.
While that is probable, as outsiders we can't tell if that user is the troll we could assume they are or if they just accidentally logged in to the wrong VPN or was given a cursed IP address by their ISP once.
Maybe one day when a bank permabans you after you've put years of money into it, and then they just reclaim all of your credits, and the reason they give you is only that "you promoted your business in a sub and that's not allowed on this tiny part of reddit" and that is against "Rule #12" on a random subreddit that didn't even publish the rule...
You probably still won't understand the ideal of how people regularly get chewed up and spit out by the massive social platform machine with no rights to appeal.
Or perhaps you work as a Reddit mod and can't feel empathy for normal users any more... meh...
That's going to be a huge problem going forward. The whole parler thing from last year has me afraid because it showed how corporate america can collude together to remove you from society if you piss them off. In this specific case it happened to a bunch of assholes who probably deserved it, but in general this is extremely dangerous because of how much power is vested in private entities that have no public accountability.
I'm personally of the opinion that, with respect to net neutrality, "service provider" should be interpreted as liberally as possible so that CDNs, hosts and SaaS platforms are subject to it instead of just companies that provide layer-3 internet access. And maybe the law should even be expanded so that it applies to financial institutions.
Agreed. Most of the people that make the decisions and execute them are people who have no idea of the impacts of their moves.
In so many situations now, platform code is written with a certain intent in mind, but then administered later by replacement employees who have no indication of the end result of what controls do...
These sites often assume that one user persona can accommodate a user base full of multiple different personas and motivations, and they brutally punish anyone that goes outside of the personas they create as templates because their user bases are far too massive to care about individual user issues. It's now easier (and better for their bottom line) to just ban people than to properly address customer support.
What’s the logic behind comparing an online discussion board with random user-moderated subreddits to a financial institution?
I’ve been using Reddit since 2010 without issues, behaving poorly enough to get permabanned (which is different than being banned from a subreddit) is serious. There’s a story being left out here.
The reddit experience is very different for a person who doesn't have a business they want to market as opposed to someone who is just there for entertainment or personal enlightenment.
Social Media sites an apps work very hard to "beat up" independent business people, so that they are huddled into a group that needs to pay (somehow) every time they want to gain customers or awareness. It's crushing the entire world of independent business. It may not be a conspiracy per-say, but it's a very serious end result of how these apps are set up and administered.
The bank analogy was just a depiction of how difficult people who are trying to promote their work have it in just being able to develop their brand/presence on the Internet now within Reddit's eco system. Scammers and others who don't represent a specific brand don't have this problem, because they don't need to represent a consistent brand name, they can easily use burner and throw-away accounts to promote themselves...
If you run a web site for your company and it gets blacklisted (shadowbanned) all across reddit, you become extra-limited, because then not even people who like your product, company, or service can even post about it or mention it on Reddit. It completely limits and controls the possibility of normal business growth and opportunity for a LOT of people when a site or app grows to be that big/vital as a community. ShadowBanning also isn't apparent to the company owner, they can potentially keep struggling to break ground and never know that all of their posts are being muted.
Frankly, I’d be more interested in the advice they offered, but then again I am not afraid of reading controversial non-PC opinions and have the intellectual and emotional capability to discern right from wrong.
It's not advice, I'm just barfing thoughts out in the void like everyone else.
After more than a decade talking online, I finally realized that it's all pointless. It's not a fact, it's just my opinion.
I loved it since it was full of people who shared the same interests. I like that I helped people and they were happy. But ultimately, for me, it was a waste of time.
I now have a blog that I won't share anywhere, it's full of rants and posts on niche technical stuff and the few people who find it seem to like it. Comments are disabled and the only way to contact me is via email. A couple of people actually contacted me lol
I'll tell you how I got permabanned. First account was banned because I shared my experience with the German healthcare system on r/germany and r/europe. I absolutely despise it to this day. I'm forced to pay insurance just to get discriminated against and get zero help. I concluded that mandatory insurance means a stable stream of income for people who have zero desire to help anyone. So I ranted about it online, since I could not do anything real. Two comments triggered a lot of people because it got the account suspended, then banned. That was rather weird.
Second account was banned because I ranted about suicide, particularly how I hate myself for failing a couple of attempts and being a coward because of that. It did not sit well with the depression subreddits, and probably Reddit itself since it's a heavy topic and a turn off for advertisers.
So, uh, yeah, third account. I posted about suicide again... in retrospect it's pretty cringe and I know complaining that much is pointless, but at the time I was pretty fucked up. Luckily, the account was suspended fast and then I received the permanent ban message.
So, that's what it takes, getting 2-3 accounts banned. I mean, yeah, what sane person has multiple accounts in the first place? :D
I made several new accounts just to have them banned almost instantly (Jesus, it's an actual addiction). So I gave up on it, thankfully.
I'm not saying the ban was unjustified, and I'm not mad at Reddit. Just my opinion, what I wrote wasn't worthy of a permaban, but yeah for those reading it I seemed like an asshole who loves to complain.
I used to write a lot of well thought out comments and posts, it's just that after years of it I got tired and jaded, my writing went to shit and I started shitposting and then complaining too much. No one wants that kind of customer. Yet I still participated. It's an addiction, there's no other explanation.
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.
Discord is madness, just the captcha process not working repeatedly reminds me that I can be severed at any time from everything I post there. I stopped logging on when TFA became arbitrary on there, I already get far too many spam calls. At least the slack channels I check on don't require it, but I'm done with walled gardens.. I just chose to cultivate my own site as the primary source of my content, no more social platform dependency, and I can just create burner accounts if need be.
> I stopped logging on when TFA became arbitrary on there
Did they do this for everybody or only certain people? In my experience Discord is one of the few apps that doesn't constantly make me dig up my phone or help train some dumb AI image recognition every time I use it.
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".
> Shortly after, the FBI began monitoring Aaron Swartz and he was arrested for downloading academic journals from MIT in an attempt to make them freely available online.
AFAICT Swartz never said or wrote why he attempted to download all of JSTOR. Even close friends like Lawrence Lessig only speculated as to what he may have been wanting to do with that data.
But I suppose this kind of lazy writing and lack of standards is what passes for news these days at the New York Times' router that could have conceivably forwarded the packets for this medium.com article.
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) or three (NSFW) "experiences" reddit decides to give me on mobile.
2. Depending on experience, jump through hoops including random "get the app!" prompts, failures to load content, failures to load nested comments, and outright refusal to display all the content in a thread unless I install the app.
3. If on an NSFW subreddit, and on about 50% of "unapproved" non-NSFW subreddits: Be blocked from viewing any additional content by an unremovable prompt. (Often, content loads in before the prompt, so you enjoy about 30 seconds of looking at your content before it's blocked.)
4. Give up, and go to old.reddit.com, which is ugly and not designed for mobile, but at least works okay.
Desktop isn't much better, but I have long had browser extensions installed that redirect everything to old.reddit.com on most of my browsers, so it becomes less of an issue.
If reddit took away my ability to use old.reddit.com, I'd probably stop browsing the site within weeks.
Oh stop being argumentative for the sake of it. You're presuming to know their gender - you don't. Therefore the correct pronoun in this instance is 'they'. Not everything is about wokeism.
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.
You just described both sides of the political spectrum for the past four decades, but chose to use a word that frames it as a unique phenomenon that is only applicable to a very specific kind of person.
The "woke" insult has even less substance than what it's desperately trying to criticize.
"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 quo", but that they are the status quo. That their rebellious ideology is in fact the norm in corporate HR departments and colleges everywhere. That their behavior is in no way welcome, or positive, or empathetic, and is really just a LARP of the social causes of the late 20th century, divorced from principle and fact.
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."
His definition reflects very succinctly what I would consider wokeness in action. It's about consolidating power in institutions by ejecting noncompliants.
If you embrace the language you will be embraced by the institution. If you reject the language you will be removed. Your actions or nuanced takes are immaterial. Embrace the ideology as prescribed, or suffer.
Arguing by “no agreed upon definition” is a transparent rhetorical bludgeon. Famously used to shut down discussion about hipsters many years ago. I hope most people will see through it.
> “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.
Exactly. Ask 10 different conservatives what "woke" means, and you'll get 10 different answers. It's become yet another generic word that simply means whatever the speaker doesn't like. Or, as in this thread, they can't even define it--except to say that it's bad and delusional and intellectual quicksand and... something about hierarchies? and institutions? Who knows? I obviously don't have the intellect to parse through all their codewords and layers of indirection.
You haven't said anything of substance. Interesting that you choose to use the phrase "politically correct" which is interchangeable with "woke" in modern parlance.
To quote myself: "Woke is used because we know who we're referring to, as do you."
‘Woke’ just means, open to the idea that the way you behave may have unintended negative effects on other, potentially disadvantaged folks and it’s worth changing the way you behave in these circumstances.
Lol yeah, I can really tell you're just chock-full of empathy by the way you're conducting yourself in this argument. Are you really unironically saying this or are you just trolling the "woke"? Who would you feel empathy for, it doesn't seem to be the woke left.
It's just a mindset, besides some minor beliefs they're just the same sort of people you are. I don't know if you'd consider me a leftist woke person, I feel that's something a younger generation is doing, and an older generation is enabling with the cancel culture and such.
But I do feel the same way you do about the wokes about conservatives, when they're dismissive of climate change, when they're rejecting social medical care, when they're taxing the poor and benefiting the rich, when they're not understanding of the BLM protests, when they're taking away personal freedoms, when they're practicing their twisted version of Christianity when you know that if they ever met Jesus they'd be the first ones to nail them to the cross. I wish they'd snap out of their delusions and see how they're against everything they should be for.
You're parroting the beliefs of the woke so chances are high that you're woke, I hope you can turn it around. You have a very confused outlook on life that does not match reality. I'll give you some pointers:
Climate change. Weather, been going on for all time. I'll pay attention when rich people abandon their seaside mansions.
Taxing the poor. Tax was invented for this.
The BLM movement was a farce. Nothing good came from it, period.
The c19 lock-downs took away our personal freedoms. 911 messed with travel a lot but these recent lock-downs are a whole new ball game (and the future does not look bright).
No one alive met Jesus, don't be ridiculous. He wouldn't be allowed to be a carpenter without doing safety training courses first, if he was alive. No one would nail him to a cross, he'd be on his cellphone like everyone else.
It's hard to believe someone on HN would be this anti-science and pro-racist as your comments have been.
You're not discussing with people with sincerity. You misquote people, and then call them names because it doesn't fit with your viewpoint (whatever that is).
I've flagged all your comments, because you cannot seem to behave in any reasonable capacity.
You're not helping. Maybe try and ask a question or contribute some knowledge. This person is misinformed and all you're doing is cement his beliefs that his opponents are clueless and spiteful.
I'm not misinformed, I've helped you with some doses of reality but those go contrary to what you've been spoon fed and believe. It's OK agree to disagree unless you're a leftist then the other must always be derided "spiteful", "clueless", or "hate" (different thread) - all sort of nonsense like that.
Well if I am, that's a new name to describe me because I've held these beliefs for over 20 years.
You are wrong about climate change. Ask your local weather service, the weather's not what it used to be. When the rich abandon their seaside mansions, you'll be too late, because the mountain retreats they'll go to they've already bought.
No, taxing was invented to fund the government (and later expanded to counter exponential wealth consolidation, but we're not allowed to talk about that very much).
The BLM protests achieved awareness, and that's all that was needed, and that was most certainly warranted.
The c19 lock-downs have since lifted, as we're in a democracy, and a civilized society we do these things for our own good to get out of a prickly situation. I get that for you being uncomfortable for a short while was infuriating, but maybe you'll be stronger the next time around.
I'd like to believe Jesus would be happy to do safety training courses, what does that have to do with anything? Anyway, the way I hear these conservatives talk about socialism, being tolerant to one another I don't think they'd like his TikTok very much at all.
It is a forgone conclusion that those with extreme wealth will have prime pick of location if they need to abandon their seaside locations. I'll repeat, I'll wait for that to happen (I don't have much choice but to do that, unless you assume I'm extremely wealthy).
The BLM protests caused widespread destruction. Michael Jackson achieved worldwide awareness with Black or White, that was 1994 - things have only ever improved in the west since that time (and would have regardless of MJ's song).
You're dancing around it. Climate change is happening because human activity is causing it, and human activity can change to reverse it, just like we reversed our effects on the ozone layer. I know you know that's true, so don't lie about it saying it's the weather and make jokes about moving when it gets bad. You don't need to inconvenience yourself, keep driving that Dodge Ram 1500 for all I care, but don't fucking deny it because the government needs to deal with this shit and deal with it now.
For what it's worth, the effects of climate change are much worse than the rising of the oceans, focusing on that was a mistake of the climate alarmists. We'll have famine and war much sooner than the rising oceans will affect the rich.
Well that explains at least some part of it, you have absolutely no idea what the protests were about. They were about the police brutality that stems from the incompetency of officers bred from the American policy on police training. MJ singing about racism has almost nothing to do with that.
I haven't lied once. I don't believe in what you believe in regarding "climate change", period.
> you have absolutely no idea what the protests were about.
Your true nature shines through.
Floyd's death was an opportune event for BLM to leverage, BLM rioters then left nothing but destruction in their wake. Nothing positive came from BLM, their legacy is hypocrisy.
What is it that you don't believe about climate change? The idea that we're emitting more CO2 than a hundred years ago? Or the idea that this is causing us to regress to the climate that we had before our hydrocarbons were sequestered? Or the idea of the greenhouse effect that makes CO2 heat up our planet more?
For fucks sake… empathy is a human motivator that is unaligned with the political spectrum. We’re biologically designed with a (varying) level of it built in to how our brains work. It’s pretty easy to find an example... Watch a male flinch when they see another male kicked in the crotch. There’s heaps more examples of you want to research this field of neuro-psychology. By dragging fundamental human behaviour into the realm of political alignments your marking the other group as less human.
Which is no way to behave towards fellow humans, not a path to any sort of moral high ground, and I’m pretty sure against the hacker news guidelines.
I sort of suspect you're not here in good faith, but just in case: my impression is that there is a difference between left and right when it comes to empathy, but it's not the amount of empathy per se, it's who benefits from it. The size of the tribe, if you will.
Painting with a broad brush, conservatives show empathy only for people like themselves and perhaps close family and friends or a local community. Progressives show empathy towards a far broader range of people.
(I think it's no accident that cities tend to be more left. They force people to have larger and more heterogenous tribes, and the correlation between political leaning and size of tribe apparently has some power in both directions.)
Conservatives will help externally, very generously when conditions permit. Progressives will demand their in group be helped, to other progressives (within the in group) this looks like caring action is taking place but the shortsighted view of the situation does not see who is being helped.
Take your city example, the city will demand food while simultaneously mocking the farmer, and taxing the farmer more if he exhibits success. The farmer knows he must produce as others depend on him.
You are likely letting America's strange healthcare situation cloud your view. That situation is fucking bizarre. Everyone should have access to publicly funded emergency health care, like we do in NZ (but do not make the mistake of thinking that it is a fantastic situation here either, private health insurance has become more normal unfortunately (i.e. our idiot government is making it more like the US for healthcare)).
‘Woke’ just means, open to the idea that the way you behave may have unintended negative effects on other, potentially disadvantaged folks and it’s worth changing the way you behave in these circumstances.
So also - empathy. I’m pretty proud to be called woke, and so should you be.
Manners, being courteous, polite and as you've said empathetic - these good behaviours all existed. That took parents to teach and individuals to act accordingly.
It is a modern myth spread by main stream media that racism and sexism are prevalent. "Woke" (or "wokeness") is weaponised world view that is intolerant and dangerous.
> It is a modern myth spread by main stream media that racism and sexism are prevalent.
As a 50-something heterosexual white guy, I think you have to close your eyes really tight, stick your finger in your ears and shout ‘ nah nah nah’ repeatedly to believe that is true.
Woke is an English adjective meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination" that originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.
The phrase stay woke had emerged in AAVE by the 1930s, in some contexts referring to an awareness of the social and political issues affecting African Americans. The phrase was uttered in a recording by Lead Belly and later by Erykah Badu. Following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, the phrase was popularised by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists seeking to raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans. After seeing use on Black Twitter, the term woke became an Internet meme and was increasingly used by white people, often to signal their support for BLM, which some commentators have criticised as cultural appropriation. Mainly associated with the millennial generation, the term spread internationally and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017.
---------------
Being woke means that serving watermelon and fried chicken and collard greens on Juneteenth is an insult. (looking at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis)
Being woke means understanding why "Circling the wagons" when around Native Americans would be a terrible insult.
Being woke means understanding calling something a "cakewalk" brings up slave-history in the south where African Americans were forced to walk around and whoever "won" got a cake.
Being woke means understanding the child's song "knick knack paddywhack, give a dog a bone" is referring to watching Irish die in the Famine, and would rather give a dog the cast-offs rather than the Irish.
Being woke means understanding "Hip hip hurray" is a deeply antisemitic slur regarding the Hep-Hep riots in 19c Germany where many thousands of recently-freed Jews were lynched.
Remembering and understanding these historically terrible sayings are bad to you and your fellow anti-woke people. Naturally, these sayings require a bit of maturity, intelligence, and understanding to see why these phrases are terrible - and not everyone practices in using those faculties on a regular basis. It all comes down to the same core beliefs: "my race/sex/demographic is superior, and theirs is subservient to mine."
There are other terms for being "anti-woke". They usually wore white pointy hats, burned crosses in "undesirables" yards, and arranged public executions via tree and rope.
> Being woke means understanding "Hip hip hurray" is a deeply antisemitic slur regarding the Hep-Hep riots in 19c Germany where many thousands of recently-freed Jews were lynched.
There is no consensus on the obscure origins of the expression - either way calling it a "deeply antisemitic slur" is baseless.
Seeing injustices in every single thing. For example, feeling the need to constantly call out microagressions or constantly having to advertise that they are virtuous people.
We won't agree on whether reddit becoming politically more leftist is a good thing or not. But setting aside whether we want it to be, I'm not convinced the evidence is compelling that that's what's happened, or that if it has, that a community which wasn't "woke" wouldn't suffer all the other problems reddit suffers.
Blaming politics you don't like is convenient, but not always helpful or accurate.
Decent niche subreddits still exist, but there has been significant concentration of moderation power in a small clique [0]. And that doesn't include the widespread use of alts for mod accounts. Multiple times now I have seen good subreddits go to shit after a new mod gets parachuted in on the "advice" of reddit staff, and then threads suddenly start getting closed with "y'all can't behave" as the justification.
The number of subreddits I bother to check has dwindled down to 2-3, and when those are gone I will stop using the site entirely.
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.
Some people genuinely believe in these things. I met a lot of lefty weirdos at house parties in California who would explain these ideas to me with nothing but love, even though they knew I did not agree. But we still drank and ate together and enjoyed the party. I would call them "woke", but not malintentioned.
The people using these things as cudgels are not the same as the people who just believed they were describing the dynamics of the world.
It seems similar to me as the difference between early Christians, and the much later elites who would go on to sell indulgences while imprisoning and hacking off the heads of people who wouldn't agree submit to the regime in both thought and action.
redditp.com is my usual go to... No comments or likes, just the content... You can alter the url to show subs only (e.g. redditp.com/r/#) and it works without a log-in, provided v.reddit doesn't go unresponsive (which happens a lot no matter what).
stopped using reddit after they introduced new design. My browser struggles scrolling it smoothly (in most compressed mode). Too complex DOM they put there. Lack of programming skills.
The tech aspect is problematic but to me it shows they don't understand what made reddit special. It's was that borked website that made people have nice convos and spaces(if you don't look at r/donald etc). The programming/UX was almost irrelevant, it was the social spirit behind that made it interesting.
I find Boost for Reddit way better than Sync (used both), but in the end it's about personal preference, there are 1-2 other decent clients, though Boost and Sync are probably ahead of competition.
Note that the API doesn't provide third party clients with access to newer features like polls, chat or the new inbuilt subreddit reaction emoji. So I think that's a precursor to reddit limiting then further in the medium term
I switched to using a self-hosted libreddit[1] instance for these same reasons.
It's a death knell when someone creates an alternative frontend for your website because the usability is so bad. Libreddit did just that for Reddit. It fixes/removes all the bullshit that Reddit introduced in the last 10 years.
> Give up, and go to old.reddit.com, which is ugly and not designed for mobile, but at least works okay.
Wait, are you kidding? I thought you were talking about using it on desktop. New reddit is literally unusable on mobile. This is what it looks like for me (https://imgur.com/a/pa07d2c). New reddit isn’t just unusable, it is literally nonfunctional. I can only imagine it’s been deliberately destroyed to drive people away from the web over to the app. They do something similar with links. All links from new reddit have their underscores "escaped" with \. Basically they corrupt the URL. If you’re on old reddit, you get these bad links and have to fix them yourself, but new reddit does it for you, of course.
Yep I quit after I couldn't browse some video game sub in the browser because it was marked "NSFW". Having to manually go in and change the subdomain is doable, but gets obnoxious over and over again especially as I hate mobile text editing.
If I may self-promote, my mobile Safari extension StopTheMadness can stop the NSFW and "get the app" popups on Reddit. It can also automatically redirect to old.reddit.com.
People complaining about Reddit remind me of that quote from Bjarne Stroustrup about computer languages: “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” A lot of people use Reddit. I've been on since nearly the beginning and seen it go through various phases. They started getting serious about moderation after Gamergate and they're still serious about it since they want to attract advertisers. The edgier content has gone to 4chan /pol/ but even that site has moderators called janitors. I really don't know where the extreme stuff has gone and I really don't care because I'm glad I don't see it anymore.
I strongly agree with your comparison, I think it's apt. There's just no way to have a tolerably pleasant public-facing community online without some kind of moderation, and people have been railing about moderators in said communities for as long as those communities have existed.
That doesn't mean moderation is an easy job, or that it shouldn't be done judiciously or consistently, but it can't be abandoned.
My first reaction when I heard Elon Musk was buying Twitter was "have he and his team figured out the moderation problem?" followed by "he probably hasn't given it much thought because if he did he would realize he doesn't need that headache on his way to Mars."
I imagine he’s just going to introduce a simple yet “radical” solution like allowing people to pay a small fee for verified status and adding the option to filter out all non-validated accounts. That should kill off a large number of the bots and sock puppet accounts.
Occupy was a series of legal protests, as opposed to a violent insurrectionist plot to subvert the legal transfer of power with sympathizers within the government. These are not the same.
Legal? Most occupy occupations were dismantled by the police, even in progressive cities like Oakland and Portland. Perhaps the police were wrong and the protestors had a right to occupy, but if so, why didn't the protestors on Jan 6 also have a right to occupy the Capitol?
Violent? The only violence on January 6th was between police and protestors. There was plenty of similar violence at Occupy protests, but the Occupy protests also had other kinds of violence, like Sexual Assaults Reported in 'Occupy' Camps[1]
Insurrectionist? "The FBI at this point believes the violence [on January 6th] was not centrally coordinated...there was no grand scheme...to storm the Capitol and take hostages."[2]
Sympathizers within the government? Like Obama?[3]
An attempt to disrupt the normal functioning of government? Yes, both were. That's actually a common protest tactic - protesters generally argue that a protest has to be disruptive to be effective.
The crucial difference between January 6 and Occupy Wall Street is that the members of Congress and the Vice President were inside the Capitol Building on January 6, whereas no elected officials were in Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street. If the break-in of the Capitol had occurred while it was empty, that would have been a different matter, still serious, but not giving the appearance of a coup attempt.
Fair point. I shouldn't have made a silly joke about the name of that group when my real point was about the much bigger left-wing protest movement that peaked in 2016.
The best example is perhaps the occupation of the Wisconsin state capital:
> Thousands of protesters rushed to the … Capitol Wednesday night, forcing their way through doors, crawling through windows and jamming corridors...thousands of pro-union activists — many bused in from out of state — rampaged through the historic building in an effort to stop a vote on collective bargaining reform legislation.
...
> during the course of the occupation, Walker received a steady stream of death threats against him and his wife, including one that promised to “gut her like a deer” and one threatening to kill his sons. Police found dozens of .22-caliber bullets scattered across the Capitol grounds. The occupiers drew chalk outlines of fake dead bodies etched with Walker’s name on the floor, and carried signs that read “Death to tyrants,” “The only good Republican is a dead Republican” and one with picture of him in crosshairs with the words, “Don’t retreat, Reload.”
...
> House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) praised the occupiers for an “impressive show of democracy in action” and tweeted as they assaulted the Capitol that she continued “to stand in solidarity” with the union activists. In other words, Democrats were for occupying capitols before they were against it.
> 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. "Police and protesters continued to get along, with no incidents reported and no arrests." It wasn't actually a "break-in". What happened was that there were already some protesters who had been inside the Capitol for some time, and then a much larger crowd showed up that night and wanted to get in, because there was a vote on the bill scheduled soon. The police were initially reluctant to allow the larger crowd to enter but decided to allow them. There was no violence.
Again, the issue isn't really protesting legislation in Capitol buildings. In general, that's a legitimate democratic activity. The issue is the safety of the members of Congress and the VP from a crowd on January 6 who wanted to overturn the results of the election that was about to be legally certified.
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're to believe that lawmakers in Washington were in danger on January 6th, despite the complete absence of any violence against lawmakers, we should also believe the lawmakers in Madison were in danger. Death threats should be taken seriously regardless of partisanship.
> 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.
As I understand the WaPo piece, it's talking about the events of Wednesday night, not some "grand context": Police found dozens of .22-caliber bullets scattered across the Capitol grounds. The occupiers drew chalk outlines of fake dead bodies etched with Walker’s name on the floor, and carried signs that read “Death to tyrants,” “The only good Republican is a dead Republican” and one with picture of him in crosshairs with the words, “Don’t retreat, Reload.”
> There were no assassination attempts on Scott Walker
Nor were there any assassination attempts on January 6th.
> the lawmakers were evacuated from the building while the Capitol police were trying to hold back the crowd.
It took me a moment to realize you were talking about Washington, because the same thing happened in Madison: The senators hid under a stairwell, out of view, while the police ordered a city bus to pull up in front of the building. Officers then formed a human wall on the sidewalk, parting the sea of protesters and creating a pathway for the senators to reach the bus. Once the senators were on board, “the mob on the street began punching the windows and shaking the vehicle. … The police told the senators and staff inside to keep their heads down in case a window shattered.”
That, by the way, is what I was talking about when I wrote "forcing lawmakers to flee".
Honestly, it's like the WaPo article and the madison.com article are describing different events, except they aren't, just two perspectives on the same event.
> Honestly, it's like the WaPo article and the madison.com article are describing different events, except they aren't, just two perspectives on the same event.
> Both are undoubtedly guilty of selective reporting.
Act 10 had been covered extensively by the Wisconsin State Journal for the previous month. You wouldn't expect every new story to say every single thing. It was already a familiar issue to us all.
> But let's be clear, are you accusing the WaPo piece of lying, not merely choosing what to cover?
I would say exaggerating. Take it from Republican Representative Glenn Grothman, who was there for both events. "It never reached that pitch (during Act 10)."
During the Wisconsin Capitol protests, Grothman was personally surrounded by protesters, who chanted "Shame!" at him but didn't harm him physically. There's even video of this.
"Grothman downplayed the situation and told the paper he didn't think he was ever in any real danger."
I do think we've strayed very far off topic, which is supposed to be Reddit...
"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 destroying media equipment."
A trivial google search turns up this newsweek article, which lists half a dozen people indicted for firearms, including one who also had more guns than he could wield himself as well as molotov cocktails stashed in his van. https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-were-there-armed-protest...
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?
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.
What do you suppose would have happened if the angry mob equipped with zipties had actually got ahold of any of the public figures they were looking for? If Nancy Pelosi had been in her office, say? Or if they'd somehow cornered Mike Pence? Just because it was incompetent and disorganized doesn't mean it wasn't earnest, or planned.
Anyway, I stand by my initial position that it is disingenuous to act so innocently amazed that people might regard an angry violent mob storming the capitol with a gallows chanting to hang the vice president as an insurrection.
Perhaps if Congress and media actually addressed voting fraud concerns rather than pretending that our elections magically became perfect now that a Democrat won something, then no one would have shown up.
But as it is, it's unclear who won the election without fraud.
Who won Georgia? Fulton County uploaded enough questionable votes to account for the number of votes Biden allegedly won by, a couple times over. That was never looked into before certification.
It's a convenient excuse. The reality is that the admins are continually clamping down on subreddits they don't like, without any justification or consistency.
For example, one is left to wonder why /r/drama was forced to shut down because the admins considered them a nuisance, yet left-leaning subreddits engaging in vote-brigading and other equally disruptive behaviour are still around.
I'd be remiss to claim that it's purely a left vs. right thing. But if the Aimee Challenor debacle was any indication, they have a clear list of people they like and people they don't like. And if they don't like you, for whatever reason, they eject you from the platform without any recourse.
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.
All of that happened before the 6th of January. If anything, reddit was pretty much scrubbed way before Jan 6th so that's a really disingenuous argument
And yet the violent BLM mobs that literally set on fire and looted businesses and shops that had nothing to do with the actual cause were not only not condemned but also glorified and celebrated.
You will not convince me that stealing TVs from target during riots that let to many unjustified injuries and deaths is about seeking justice.
I’m not even American and this was completely obvious.
Please let’s not pretend we don’t have extremism on both sides of the political compass.
I have witness this behaviour on HN many times as well since this website leans overwhelmingly left; try saying anything remotely controversial and watch the downvotes ensue. I intentionally avoid speaking about my own views openly here out of fear of repercussion; especially because many users on this website run businesses and have the power to ruin my career and my livelihood.
If it weren’t for dang, this place would descend to chaos just as well.
I live in NYC and was first-hand there for the BLM protests. Can attest that they were almost unilaterally peaceful from my anecdotal experience. The police were extreme in their responses. I was at Un Sq and ppl in the streets were just chanting "no justice, no peace" (but peacefully doing so, I suppose a bit of irony), and suddenly the police yelled out to disperse. I was off the to the side just to observe a moment of history, and watched ppl obey that order, yet personally got rammed by a police shield and hit with a baton because it just takes a crowd a certain amount of time to move. I was livid and saw police barbarity in action.
There certainly were bad actors. I saw a police van lit on fire. But from what I read in the papers, these were prosecuted and out of staters coming to NY to basically get their rocks off. The overall movement was peaceful.
You watched someone. As in one person. Which the person you are replying to already acknowledged that there were some bad actors however, the movement was largely peaceful.
Saying that you are sticking to your lying eyes is not productive to the conversation when you are responding to someone else with a first person account too.
Tell that to /r/conservative where I am banned from for even attempting to present an alternate viewpoint. Dissent is literally forbidden by the subreddit's rules.
You're missing the point. Reddit is not and never has banned subreddits purely for being conservative. That's a persecution fantasy that lives entirely in your head.
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.
100% accurate, they purged all the feminist subreddits that aligned with JK Rowling a couple years back. Ironically you are now hard-pressed to find a moderator on r/TwoXChromosomes who actually has two X chromosomes.
There are several tools for viewing them, primarily based on Pushshift, an apparently individual-run database that grabs whatever it can from the Reddit API, usually within a few minutes. The frontends come and go; currently the major ones are unddit.com and reveddit.com (which honours user deletions, refusing to show them).
There are also Pushshift-based sitewide search engines: redditsearch.io is made by the Pushshift creator but doesn't show deleted content. ihsoyct.github.io does, but is unreliable, often randomly missing some comments and posts in any one run of a query.
With the amount of constructive comments/posts removed for seemingly no reason nowadays, and the blight of users overwriting and/or deleting helpful, otherwise anonymous comments when making privacy purges, I find it now more pleasant to browse with all deleted content shown than without.
There is an entire and big-ish sub (I forgot its name) which basically just bans anything that mentions the word "trans", doesn't matter if it's a positive mention or a negative one, just straight up ban.
It's not that they are pro or against the trans issue (they're an "edgy" sub, that I do remember), it's just that the mods don't want their sub getting nuked by the admins and, as such, staying as far as possible from that trans subject is the best course of action.
I would do the same. Not because of fear of reddit, but because I have rarely seen a debate on trans issues not devolve into a hurricane of piss and then the janitors/mods will have to mop up the mess. I got better things to do.
moderatepolitics does this, not because they want to, but because Reddit threatened to ban the entire subreddit if there was any discussion of trans issues.
Meanwhile on late stage capitalism they stickied a post with home addresses of judges, encouraging people to arm themselves and generally being hysterical. And that’s OK because woke.
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…
If you can ignore the incompleteness of black/women/LGBT civil rights movements and the current attacks on black/women/LGBT rights, there's a lot that can be done in things like mental illness (both mild and extreme forms), medical debt, disability, poverty traps, veterans, homeless, prisoners.
>I'd hate to be the one to have to tell the minority picked last that their civil rights isn't scheduled until 2050.
Can you give me a specific example related to that, as in, name a minority that hasn't yet had their 'civil rights' granted?
Because my take on what's going on kinda aligns with the guy above, there's been a mass push for stuff that isn't any kind of accepted by the general populace (and affects fractions of a percent of people) and it's caused a blowback effect when people get sick of having micro-minority issues make daily headline news when their lives are getting measurably worse.
If you were talking about extending basic civil rights to groups that were measurably disenfranchised I don't think you'd be seeing the same pushback.
Instead we see 'drag queen story hour' repeat x 10. You don't have to be any kind of conservative to realise that drag shows and culture aren't well understood by the mainstream population and that a lot of people are going to get the wrong fucking idea and be annoyed as hell but the left just keep hammering it over and over again, like, it's NOT HELPING YOUR CAUSE. I can see it isn't helping. I can see it's going to create resentment and increase divisiveness. Why can't they see that? Are the walls of their bubble that thick? Do they have that much contempt for the average person?
I'm not saying that. Remember I'm saying I'm a super-liberal NYer trying to reconcile how good ppl in the rest of the country can have such different views. First I realize that if you've never met a black/trans/gay/immigrant person, you probably believe the worst of what Fox tells you. So as the progressive movement, we should give the benefit of the doubt to ppl (e.g. don't make a big deal of pronouns; state your pronoun without shame, but also realize that lots of ppl have zero experience w/ non-traditional pronounce so cut them some slack when they slip up). And find common ground. The biggest thing I learned moving from small-town all-white CT where yes, racism was prevalent to NYC was that wow, we're all basically the same. We all want the same basic freedoms and have the same struggles. Don't let politicians divide us and unite as Americans because we're almost all fucking immigrants.
How about the sticky on the /r/atheism Roe thread?[1] The moderation team states that "there is no non-bigoted way of advocating" against abortion, that any argument you have "has already been addressed and thoroughly refuted", and that speaking up "will result in an immediate, permanent ban." The mods are absolutely opposed to freedom of expression. Nobody was shutting down discourse like this when I was growing up.
The Internet has always been full of private fora where people limit the range of discussion. There are plenty of subreddits where you can express your views, should they happen to fall on the opposing side of the issue.
The freedom to have discussions on topics you want in restricted spaces is not censorship, folks. And it’s (unfortunately) a thing that happens when your space is open to the entire global Internet.
> The Internet has always been full of private fora where people limit the range of discussion.
That's fine, but Reddit shows users their removed comments as if they're not removed [1]. Users don't have a chance to migrate to another group or platform if they don't know they're being censored.
> The freedom to have discussions on topics you want in restricted spaces is not censorship, folks.
I would agree with you if the platform were upfront with users about what gets removed. Unfortunately at this point it isn't.
Whenever I hear the word "Private" I immediately check my gun. There is nothing 'private' about reddit moderation, especially on a large sub like atheism (if i remember correctly, I haven't visited that cesspool since 2019). Power mods control tens of subs and cross-enforce their delusions and purity tests across them all, and reddit admins are obviously, pathetically, in league with them, always with the asymmetric tolerance and double standards. ("oh, they say 'kill all men' on female dating strategy? That's just their freedom of speech sweety. Now please remove your anti feminism post, it's harmful and ban worthy, fReEDoM oF SpEEcH dOESn'T MeAn FreeDOm FroM ConSeQuEnCEs.")
You have to stop looking at it from the ridiculous and childish private\public perspective and start looking at it in terms of right to exit and availability of alternatives. If a small, 1000 km^2, irrelevant country bans something, that's not a big problem because the residents can easily move out or otherwise subvert the ban. If a giant corporation with monopolistic control of its niche bans a thing and treats certain users unfairly, that's a much more serious violation of free speech. It's all about how easily you can get alternatives, once you reach a certain usage/alternatives ratio, you don't have the right to be "Private", you must be forced to be fair.
The public\private thing is a sort of "Stories for Children" heuristic that used to approximate the truer underlying dynamics somewhat decently, before bad faith authoritarian fan boys milked it into oblivion with cliché "Just build your own X bro" mindless slogans. The original idea being that 'public' things are usually things like states, courts, police forces and other societal structures that are usually very difficult to exit or be free of. While 'private' things are (the cliché example goes) things like gas stations or coffee shops, things you can easily exit and replace. The heuristic obviously breaks down whenever the private entity in question is $GIANT inc.
That is indeed a pretty extreme position for a 3-million member sub to take. And r/conservative is essentially doing the same thing [1].
I wouldn't see a problem with all of that if people knew their comments were being removed. But, Reddit hides that from users, even going as far as showing you your removed comments while logged in as if they're not removed.
I had comments removed, temp suspensions, and then a permanent suspension in one of the main covid related subs because I wasn’t agreeing with the hive mind around the effectiveness of “face coverings.”
Not only was my main account suspended, they banned my 2 alt accounts as well as my wife’s account. Any account that logged in from my home IP was permanently suspended without recourse.
All because I said “i don’t think masks are as effective as you guys do” in a covid sub.
Didn't they just ban tumblrinaction, which was just right-wingers making fun of tumblr users? It was a bit distasteful, sure, but violent and extremist? I don't think so
I tried searching for "Hunter Biden" on Reddit after reading about him in the news before the election. Nothing returned. Not a single post about this person, like he didn't exist at all. After the election, results started to appear. I'm not even American, just someone who wanted to look at comments about the news. I don't think "both sides" is an accurate statement of what's happening.
Ironically, on this specific topic, Google has its own problems. If I search for "hunter biden emails" on Google, I get page after page of media analysis telling me what to think, but no link to the emails themselves. If I used that same search term on Yandex, the page hosting the emails is the very first result.
Generally anything that does not fit the ideologies of a typical reddit mod, and yes they will have certain belief systems, as most people do not have the time or desire to be moderating even for a few hours a day for no monetary rewards, which the average reddit mod sort of needs to have.
This is why reddit leans heavily socialist/communist/anti-capitalist (moderated by people who believe moderating for free is more important than a real job).
Its a rabbit hole to dive into, but once you dig deeper you realize just how much political manipulation is occurring, not just in reddit mind you.
Other forums do not suffer from this particular political lean. Reddit mods in particular are known for authoritarian ban hammering because its the only way to quiet ideas that go against their worldview, and they often approach it as a holy war that they should control the information that is visible to the public eye so they can protect the public for them, and that the public themselves are unable to decide what is right or wrong by themselves. Political discussion is often so skewed on reddit the term hive mind is not only a term used to describe the website userbase, but also observable in real time.
Hacker news doesn't suffer from this, thankfully, the moderators do not think its appropriate to manipulate or outright silence any viewpoints dangerous to the reputation of their ideologies. Which is why we're allowed to have these types of discussions here in the first place. On reddit, however, I have written statements that have been moderated away I presume "for the safety of the public" as if the public could not decide on its own. Don't assume that everybody on the planet agrees with that kind of sentiment. Go out there and talk to your right wing nutjob friends. They have differing opinions. Just because you don't see them on reddit doesn't mean they don't exist, nor that they are not normal people with normal opinions either.
You can label it a conspiracy theory if you want. But that doesn't eliminate the presence of the facts from which the conspiracy theories have arisen, nor does it eliminate the the presence of covered up removal of those facts for the sake of engineering truth.
You are just unaware of the world beyond the veil of your lived experiences. But it doesn't help that your emotions are so tied to your defense of your ego.
Again, I think you are conflating normal people having normal opinions with some kind of conspiracy that simply doesn't exist.
What is "the message"? What are the "viewpoints dangerous to the reputation of their ideologies"?
It also seems weird to directly compare HN, Reddit, and "other forums" as if they are all the same thing. Reddit has hundreds of millions of users and millions of subreddits. HN is probably fairly comparable to a mid-sized subreddit but neither is really that similar to a "classic" web forum.
> Reddit has hundreds of millions of users and millions of subreddits. HN is probably fairly comparable to a mid-sized subreddit
Yes, since you're going to bring up a generalization in my argument in order to dismiss the whole thing, let me clarify it with more words than would have been acceptable in the first post. There are free-speechly(for lack of a better word, since liberal means authoritatian these days) run subreddits as well authoritatively run subreddits. Hacker news is like a free-speechly run subreddit with moderation to reduce spam but not opposing viewpoints. A whole universe of subreddits out there. I should have been more careful to keep my argument less leaky, but largely most mainstream subreddits suffer from an ideology protecting regime.
Well run or not is not, that's a matter of opinion. You probably think those reddits you defend run by authoritarian reddit mods who believe in silencing "viewpoints dangerous to the reputation of their ideologies" is well run. I happen to think it approaches the fervor, passion, hope, zeal, and spirit of the third reich.
What are these ideologies? Ive already mentioned one. Communal vs Capitalistic beliefs. Reddit moderating is a job for people who believe in contributing to the community, and thats a good thing inherent to human nature, but a gaping flaw when we move so far past dunbars number that it wouldn't even register when looking at the whole. These very good ideological beliefs thus left unchecked in an environment it wasn't meant for transforms into the thing we see today where communal maintainers feel threatened by non-communal actors and often take the dark side of abusing their power to maintain order through authoritarian means. A complete removal of discussion of outside ideas because they threaten an ideology that only works when everyone plays along.
I'm not here to discuss that topic of communism/capitalism or any other "ideologies" though. Just here to point out that the rules that govern the system self selects personalities that gravitate towards ruling through certain means. That's the "conspiracy" that is observable in real time.
The smartest thing reddit has done was learn from Digg.
They've done a FUCKLOAD of dumb stuff. A truly phenomenal amount. Some of the issues stem from just growing and having your crowd change and EVERY marketing company out there working to control your content, but they have very impressively managed to make a baffling number of stupid decisions.
But, you can opt out. It's dumb that you need to, it's dumb that they don't understand what they have, and that they're making what's currently failing (yet another facebook), and yet there's still a large variety of ways to make it not totally fucking awful.
You can still just go to the subreddits you tolerate and ignore the rest, you can still browse in old mode, and you can block most of the ads and nonsense pretty trivially. It was very very smart of them to leave in that option, which while the most obvious fucking thing in the world to a person, is a near miracle for a company.
Not forcing the new design (and a couple of other anti user practices) is one of the best decisions they ever made, and if you've EVER worked in a company rolling out a redesign that's supposed to up engagement and revenue, you have got to understand just how fucking rare anything like that is.
I do wonder when it'll all go to shit finally, and I wonder what will take it's place (i've looked for the reddit of digg for reddit, and haven't seen much potential), but right now every day they don't force the redesign is a damn near miracle in a company of that size.
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 just what people are used to
I find your comment so funny, and it is right in a lot of regards.
A very long time ago I was an avid slashdot reader (I had a 5 digit account long lost). I briefly went to Digh fir bit, and remember very early on visiting this "reddit" thing that was the new nerd thing.
I remember loading the page, browsing a bit and moving on because of the ugly unusable UI that it had (not even sure if it has subs at that time).
Fast forward all these years later, and I'm active on reddit but exclusively use the old.reddit version. The new one feels overloaded with stuff and my brain cant handle it.
As you very well say, it's mostly a matter of our brains getting used to it. Now I go to slashdot And their comments system seems so broken. When at the time it was pretty good.
The one thing I miss is the ability to quickly post as AnonymousCoward, instead of the throwaway account bullshit
This is, to me, the clincher. Is old reddit perfect? God no (i sometimes block certain elements to clean it up), but the information density is vastly better.
I read/scan quickly and don't care much about images. I can very quickly see if there's anything of interest on the page i'm on, and then move on to something else, or queue up a few comment threads to read through in other tabs. If there's an image, it's usually trivial to quickly zoom in to look at it rather than even bothering to load it again (hit or miss depending on quality).
It's obviously not perfect, but I don't think it's just nostalgia. I legit desire something fundamentally different that what new reddit is trying to offer. I'm looking for a website i wouldn't mind quickly browsing from the terminal using keyboard hotkeys, not something that I swipe forever on my phone with. Even on the phone though I prefer old reddit (was best on firefox for mobile with blockers but i'm back on apple so i need to look into my options.)
Someone like me just wants more text based/information dense screens that can be quickly navigated and then drilled into if i desire more information/content.
Besides 8chan there was Voat (and other Reddit clones). Some of the larger subreddits like /r/drama,/r/the_donald, and /r/fatpeoplehate splintered off to their own websites.
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 quality in “default” content. Yes, you’re funneled into these channels. Yes, Reddit is seeking to get people to consume them. Yes, the interest of advertisers override all others. Yes, Reddit constantly inserts unwanted subs into my feed.
Yet Reddit is still a place I can curate to the subs that align with my interests & values. it’s not dead yet.
I don’t expect any social media platform to give me the defaults I want. I’ve accepted that I can take responsibility for the content I consume.
What I’d like is to build tools that enable people to more easily filter for that content. I believe we need stronger filtering tools, not weaker.
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.
I don’t know if web3 genuinely offers a second chance, but I do know that I will continue to want the ability to learn from thoughtful people of all walks of life. That requires the ability to filter out everything else. At this point, I’d rather select keywords to filter than to surface & happily pay for the privilege.
I’m so tired of being spoon fed the empty calories of outrage.
Sounds like you haven't met any reddit mods. And no, web3 offers nothing except the ability to try and control your digital currency and make money off you.
I think the tiny amount of power goes to people's heads. Power-tripping moderators of small subreddits are a dime a dozen.
The larger problem is that most subreddits are moderated by a handful of people, whose interest is expressly _moderating_. They don't care about the community. How could they, they have so many? And the power absolutely goes to their head.
It's really because most mods and tech leaders are the types of people that want to play everything like a video game and have everyone else just watch them play as a spectator...
We praise exec wisdom and foresight a lot, but in reality, the people who come in an sit for years in exec positions when no new innovation happens are just reacting to profit indicators and protecting the company for as long as they serve, while leaving a bunch of headaches for the next guy who comes in.
This is the age of "don't rock the userbase" boat in tech. It's only companies that disrupt the entire social media landscape as we know it that wins next, but given time, they too will screw it all up...
All of it repeatedly just reaffirming the true genius of MySpace Tom.
Default subs are doing this. It's one thing if a small sub does strange things, but if a massive sub that explicitly recommend by Reddit acts like this (for years now!), it sends a pretty clear message.
Thanks for the correction. I'm not subscribed to any of those (everyone knows the best content is in the smaller subs right?) so completely missed that!
And yet that can also be valid - the /r/teen sub, which is meant as a safe place for teenagers to talk, bans people who've posted in creepy subs - do you disagree with that?
That’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is, for every creepy person caught by that, how many are there who are smart enough to make a new account?
The premise of creating via raw moderator power, a safe space for teenagers on an anonymous internet forum that encourages throwaway accounts is ridiculous.
I imagine the calculus involved would say it’s far better to create a safe space for teenagers and rid would be creeps than allow entry for non-teenagers in a space not even meant for them.
It would be like getting mad that a school prom doesn’t allow any adults inside. I’m sure there are good adults , but I doubt the intention of random adults and would rather have a whitelist of what adults are allowed.
I’d encourage you to consider than one of the public goods Reddit provides is to homeless teams & vulnerable people escaping abusive family.
Given the incredible breadth of services available to those individuals & yet the very real evidence that it continues to be a significant societal challenges, it’s worth considering the role a supportive community of random strangers play.
Post in /r/lockdownskepticism or pretty much any of the subs questioning the covid19 narrative and the same thing happens. Like 50 subs.
Getting banned from the covid-19 subs is also frighteningly easy as well. Any question about vaccine effectiveness or questioning “face coverings” and you’ll either get buried, comment removed, or banned outright.
> 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.
fair - I don’t mean to define his work or vision, just my own sense of admiration for seeking to establish a source of knowledge not fully co-opted by institutions.
It might not be possible to create a public forum in a way that it stays thoughtful and interesting even when it becomes popular.
The first problem is that thoughtful and interesting content rarely attracts many readers.
The second is that if many readers show up, the discussion quality is going down. So there would need to be strong centralized censorship to downvote the low quality posts and prevent accounts that play the populism game to gain traction.
Almost half the population is below average in whatever way you wish to judge them and the bar for entry for most applications is as simple as clicking a button in an app store.
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 low-effort content, the moderators were overzealous and clueless, and in general there was no sense of community due to the size of the site + lack of individual identifiers beyond usernames, like avatars and signatures from a typical internet forum of the day. Basically, reddit is just as bad today as it was a decade ago.
But I'm sure for people who had their first internet-social experiences on reddit, they remember it a lot more fondly.
I will concede that objectively speaking, "new Reddit" is an abject failure (and the fact that old.reddit.com continues to exist is a testament to the such) and that it's much more heavily astroturfed by major corporations now.
Reddit is hijacking content by requiring it to be hosted on it's own CDN... It's one of the main reasons why they put up walls. Many reddit users are actively involved in content and credit theft as well, but no one knows about how deep it runs. In a world where creators are going unviewed from IG to TikTok, there is literally an underground repost network that literally steals and reposts content to claim credit and monetize the lifted content on reddit and other sources through various means. This is also why Reddit rarely lets posters link to original content sources like YouTube, IG, and TikTok on major subs any more.
Millions of creators on sites like YouTube and others never get credited or viewed even though their stolen content goes viral on bootleg accounts. It's a huge problem. Even replies and posts from other sites are hijacked for the same purposes now.
It laid the ground work for content theft going on everywhere now...
Reddit only bans links when the Reddit post is mockery/harassment of the original content/creator, as an anti-doxxing measure. Otherwise linking to source is common and encouraged.
There is no way to verify content that is hosted on reddit's CDN, anyone could make any claim about OC at any time. The only way IDs happen is in comments, and that comes long after the damage is already done. Reddit used to allow external links, but now only a few subs do it (None of the default subs allow external links) because it's common practice on the site. Regardless of linking to the OC, it's still hijacking views from the original creators and undermining content creators. Reddit does not pay original content creators for their views... If Reddit had to pay OC creators for views fairly, they'd likely not be as popular nor profitable as they are now.
I think because youtube can earn creators significant money, it becomes the a primary source of spam on reddit and profitable youtubers can flood everything out with voting rings.
And that is the stuff behind subs blocking youtube and the strict self-promotion rules.
You mean 9gag surely. I thought they were the ones that stole everyone else's content, or are we just having the same conversation that we were having 15 years ago.
Content theft on the internet is as old as the internet.
It's not the same discussion. a lot more sites pay content creators now. There are many people that work hard on their content. Many sites are engaged in fostering hijacked content, and they quietly do nothing about it because it makes them a lot of untraceable money, a LOT more money than 9gag ever made off of stolen memes... Perhaps it should be called Content Laundering?
Reddit has even gone as far as to prohibit posting of OC by creators themselves by banning their posts and accounts when they post their own work, calling it "self promotion", while other accounts violate the rule with obvious immunity. They also ban subreddits after they are cultivated and curated too, many times for no good reason. I understand that spam needs to be controlled, but how moderation occurs on Reddit, it's totally not conducted in a normal nor reasonable manner at all.
Yeah, at least twice now a content creator friend of mine went viral (think tens of millions of views) without getting much of the traffic herself; the thieving accounts/networks captured almost all of the benefits. Having those taken down have proven to be almost impossible. It’s disgusting.
Edit: In addition, just recently she managed to ward off a blatant thief and finally drive traffic from another hit to herself. But the income lost to the thief in the first few days? Forget about it.
Agreed, also the fact that rehosted content often never points back to the source creator, which potentially robs OC creators of real followers and potential business leads that could likely support them through these harsh times, literally to line pockets of people that had nothing to do with the content creation process at all.
(Theoretically only, just opinion, not fact of course by any means) Mods could potentially get paid by building popularity of their sub through reposting popular content that gets upvoted. They then could charge other users and sponsors for prime placement and promotion within their subs all arranged possibly offline. Reddit normally collects money off the activity through the ad revenue generated by page views and ad loading, and through sales of ads purchased by platform users... It may not seem like a lot of money until you really understand how much traffic the site gets, and how much mods and corporate on reddit can control and even script what kinds of content makes it to the top/front of pages.
Also there's always old payment methods where crypto/NFT/digital payment services or even a bag of cash can be used under the table, though nobody can or would want to prove that of course, and of course it's not presented as fact because I have no stake whatsoever in reddit nor desire to see it made less skewed like it used to be in the past.... I've already given up on it myself, long ago when they banned me for no reason and took my sub.
Look carefully at each video you watch on any platform from now on for what products, slogans, and logos are placed in them, and the links/comments that are posted in the comments. There is advertising going on in the majority of reddit posts for something, even if most people don't know it. A lot of the time, even the music used in content is often being subtly imprinted across multiple sites so that it becomes an ear worm as a low-key psychological marketing tactic.
Many major companies are putting out completely engineered "low budget" home videos as ads, they're no longer marking paid ad posts as sponsored, and companies are regularly hiring the most popular and trusted creators to inject subtle advertising cues into otherwise organic looking viral videos. I'm pretty sure that most of what we see on social platforms with paid advertising options now is either staged/funded/enlisted/sponsored production, bot driven content, or low key psychological marketing. This does not include HN based on what I've observed, because they don't sell ad-based post boosting (as far as I know).
OC creators struggle often in futility to break past algorithm ratios just to be seen by small audiences if they don't have massive sums of money to pay for advertising for each post they make on each platform. Getting to the front page without the right funding may be damn near impossible by now, fair enough though, there are a lot of other users competing against you that have copied your style, branding, and/or content, so "F" it, maybe we're all doomed/
That's funny. I remember when nobody knew what TikTok was, and TikTok-watermarked videos were all over Reddit's front page. It was a great marketing spot for them.
and this endless reposting of viral content ... well, it's ongoing since we have viral content. is it great? of course not, but it's not like the reddit CDN somehow changed anything with regards to this problem.
youtube has contentID ... "creators" are free to organize and advocate for reddit/IG/tiktok to introduce it (or lobby US/EU/China to mandate it or whatever)
>This is also why Reddit rarely lets posters link to original content sources like YouTube, IG, and TikTok on major subs any more.
A lot of content creators spam Reddit to get clicks and eyeballs (obviously). Some subreddits have nearly become 100% YouTube threads. As a result some subs/admins have started to craft tighter requirements for the links posted to bring some sort of balance back to the content.
this almost killed /r/indianfood. we had to clamp down very sharply on posts that were just links to youtube videos, even if those videos were technically on topic for the sub, not out of any desire for petty power tripping, but because the page had literally become a wasteland of youtube spam crowding out other content. since then things have gotten a lot better, and we even get a drive by comment every now and then thanking us for sticking to the rule.
tiktok provides better “communities” with more organic content. it know it sounds weird but you can get into areas of tiktok very similar to a subreddit. the lack of centralization like public karma, mods, sticky posts, etc actually helps
TikTok recommendation algo is creepy but strange enough it's community is much more kinder and less angry than Reddit. If you give it a day or two train and get past the dancing videos its excellent (unless dancing videos are your thing of course).
It's quite possibly not the algo anymore running TikTok ...
It's likely now all just a random assortment of content from whoever pays the most for ad promotions on their posts, without violating community standards and policy, and occasional celeb posts here and there... of course.
The algo likely only does light duty when something bad on the platform makes the news... They have to make sure paid ads run as promised, and a lot of people buy ads, there is likely no more space for unpaid algo picks, as the Internet now runs 24/7 worldwide with over 8 billion potential customers.
It always depends on what type of user you are... The most disgruntled people usually are people who are business owners... If you're not marketing a business or your art work for example, you have no problems and the algorithm entertains you seamlessly.
If you're someone like a musician, makeup artist, or web developer (for example) TikTok floods you with success tips, tutorials about how people went viral, with tips on pay for promotional ads on the platform, and a constant stream of thought leadership programming to keep you struggling and spending time and money on growth. It's quite hostile to anyone who just wants to develop listeners and viewers, or anyone who wants to market a product independently. Big businesses can just have a meeting with TikTok reps, pay a fee, and get prime promo placement. When you run a small business, without lots of employees, managing social media presence becomes a huge mountain to climb, and TikTok won't meat with you unless you're very popular or wealthy (and willing to spend) already.
Everyone on the platform has a different perspective, TikTok's algo is good at determining that and maximizing what can be earned from each user, but it's not fair nor transparent at all, and it creates a situation where no one can question things because there are others that will always say their TikTok experience is "going just fine". User experience all depends on the user's personas.
Most certainly is. It's the best recommendation algo I've met.
YouTube feels completely random and amateurish compared to it, at least for me. In fact I've hated every personalized algo before with the products I've used since they give me plain wrong things. Not TikTok.
The real tragedy is the shear volume of effort that made reddit the valuable resource it once was... Anyone starting a better version of that would need to wait ages before it gets populated with data, and they'd be extremely lucky if the same quality of minds contributed serious posts to it without totally and quickly devolving it into a bed of memes and clickbait now that everyone has been trained that these types of efforts really don't serve nor reward them.
Truly a missed field goal... Someone responsible should be spoken to rather harshly about this dereliction of duty, and the db should be at least reverted back to it's 2010 state. heh. :/
I have in fact. I have discovered a forum that used to be quite popular back in the day and very chaotic. It literally spawned 4chan at the time, but in the meantime it kept going, many left and grew out of it and the remaining posters are now in their 30s and I've had some of the best and some of the most inane discussions of the past few years in there, with topics for most of my interest, gaming, mental health, programming, stairs. Surprisingly there's a lot of people with newer accounts. Parts of it are still a bit of a cesspool, but it's what the Internet we love to reminisce was also about, instead of the sanitised corporate web we're dealing with today.
It's been an arduous process but I've managed to replace Reddit with a few forums, HN included, that are still alive to this day.
And I've completely banned myself from Reddit. It's hard given how much information is stored on that site.
Thank you for introducing this concept of the "Eternal September" - it has a real archetypal power to it, reminds me of Northrop Frye's genre-seasons: comedy with spring, romance with summer, tragedy with autumn, satire with winter.
It’s important to realize that it’s not a stage of development, it’sa failure state. Specifically it occurs when the number of new members joining exceeds the capacity of the current members to educate them in the norms of the site’s culture. This results in the total destruction of the previous culture.
You're looking at it all wrong. Kind of through the lens of an narcissist. Not nearly as many people have had the opportunity to even become "full" intellectuals. The irony here is that while the world burns, the easiest solution is raising that bar for them by challenging them and leading them into better paradigms, through interaction and debate or even arguments.
Without your presence amongst the people on that platform, and with the condemnation and final-judgement people like yourself dole out... how could you expect them to ever be any better or things to improve over the course of a decade?
Team values have all but disappeared. That is the real issue at hand.
We need to be finding leverage and educating them on how to think critically, while providing them with support and encouragement of lifestyles which improve their intellectual abilities. Not put them down and shut them out.
You may disagree - you may believe that there needs to be a culling like a lot of the entitled wealthy class, but that's just naive weak thinking from a group of individuals who couldn't build or run something themselves if their life depended on it. They're essentially nothing more than spoiled children living in a bubble. They have no foresight.
I agree with this in principle, but in reality the flood of new people, influence/manipulation by organisations (political and market) and encouragement of features that reward low quality content (emotes, monetisation, etc) mean the site doesn't actually promote the environment you suggest should exist.
Old fashioned forums are still far and away the best 'system' for this, they're just not 'popular' enough any more, particularly with Facebook providing groups within their massive walls.
The solution seems to be a Goldilocks zone between popularity and death, too popular and it devolves, too unpopular and it dies. HN manages to keep itself tucked neatly into that zone I think.
Now this is something I completely agree with and you can see it most easily in the video game industry.
Our predecessors have homogenized products and services, reducing quality and efficacy - in many cases effectively shadow banning certain types of quality or goods, e.g. food which contains a ton of cancer causing chemicals, or video games which prey upon vulnerable youth and adults VS organic sustainably locally farmed fresh produce that empowers people and brings them together and video games that provide emotionally, socially, and intellectually rewarding experiences of a lifetime.
Developing for the lowest common denominator is the work of an MBA or Economist. It's parasitic behavior of an individual who actually has ZERO interest in the companies services or products or what they actually do for their fellow citizens, and instead do everything they can to divert from those goals in order to steal money and get away with it, effectively.
In the case of Reddit - they pretend to be too much, to do too much, while in reality when you weigh the damage they do to society and themselves VS. the profits they make. The point is, which I think you were making, is that they are catering to a very low bar in order to earn more money at the cost of damaging the foundations upon which their business stands, their own life as well - by damaging and corrupting, or driving away communities who would otherwise be empowered and empowering others (including the MBAs & Economists own families and friends).
The opportunity cost is rapid advancement of technology and stability of social systems, as well as the possible prevention of mass extinction events or prevention of fully blown dystopian realities. These people are literally trading a Jetsons like, badass future for.. short term parties on yachts because they can't get it otherwise. Do you see what I 'm getting at? If these people, these 1% "elites" and "leaders" in our society would just be team players instead they would most likely have the ability to go to the store in just a decade or two and buy themselves a brad pitt body, or a space alien brain, or cure any disease, or buy a perfectly pristine plot of land on the moon or mars (most likely less time than that because things tend to advance at exponential rates when people work together without so much impedance).
This is why I wish more people would start debating with these obscenely rich and powerful people because the people aren't going to cut it in this day and age. We live in unprecedented times where reaching a critical mass with just a bunch of uneducated people is simply no longer effective due to the tools of mass manipulation and fake news that there are. It's also reason to get your hands dirty with undereducated and underprivileged reddit users. All you have to do to get through to them is (A) use their language and (B) balance it out with validation, acknowledgement / mirroring / positive reinforcement of their good logic and behavior. They learn VERY quickly this way and can become formidable allies in a short time.
If we want to do this, we need simply to illustrate for the rich "elite" the opportunity costs of continuing down the path they're on. They are not intelligent business persons when you consider these costs. It's actually insane. It's like trying to compare a $48,000 salary in the early 2000s (after 2001) to infinity. There isn't a comparison, it's just stupid business practices all the way down. HOWEVER, we know they aren't exactly unintelligent either, so to say it's impossible to reach them and convince them is just silliness. They will wake up to it they just need someone they'll listen to, to explain it for them using their own language.
So what you're saying is because the site rewards low quality or even fake posts, you give up?
You're not making any sense at all and it seems like you've just completely shifted subjects to the algorithm and what makes it to the top.
I wonder - are you under the impression that you have to have a big following or be at the top to influence people? In that case, you should think about how you view top posts and reddit and realize that your target audience isn't bots or necessarily clandestine orgs, but people who could be considered low hanging fruit or "on the fence".
In fact it is best if you are a nobody. It's how you choose to use your words and how good you are at cutting through all the conjecture and b.s. logical fallacies. It's quite effective and doesn't require hardly any effort.
Your attitude, no offense, stinks it would seem. You basically skipped over everything I said, haven't appeared to consider any of the points I made and then switched subjects.
Are you debating here in good faith? Because it really doesn't seem that way at all based on your entire response.
No one has educated anyone sitting in the middle of a circus full of novelty, over stimulation, distractions and interruptions.
Yes "Education" requires patient teachers, but it also requires a very specific environment without all of the above. You don't have to look to social media platforms for it cause that's not where education happens.
Free education services is a niche not anyone interested in or good at. Its normal to expect interesting people to be (not to be educated by me) online with current internet penetration
It's true that people have been complaining about "eternal september" since at least 2010 when I joined. However IMO reddit really has declined in discussion quality for the most part since then, asides from banning some of the worst subreddits. To say that 2022 reddit is the same as 2010 reddit is preposterous.
The main thing right now is bots. Endless copying & reposting of submissions, and even wholesale copy/pasting comment replies. The reddit staff have to know about this as it's been going on for a while, but seemingly don't care.
I also joined in 2010-ish, and although the big subreddits have been declining forever, some of the niche ones have improved massively because of the increased number of users. To me, reddit is two parallel user experiences - interesting discussion in niche subreddits matching my interests, and mindless doom scrolling through the big, astro turfed generic subreddits. There used to be more overlap between the two, but the days of interesting comment threads in the default subreddits are definitely gone now.
I've been on Reddit since 2008 myself and was an avid user of forums etc for years before that.
When I started on Reddit there was already an element of things having changed, a move away from niche technology discussion towards lowest common denominator stuff and discussion by meme.
In general this was fine as you could just move to smaller subreddits, and the bigger pages had fun cultures that permeated the others and gave it all a sense of unity and shared interest even when you were in your bubble.
The difficult change I've seen in the past few years is the rising number of hate and harassment subs, and Reddit tolerating them. If you scroll through the top of /r/BanFemaleHateSubs or /r/AgainstDegenerateSubs you'll see how bad things have become and how unsafe the general environment is.
It's not that discussion has become worse in an Eternal September way, it's that discussion has become openly threatening, with innocent women having their pictures and social media links shared for strangers to discuss rape and murder fantasy, and this gets 10s of 1000s of subscribers and Reddit routinely ignores reports about it.
Reddit always had an element of \dchan in it ever since user subs were created. Coontown (and the preceding slur subreddit), FPH etc.
In my view this is just a symptom of the wider populace gaining access to internet forums and the cultural shift mass internet usage brought. As in, there have always been darker corners of the internet, just that the people who frequented them had to have some level of nerdiness/geekiness and {nerds}∩{violent racists} is smaller than {whole population}∩{violent racists}.
There always having been elements of racism and violent misogyny doesn't preclude there being either a quantitative or qualitative shift in how much Reddit as a whole is steered by such ideas.
Back in 2010 there would be discussions about places like /r/jailbait, about the tradeoffs between free speech and public safety etc. Now there are subreddits openly sharing child pornography with links to the social media accounts of the children and their families, and Reddit auto responds that these things don't violate their usage policies when reported.
> The difficult change I've seen in the past few years is the rising number of hate and harassment subs, and Reddit tolerating them. If you scroll through the top of /r/BanFemaleHateSubs or /r/AgainstDegenerateSubs you'll see how bad things have become and how unsafe the general environment is.
The r/BanThisandThat subreddits are little more than morality police. Many of those posts will take statements out of context or regard any "cis-het" sexual fantasies as threatening to women.
> It's not that discussion has become worse in an Eternal September way, it's that discussion has become openly threatening, with innocent women having their pictures and social media links shared for strangers to discuss rape and murder fantasy, and this gets 10s of 1000s of subscribers and Reddit routinely ignores reports about it.
Firstly, social media accounts aren't secret. Anyone who publishes to a Twitter or FB account cannot claim a retroactive right to privacy. The other contention I have is that Reddit should not punish a written expression of thought merely because it's unpalatable to a certain section of its userbase. Pandering to a moral minority sets up a precedent for the most loudest performing "victims"-of-the-day to decide what everyone else is allowed to say, hear, or think.
Have you looked at the subs they're talking about? They're sharing collections of zip folders of girls openly advertised as as young as 13, they're stalking women via social media sending descriptions of their potential rape to their family, they're robbing women's houses and sharing their stolen belongings, they're flashing, groping and ejaculating on women in public and filming it for upvotes.
Call it morality police if you want but it's targeted sexual violence against minors and women who don't consent. I guess your morality and mine don't align. If I'm in the "morality minority" on this one then that's very sad and I would encourage yourself and other members of "morality majority" to reflect on how women are treated in your society.
Out of interest, would you mind sharing your Facebook or Instagram profile here, so that someone could share you pictures on a subreddit for rape and murder fantasy about you, linking back to the account? It's only fantasy right, would be a shame of the morality police ruined the fun.
I think the point that GP is making is not that every subreddit that a group of people complain about is nothing to be concerned or worried about; rather, that people who inhabit subs dedicated to banning other subs operate within a moral framework which on the whole is dubious at the edges. For example, clamoring to ban consensual non-consent (CNC, a form of kink) subreddits because they perceive it as "normalizing" certain behaviors, or banning content of fictional characters, or banning support groups where various "degenerate" people frequent. These are edge cases which do not fit into the generalization of "jailbait"/"stealthing"/"creepshot" subreddits, which are non-consensual by nature. It's disingenuous to suppose that a subreddit for roleplaying BDSM/risque fantasies between members falls under the same moral realm of regulation as subreddits that post links to childrens' social media accounts to gather risque photos.
I'm all for illegal and non-consensual content subreddits to be banned. That's not all the mentioned "Ban This and That" subs are asking for, so I won't accept their moral opinions beyond the issues of non-consenting and illegal materials. They are prescribing a sexual morality, one which I, and I think many reasonable people, disagree with or at least have qualms with. If you don't believe me, r/BFHS seems to be a hotspot for anti-kink and anti-porn activists who suggest that women with kinks need to "heal"[0]. If that's not moralizing, I'm not sure what is.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take from this. You're giving me an example of a community that has "moralising" elements. I have no doubt that there are people there against pornography and who are willing to openly say they're uncomfortable with certain kinks. I know there are also people in the community who are not like that.
The function of the community is to draw attention to outright abuse that is happening on Reddit in the open. That is a broad mission and will definitely attract a range of people. Some may be moralists or however you want to paint them. Does that mean we should turn away from them or what do you suggest?
Maybe you could join the effort and be a voice of the reason you believe in and speak out against what you perceive as unhealthy "kink shaming" and ensure the topic stays on hand against things that are definitely not "edge cases" (which from my experience is the majority of what's posted).
No doubt it's imperfect "at the edges" but what isn't? It seems dangerous to draw attention away from _the huge issue in the middle_.
The purpose is to have the people who can stomach it visit in order to report them, in the hope they'll be taken down. It raises awareness and creates a conversation about the issue for people who can't visit
Some actors will use it as advertising space but I don't think the blame for that should be put onto the shoulders of those fighting it.
Do you have an idea of how this issue could be avoided without turning a blind eye?
This is pure FUD and very dangerous. Firstly, you're talking about a different sub that what I linked to, grouping these together. The subs I linked are female led and moderated, at least BFHS.
Secondly, they also have large numbers of participants from a range of backgrounds with a range of motivations. The subreddits they are discussing tend to have 10s of 1000s of followers actively engaging in various levels of harassment, I doubt that's a single sock puppet.
Thirdly, do you have a source for anything you're claiming?
Finally, if what you're saying is true then someone is posting child pornography to Reddit. Regardless of his intentions we should be concerned about that.
According to one of the sources linked in a sibling comment, this user was arrested for domestic violence. A quick look at their user profile shows they are the top mod of r/garland, which isn't far from where the arrest occurred.
Are you saying this single user is manning the sock puppets of everyone involved on /r/BanFemaleHateSubs and also the accounts of the 1000s of men who are, for example, inappropriately touching 1000s of sleeping women?
It depends on the specific subreddit. It makes some sense that the largest subs would succumb to eternal September, but there are plenty of small niche subs that haven't.
I agree though that just about all changes made to the reddit website itself have been for the worse. Perhaps the story of digg.com will play out again?
I think part of the problem is that reddit seems to really aggressively push for subreddit growth. This artificially creates an "eternal september" almost everywhere. I'm not really sure why they are pushing this so hard, if it's to show investors how fast reddit is growing or something?
But bottom line is that perhaps the single most disruptive event an online community can experience is a large sustained influx of new members. It just will not be the same before and after.
> This artificially creates an "eternal september" almost everywhere.
This is also why the 'powermods' are so damaging: without proper, attentive moderation an influx of new users invariably leads to a decline in quality.
Half the subreddits in /r/all are so homogeneous that it's impossible to tell if a post was in /r/muderedbywords, /r/nextfuckinglevel, /r/damnthatsinteresting, /r/unexpected, etc.
> 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 show the usernames at all, only the names of subreddits - producing the odd impression that the subreddits are authoring the posts and not individual users within the subreddit.
HN's UI is sort of similar on the first half: Users are de-emphasized here as well, but there are no subreddits to emphasize instead. Though I think it would be interesting if someone made an alternative frontend for HN that presented threads in the style of an old web forum, with user identities shown prominently
I think it works frightenly well sometimes. Ask yourself:
- How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year?
> - How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year?
- None that I remember, thank goodness. One man's conversations are another man's flame wars.
> - How many people do you know on HN?
- At the very least, knowing HN users' affiliations and posting tendencies is key to quickly blocking unwanted ideological noise, whether it concerns international politics or programming languages.
> - At the very least, knowing HN users' affiliations and posting tendencies is key to quickly blocking unwanted ideological noise, whether it concerns international politics or programming languages
This is IMO the approach that makes the most sense. Let users ignore other users, rather than enforcing bans/shadowbans on the whole userbase.
While I personally would rather not block anyone, I think everyone should have the ability to police the content they see, but in most cases not what other people see.
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.
I started using reddit in 2009 and can agree that the quality was always lacking. The posts that made it to the top were the ones that were the lowest effort to consume which quickly get repetitive and boring.
The comments were often equally low effort with memes and weak jokes rising to the top. This was especially infuriating in places like /r/askreddit where the only chance of seeing replies that weren't clear fabrications or jokes was to specifically ask for serious replies.
There were really only 2 ways for a subreddit to be good. It either had to be small and relatively close-knit or it had to have rules against low effort content and solid moderation enforcing those rules. But since communities will naturally grow as people find them and because people hate when moderators remove their posts, Reddit ended up exactly where it was destined to.
I agree. I think it's fundamentally a flaw of the voting system: the idea that previous users should be able to anonymously and indirectly influence the visibility of a message or post to future users.
The author is actually complaining about a lot of half conspiracy theories around reddit.
They don't even touch on the Eternal September of reddit. Every thread is full of the most mundane observations possible, lazy puns, entirely expected The Office references and sayings which have been said literally thousands of times before -- followed up by someone going "this is the most perfect comment" all of which is wildly upvoted.
It feels like it is being botted by a simplistic lazy circle jerking ML text generation algorithm. Maybe it is. But it is definitely drowning in https://xkcd.com/1053/.
First, I have no idea what Reddit the company has been doing since basically every addition to the site in over a decade has been garbage and has made the site worse to use. The site is basically unusable without the old.reddit.com style, their media hosting is worse than imgur or any of the other alternatives, their app and mobile experience is worse than any number of free alternatives, and besides that I don't know what else the have done except gamify posts with their awards system.
The second problem is how communities on Reddit and the internet as a whole are structured, incentivized and evolve. So many of these communities are unable to check themselves (which generally requires very good moderation), and with incentive structures like upvotes and awards, posting is gamified where people post things they think others will approve of and will reward, which causes communities to become monocultures as everyone else just leaves, is downvoted into oblivion or just banned from the subreddit. These communities basically become filled with people who have the same opinions and circlejerk about them in ways that affirm their opinions and disparage ones that oppose them, causing them to slowly become detached from reality. It creates a community of people who basically become unable to discuss things with people who don't share the same opinions, which then carries over to interactions outside of those monocultures. Lots of these people just dont have the ability to even talk to others with differing viewpoints now.
The best communities and best conversations I have had online have been those that offer a lot of off topic discussions within interest based communities. Support group/ identity based communities need very strong moderation because they are much more susceptible to "radicalization" if that is the correct term.
In a decade this essay will still be available on some web archive, but the author will be fully grown, and the zeitgeist that shaped his adolescence, which is already dying, will be as transparently foolish as is, to contemporary sensibilities, a 1970's punk rocker shouting 'The Beatles suck!'
It is true Reddit is a pile of garbage, but it was a worse pile of garbage when its community was posting kiddie porn and creating 'N-chain' comment threads.
There is still a humongous amount of good discussion there. Perhaps the problem is you need to remove some bad subreddits? Some of those have definitely gotten worse, but there are plenty of good ones to find.
I've been active on Reddit for 14 years. The quality of discussion has been more or less unchanged overall, but you must choose your subreddits in order for that to be true.
All of the major subreddits have gotten watered down because that's what happens when 29 million users (r/pics) are voting on comments. Communities change fundamentally when they scale up. The answer is to seek out smaller communities.
The smartest thing the Reddit admins every did was to create subreddits. At the time, everyone on Reddit criticized them for it. Users wanted to be able to have a single link get posted to multiple subreddits with a single discussion, so that subreddits would behave like tags. But the admins said that, no, the whole point was to create separate distinct communities that could flourish on their own and they were absolutely right.
They were right only because their goal was to increase the number of users to the largest extent possible.
> everyone on Reddit criticized them for it
... and they were also right, because at the time reddit was a community for mostly tech news, similarly to what HN represents now. Creating the subreddits led to the tech part of the community to be splintered and then get more and more watered down as time went by. It's sad.
I agree, but sadly besides all the cool communities out there there's an order of magnitude more of them that are a stain and a strain on reasonable discussion.
As a user of reddit I would like to isolate myself from these people as much as possible, which is now somewhat possible by blacklisting subbredits. But sadly the people themselves are vastly over represented in the wider community and having to suffer through chains of memes and hot takes, vitriol and all around non good faith discourse is making me go less and less into the comments of interesting posts because I don't really want to subject myself to all that negativity.
In my opinion, the overall effect is negative, despite the existence of diamonds in the rough communities here and there.
PS. I am saying these things as a long time reddit user and as a dev that tries to build an alternative link aggregator and discussion platform for communities to move to. :D
Do also find someone clicking an upvote hilarious? I don't get why upvote or downvote button would either be hilarious? Isn't that already normalized from Reddit, YouTube, etc.. ?
> They permanently ban accounts for minor infractions (e.g. old fashion flame war), then they ban any account that could be associated (e.g. by IP address).
This isn't true. Banning is _per-subreddit_, done by the respective mod teams. Your behaviour would need to be especially egregious for it to be picked up by the admins.
> Leftists naturally following a very North Korean and censorious approach.
> This isn't true. Banning is _per-subreddit_, done by the respective mod teams. Your behaviour would need to be especially egregious for it to be picked up by the admins.
Reddit will ban your IP and all accounts corresponding to that IP for alleged ban evasion of a single sub ban.
So no, banning isn't per subreddit or the alleged ban avoider would be just banned solely on the specific sub they have been banned before.
> Reddit will ban your IP and all accounts corresponding to that IP for alleged ban evasion of a single sub ban.
Is this anecdotal, or do you have more information about this?
In my experience the admins do not care about subreddit bans and only get involved when a person is consistently rule-breaking and evading bans.
Moderators of large subreddits don't even have a direct line of commutation with the admins anymore. There used to be a dedicated Slack where mods could escalate things.
A big issue on reddit is 'powermods' and how if your sub gets popular enough the admins will install their own mods. Everything ends up feeling incredibly similar.
Reddit works fine for me. In R/W mode I use only /r/diypedals and /r/guitarpedals and for daily dose of doom and gloom in R/O mode I use /r/news and /r/worldnews. I access it only via RSS reader and it navigates me directly to compact version which loads instantly and works well on mobile.
I don't know if it is the same person, but there was a quite disheartening story posted by a person who due to internally misunderstood depression transitioned at the suggestion of people on reddit, regretted it, then later went dark and everyone assumes took their life.
Yeah something like that came to my mind as well. Even if that is the case it seems a little odd to blame the news subreddit specifically and not their own poor decision-making. It's like if someone who panic sold during the covid scare blaming the news.
Getting in on the global 24/7 news cycle is bad for your mental health[0]. You don't gain anything positive from knowing about the latest $bad_thing the hour it happens.
I acted on them. I fell for it just like people who fall for (other) conspiracies. None of us are immune.
So, during Brexit times, I read (and wrote) a lot of r/europe, r/ukpolitics, r/brexit. Which at the time were cesspools of doom, every little thing was a catastrophe, and I believed it. I started thinking "I need to get out", that was on my mind fucking 24/7.
Then I lost my job partly because of Brexit (drop in exports to EU, company decided to lay off a bunch of people), at which point I was convinced the UK was going to shit and I was gonna get locked in, kicked out or some weird shit.
So, yeah, I left the UK without bothering to apply for pre-settled status, just abandoned everything. Those Reddit subs played a major part in it - I've thought about it a lot and it's a reasonable conclusion.
The reality is that the UK is the best country in Europe if you speak English and like your freedoms. It has not gone to shit, and it's unlikely that it will. I know poor Brits love to complain, but they're just not seeing the opportunities. It was by far the easiest country to settle and make a lot of money in. And the food is great - people who say otherwise are either snobs who only talk about restaurants, trolling or have never stepped into an ASDA lol
Anyway, don't be a dumbass like me. Just do yourself a favour and don't read r/politics, /r/news, worldnews, national subreddits, and just most general subreddits. If you see a lot of doom and gloom, abandon it.
People who hate their lives? I’m sorry I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ll find all sort of people on Reddit, but certainly not mostly people hating their lives, society and others. You must have spent too much time on the worst subreddits.
You’re the one hating here. I wonder what your "reality" is like.
I fully agree with jotm based on my more than a decade on Reddit.[1] I firmly believe that the average mod of /r/politics, /r/worldnews, etc., and authors of the posts that make it to the top (or, more accurately, are allowed to), is a 19-year old who a) hates himself and b) is desperate to prove himself as smarter than his parents.
[1] Unfortunately, there is no better alternative.
I think Reddit is fantastic. So much interesting and useful content. It’s amazing to me that it isn’t full of spam if you think about how much of that there is on the internet these days so personally I think the mods are doing a really good job.
There are good subreddits indeed. I like the ability to split content thematically into subreddits. Unlike HN, this allows me to better focus on what interests me, and what I'm not interested in, I don't even get to see. On HN, instead, there's just one big pot, and what interests me often doesn't even make it to the front page, or only for a few minutes. Also on hckrnews.com I only see stuff that already has a minimum number of points. So I often go to the RSS feed; there I often find the more interesting posts than on the front page.
I thought this was a clever joke at first that parodied how reddit forces their app on mobile users in various insidious ways... but it turns out Medium does the same.
You want to know why the web is so bad? Because it's slowly become acceptable to treat your users with complete contempt by interrupting and "nudging" them into being surveillance cattle.
> What started as a bastion of independent thought, Reddit has slowly devolved into a den of groupthink, censorship, and corporate greed.
This is revisionist romanticism. Reddit is just a collection of forums like the many hundreds of thousands that came before it, and continue to exist alongside it. Reddit is also so incredibly massive that making sweeping statements about its quality or composition is meaningless, what one consumes on reddit is really more a reflection of the individual rather than the site itself.
I agree with you kind of. But it was a loose collection of forums initially and still is if you look at it that way. The Reddit admins forced the idea of communities as a reason to start banning. You can see this over time. Subreddits were not called "communities" until the admins started banning subs. It's classic group dynamics.
You can't ban a group that isn't a group. So the site grouped loose collections of people into what they called communities. And it became self fulfilling as groups define themselves by what they are not as well as what they are.
> The Reddit admins forced the idea of communities as a reason to start banning.
The admins also started actively policing subreddits, and shuffling uncooperative mod teams.
Perhaps Reddit was never a bastion of 'independent thought', but in the beginning (after subreddits came into being) there was an understanding that communities were independent.
But eventually they started getting bad press (e.g. /r/jailbait) and the 'jannies' started refusing to work for free (e.g. blackouts), so they decided to quash anyone causing them grief.
I'm sure Aaron was thinking of ridiculing fat people, fascism, revenge porn, jailbait or your right to hate the gays when he said he was concerned about corporate tyranny.
On the other hand it's full of Americans touting their free speech is true like no other country on earth and blah blah, so I guess, free speech except for those you disagree with
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
There’s nothing in there about Reddit making moderation policies
You're conflating 1A with free speech. Free speech is the principle that inspires 1A but it's a larger concept and the same reasoning applies to things like reddit. This whole "don't let you political opponents speak or coordinate because you happen to have the power to stop them" is the weapon of a tyrant, one of these days a real tyrant will seize the reins of these platforms and show us all how they're really used.
Parent comment is about “Americans touting their free speech.” First Amendment is obviously what that refers to.
The Internet doesn’t have a limit on the number of web sites. You want to say something, get a $2/month shared hosting plan and post HTML, or lease fiber and run your own server farm, or do any number of things in between.
Long before Reddit, there were dial-up BBSes in the 1980's. You don't know what petty online brownshirting is if you had not not experienced that --- and every little of it was corporate in any shape or form.
I'm curious what reddit even aspires to be at its greatest.
Most of the popular subreddit's comment sections have top rated comments being something totally predictable and sarcastic.
Right now the top post on r/news is [1]
Contrasted to the equivalent story on hackernews: [2]
There isn't anything remotely thought provoking in the top rated comments on reddit as there is on hackernews.
It seems to me this isn't due to censorship or corporate influence, but purely due to the fact that the reddit post has 100x more upvotes (and therefore more viewership) than the hackernews equivalent.
In the pockets of reddit that have a small but active community, I think it's easier to argue that the original essence and charm of reddit is still very much alive.
I'm skeptical that even without all the corrupting factors mentioned in this article, that reddit would ever be a place for the masses to engage healthy discourse and speech
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?
518 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadThe 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.
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.
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.
If you let third-party apps provide a UX for your data, the app developer will naturally try to make the bext experience they can for users. The first step to doing that is to ditch all the ads. Now you're paying all the cost to host and serve the data, but the third-party app is killing your income.
https://www.derailingfordummies.com/
If you don't think r/politics is an echochamber then I don't know what to tell you.
r/fatFIRE was a great subreddit I used to visit frequently but it grew very quickly over the past few months and the mods haven't scaled accordingly. The moderation has gotten really, really bad over the past few months and the sub is now just filled with dumb posts like "what handbag do rich people buy"? It used to be far more technical, interesting discussions around real estate investing, taxes, etc.
https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/11/ron-p...
That said, I'm not sure how many of the problems are problems with reddit itself vs how many of the problems would still exist on other platforms even if reddit didn't. Forum moderators have always had a reputation for being napoleonic idiots who abuse their power for extremely petty purposes. The problem of corporations and wealthy celebrities buying out moderators and admins to push their narratives and silence criticisms of their products[1] could easily have happened on webforums.
There's an unfortunate drive towards centralization in online communities these days that we'd all be better without. I personally think fediverse is the best solution to this as it centralizes communities without centralizing the actual platform, but I'm not so confident it will succeed when it's up against well-funded and well-established platforms like facebook, reddit, etc.
[1] i don't have any real proof there's a monetary interest involved, but I'm perma-banned from /r/startrek for saying that the creators behind "Star Trek: Picard" and "Star Trek Discovery" probably aren't even fans of Star Trek based on the shows' many discontinuities with their predecessors, and it makes me wonder if the mods are on paramount's payroll or something. This should not be a controversial statement after how terrible the most recent season of Picard was.
Definitely resonates with me as mostly a life-long lurker. HN is on a very, very short list of online communities I actually post on and engage with. Never got into reddit, left social media long ago.
Some mods are power tripping, but also the value of a user is now near-zero. As long as you don't piss off too many, your subreddit will be fine. Especially for popular keywords - it's like owning "startrek.com", people will find it.
Subreddit owners can't actually make money in most traditional ways (so yeah, they may be paid behind the scenes), and there's a strong anti-monetization culture among Redditors, which is hilarious given that it's a for profit company that makes money off everyone's content. They still see it as an underdog online community. Newsflash, Facebook users also think they're enlightened on an exclusive platform/group.
Setting up a forum has never been easier - even security wise. Yet even that is too hard for people, so centralization is what we get. Hell, it's too much of a pain even for companies (for different reasons) - I still can't believe they shut down NotebookReview Forums - I was a long time active contributor. Surely no one in their right mind does that? Surely the decent Google traffic is worth something? Apparently not! Now I look suspiciously at TechPowerUp and Level1techs Forums...
I hope Reddit's asinine Facebook inspired user acquisition strategies will lead to its downfall, but I don't know... too many people have/make accounts. Hell, people make Facebook/Instagram and even Pinterest accounts, so clearly gating works. Maybe once they decide to disallow indexing by search engines? But then again Facebook is doing fine...
Discord is even worse - contributing unique information publicly (apparently that's what users believe, that it's "public"!) on chat platforms? I don't even know why people started doing that.
Being _permabanned_ suggests that they've done something particularly egregious. Either that, or their behavior is indistinguishable from a spam bot.
Or perhaps you work as a Reddit mod and can't feel empathy for normal users any more... meh...
I'm personally of the opinion that, with respect to net neutrality, "service provider" should be interpreted as liberally as possible so that CDNs, hosts and SaaS platforms are subject to it instead of just companies that provide layer-3 internet access. And maybe the law should even be expanded so that it applies to financial institutions.
In so many situations now, platform code is written with a certain intent in mind, but then administered later by replacement employees who have no indication of the end result of what controls do...
These sites often assume that one user persona can accommodate a user base full of multiple different personas and motivations, and they brutally punish anyone that goes outside of the personas they create as templates because their user bases are far too massive to care about individual user issues. It's now easier (and better for their bottom line) to just ban people than to properly address customer support.
I’ve been using Reddit since 2010 without issues, behaving poorly enough to get permabanned (which is different than being banned from a subreddit) is serious. There’s a story being left out here.
You can post pretty disturbing shit and still not even get your NSFW account blocked, nevermind having all your accounts permbanned by IP.
Social Media sites an apps work very hard to "beat up" independent business people, so that they are huddled into a group that needs to pay (somehow) every time they want to gain customers or awareness. It's crushing the entire world of independent business. It may not be a conspiracy per-say, but it's a very serious end result of how these apps are set up and administered.
The bank analogy was just a depiction of how difficult people who are trying to promote their work have it in just being able to develop their brand/presence on the Internet now within Reddit's eco system. Scammers and others who don't represent a specific brand don't have this problem, because they don't need to represent a consistent brand name, they can easily use burner and throw-away accounts to promote themselves...
If you run a web site for your company and it gets blacklisted (shadowbanned) all across reddit, you become extra-limited, because then not even people who like your product, company, or service can even post about it or mention it on Reddit. It completely limits and controls the possibility of normal business growth and opportunity for a LOT of people when a site or app grows to be that big/vital as a community. ShadowBanning also isn't apparent to the company owner, they can potentially keep struggling to break ground and never know that all of their posts are being muted.
Pretty sure that they just let an AI do it. There’s nobody actually checking or answering the appeals.
After more than a decade talking online, I finally realized that it's all pointless. It's not a fact, it's just my opinion.
I loved it since it was full of people who shared the same interests. I like that I helped people and they were happy. But ultimately, for me, it was a waste of time.
I now have a blog that I won't share anywhere, it's full of rants and posts on niche technical stuff and the few people who find it seem to like it. Comments are disabled and the only way to contact me is via email. A couple of people actually contacted me lol
I'll tell you how I got permabanned. First account was banned because I shared my experience with the German healthcare system on r/germany and r/europe. I absolutely despise it to this day. I'm forced to pay insurance just to get discriminated against and get zero help. I concluded that mandatory insurance means a stable stream of income for people who have zero desire to help anyone. So I ranted about it online, since I could not do anything real. Two comments triggered a lot of people because it got the account suspended, then banned. That was rather weird.
Second account was banned because I ranted about suicide, particularly how I hate myself for failing a couple of attempts and being a coward because of that. It did not sit well with the depression subreddits, and probably Reddit itself since it's a heavy topic and a turn off for advertisers.
So, uh, yeah, third account. I posted about suicide again... in retrospect it's pretty cringe and I know complaining that much is pointless, but at the time I was pretty fucked up. Luckily, the account was suspended fast and then I received the permanent ban message.
So, that's what it takes, getting 2-3 accounts banned. I mean, yeah, what sane person has multiple accounts in the first place? :D
I made several new accounts just to have them banned almost instantly (Jesus, it's an actual addiction). So I gave up on it, thankfully.
I'm not saying the ban was unjustified, and I'm not mad at Reddit. Just my opinion, what I wrote wasn't worthy of a permaban, but yeah for those reading it I seemed like an asshole who loves to complain.
I used to write a lot of well thought out comments and posts, it's just that after years of it I got tired and jaded, my writing went to shit and I started shitposting and then complaining too much. No one wants that kind of customer. Yet I still participated. It's an addiction, there's no other explanation.
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.
Did they do this for everybody or only certain people? In my experience Discord is one of the few apps that doesn't constantly make me dig up my phone or help train some dumb AI image recognition every time I use it.
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".
AFAICT Swartz never said or wrote why he attempted to download all of JSTOR. Even close friends like Lawrence Lessig only speculated as to what he may have been wanting to do with that data.
But I suppose this kind of lazy writing and lack of standards is what passes for news these days at the New York Times' router that could have conceivably forwarded the packets for this medium.com article.
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) or three (NSFW) "experiences" reddit decides to give me on mobile.
2. Depending on experience, jump through hoops including random "get the app!" prompts, failures to load content, failures to load nested comments, and outright refusal to display all the content in a thread unless I install the app.
3. If on an NSFW subreddit, and on about 50% of "unapproved" non-NSFW subreddits: Be blocked from viewing any additional content by an unremovable prompt. (Often, content loads in before the prompt, so you enjoy about 30 seconds of looking at your content before it's blocked.)
4. Give up, and go to old.reddit.com, which is ugly and not designed for mobile, but at least works okay.
Desktop isn't much better, but I have long had browser extensions installed that redirect everything to old.reddit.com on most of my browsers, so it becomes less of an issue.
If reddit took away my ability to use old.reddit.com, I'd probably stop browsing the site within weeks.
That's what your little "woke" slur means.
It changed "they're" to "xer", looks like you're wrong.
And yes, I said 'they' because I do not presume to know their gender, unlike yourself it seems. Not because I am being 'woke'.
Exactly like you just did.
The "woke" insult has even less substance than what it's desperately trying to criticize.
That's one hell of self inflicted insult if that's how you feel.
To quote myself: "Woke is used because we know who we're referring to, as do you."
"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 quo", but that they are the status quo. That their rebellious ideology is in fact the norm in corporate HR departments and colleges everywhere. That their behavior is in no way welcome, or positive, or empathetic, and is really just a LARP of the social causes of the late 20th century, divorced from principle and fact.
For some, the term Woke goes no farther than "they cast a black person in this movie."
If you embrace the language you will be embraced by the institution. If you reject the language you will be removed. Your actions or nuanced takes are immaterial. Embrace the ideology as prescribed, or suffer.
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.
Waiting for your insightful "that's pretty woke of you" retort.
To quote myself: "Woke is used because we know who we're referring to, as do you."
So also - empathy.
But I do feel the same way you do about the wokes about conservatives, when they're dismissive of climate change, when they're rejecting social medical care, when they're taxing the poor and benefiting the rich, when they're not understanding of the BLM protests, when they're taking away personal freedoms, when they're practicing their twisted version of Christianity when you know that if they ever met Jesus they'd be the first ones to nail them to the cross. I wish they'd snap out of their delusions and see how they're against everything they should be for.
Climate change. Weather, been going on for all time. I'll pay attention when rich people abandon their seaside mansions.
Taxing the poor. Tax was invented for this.
The BLM movement was a farce. Nothing good came from it, period.
The c19 lock-downs took away our personal freedoms. 911 messed with travel a lot but these recent lock-downs are a whole new ball game (and the future does not look bright).
No one alive met Jesus, don't be ridiculous. He wouldn't be allowed to be a carpenter without doing safety training courses first, if he was alive. No one would nail him to a cross, he'd be on his cellphone like everyone else.
It's hard to believe someone on HN would be this anti-science and pro-racist as your comments have been.
You're not discussing with people with sincerity. You misquote people, and then call them names because it doesn't fit with your viewpoint (whatever that is).
I've flagged all your comments, because you cannot seem to behave in any reasonable capacity.
You are wrong about climate change. Ask your local weather service, the weather's not what it used to be. When the rich abandon their seaside mansions, you'll be too late, because the mountain retreats they'll go to they've already bought.
No, taxing was invented to fund the government (and later expanded to counter exponential wealth consolidation, but we're not allowed to talk about that very much).
The BLM protests achieved awareness, and that's all that was needed, and that was most certainly warranted.
The c19 lock-downs have since lifted, as we're in a democracy, and a civilized society we do these things for our own good to get out of a prickly situation. I get that for you being uncomfortable for a short while was infuriating, but maybe you'll be stronger the next time around.
I'd like to believe Jesus would be happy to do safety training courses, what does that have to do with anything? Anyway, the way I hear these conservatives talk about socialism, being tolerant to one another I don't think they'd like his TikTok very much at all.
The BLM protests caused widespread destruction. Michael Jackson achieved worldwide awareness with Black or White, that was 1994 - things have only ever improved in the west since that time (and would have regardless of MJ's song).
> The c19 lock-downs have since lifted
Have they? No, not in the country I reside.
For what it's worth, the effects of climate change are much worse than the rising of the oceans, focusing on that was a mistake of the climate alarmists. We'll have famine and war much sooner than the rising oceans will affect the rich.
Well that explains at least some part of it, you have absolutely no idea what the protests were about. They were about the police brutality that stems from the incompetency of officers bred from the American policy on police training. MJ singing about racism has almost nothing to do with that.
> you have absolutely no idea what the protests were about.
Your true nature shines through.
Floyd's death was an opportune event for BLM to leverage, BLM rioters then left nothing but destruction in their wake. Nothing positive came from BLM, their legacy is hypocrisy.
Is there something on this page that you don't find believable? https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
What is my true nature that shines through in that statement?
Why was Floyd's death opportune for BLM, what do you think the motivation was?
Which is no way to behave towards fellow humans, not a path to any sort of moral high ground, and I’m pretty sure against the hacker news guidelines.
Painting with a broad brush, conservatives show empathy only for people like themselves and perhaps close family and friends or a local community. Progressives show empathy towards a far broader range of people.
(I think it's no accident that cities tend to be more left. They force people to have larger and more heterogenous tribes, and the correlation between political leaning and size of tribe apparently has some power in both directions.)
Conservatives will help externally, very generously when conditions permit. Progressives will demand their in group be helped, to other progressives (within the in group) this looks like caring action is taking place but the shortsighted view of the situation does not see who is being helped.
Take your city example, the city will demand food while simultaneously mocking the farmer, and taxing the farmer more if he exhibits success. The farmer knows he must produce as others depend on him.
You are likely letting America's strange healthcare situation cloud your view. That situation is fucking bizarre. Everyone should have access to publicly funded emergency health care, like we do in NZ (but do not make the mistake of thinking that it is a fantastic situation here either, private health insurance has become more normal unfortunately (i.e. our idiot government is making it more like the US for healthcare)).
So also - empathy. I’m pretty proud to be called woke, and so should you be.
It is a modern myth spread by main stream media that racism and sexism are prevalent. "Woke" (or "wokeness") is weaponised world view that is intolerant and dangerous.
As a 50-something heterosexual white guy, I think you have to close your eyes really tight, stick your finger in your ears and shout ‘ nah nah nah’ repeatedly to believe that is true.
Woke is an English adjective meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination" that originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.
The phrase stay woke had emerged in AAVE by the 1930s, in some contexts referring to an awareness of the social and political issues affecting African Americans. The phrase was uttered in a recording by Lead Belly and later by Erykah Badu. Following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, the phrase was popularised by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists seeking to raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans. After seeing use on Black Twitter, the term woke became an Internet meme and was increasingly used by white people, often to signal their support for BLM, which some commentators have criticised as cultural appropriation. Mainly associated with the millennial generation, the term spread internationally and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017.
---------------
Being woke means that serving watermelon and fried chicken and collard greens on Juneteenth is an insult. (looking at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis)
Being woke means understanding why "Circling the wagons" when around Native Americans would be a terrible insult.
Being woke means understanding calling something a "cakewalk" brings up slave-history in the south where African Americans were forced to walk around and whoever "won" got a cake.
Being woke means understanding the child's song "knick knack paddywhack, give a dog a bone" is referring to watching Irish die in the Famine, and would rather give a dog the cast-offs rather than the Irish.
Being woke means understanding "Hip hip hurray" is a deeply antisemitic slur regarding the Hep-Hep riots in 19c Germany where many thousands of recently-freed Jews were lynched.
Remembering and understanding these historically terrible sayings are bad to you and your fellow anti-woke people. Naturally, these sayings require a bit of maturity, intelligence, and understanding to see why these phrases are terrible - and not everyone practices in using those faculties on a regular basis. It all comes down to the same core beliefs: "my race/sex/demographic is superior, and theirs is subservient to mine."
There are other terms for being "anti-woke". They usually wore white pointy hats, burned crosses in "undesirables" yards, and arranged public executions via tree and rope.
There is no consensus on the obscure origins of the expression - either way calling it a "deeply antisemitic slur" is baseless.
You're taking this a bit far.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_APjzWh5d0o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_APjzWh5d0o
Blaming politics you don't like is convenient, but not always helpful or accurate.
Don't mistake people disagreeing with you for people failing to hold an opinion. Those are two very different things.
The number of subreddits I bother to check has dwindled down to 2-3, and when those are gone I will stop using the site entirely.
[0] - https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gkkfg5/upda...
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.
The people using these things as cudgels are not the same as the people who just believed they were describing the dynamics of the world.
It seems similar to me as the difference between early Christians, and the much later elites who would go on to sell indulgences while imprisoning and hacking off the heads of people who wouldn't agree submit to the regime in both thought and action.
Maybe I'm splitting too fine a hair.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenmayay...
I use i.reddit.com for this. (Thank goodness it still works.)
who's the new reddit ? :)
Fully FOSS, private, and all ads removed.
[0]: https://f-droid.org/packages/ml.docilealligator.infinityforr...
[1]: https://github.com/Docile-Alligator/Infinity-For-Reddit
It's a death knell when someone creates an alternative frontend for your website because the usability is so bad. Libreddit did just that for Reddit. It fixes/removes all the bullshit that Reddit introduced in the last 10 years.
[1] https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit
Wait, are you kidding? I thought you were talking about using it on desktop. New reddit is literally unusable on mobile. This is what it looks like for me (https://imgur.com/a/pa07d2c). New reddit isn’t just unusable, it is literally nonfunctional. I can only imagine it’s been deliberately destroyed to drive people away from the web over to the app. They do something similar with links. All links from new reddit have their underscores "escaped" with \. Basically they corrupt the URL. If you’re on old reddit, you get these bad links and have to fix them yourself, but new reddit does it for you, of course.
https://apps.apple.com/app/stopthemadness-mobile/id158308293...
1. Use rif is fun for Reddit (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....), or other third-party apps.
That doesn't mean moderation is an easy job, or that it shouldn't be done judiciously or consistently, but it can't be abandoned.
It started around 2015/16 and it was very clearly visible in all subs.
One is banned, the other promoted. Not just on Reddit but on many social media.
The left had a nationwide movement named "Occupy" and the Democrats and most media approved.
The right did it once and the same people all lost their minds.
Violent? The only violence on January 6th was between police and protestors. There was plenty of similar violence at Occupy protests, but the Occupy protests also had other kinds of violence, like Sexual Assaults Reported in 'Occupy' Camps[1]
Insurrectionist? "The FBI at this point believes the violence [on January 6th] was not centrally coordinated...there was no grand scheme...to storm the Capitol and take hostages."[2]
Sympathizers within the government? Like Obama?[3]
An attempt to disrupt the normal functioning of government? Yes, both were. That's actually a common protest tactic - protesters generally argue that a protest has to be disruptive to be effective.
1: https://abcnews.go.com/us/sexual-assaults-occupy-wall-street...
2: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-fbi-finds-scant-e...
3: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-risky-embrace...
The establishment media (millionaire mouthpieces for billionaires) is not going to assist any movement that actually threatens the establishment.
Occupy Wall Street was 2011.
The crucial difference between January 6 and Occupy Wall Street is that the members of Congress and the Vice President were inside the Capitol Building on January 6, whereas no elected officials were in Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street. If the break-in of the Capitol had occurred while it was empty, that would have been a different matter, still serious, but not giving the appearance of a coup attempt.
The best example is perhaps the occupation of the Wisconsin state capital:
> Thousands of protesters rushed to the … Capitol Wednesday night, forcing their way through doors, crawling through windows and jamming corridors...thousands of pro-union activists — many bused in from out of state — rampaged through the historic building in an effort to stop a vote on collective bargaining reform legislation.
...
> during the course of the occupation, Walker received a steady stream of death threats against him and his wife, including one that promised to “gut her like a deer” and one threatening to kill his sons. Police found dozens of .22-caliber bullets scattered across the Capitol grounds. The occupiers drew chalk outlines of fake dead bodies etched with Walker’s name on the floor, and carried signs that read “Death to tyrants,” “The only good Republican is a dead Republican” and one with picture of him in crosshairs with the words, “Don’t retreat, Reload.”
...
> House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) praised the occupiers for an “impressive show of democracy in action” and tweeted as they assaulted the Capitol that she continued “to stand in solidarity” with the union activists. In other words, Democrats were for occupying capitols before they were against it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/14/democrats...
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. "Police and protesters continued to get along, with no incidents reported and no arrests." It wasn't actually a "break-in". What happened was that there were already some protesters who had been inside the Capitol for some time, and then a much larger crowd showed up that night and wanted to get in, because there was a vote on the bill scheduled soon. The police were initially reluctant to allow the larger crowd to enter but decided to allow them. There was no violence.
https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/article...
Again, the issue isn't really protesting legislation in Capitol buildings. In general, that's a legitimate democratic activity. The issue is the safety of the members of Congress and the VP from a crowd on January 6 who wanted to overturn the results of the election that was about to be legally certified.
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're to believe that lawmakers in Washington were in danger on January 6th, despite the complete absence of any violence against lawmakers, we should also believe the lawmakers in Madison were in danger. Death threats should be taken seriously regardless of partisanship.
> 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.
> There were no assassination attempts on Scott Walker
Nor were there any assassination attempts on January 6th.
> the lawmakers were evacuated from the building while the Capitol police were trying to hold back the crowd.
It took me a moment to realize you were talking about Washington, because the same thing happened in Madison: The senators hid under a stairwell, out of view, while the police ordered a city bus to pull up in front of the building. Officers then formed a human wall on the sidewalk, parting the sea of protesters and creating a pathway for the senators to reach the bus. Once the senators were on board, “the mob on the street began punching the windows and shaking the vehicle. … The police told the senators and staff inside to keep their heads down in case a window shattered.”
That, by the way, is what I was talking about when I wrote "forcing lawmakers to flee".
Honestly, it's like the WaPo article and the madison.com article are describing different events, except they aren't, just two perspectives on the same event.
The Washington Post article is literally labeled an "Opinion" by the Washington Post, and it was written by Marc Thiessen, who coincidentally co-wrote a book with Scott Walker: https://www.amazon.com/Unintimidated-Governors-Story-Nations...
Talk about obvious and undeniable bias!
Both are undoubtedly guilty of selective reporting.
But let's be clear, are you accusing the WaPo piece of lying, not merely choosing what to cover?
Act 10 had been covered extensively by the Wisconsin State Journal for the previous month. You wouldn't expect every new story to say every single thing. It was already a familiar issue to us all.
> But let's be clear, are you accusing the WaPo piece of lying, not merely choosing what to cover?
I would say exaggerating. Take it from Republican Representative Glenn Grothman, who was there for both events. "It never reached that pitch (during Act 10)."
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2021/01/08/wisconsin-act...
During the Wisconsin Capitol protests, Grothman was personally surrounded by protesters, who chanted "Shame!" at him but didn't harm him physically. There's even video of this.
"Grothman downplayed the situation and told the paper he didn't think he was ever in any real danger."
I do think we've strayed very far off topic, which is supposed to be Reddit...
"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 destroying media equipment."
A trivial google search turns up this newsweek article, which lists half a dozen people indicted for firearms, including one who also had more guns than he could wield himself as well as molotov cocktails stashed in his van. https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-were-there-armed-protest...
Also interesting that a handful of bad people carrying guns make everybody else a criminal. Is that the world you want to 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.
Anyway, I stand by my initial position that it is disingenuous to act so innocently amazed that people might regard an angry violent mob storming the capitol with a gallows chanting to hang the vice president as an insurrection.
But as it is, it's unclear who won the election without fraud.
No it isn't.
Other states have similar problems.
For example, one is left to wonder why /r/drama was forced to shut down because the admins considered them a nuisance, yet left-leaning subreddits engaging in vote-brigading and other equally disruptive behaviour are still around.
I'd be remiss to claim that it's purely a left vs. right thing. But if the Aimee Challenor debacle was any indication, they have a clear list of people they like and people they don't like. And if they don't like you, for whatever reason, they eject you from the platform without any recourse.
http://www.thewebcomicfactory.com/comic/the-antiwar-comic-in...
http://www.thewebcomicfactory.com/comic/the-antiwar-comic-on...
http://www.thewebcomicfactory.com/comic/the-antiwar-comic-th...
You will not convince me that stealing TVs from target during riots that let to many unjustified injuries and deaths is about seeking justice.
I’m not even American and this was completely obvious.
Please let’s not pretend we don’t have extremism on both sides of the political compass.
I have witness this behaviour on HN many times as well since this website leans overwhelmingly left; try saying anything remotely controversial and watch the downvotes ensue. I intentionally avoid speaking about my own views openly here out of fear of repercussion; especially because many users on this website run businesses and have the power to ruin my career and my livelihood.
If it weren’t for dang, this place would descend to chaos just as well.
There certainly were bad actors. I saw a police van lit on fire. But from what I read in the papers, these were prosecuted and out of staters coming to NY to basically get their rocks off. The overall movement was peaceful.
Saying that you are sticking to your lying eyes is not productive to the conversation when you are responding to someone else with a first person account too.
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.
Any light criticism or joke results in a subreddit and site wide ban.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCynical/comments/hovdsi/just_...
Pointing this out would get you banned from Reddit extremely quickly.
Not a criticism, just an observation.
There are also Pushshift-based sitewide search engines: redditsearch.io is made by the Pushshift creator but doesn't show deleted content. ihsoyct.github.io does, but is unreliable, often randomly missing some comments and posts in any one run of a query.
With the amount of constructive comments/posts removed for seemingly no reason nowadays, and the blight of users overwriting and/or deleting helpful, otherwise anonymous comments when making privacy purges, I find it now more pleasant to browse with all deleted content shown than without.
It's not that they are pro or against the trans issue (they're an "edgy" sub, that I do remember), it's just that the mods don't want their sub getting nuked by the admins and, as such, staying as far as possible from that trans subject is the best course of action.
>I'd hate to be the one to have to tell the minority picked last that their civil rights isn't scheduled until 2050.
Can you give me a specific example related to that, as in, name a minority that hasn't yet had their 'civil rights' granted?
Because my take on what's going on kinda aligns with the guy above, there's been a mass push for stuff that isn't any kind of accepted by the general populace (and affects fractions of a percent of people) and it's caused a blowback effect when people get sick of having micro-minority issues make daily headline news when their lives are getting measurably worse.
If you were talking about extending basic civil rights to groups that were measurably disenfranchised I don't think you'd be seeing the same pushback.
Instead we see 'drag queen story hour' repeat x 10. You don't have to be any kind of conservative to realise that drag shows and culture aren't well understood by the mainstream population and that a lot of people are going to get the wrong fucking idea and be annoyed as hell but the left just keep hammering it over and over again, like, it's NOT HELPING YOUR CAUSE. I can see it isn't helping. I can see it's going to create resentment and increase divisiveness. Why can't they see that? Are the walls of their bubble that thick? Do they have that much contempt for the average person?
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-the-proud-boys-so-af...
Unless you're complaining about far right terrorism or intentionality divisive mainstream media coverage, you've completely lost me.
>I'd hate to be the one to have to tell the minority picked last that their civil rights isn't scheduled until 2050.
Can you give me a specific example related to that, as in, name a minority that hasn't yet had their 'civil rights' granted?
1: https://old.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/vjpvsa/in_honor_of...
The freedom to have discussions on topics you want in restricted spaces is not censorship, folks. And it’s (unfortunately) a thing that happens when your space is open to the entire global Internet.
That's fine, but Reddit shows users their removed comments as if they're not removed [1]. Users don't have a chance to migrate to another group or platform if they don't know they're being censored.
> The freedom to have discussions on topics you want in restricted spaces is not censorship, folks.
I would agree with you if the platform were upfront with users about what gets removed. Unfortunately at this point it isn't.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky
You have to stop looking at it from the ridiculous and childish private\public perspective and start looking at it in terms of right to exit and availability of alternatives. If a small, 1000 km^2, irrelevant country bans something, that's not a big problem because the residents can easily move out or otherwise subvert the ban. If a giant corporation with monopolistic control of its niche bans a thing and treats certain users unfairly, that's a much more serious violation of free speech. It's all about how easily you can get alternatives, once you reach a certain usage/alternatives ratio, you don't have the right to be "Private", you must be forced to be fair.
The public\private thing is a sort of "Stories for Children" heuristic that used to approximate the truer underlying dynamics somewhat decently, before bad faith authoritarian fan boys milked it into oblivion with cliché "Just build your own X bro" mindless slogans. The original idea being that 'public' things are usually things like states, courts, police forces and other societal structures that are usually very difficult to exit or be free of. While 'private' things are (the cliché example goes) things like gas stations or coffee shops, things you can easily exit and replace. The heuristic obviously breaks down whenever the private entity in question is $GIANT inc.
I wouldn't see a problem with all of that if people knew their comments were being removed. But, Reddit hides that from users, even going as far as showing you your removed comments while logged in as if they're not removed.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/vjpeia/roe_v_...
Not only was my main account suspended, they banned my 2 alt accounts as well as my wife’s account. Any account that logged in from my home IP was permanently suspended without recourse.
All because I said “i don’t think masks are as effective as you guys do” in a covid sub.
To be fair, Reddit's search is completely broken. The only way you can get decent results is using Google...
This is why reddit leans heavily socialist/communist/anti-capitalist (moderated by people who believe moderating for free is more important than a real job).
Its a rabbit hole to dive into, but once you dig deeper you realize just how much political manipulation is occurring, not just in reddit mind you.
Its tearing apart society.
Hacker news doesn't suffer from this, thankfully, the moderators do not think its appropriate to manipulate or outright silence any viewpoints dangerous to the reputation of their ideologies. Which is why we're allowed to have these types of discussions here in the first place. On reddit, however, I have written statements that have been moderated away I presume "for the safety of the public" as if the public could not decide on its own. Don't assume that everybody on the planet agrees with that kind of sentiment. Go out there and talk to your right wing nutjob friends. They have differing opinions. Just because you don't see them on reddit doesn't mean they don't exist, nor that they are not normal people with normal opinions either.
You can label it a conspiracy theory if you want. But that doesn't eliminate the presence of the facts from which the conspiracy theories have arisen, nor does it eliminate the the presence of covered up removal of those facts for the sake of engineering truth.
You are just unaware of the world beyond the veil of your lived experiences. But it doesn't help that your emotions are so tied to your defense of your ego.
What is "the message"? What are the "viewpoints dangerous to the reputation of their ideologies"?
It also seems weird to directly compare HN, Reddit, and "other forums" as if they are all the same thing. Reddit has hundreds of millions of users and millions of subreddits. HN is probably fairly comparable to a mid-sized subreddit but neither is really that similar to a "classic" web forum.
Yes, since you're going to bring up a generalization in my argument in order to dismiss the whole thing, let me clarify it with more words than would have been acceptable in the first post. There are free-speechly(for lack of a better word, since liberal means authoritatian these days) run subreddits as well authoritatively run subreddits. Hacker news is like a free-speechly run subreddit with moderation to reduce spam but not opposing viewpoints. A whole universe of subreddits out there. I should have been more careful to keep my argument less leaky, but largely most mainstream subreddits suffer from an ideology protecting regime.
Well run or not is not, that's a matter of opinion. You probably think those reddits you defend run by authoritarian reddit mods who believe in silencing "viewpoints dangerous to the reputation of their ideologies" is well run. I happen to think it approaches the fervor, passion, hope, zeal, and spirit of the third reich.
What are these ideologies? Ive already mentioned one. Communal vs Capitalistic beliefs. Reddit moderating is a job for people who believe in contributing to the community, and thats a good thing inherent to human nature, but a gaping flaw when we move so far past dunbars number that it wouldn't even register when looking at the whole. These very good ideological beliefs thus left unchecked in an environment it wasn't meant for transforms into the thing we see today where communal maintainers feel threatened by non-communal actors and often take the dark side of abusing their power to maintain order through authoritarian means. A complete removal of discussion of outside ideas because they threaten an ideology that only works when everyone plays along.
I'm not here to discuss that topic of communism/capitalism or any other "ideologies" though. Just here to point out that the rules that govern the system self selects personalities that gravitate towards ruling through certain means. That's the "conspiracy" that is observable in real time.
They've done a FUCKLOAD of dumb stuff. A truly phenomenal amount. Some of the issues stem from just growing and having your crowd change and EVERY marketing company out there working to control your content, but they have very impressively managed to make a baffling number of stupid decisions.
But, you can opt out. It's dumb that you need to, it's dumb that they don't understand what they have, and that they're making what's currently failing (yet another facebook), and yet there's still a large variety of ways to make it not totally fucking awful.
You can still just go to the subreddits you tolerate and ignore the rest, you can still browse in old mode, and you can block most of the ads and nonsense pretty trivially. It was very very smart of them to leave in that option, which while the most obvious fucking thing in the world to a person, is a near miracle for a company.
Not forcing the new design (and a couple of other anti user practices) is one of the best decisions they ever made, and if you've EVER worked in a company rolling out a redesign that's supposed to up engagement and revenue, you have got to understand just how fucking rare anything like that is.
I do wonder when it'll all go to shit finally, and I wonder what will take it's place (i've looked for the reddit of digg for reddit, and haven't seen much potential), but right now every day they don't force the redesign is a damn near miracle in a company of that size.
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 just what people are used to
A very long time ago I was an avid slashdot reader (I had a 5 digit account long lost). I briefly went to Digh fir bit, and remember very early on visiting this "reddit" thing that was the new nerd thing.
I remember loading the page, browsing a bit and moving on because of the ugly unusable UI that it had (not even sure if it has subs at that time).
Fast forward all these years later, and I'm active on reddit but exclusively use the old.reddit version. The new one feels overloaded with stuff and my brain cant handle it.
As you very well say, it's mostly a matter of our brains getting used to it. Now I go to slashdot And their comments system seems so broken. When at the time it was pretty good.
The one thing I miss is the ability to quickly post as AnonymousCoward, instead of the throwaway account bullshit
This is, to me, the clincher. Is old reddit perfect? God no (i sometimes block certain elements to clean it up), but the information density is vastly better.
I read/scan quickly and don't care much about images. I can very quickly see if there's anything of interest on the page i'm on, and then move on to something else, or queue up a few comment threads to read through in other tabs. If there's an image, it's usually trivial to quickly zoom in to look at it rather than even bothering to load it again (hit or miss depending on quality).
It's obviously not perfect, but I don't think it's just nostalgia. I legit desire something fundamentally different that what new reddit is trying to offer. I'm looking for a website i wouldn't mind quickly browsing from the terminal using keyboard hotkeys, not something that I swipe forever on my phone with. Even on the phone though I prefer old reddit (was best on firefox for mobile with blockers but i'm back on apple so i need to look into my options.)
Someone like me just wants more text based/information dense screens that can be quickly navigated and then drilled into if i desire more information/content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8chan
and I don't visit it either because I am too old but who would want to fight qanon would probably need to. I salute them.
These things do not last. /r/changemyview tried it too, their website is also gone.
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 quality in “default” content. Yes, you’re funneled into these channels. Yes, Reddit is seeking to get people to consume them. Yes, the interest of advertisers override all others. Yes, Reddit constantly inserts unwanted subs into my feed.
Yet Reddit is still a place I can curate to the subs that align with my interests & values. it’s not dead yet.
I don’t expect any social media platform to give me the defaults I want. I’ve accepted that I can take responsibility for the content I consume.
What I’d like is to build tools that enable people to more easily filter for that content. I believe we need stronger filtering tools, not weaker.
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.
I don’t know if web3 genuinely offers a second chance, but I do know that I will continue to want the ability to learn from thoughtful people of all walks of life. That requires the ability to filter out everything else. At this point, I’d rather select keywords to filter than to surface & happily pay for the privilege.
I’m so tired of being spoon fed the empty calories of outrage.
The larger problem is that most subreddits are moderated by a handful of people, whose interest is expressly _moderating_. They don't care about the community. How could they, they have so many? And the power absolutely goes to their head.
We praise exec wisdom and foresight a lot, but in reality, the people who come in an sit for years in exec positions when no new innovation happens are just reacting to profit indicators and protecting the company for as long as they serve, while leaving a bunch of headaches for the next guy who comes in.
This is the age of "don't rock the userbase" boat in tech. It's only companies that disrupt the entire social media landscape as we know it that wins next, but given time, they too will screw it all up...
All of it repeatedly just reaffirming the true genius of MySpace Tom.
Regardless of the content of your responses/posts, you get banned.
The premise of creating via raw moderator power, a safe space for teenagers on an anonymous internet forum that encourages throwaway accounts is ridiculous.
It would be like getting mad that a school prom doesn’t allow any adults inside. I’m sure there are good adults , but I doubt the intention of random adults and would rather have a whitelist of what adults are allowed.
Given the incredible breadth of services available to those individuals & yet the very real evidence that it continues to be a significant societal challenges, it’s worth considering the role a supportive community of random strangers play.
You can’t post any pro Israel news on /r/politics.
Their definitely needs to be stronger guidelines in place for mods, especially as they become sizable.
Seems sensible to me when anti-Israel news is pretty much banned everywhere else.
Getting banned from the covid-19 subs is also frighteningly easy as well. Any question about vaccine effectiveness or questioning “face coverings” and you’ll either get buried, comment removed, or banned outright.
Aside from not calling it a "cyberpunk movement", the people who work on such tech are still around. See: Mastodon, Pleroma.
The first problem is that thoughtful and interesting content rarely attracts many readers.
The second is that if many readers show up, the discussion quality is going down. So there would need to be strong centralized censorship to downvote the low quality posts and prevent accounts that play the populism game to gain traction.
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 low-effort content, the moderators were overzealous and clueless, and in general there was no sense of community due to the size of the site + lack of individual identifiers beyond usernames, like avatars and signatures from a typical internet forum of the day. Basically, reddit is just as bad today as it was a decade ago.
But I'm sure for people who had their first internet-social experiences on reddit, they remember it a lot more fondly.
I will concede that objectively speaking, "new Reddit" is an abject failure (and the fact that old.reddit.com continues to exist is a testament to the such) and that it's much more heavily astroturfed by major corporations now.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Millions of creators on sites like YouTube and others never get credited or viewed even though their stolen content goes viral on bootleg accounts. It's a huge problem. Even replies and posts from other sites are hijacked for the same purposes now.
It laid the ground work for content theft going on everywhere now...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a4geZL2xmM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaEJWlAbXLk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcE8ZVG_tmo
And that is the stuff behind subs blocking youtube and the strict self-promotion rules.
Content theft on the internet is as old as the internet.
Reddit has even gone as far as to prohibit posting of OC by creators themselves by banning their posts and accounts when they post their own work, calling it "self promotion", while other accounts violate the rule with obvious immunity. They also ban subreddits after they are cultivated and curated too, many times for no good reason. I understand that spam needs to be controlled, but how moderation occurs on Reddit, it's totally not conducted in a normal nor reasonable manner at all.
Edit: In addition, just recently she managed to ward off a blatant thief and finally drive traffic from another hit to herself. But the income lost to the thief in the first few days? Forget about it.
The other major subs are also filled with shallow/unsubstantial content
But if you keep out of those it is usually ok
Also there's always old payment methods where crypto/NFT/digital payment services or even a bag of cash can be used under the table, though nobody can or would want to prove that of course, and of course it's not presented as fact because I have no stake whatsoever in reddit nor desire to see it made less skewed like it used to be in the past.... I've already given up on it myself, long ago when they banned me for no reason and took my sub.
Look carefully at each video you watch on any platform from now on for what products, slogans, and logos are placed in them, and the links/comments that are posted in the comments. There is advertising going on in the majority of reddit posts for something, even if most people don't know it. A lot of the time, even the music used in content is often being subtly imprinted across multiple sites so that it becomes an ear worm as a low-key psychological marketing tactic.
Many major companies are putting out completely engineered "low budget" home videos as ads, they're no longer marking paid ad posts as sponsored, and companies are regularly hiring the most popular and trusted creators to inject subtle advertising cues into otherwise organic looking viral videos. I'm pretty sure that most of what we see on social platforms with paid advertising options now is either staged/funded/enlisted/sponsored production, bot driven content, or low key psychological marketing. This does not include HN based on what I've observed, because they don't sell ad-based post boosting (as far as I know).
OC creators struggle often in futility to break past algorithm ratios just to be seen by small audiences if they don't have massive sums of money to pay for advertising for each post they make on each platform. Getting to the front page without the right funding may be damn near impossible by now, fair enough though, there are a lot of other users competing against you that have copied your style, branding, and/or content, so "F" it, maybe we're all doomed/
does it require it or provide it as an option?
as far as I know you can submit image URLs just fine. gyfcat and imgur videos are regularly on r/all.
hosting multimedia content provides a better experience. does it have downsides? yes. just with google's AMP.
a bit offtopic, but tiktok creators' fund is already shortshelling creators. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAZapFzpP64
and this endless reposting of viral content ... well, it's ongoing since we have viral content. is it great? of course not, but it's not like the reddit CDN somehow changed anything with regards to this problem.
youtube has contentID ... "creators" are free to organize and advocate for reddit/IG/tiktok to introduce it (or lobby US/EU/China to mandate it or whatever)
A lot of content creators spam Reddit to get clicks and eyeballs (obviously). Some subreddits have nearly become 100% YouTube threads. As a result some subs/admins have started to craft tighter requirements for the links posted to bring some sort of balance back to the content.
Are there non traditional communities like Tildetown that you enjoy?
It's likely now all just a random assortment of content from whoever pays the most for ad promotions on their posts, without violating community standards and policy, and occasional celeb posts here and there... of course.
The algo likely only does light duty when something bad on the platform makes the news... They have to make sure paid ads run as promised, and a lot of people buy ads, there is likely no more space for unpaid algo picks, as the Internet now runs 24/7 worldwide with over 8 billion potential customers.
In fact TikTok is widely said to have the best algorithm for determining someone's interests.
If you're someone like a musician, makeup artist, or web developer (for example) TikTok floods you with success tips, tutorials about how people went viral, with tips on pay for promotional ads on the platform, and a constant stream of thought leadership programming to keep you struggling and spending time and money on growth. It's quite hostile to anyone who just wants to develop listeners and viewers, or anyone who wants to market a product independently. Big businesses can just have a meeting with TikTok reps, pay a fee, and get prime promo placement. When you run a small business, without lots of employees, managing social media presence becomes a huge mountain to climb, and TikTok won't meat with you unless you're very popular or wealthy (and willing to spend) already.
Everyone on the platform has a different perspective, TikTok's algo is good at determining that and maximizing what can be earned from each user, but it's not fair nor transparent at all, and it creates a situation where no one can question things because there are others that will always say their TikTok experience is "going just fine". User experience all depends on the user's personas.
Sounds like the ideal opaque platform to brainwash people with "organic", shallow and easy to watch content.
The perfect backdoor for an open society.
Truly a missed field goal... Someone responsible should be spoken to rather harshly about this dereliction of duty, and the db should be at least reverted back to it's 2010 state. heh. :/
It's been an arduous process but I've managed to replace Reddit with a few forums, HN included, that are still alive to this day.
And I've completely banned myself from Reddit. It's hard given how much information is stored on that site.
Without your presence amongst the people on that platform, and with the condemnation and final-judgement people like yourself dole out... how could you expect them to ever be any better or things to improve over the course of a decade?
Team values have all but disappeared. That is the real issue at hand.
We need to be finding leverage and educating them on how to think critically, while providing them with support and encouragement of lifestyles which improve their intellectual abilities. Not put them down and shut them out.
You may disagree - you may believe that there needs to be a culling like a lot of the entitled wealthy class, but that's just naive weak thinking from a group of individuals who couldn't build or run something themselves if their life depended on it. They're essentially nothing more than spoiled children living in a bubble. They have no foresight.
Old fashioned forums are still far and away the best 'system' for this, they're just not 'popular' enough any more, particularly with Facebook providing groups within their massive walls.
HN still keeps to its 'niche' well enough, much as forums have their usual genres that allow for clear moderation and purpose/values.
Our predecessors have homogenized products and services, reducing quality and efficacy - in many cases effectively shadow banning certain types of quality or goods, e.g. food which contains a ton of cancer causing chemicals, or video games which prey upon vulnerable youth and adults VS organic sustainably locally farmed fresh produce that empowers people and brings them together and video games that provide emotionally, socially, and intellectually rewarding experiences of a lifetime.
Developing for the lowest common denominator is the work of an MBA or Economist. It's parasitic behavior of an individual who actually has ZERO interest in the companies services or products or what they actually do for their fellow citizens, and instead do everything they can to divert from those goals in order to steal money and get away with it, effectively.
In the case of Reddit - they pretend to be too much, to do too much, while in reality when you weigh the damage they do to society and themselves VS. the profits they make. The point is, which I think you were making, is that they are catering to a very low bar in order to earn more money at the cost of damaging the foundations upon which their business stands, their own life as well - by damaging and corrupting, or driving away communities who would otherwise be empowered and empowering others (including the MBAs & Economists own families and friends).
The opportunity cost is rapid advancement of technology and stability of social systems, as well as the possible prevention of mass extinction events or prevention of fully blown dystopian realities. These people are literally trading a Jetsons like, badass future for.. short term parties on yachts because they can't get it otherwise. Do you see what I 'm getting at? If these people, these 1% "elites" and "leaders" in our society would just be team players instead they would most likely have the ability to go to the store in just a decade or two and buy themselves a brad pitt body, or a space alien brain, or cure any disease, or buy a perfectly pristine plot of land on the moon or mars (most likely less time than that because things tend to advance at exponential rates when people work together without so much impedance).
This is why I wish more people would start debating with these obscenely rich and powerful people because the people aren't going to cut it in this day and age. We live in unprecedented times where reaching a critical mass with just a bunch of uneducated people is simply no longer effective due to the tools of mass manipulation and fake news that there are. It's also reason to get your hands dirty with undereducated and underprivileged reddit users. All you have to do to get through to them is (A) use their language and (B) balance it out with validation, acknowledgement / mirroring / positive reinforcement of their good logic and behavior. They learn VERY quickly this way and can become formidable allies in a short time.
If we want to do this, we need simply to illustrate for the rich "elite" the opportunity costs of continuing down the path they're on. They are not intelligent business persons when you consider these costs. It's actually insane. It's like trying to compare a $48,000 salary in the early 2000s (after 2001) to infinity. There isn't a comparison, it's just stupid business practices all the way down. HOWEVER, we know they aren't exactly unintelligent either, so to say it's impossible to reach them and convince them is just silliness. They will wake up to it they just need someone they'll listen to, to explain it for them using their own language.
You're not making any sense at all and it seems like you've just completely shifted subjects to the algorithm and what makes it to the top.
I wonder - are you under the impression that you have to have a big following or be at the top to influence people? In that case, you should think about how you view top posts and reddit and realize that your target audience isn't bots or necessarily clandestine orgs, but people who could be considered low hanging fruit or "on the fence".
In fact it is best if you are a nobody. It's how you choose to use your words and how good you are at cutting through all the conjecture and b.s. logical fallacies. It's quite effective and doesn't require hardly any effort.
Your attitude, no offense, stinks it would seem. You basically skipped over everything I said, haven't appeared to consider any of the points I made and then switched subjects.
Are you debating here in good faith? Because it really doesn't seem that way at all based on your entire response.
Yes "Education" requires patient teachers, but it also requires a very specific environment without all of the above. You don't have to look to social media platforms for it cause that's not where education happens.
The main thing right now is bots. Endless copying & reposting of submissions, and even wholesale copy/pasting comment replies. The reddit staff have to know about this as it's been going on for a while, but seemingly don't care.
When I started on Reddit there was already an element of things having changed, a move away from niche technology discussion towards lowest common denominator stuff and discussion by meme.
In general this was fine as you could just move to smaller subreddits, and the bigger pages had fun cultures that permeated the others and gave it all a sense of unity and shared interest even when you were in your bubble.
The difficult change I've seen in the past few years is the rising number of hate and harassment subs, and Reddit tolerating them. If you scroll through the top of /r/BanFemaleHateSubs or /r/AgainstDegenerateSubs you'll see how bad things have become and how unsafe the general environment is.
It's not that discussion has become worse in an Eternal September way, it's that discussion has become openly threatening, with innocent women having their pictures and social media links shared for strangers to discuss rape and murder fantasy, and this gets 10s of 1000s of subscribers and Reddit routinely ignores reports about it.
In my view this is just a symptom of the wider populace gaining access to internet forums and the cultural shift mass internet usage brought. As in, there have always been darker corners of the internet, just that the people who frequented them had to have some level of nerdiness/geekiness and {nerds}∩{violent racists} is smaller than {whole population}∩{violent racists}.
Back in 2010 there would be discussions about places like /r/jailbait, about the tradeoffs between free speech and public safety etc. Now there are subreddits openly sharing child pornography with links to the social media accounts of the children and their families, and Reddit auto responds that these things don't violate their usage policies when reported.
The r/BanThisandThat subreddits are little more than morality police. Many of those posts will take statements out of context or regard any "cis-het" sexual fantasies as threatening to women.
> It's not that discussion has become worse in an Eternal September way, it's that discussion has become openly threatening, with innocent women having their pictures and social media links shared for strangers to discuss rape and murder fantasy, and this gets 10s of 1000s of subscribers and Reddit routinely ignores reports about it.
Firstly, social media accounts aren't secret. Anyone who publishes to a Twitter or FB account cannot claim a retroactive right to privacy. The other contention I have is that Reddit should not punish a written expression of thought merely because it's unpalatable to a certain section of its userbase. Pandering to a moral minority sets up a precedent for the most loudest performing "victims"-of-the-day to decide what everyone else is allowed to say, hear, or think.
Call it morality police if you want but it's targeted sexual violence against minors and women who don't consent. I guess your morality and mine don't align. If I'm in the "morality minority" on this one then that's very sad and I would encourage yourself and other members of "morality majority" to reflect on how women are treated in your society.
Out of interest, would you mind sharing your Facebook or Instagram profile here, so that someone could share you pictures on a subreddit for rape and murder fantasy about you, linking back to the account? It's only fantasy right, would be a shame of the morality police ruined the fun.
I'm all for illegal and non-consensual content subreddits to be banned. That's not all the mentioned "Ban This and That" subs are asking for, so I won't accept their moral opinions beyond the issues of non-consenting and illegal materials. They are prescribing a sexual morality, one which I, and I think many reasonable people, disagree with or at least have qualms with. If you don't believe me, r/BFHS seems to be a hotspot for anti-kink and anti-porn activists who suggest that women with kinks need to "heal"[0]. If that's not moralizing, I'm not sure what is.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/BanFemaleHateSubs/comments/unaa88/c...
The function of the community is to draw attention to outright abuse that is happening on Reddit in the open. That is a broad mission and will definitely attract a range of people. Some may be moralists or however you want to paint them. Does that mean we should turn away from them or what do you suggest?
Maybe you could join the effort and be a voice of the reason you believe in and speak out against what you perceive as unhealthy "kink shaming" and ensure the topic stays on hand against things that are definitely not "edge cases" (which from my experience is the majority of what's posted).
No doubt it's imperfect "at the edges" but what isn't? It seems dangerous to draw attention away from _the huge issue in the middle_.
Some actors will use it as advertising space but I don't think the blame for that should be put onto the shoulders of those fighting it.
Do you have an idea of how this issue could be avoided without turning a blind eye?
Like how r/tumblrinaction got banned recently, the members of the sub didn't report themselves for racism and transphobia.
Secondly, they also have large numbers of participants from a range of backgrounds with a range of motivations. The subreddits they are discussing tend to have 10s of 1000s of followers actively engaging in various levels of harassment, I doubt that's a single sock puppet.
Thirdly, do you have a source for anything you're claiming?
Finally, if what you're saying is true then someone is posting child pornography to Reddit. Regardless of his intentions we should be concerned about that.
Your second point is simply false. There are plenty of real women active on Reddit, and many active as moderators. Yes I am sure of it.
You mean transgender people? Because that's a pretty offensive description
The user revealed their name in an interview here: https://www.fastcompany.com/3026860/a-brief-rundown-of-the-s...
According to one of the sources linked in a sibling comment, this user was arrested for domestic violence. A quick look at their user profile shows they are the top mod of r/garland, which isn't far from where the arrest occurred.
That's how I read the original comment.
I agree though that just about all changes made to the reddit website itself have been for the worse. Perhaps the story of digg.com will play out again?
An Subreddits can only help you towards alternative mainstream until they grow too big.
But bottom line is that perhaps the single most disruptive event an online community can experience is a large sustained influx of new members. It just will not be the same before and after.
This is also why the 'powermods' are so damaging: without proper, attentive moderation an influx of new users invariably leads to a decline in quality.
Half the subreddits in /r/all are so homogeneous that it's impossible to tell if a post was in /r/muderedbywords, /r/nextfuckinglevel, /r/damnthatsinteresting, /r/unexpected, etc.
And that's not to mention all the bots...
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 show the usernames at all, only the names of subreddits - producing the odd impression that the subreddits are authoring the posts and not individual users within the subreddit.
HN's UI is sort of similar on the first half: Users are de-emphasized here as well, but there are no subreddits to emphasize instead. Though I think it would be interesting if someone made an alternative frontend for HN that presented threads in the style of an old web forum, with user identities shown prominently
I think it works frightenly well sometimes. Ask yourself:
- How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year?
- How many people do you know on HN?
> - How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year?
- None that I remember, thank goodness. One man's conversations are another man's flame wars.
> - How many people do you know on HN?
- At the very least, knowing HN users' affiliations and posting tendencies is key to quickly blocking unwanted ideological noise, whether it concerns international politics or programming languages.
This is IMO the approach that makes the most sense. Let users ignore other users, rather than enforcing bans/shadowbans on the whole userbase.
While I personally would rather not block anyone, I think everyone should have the ability to police the content they see, but in most cases not what other people see.
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.
The comments were often equally low effort with memes and weak jokes rising to the top. This was especially infuriating in places like /r/askreddit where the only chance of seeing replies that weren't clear fabrications or jokes was to specifically ask for serious replies.
There were really only 2 ways for a subreddit to be good. It either had to be small and relatively close-knit or it had to have rules against low effort content and solid moderation enforcing those rules. But since communities will naturally grow as people find them and because people hate when moderators remove their posts, Reddit ended up exactly where it was destined to.
the success of this comment is a far better illustration of Eternal September
They don't even touch on the Eternal September of reddit. Every thread is full of the most mundane observations possible, lazy puns, entirely expected The Office references and sayings which have been said literally thousands of times before -- followed up by someone going "this is the most perfect comment" all of which is wildly upvoted.
It feels like it is being botted by a simplistic lazy circle jerking ML text generation algorithm. Maybe it is. But it is definitely drowning in https://xkcd.com/1053/.
First, I have no idea what Reddit the company has been doing since basically every addition to the site in over a decade has been garbage and has made the site worse to use. The site is basically unusable without the old.reddit.com style, their media hosting is worse than imgur or any of the other alternatives, their app and mobile experience is worse than any number of free alternatives, and besides that I don't know what else the have done except gamify posts with their awards system.
The second problem is how communities on Reddit and the internet as a whole are structured, incentivized and evolve. So many of these communities are unable to check themselves (which generally requires very good moderation), and with incentive structures like upvotes and awards, posting is gamified where people post things they think others will approve of and will reward, which causes communities to become monocultures as everyone else just leaves, is downvoted into oblivion or just banned from the subreddit. These communities basically become filled with people who have the same opinions and circlejerk about them in ways that affirm their opinions and disparage ones that oppose them, causing them to slowly become detached from reality. It creates a community of people who basically become unable to discuss things with people who don't share the same opinions, which then carries over to interactions outside of those monocultures. Lots of these people just dont have the ability to even talk to others with differing viewpoints now.
The best communities and best conversations I have had online have been those that offer a lot of off topic discussions within interest based communities. Support group/ identity based communities need very strong moderation because they are much more susceptible to "radicalization" if that is the correct term.
It is true Reddit is a pile of garbage, but it was a worse pile of garbage when its community was posting kiddie porn and creating 'N-chain' comment threads.
All of the major subreddits have gotten watered down because that's what happens when 29 million users (r/pics) are voting on comments. Communities change fundamentally when they scale up. The answer is to seek out smaller communities.
The smartest thing the Reddit admins every did was to create subreddits. At the time, everyone on Reddit criticized them for it. Users wanted to be able to have a single link get posted to multiple subreddits with a single discussion, so that subreddits would behave like tags. But the admins said that, no, the whole point was to create separate distinct communities that could flourish on their own and they were absolutely right.
They were right only because their goal was to increase the number of users to the largest extent possible.
> everyone on Reddit criticized them for it
... and they were also right, because at the time reddit was a community for mostly tech news, similarly to what HN represents now. Creating the subreddits led to the tech part of the community to be splintered and then get more and more watered down as time went by. It's sad.
As a user of reddit I would like to isolate myself from these people as much as possible, which is now somewhat possible by blacklisting subbredits. But sadly the people themselves are vastly over represented in the wider community and having to suffer through chains of memes and hot takes, vitriol and all around non good faith discourse is making me go less and less into the comments of interesting posts because I don't really want to subject myself to all that negativity.
In my opinion, the overall effect is negative, despite the existence of diamonds in the rough communities here and there.
PS. I am saying these things as a long time reddit user and as a dev that tries to build an alternative link aggregator and discussion platform for communities to move to. :D
You don’t have to publicly blame it on "leftists" and compare it to NK. Your kind of speech isn’t welcome here.
Why not, comparison is a good way to paint picture and leftists are the bad actors in what is being discussed.
> Your kind of speech isn’t welcome here.
How very tolerant of you.
This isn't true. Banning is _per-subreddit_, done by the respective mod teams. Your behaviour would need to be especially egregious for it to be picked up by the admins.
> Leftists naturally following a very North Korean and censorious approach.
Ah, I see. Makes complete sense.
Reddit will ban your IP and all accounts corresponding to that IP for alleged ban evasion of a single sub ban.
So no, banning isn't per subreddit or the alleged ban avoider would be just banned solely on the specific sub they have been banned before.
Is this anecdotal, or do you have more information about this?
In my experience the admins do not care about subreddit bans and only get involved when a person is consistently rule-breaking and evading bans.
Moderators of large subreddits don't even have a direct line of commutation with the admins anymore. There used to be a dedicated Slack where mods could escalate things.
I moderated dozens of large subreddits, many defaults, until a few years ago.
I'd love to know what makes you more experienced. Perhaps some concrete evidence?
It's user generated content, mostly by people who hate their lives, hate society and hate others, aided by the traditional media they link to.
By the time I saw that reality is different and so much better than the doom I got on Reddit, it was too late.
I don't understand. How could you make a life-changing mistake by reading the news?
Sadly somewhat common. And you can talk about it almost nowhere, due to "transphobia"
[0] https://time.com/5125894/is-reading-news-bad-for-you/
So, during Brexit times, I read (and wrote) a lot of r/europe, r/ukpolitics, r/brexit. Which at the time were cesspools of doom, every little thing was a catastrophe, and I believed it. I started thinking "I need to get out", that was on my mind fucking 24/7.
Then I lost my job partly because of Brexit (drop in exports to EU, company decided to lay off a bunch of people), at which point I was convinced the UK was going to shit and I was gonna get locked in, kicked out or some weird shit.
So, yeah, I left the UK without bothering to apply for pre-settled status, just abandoned everything. Those Reddit subs played a major part in it - I've thought about it a lot and it's a reasonable conclusion.
The reality is that the UK is the best country in Europe if you speak English and like your freedoms. It has not gone to shit, and it's unlikely that it will. I know poor Brits love to complain, but they're just not seeing the opportunities. It was by far the easiest country to settle and make a lot of money in. And the food is great - people who say otherwise are either snobs who only talk about restaurants, trolling or have never stepped into an ASDA lol
Anyway, don't be a dumbass like me. Just do yourself a favour and don't read r/politics, /r/news, worldnews, national subreddits, and just most general subreddits. If you see a lot of doom and gloom, abandon it.
You’re the one hating here. I wonder what your "reality" is like.
[1] Unfortunately, there is no better alternative.
You want to know why the web is so bad? Because it's slowly become acceptable to treat your users with complete contempt by interrupting and "nudging" them into being surveillance cattle.
This is revisionist romanticism. Reddit is just a collection of forums like the many hundreds of thousands that came before it, and continue to exist alongside it. Reddit is also so incredibly massive that making sweeping statements about its quality or composition is meaningless, what one consumes on reddit is really more a reflection of the individual rather than the site itself.
You can't ban a group that isn't a group. So the site grouped loose collections of people into what they called communities. And it became self fulfilling as groups define themselves by what they are not as well as what they are.
The admins also started actively policing subreddits, and shuffling uncooperative mod teams.
Perhaps Reddit was never a bastion of 'independent thought', but in the beginning (after subreddits came into being) there was an understanding that communities were independent.
But eventually they started getting bad press (e.g. /r/jailbait) and the 'jannies' started refusing to work for free (e.g. blackouts), so they decided to quash anyone causing them grief.
There’s nothing in there about Reddit making moderation policies
The Internet doesn’t have a limit on the number of web sites. You want to say something, get a $2/month shared hosting plan and post HTML, or lease fiber and run your own server farm, or do any number of things in between.
Most of the popular subreddit's comment sections have top rated comments being something totally predictable and sarcastic.
Right now the top post on r/news is [1]
Contrasted to the equivalent story on hackernews: [2]
There isn't anything remotely thought provoking in the top rated comments on reddit as there is on hackernews.
It seems to me this isn't due to censorship or corporate influence, but purely due to the fact that the reddit post has 100x more upvotes (and therefore more viewership) than the hackernews equivalent.
In the pockets of reddit that have a small but active community, I think it's easier to argue that the original essence and charm of reddit is still very much alive.
I'm skeptical that even without all the corrupting factors mentioned in this article, that reddit would ever be a place for the masses to engage healthy discourse and speech
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/vjpfbh/supreme_court_...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31862258
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
But it's a good place to see where the wind is blowing in terms of the ongoing radicalization of white men.
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?
And there are also subs which disallow snarky "fuck this country"-kind of takes.