Frankly it's depressing how many people there are who value money over integrity. I'm sure they've always existed, but the Internet certainly has amplified their existence.
I think the internet provides a tantalizing way for them to make money, but I think it's changes in the legal, economic, and social environment that has really amplified them.
I've dropped reddit and started moving towards small communities that also do in-person events. I can't engage with anonymous communities anymore. Everyone is potentially a bot. The irony being that I still use hackernews.
Twitter is 10x worse than reddit for astroturfing, political propaganda bots, and blue check clowns. I agree with you for sure that HN is several notches above reddit though
I have been curating and sanitizing my feed, I get cat pics, occasional Marvel stuff, ML stuff and ones from friends, but yeah still if I browse the main feed, vitriol does pop up, though I mute accounts and keywords.
Yea after their blatant disregard for community after the API fiasco, I decided I didn't need to use Reddit anymore.
For a while I just used hacker news. Then I picked up TikTok. It isn't horrible but I sometimes have to be careful because the feed will start to try and feed me stuff that's just brain rot.
Yeah I'm basically cut off from the modern internet because my values don't align with it, as a young person. I can't stomach anything where people are trying to sell something or gain popularity and are insincere. It means im basically just on here, ft comments, and ars sometimes.
Speaking as someone who joined it as early as 2007, getting banned from reddit with no explanation and no chance of recourse was the best thing that happened to be me in 2024.
The same thing happened to my extremely old account (17+ years). A few weeks ago I noticed I stopped getting replies and taking a look in incognito mode verified my suspicion. I had stopped existing. I think it was because I had started the habit of deleting my older comments. Oddly enough, the hundreds of comments I had deleted had returned (only visible to me of course...other uses clicking on my profile would see an "account doesn't exist" message). At that point I just deleted the account in disgust.
Moderation has become a real weak-point for reddit. They expect anonymous and unpaid volunteers to do the hard and thankless job of keeping large numbers of passionate strangers, malicious bots, trolls, etc. under control while being impartial, honest, etc.. In reality, their mods are usually either power-tripping, pushing their own agenda, or state-sponsored propagandists. There's absolutely no recourse if you see shady moderation going on. Reddit doesn't care so long as everybody keeps clicking.
I recently decided to take a break from reddit, and may yet make that break permanent. There is still some good stuff there, but it's getting rarer and harder to find in a sea of spam.
I doubt you were banned from 'reddit' with no chance of recourse. More likely that you were banned from a subreddit; site-wide bans are generally clearly explained.
My account is 18+ years old with 100k+ of organic karma evenly split between posting and commenting. I was an active moderator for both my local country sub and part of the moderator reserves program.
Did you contact Reddit? A similar thing happened to me a few years ago, turns out I had accidentally upvoted my own content from a different account. Admins replied to the e-mail with an explanation, and fixed it quite fast.
I did and got back what appeared to be an automated reply given the near immediate response.
>Thanks for submitting an appeal to the Reddit admin team. We've reviewed your request and your appeal will not be granted and your ban will remain in place.
>-Reddit Admin Team
>This is an automated message; responses will not be received by Reddit admins.
It's really a bummer to lose an 18+ year account that I've accumulated so many friends and community relations, and one that is tied to a common public nickname I use on socials and is literally tattooed on my arm. So I figured I'd wait a year and request again.
But that was years ago. Since shortly before the API purge, all you get is an auto response of "we have reviewed your report and there was no mistake."
Same! My >decade old account was banned in 2023 despite having great karma and a clean track record. I swore the place off and have been much happier and more productive since.
I engage with real people on various discord servers instead nowadays.
Some people post in different timezones, so capture the attention of 'as many as possible', but you are likely correct as previous post was 22h ago (so almost same time yesterday), and not 4/8/12/16/20 hours ago.
I get it but for what is worth, the accepted behavior here is that you can repost eventually but you should wait significantly longer than a day before doing so.
> Are reposts ok?
>If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
Weeeell, technically a fresh new story hasn't got any attention in the last year or so because it was never posted before, so a small number of reposts - like in this case - should be ok.
Seems like the resulting attention on the repost makes for decent justification in this case. I'm glad to have seen this, and I don't like the idea of good content slipping through the cracks because of timing and circumstance.
I can relate and it is something I'm thinking about as I have a post I'd like to try reposting without coming off as spammy. In this case, the repost was indeed worth it as far as I can tell.
Note that there is a “second chance” pool of posts which did not get much attention but are perhaps more interesting to the community than the engagement suggests. The mods seem to agree with this point, given that.
I've gotten on the frontpage multiple times by reposting a day later. You never know how the timing is going to work out. This behavior also fits within the guidelines.
I can empathize. Part of what we require seems to be better detection and signaling of which accounts are most and least likely to be human but I'm not sure if we'll get that in the biggest forums.
LLMs can practically pass the Turing test in this context so on one hand, this should become worse, but on the other hand we are not that far from where the LLM comments are about as worth as the random real ones anyway. And if you want more than this level, you have to curate better.
I'm reminded of some of the 'virtue' of the crassness and unfriendliness of the chans - namely, they are not friendly to corporations. No corporation wants to be found to be associated with such a place, spewing slurs and bigotry, however ironic, in order to sell their goods.
This has its own problems, obviously, but there is something to a monied-interests-unfriendly set of cultural shibboleths.
I'll buy an expensive hat and eat it, though, if the chans aren't already crawling with sinister propagand-anon-automatons playing tug of war with the Overton window of edgelord discourse.
> Maybe they were also bots, spiraling endlessly into their algorithmically optimized oblivion?
As long as they got a timer, so the bots react "between 10 and 30 mins later" and they got a limit to "5 interactions per day", otherwise, if some-five coders forget those limits, and we end up having 5 bots interacting within a 1ms of the 'previous post', Reddit will run out of storage space :)
Yes, which was also a bot comment in the bot post that the bot article commented on:
> The top comment mentions something called "Dead Internet Theory": the belief that most online interactions are automated loops of bots communicating with eachother.
But seriously, I think we'll see some social networks start pushing a "verified human" tag soon enough... if it wasn't for the fact they earn tons of money from bots that provide a steady supply highly upvoted / impressed / engaged with / ad view generating content.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if Reddit itself is behind bot networks. But we'd need a whistleblower to verify that conspiracy theory.
Reading linked article and comments like yours was an interesting trip. At first I took the post to be about a real post, then the Reddit post is a bot, then the replies are perhaps bots. Now I don't even know what's real of this story, which is probably the real lesson. Maybe I just wanted a story with clear bad and good guys.
I was walking along in the desert when I noticed a tortoise crawling in the sand. I reached down and flipped the tortoise on its back. It laid on its back, belly baking in the hot sun, legs beating, trying to turn itself right side up, but it couldn’t, not without my help. But I didn’t help. AITA?
"...cancels an android into catalepsy," Rachael said, her eyes shut. "For a few seconds."
It is mentioned once, then never again AFAIR. They could use that device to detect andys with the press of a button, but why do that when you have something straightforward like the Voigt-Kampff test?
Interestingly, a few hours after the posthuman.blog post circulated on reddit yesterday, the embedded amazon link at the end of the original post was suddenly edited out.
Behind every bot is a shifty motherfucker who has always been a scamming piece of shit.
First they polluted email with spam. Then they polluted search results with SEO. Now they pollute forums with crap like this.
For a brief moment in the 20th century, small pockets of middle-class people in the West forgot this basic fact of the universe, but people the world over still suffered. Leaded gasoline. Big tobacco. Cults. Big oil. Big sugar. Violent ideologies with seven-digit body counts. ...All of this happened while we were enjoying our nice suburban lifestyles where we could "leave our doors unlocked."
It never stopped, but it never started, either. Radium water. Snake oil salesmen. The Claque. Papal indulgences. Debased and shaved coinage. The greatest engineer of the Roman period, Hero of Alexandria, made numerous devices that performed "miracles" so temples could extract donations from visitors. I'm sure if they were around today, those same ancient corrupt priests would be shilling memecoins.
This behaviour isn't even unique to humans.
Ever since the first bacterium with a defective metabolic pathway started taking excess production from its neighbours, there have been cheaters. Ecologists call it the Black Queen hypothesis: if the other guy is left holding the bag, then you can invest more of your own energy into reproducing, until there's no more slack in the carrying capacity. Cheating is literally an evolutionary strategy.
To be part of the world you must be resilient to the evil that is baked into it, even when it comes to your doorstep.
If a platform can't or won't offer the tools to limit abuse, go find or build a new platform that can.
I can understand what the bots posting this stuff on reddit are after, but what puzzles me a bit are the posters here who clearly are LLM-backed bots that post once or twice without any affiliate links or other visible scams, then disappear. Maybe they are getting banned but it isn't obvious? (If so, good job dang and team!)
For an example mixed with a bit of irony, a few months ago, I submitted a link to a content obfuscator (meant to target site scraping bots) that I wrote. One of the replies was from a brand new account, that hasn't posted before or since, with a fairly obvious LLM take:
If your content got ingested by scrapers that don't respect the robots.txt, but that it was copied to another domain with a more lenient robots.txt, you could poison legitimate datasets.
It seems wasteful to actively try to sabotage humankind's technological progress.
I took it as a poor-quality local model. I suppose it is possible, but it seems...unlikely... that one of the three responses to that post was a person who was so upset by the idea of serving junk content to scraper bots that they registered for an account, wrote their criticism, and then disappeared from the site.
At that time, there were a whole bunch of flagged-dead comments from newly-created accounts that had compound-word usernames (such as the text I linked to above from 'earlydeveloper'.) So, if these are people manually writing those posts, I understand the behavior even less than the bot hypothesis.
The web we know is dead. I almost stopped reading anything outside HN, and even in HN, I've been noticing a rise of bots, especially with ShowHN where suddenly a bot will start upvoting and commenting random crap to move it to the top.
I read a report that 49% of internet traffic in 2024 was bots. I believe this will increase significantly this year.
Funny how back in the 90s/00s, we used to say 49% of the internet was porn. And now we say it's bots. Something curious about both being fake human interactions.
I've started using old-school forums where I can find them for communities I care about (e.g. music production forums like vi-control...sometimes Hans Zimmer shows up!). It's a joy when you find one, kinda feels like the old days. The only annoying thing is the never-die threads. Some threads on these forums are over 15 years old. But honestly, I've really soured on the voting mechanic.
It's grifting all the way down. The only solution I can envision is an internet liberated of commercial pressures. If you couldn't make money online, surely grifters would stop caring?
People karma-farm here for no obvious commercial benefit. I'm sure the activity would be greatly reduced, but not eliminated, with a lack of commercial incentives.
I used to love Reddit, but the astroturfing has become unbearable, especially by political groups.
After this last election, I think political groups realized local subreddits were underutilized and have regrouped accordingly.
While I still trust some appended Reddit searches on Google, I'm losing faith there too. Product/service recommendation threads are really easy to manipulate.
Reddit is incredibly echo-chamber-y for me, the voting and karma system optimizes for the wrong type of content I feel. I've tried to engage with a few niche-interest subreddits (homebrewing, electronics, musical instruments) over the years and all of them left me generally dissapointed.
My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.
The last 2-3 years this issue just became worse and worse.
Reddit is fantastic for memes though. There are some hilarious subreddits out there. But I rarely engage, just consume.
Leading up to the election Reddit fed me stories about Kamala’s huge rally turnouts, Trump‘s tiny rally turnouts, and endless links to stories about positive signs she would win. It was a forgone conclusion to me it was going to be a blowout for her.
Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the content. It's not designed to give you an accurate view of upcoming election outcomes, and is not at all surprising that it might show someone mostly content from one side's fans, regardless of whether they side is going to win or not.
There was a brief moment when pro-Trump content would occasionally surface on the algorithm, at which point the site operators hit the panic button and banned the offending subreddit.
The reason for deliberately antagonizing them, and eventually banning them, was that /r/The_Donald's moderators were directly telling their membership to upvote specific posts so they'd rocket to the front page. "Inorganic results", "vote manipulation", "gaming the algorithm", whatever you'd like to call it.
So the admins had a reason to ban it, even if no doubt they and most of Reddit's users saw Trump supporters as "the enemy".
The reason for deliberately antagonizing them, and eventually banning them, was that /r/The_Donald's moderators were directly telling their membership to upvote specific posts so they'd rocket to the front page.
There would need to be extensive evidence to convince me that the subreddit wasn't just botted. Threads would get thousands of posts extremely quickly, and there would sometimes be only a handful of comments. I don't really believe organic users were spending their free time refreshing "new" just in case a new post was made that required an immediate upvote.
It doesn't need bots to explain it. And even the Reddit admins were convinced T_D had legitimate traffic, which is why they were reticent to kill it... they just didn't like the manipulation and brigading and so on. If they could show it was bots, they would've killed it much sooner.
Normal humans tend to upvote things that are already upvoted. But normal humans don't tend to look at the incoming stream of posts.
Ordinary T_D users were refreshing the subreddit's front page. Mods stickied the posts they wanted to rocket to the top. This got them past the hurdle where very few people look at /new to give those all-important first few upvotes. Ordinary T_D users upvoted the stickied posts. The mods then unstickied them less than an hour later, because now they're "organically" at the top of T_D, and the upvotes continued to pile in, rocketing the post to /r/all
Meanwhile, all the other subreddits weren't playing this game, so their users votes were split across multiple posts on their subreddit's front page. And mods of other subs use sticked posts for administrative notices, which are worded as such and tend not to get upvoted much... but if you were to sticky a normal post, users would upvote it. But stickied posts aren't eligible for /r/all... unless you unsticky them. Oops! T_D successfully gamed that oversight.
EDIT1: Also... as the comments in the link above reminds me; it used to be that any post could be stickied, e.g. normal link posts. It wasn't necessarily clear that they were stickied posts. What changed after the T_D manipulation is that sticky posts were renamed "Administrative Notes" and had to be text posts and had to be coloured differently from normal posts. Before that change, they weren't distinguished that way. Now perhaps the subterfuge by mods makes more sense?
EDIT2: WIRED's postmortem on T_D - it was cunning mods, not bots.
T_D’s moderators were looking for a way to game the system and force T_D onto r/all every day.
The mods realized that a key lay in the “sticky” system, by which moderators could pin a post at the top of their subreddit indefinitely. The system was meant for announcements, rule changes, upcoming events, and other minutia of day-to-day Redditing. But any thread could be stickied, and stickied threads behaved the same way that any other Reddit thread did: They accrued points by vote, and more points boosted the thread closer to the top of the page. This didn’t typically matter, since a stickied thread was by definition artificially held at the top of its subreddit already. But the mods weren’t trying to make threads visible on The_Donald. They wanted to boost them onto r/all.
T_D’s moderators began to sticky threads unrelated to their rules or announcements. Instead, they promoted especially provocative user-created threads. This tactic quickly proved effective. Before long, T_D was elevating a post or two onto r/all day after day.
Another T_D mod, Alex, says the team kept in close touch not only with which threads were successful, but also how mods could encourage their users to vote on stickied threads and drive them higher in Reddit’s r/all rankings. “We trained our subscribers to upvote and comment in every thread,” Alex says. “That is how we originally gamed the algorithm.” Jessie, a third mod, says T_D’s mods made “repetitive requests” to the user ...
On the one hand, yes; I don't think the admins made that specific change, but they took away the ability to sticky normal posts, in response to T_D's shenanigans, ending the effectiveness of that tactic.
On the other hand, there aren't simple technological fixes to social problems. T_D's mods remained tricksy and continued to work their userbase to upvote and focus - in ways which didn't breach the sitewide rules on manipulation - and still kept hitting /r/all
Reddit could have simply banned T_D at any time. In the years since then they've definitely started banning subreddits for no good reason, but apparently based simply on how much upper management likes the subreddit. Presumably, T_D was not banned because upper management liked it.
>Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the content.
You see the same phenomena on /r/all, which isn't personalized.
I actually found out about the Silksong “announcement” from it being number one on the r/all feed followed by several other switch 2/games announcements in the top 5…
You have to remember that there was some pretty nutso tariff news right about the same time, not that strange for it to be highly represented on the front page.
> Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the conten
That's not the whole truth. Subreddit Moderation is the key point that's vulnerable to abuse. I block all political subreddits. My blocklist has 120 entries. 10 of those are of inherent political nature. The rest is just like /r/pics - enshittified rage bait about Trump.
Reddit’s algo is doing an astonishingly bad job if they want me to stay engaged based on the things I follow. I’ve got two seperate accounts one for general stuff, the other intended strictly for NSFW purposes and meeting people with similar interests. I spent maybe half an hour yesterday on the NSFW account blocking everything that wasn’t in my interests, but more and more unrelated (and general) subreddits kept being recommended to me. After a while of this, I gave up and deleted the app, which I can’t imagine is good for Reddit’s bottom line. I’ll probably be back at some point as it is still in my experience the best way to see that stuff and meet like-minded people, but I was kinda shocked at how difficult (impossible?) it was to just keep one account restricted to specific interests that I do kinda want to be engaged with.
As someone with a reddit account old enough to vote, it's always been like that. If you only browsed reddit it would have been a sure bet that Bernie Sanders would be the democratic candidate, and Ron Paul was going to win before that.
Same. And for about 12 to 24 hours after the election loss it was... quiet. A few people coming to terms that the illusion had disappeared, but not in any way comparable to the interactions beforehand.
The default subs are filled with left-wing conspiracy theories these days.
A consequence of years of reddit allowing its mods to shadow ban centrist voices.
It’s hard to see how reddit escapes this mess. They need more normal people and less political zealots, but the site is already so far down the echo chamber path that its overt political partisanship scares off potential new normal users from participating.
I don't see why they would. Rage drives engagement, and they just got the number one rage inducing factor back into public office for the next 4 years. This form of engagement also works better on progressives I think.
Honestly, the internet is killing us all slowly. It was better not to argue with our neighbors on the Internet or even social media. Or fellow citizens or even foreign ones CONSTANTLY
There was certainly a lot of optimism but I don't think you can really say the mood was a clear blow out. Anyone mentioning such a thing would get many replies of "doesn't matter...vote anyway!"
I think Kamala actually did have the lead in Reddit's demographics.
I would absolutely get that same feeling from reddit. But like do you not interact in the actual world? Trump would have a rally and areas 45 minutes away are backed up with traffic for 8 hours. Kamala had one and you can't even reliably figure out how to get tickets and other than motorcade closures traffic is nothing.
So much anti-Kamala and pro-Trump stuff in the communities that are supposed to be strong for her.
That Kamala did as well as she did was really shocking to me. I mean it wasn't close, but Kamala couldn't even make past the very first debate in 2020 and her list of accomplishments is basically nothing. I never met anyone in real life with an actual compelling or supportive argument for her. At best it was "she's not Trump".
Taking Biden out and having no primary is probably the worst thing Democrats could have done.
> having no primary is probably the worst thing Democrats could have done.
I'd argue the 15 years of identity politics that both led to Harris as VP and prevented them from being able to commit the faux paux of possibly passing her up by letting their constituents decide if they liked her was their worst decision.
Your entire post reads like a bot post on reddit. Not sure if you're trying to prove the point and forgot the /s or actually believe the nonsense you've posted.
part of the echo chamber is also instant shadow bans on many of the major subs, and especially political ones, unless you consistently comment (shadow banned) comments and eventually get whitelisted by a mod or bot who's determined you to be the "right" sort of commenter. and again an instant shadow ban again the second you trigger any "bad" keywords
That's presumably an anti-bot/astroturfing measure. As bad as that is, I'm not sure what the alternative should be. Allowing anyone to post with a 1 minute old account? Implement real name verification?
I can't speak to every local subreddit but I can tell you for sure that while it may have started as an anti-bot measure, on /r/newzealand it is absolutely used as a way to gatekeep the wrong opinions from being present on the subreddit.
Using the 1/9/90 split [0] for creators/commenters/readers, it seems farfetched to suggest that reddit accounts (which benefits readers making an account to curate subreddit subscriptions) can't follow this pattern where many legitimate human users do not comment often.
Plenty of people don't comment often, but the impetus to sign up for an account is often to comment, which subs then either disallow or delete because they don't want new accounts commenting.
> My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.
In my experience, Reddit can be an okay place for niche hobbies until the reddit becomes semi-popular. Then it's a lost cause for anyone but newbies posting the same question every day and old timers who take pleasure in yelling at them.
I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
Any real discussion is drowned out so the average post now is "bought these, new to the hobby, what do I do with them?".
The meshtastic sub is a good example of that. People buying hobbyist hardware, without doing any research. They probably saw some youtube video, hit the amazon "buy", then when it arrived, they're stumped.
Yeah, it's just consumption consumption consumption.
Post a photo of your new gizmo: 300 upvotes. Video of you using your widget: 4 votes.
And in subreddits dedicated to actually making things, it's just hustling hustling hustling. With a small percentage of self-help posts like "how I spent 4 years in my boring-ass generic video game and nobody wanted it".
> I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
This is exactly what happened to all of the hobby reddits I enjoyed.
Any useful discussion was crowded out by 10 posts per week (or day) of people posting their newest purchase or asking a question that had been answered 1000 times already.
The useful Subreddits have mods who come down hard on these posts. They don’t proliferate as much if people don’t see them everywhere. It’s a lot of work for mods though.
>I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.
A really great (awful) example of this that I saw was on the typewriters subreddit (which is already 90% people posting pictures of the same 5 or so overhyped machines):
In the 1950s, Royal used to give out gold typewriters as part of a writing contest.[0] I saw one of these come up on Goodwill’s auction site, saved screenshots for my records and followed it closely, since I knew bids would get really stupid really fast. Sure enough, winning bid was around $1500.
About two weeks after the auction ended (about the time Goodwill’s very slow shipping takes), I saw it pop up on the subreddit, exact machine, identical scratches, blemishes, and all to the one I had screenshots of. The post title? “Found this at my local thrift store for $50. How’d I do?”
That was enough to finally make my delete my account and seriously question anyone who thinks Reddit is actually good for niche hobbies.[1]
[1] Well, that and the fact that and the fact that I was probably going to lose my mind if I earnestly gave detailed advice on repairing a machine I had personally stripped and reassembled, only for someone to get upvoted to the top for posting a confident pseudo answer about some mechanism—that may or may not even exist in that machine—that they only faintly understood from a general YouTube video that they only half watched.
My "favourite" is on the r/vandwellers subreddit with countless people posting a basic photo of a van they just bought with zero information about themselves, their build plans, how they intend to use it. It might as well be the Craigslist vehicle sales section.
I think it's less "echo chamber" than under direct political influence.
It takes a lot of effort to moderate a subreddit. People will post stuff all day, in large volumes.
Who's going to be willing to do that? Sure, some will just be nice people with a ton of free time, but many will definitely be political activists (or even state actors at this point) who have something to promote.
You know how certain professions are known for attracting certain pathologies? CEOs/narcissism, car salesman/ lmachiavellianidm and surgeons/God? Reddit moderator/d-bag is not exempt from that phenomenon and for reasons unknown to me, because it’s volunteer (Ok, I can’t say 100%, but mostly it’s volunteer) seems to be some kind of mental illness XP multiplier attractant for the role. Perhaps it empowers people because they’re giving so much of their lives to their own perceived cause, that no one asked for. But there are a lot of good, great even, mods out there. Surely. But anyhow,
I’m going back to irc.
Niche content for sure is the best thing Reddit is for. I only go there for info on my favorite instruments, and a few other shitposting communities for games and shows I watch.
> My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.
This. On forums you recognize members by their funny avatars and the hyper specific advice that they have (useful or otherwise). Stickied posts like "timbit2's Guide to Vintage Frobulators" or "New to Frobs? Not Sure Where to Start? READ" abound. There are usually decades of easily-searchable posts accumulated. People reply to your threads helpfully. The marketplace forums are full of well-cared-for gear.
On Reddit you get a lot of beauty shots and question posts with replies like "bro just get the new Vinculum x Chadbert420 frobber. Shit is [fire emojis]". There's usually a woefully out-of-date wiki or sticky that you can only access from one interface or another. There's no sense of community, just upvotes of pictures for clout.
Of course these are contrived straw men versions of their respective communities but in my experience they're correct more often than not. I have been dipping my toe into various Discords that seem to have a better sense of community but Discord doesn't seem to lend itself to longer-form content as forums do... I wonder whether this is something the Discord platform could be augmented to facilitate.
Discord is a chat platform, not a forum, and its contents are closed-off, not discoverable via web search. It’s a modern form of IRC chats, not of web forums. The two serve different needs and audiences.
I used to think that the up voting mechanic was the future of the internet.
Now I think that it's a perverse incentive that requires very heavy handed moderation to not suck (AKA more free labor), and that time decaying posts can discourage quality, in-depth discussions.
Corollary: necroing forum threads isn't necessarily bad.
I'm sure it'd be content specific, but in a thread about technical discussions (_especially_ in fields with information that can be just as valuable a decade later) it seems totally fine. Those forums seem to be okay with it, though...
What's ironic is this thread is full of comments agreeing that Reddit sucks because the voting/karma system is flawed and shadow banning is toxic and deranged yet all those very features and policies exist here. In fact, HN is mentioned in the Wikipedia article for shadow banning as an early adopter of the practice. (Yes I agree it sucks but that's not the point of my comment.)
So what changed or what makes this place different? I would argue it's not the forum software but rather run differently, not placing in charge of every subreddit a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.
Or maybe the forum software does suck and some just naturally migrated to a text-only low-bandwidth version of Reddit?
> a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.
Speaking of which, does anyone know if there are any good articles/documentaries/exposés on reddit moderators? I really just want to know what one is like.
> So what changed or what makes this place different?
It's an interesting question. Primarily, I think it's because HN doesn't allow you to downvote instantly or even after a lengthy period of time. I think it's tied to total karma, but someone would have to provide more information there. Regardless, that single change probably makes a big difference.
Compared to Reddit, I've had some comments go into the tens of negative karma points within five minutes of posting. It wasn't because it was low quality, but because it wasn't the "correct" view to have in whatever subreddit I was engaging in. The downvoting there is practically militant.
However, as someone who usually holds a minority view on HN, I don't think the system here is perfect either. Usually an echo chamber forms because the dissidents don't last long and leave. If you reward the ones that stay the longest with downvote capabilities, it would explain my general experience quite well. But again, it's nothing compared to Reddit.
Note: I recognize this is a conversation on karma, which has a rule associated with it, but I hope we can make an exception here given it's a good faith discussion between Reddit/HN :)
I often wonder whether "limited downvotes" scheme would work: (let's say) 30 downvotes per 24h are free to use and after that each downvote decreases your karma by 1.
My personal opinion is that downvotes, upvotes and algorithms are design decisions that often stick before the best one is found.
It's a shame really, because I think it's not only really important (e.g. to combat fake news/users etc.) but most interesting.
Nonetheless, HN did good with their version where the max. downvote of a comment is -4 and where the up/downvote of a comment is not listed publicly. All functions that help with community building. However, I fret the moment when AI users and shills take over (especially since throwaway accounts are so easy to create).
There’s 4 things that are disastrous topics for any community, the horsemen of the apocalypse if you like. Politics, Religion, Identity, and Meta.
There’s several natural filters that promote healthy communities - Highly informed users, Active mods, Small community sizes, “Get stuff done” type conversations. In essence, communities where it’s easy to identify BS, and discourage navel gazing, have high signal to noise ratios. They are actively hostile to lazy posting.
A good example of this type of community is r/badeconomics, or was the last I checked, and askhistorians.
A separate note, There’s a 2024 paper that showed that that estimated that young adults spent a smaller portion their time online on high cognitive load reading. A majority of the time would be spent on “timepass” content.
HN is okay-ish, but you still can’t have long-running discussions on it, or explore some topic in depth, like it is par for the course on old-style forums. One reason is the time cutoff (can’t reply anymore after a day or so), another is that there is no mechanism for tracking which comments you’ve already read and which you haven’t.
HN is not much different (or better) in my opinion
I dislike the voting mechanism here. It incentivises me to optimize my posting to things that will maximise the votes, rather than things I think will add value to the community, even if it's controversial.
On a forum, if I say something stupid/against-the-grain, I am called out by the forum members, or we have a debate about it. On HN and on reddit, I'm downvoted into oblivion with very little in the way of any discussion that helps me learn and improve.
The only thing that makes HN better than reddit for me is the community of like-minded people, a general respect for the rules, and the fact that here we have fantastic moderators.
But I maintain that the underlying _system_ that is managing discourse here is flawed in it's design. I wonder what HN would look like if voting was abolished, and /active was the homepage, where the most actively discussed posts are the ones that filter to the top of the list.
I basically have switched to /active. IMO it's a stronger and more relevant set of articles, and tends not to be clogged with all the "Here's a thing, but with AI!" blogspam and endless number of "I ported this angular script to rust" turds that always seem to make it to the normal front page.
Reddit was definitely an amazing place for Niche hobbies. Forums were great too, but the layout and having an "orangered" beat out forums. Plus you could be on so many forums at essentially the same time. Prior to reddit I had basically the same setup with RSS feeds for like my top 10-15 forums. But reddit basically copied and eclipsed that and the forums pretty much all died.
Forums were great too, but reddit made it really easy to get access to new niches quickly. Without having to join a new site, learn the forum slang and etiquette, etc.
Reddit is awful now though. IDK what the alternative is either. I'm in a few discords and Facebook groups that cover most topics but they both offer a much poorer user experience imo.
I was an active contributor to /r/espresso for a while, but in the process of the hobby I realized I disagree with some of their advice and best practices. Minor stuff really.
I would not describe the sub as toxic or anything, but it's literally impossible to get a dissenting opinion across on Reddit. Other hobby subs were the same.
Every single time I mentioned an opinion differing from the "hive-mind" consensus it was downvoted to hell, with no responses, counter arguments or anything resembling discussion. I would have liked to trade experiences but that's not possible.
While at the same time some of the other posters giving advice freely admit they don't actually have experience with what is discussed and are just repeating older posts.
There is no real value in that, and nowadays you can get mostly the same experience by just asking ChatGPT. Both have no clue and no real opinion of their own when it comes to details.
I take part in a few forums now, and it's a breath of fresh air. Much better experience and a lot more personal as well.
Everywhere you let the masses upvote and/or downvote, you're going to have the hive-mind problem. We have it here, too.
I'd propose having a separate UI for users to agree/disagree, vs. for users to flag rule breaking posts, like spam, flamebait, insults and so on. The agree/disagree count would just display a vanity number, but the rule-breaking UI would actually downweight the article or comment. You could audit occasionally and remove voting privileges from people abusing the rule-breaking UI as a "Mega-disagree."
There are some niche forums still, but they have to be really small. Mostly related to very specific media as general topics are affected by astroturfing. These communities often don't live as long, but they can be active, helpful and interesting.
> I used to love Reddit, but the astroturfing has become unbearable, especially by political groups.
I really doubt most of it is astoturfing. You can find bot accounts, obviously. However, the Reddit hivemind has a very intense echo chamber.
Everyone learns very quickly that if you write something that doesn't match the popular opinion of Reddit, you're going to get downvoted quickly. Strike a nerve and you'll even get angry private messages or people going through your post history and trying to extend their argument into old comments.
Large forums have always been like this. You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight. You just can't compete with someone with infinite free time and a lot of anger to get out. Eventually they all sync up to drive away differing opinions
its astroturfing by for profit companies. after the election, they realized: a) that folks were filtering out the astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's filter list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, they switched tactics - by astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee to their clients that their posts will make the front of r/all for everyone.
Back when Pushshift was publicly available, I used to check the mod actions on some subreddits. What I found was that the subreddits that I thought had biased moderators were simply undermoderated. Pretty much every mod action I saw was fair and there were also a lot more than expected, but clearly the issue was that total comment volume was far more than the mod team could handle.
> You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight.
These people are also masters at toeing the line of forum or subreddit rules when trashing others, constantly baiting people to cross the line in replies and get themselves moderated. It's worse in forums where downvoting isn't available.
Its fully astroturfing. The trick is to implement non-member/non-flaired rules to block most folks from the discourse. Then you can just focus on hitting the front page, which you can juice with other rules like only members can down vote. Now you can just focus on hitting the front page and suddenly you get a very biased thread with a lot of eyeballs and no response. /r/The_Donald used this to much success and there have been others.
> Its fully astroturfing. The trick is to implement non-member/non-flaired rules to block most folks from the discourse.
The number of subreddits that do this is small. Hardly representative of typical Reddit behavior.
Everyone knows by now that /r/conservative isn’t a real subreddit because it’s “flavored users only”.
However, too many people make the leap from “astroturfing exists” to “everything I don’t like is astroturfing” way too quickly. It’s right up there with accusing people you disagree with of using ChatGPT or being paid shills.
The truth is, a lot of subreddits are the way they are because that’s just what Reddit’s user base thinks, not because a shadowy cabal is making them say those things.
>/r/The_Donald used this to much success and there have been others.
I read a post from a former reddit admin a while back that was talking about they managed that. Apparently they had one sticky post each day, and sticky posts are blocked from being on the frontpage but since they'd change the main post each day, once they un-stickied it, it'd immediately get picked up by the algorithm for the frontpage, inadvertently gaming the whole system.
After the last election, one smaller local subreddit that has had the same overall culture for many, many years, seemingly overnight, at the snap of some fingers, lurched completely to the extreme opposite direction. If you dare to share any of the same ideas that were once widely accepted there for many years on end, now you instead get absolutely pummeled, ridiculed, downvoted out of existence.
It's just so blatantly, demonstrably, obvious the level of manipulation which was targeted at the sub. Somebody, somewhere, added it to a list of subreddits to be manipulated. But you can't even discuss it there, because how are you going to use a compromised communication channel to communicate about how it's compromised?
The majority of the population seemingly can't even notice that sort of communication manipulation, it's gotten so sophisticated. Bot accounts used to be much easier to detect, now they all have very cleverly built-up account history and posts that are near indistinguishable from humans. And of course not all manipulation is bots/AI, there's coordinated shill/sockpuppet/astroturf campaigns with real people being tasked with doing the manipulation.
The smart people have already left and gone on to the next place, which will never be allowed to grow large enough or significant enough without the propaganda fire hose eventually being turned on it too. The only way to fix things is a radically different framework for communication.
Who knew that giving power to unpaid volunteers who don‘t necessarily have the users or the companies‘ best interest in mind might turn out to be a bad business practice.
Back to conventional forums with threaded, sequential, discussion? We managed fine for years and well-moderated forums seem to deal with spam/bots better.
I agree with you, and think that if Slashdot were to do a rebirth, it might succeed. Of course, they'd have to figure out what went wrong and put in mechanisms to prevent that.
But the five vote options (insightful, interesting, funny, off-topic, troll) were _useful_. Having a feed based on the score of votes plus friend bonus, friend-of-a-friend bonus, foe penalty, friend-of-a-foe penalty gave me a super news feed I stuck with for almost a decade.
I could see a more complex voting rule set being helpful. But basically, it was really good until it wasn't, and that was a problem of the people behind the scenes there, and not the system itself.
The default sorting on Reddit usually isn’t sequential, and there is no way to track how far you’ve read along the sequence or subthread. In addition, threads get “archived” and you can’t reply anymore. In old-style forums, threads get usually sorted by last activity, meaning that active threads, including resurrected ones, are reliably at the top (sequential by last activity, if you will). On Reddit, orderings like Hot and Best give you some unreliable heuristics, unsuitable for keeping track of current discussions.
Ah, I see, I thought you meant linear within a thread. So you mean some kind of deterministic/transparent sorting (like "most recent activity"). I agree that would improve things.
I meant both posts within a thread and threads within the forum. Reddit makes it hard to track a discussion within a thread and also tracking new threads vs. read threads vs. previously read threads but with new posts, or picking up a half-read thread later on.
Discourse seems to be a modern forum platform that handles a good deal of that. The tricky thing is paying for it, including configuring it and/or paying someone to do that.
Virtually all forums (and their ancestral mailing lists) default to chronological order. A good comparison is perhaps the difference between comment-driven and discussion-driven sites, if there's a technical name for that?
HackerNews is comment driven, but does a decent job of facilitating discussions - but not particularly deeply. Reddit is similar. Forums are much more amenable to linear, deep, discussion between a few parties, but can also facilitate comments. Both have their place on the internet, and I don't think that forums are necessarily the answer to everything, but it feels like a lot of people left those communities to end up in Reddit and that's a shame.
Interestingly, old forums rarely supported nested threading. The only "threads" were just linear sequences of posts in a topic. Nested threading is nice but it's also a different cognitive experience that maybe has some downsides as well.
Nested threading for long-running threads only really makes sense when you can manage the “read” status per post (as in Usenet and mailing lists). Otherwise, new “leaves” or subthreads in the thread tree are all over the place, and you don’t know which you’ve already seen/read and which you haven’t. Web forums generally only track a single “water mark” per thread for how far you’ve already read, which more or less implies that only chronological order makes sense. You still have hyperlinked indications of which post is replying to which other post, via quotes.
If you reply to an earlier one, the UI will handle it and show a new branch where that conversation started. I'm not a huge fan of typical mailing list web UX and usually view flat, but it's so common that I guess a lot of people like it. My opinion is probably biased from years of using/running forums, so I'm much more used to that UI.
I think newer systems like Discourse will formally track replies to you (versus a new message in the overall thread), while legacy forums like PHPBB usually just quote-reply.
> After this last election, I think political groups realized local subreddits were underutilized and have regrouped accordingly.
its not that. they realized: a) that folks were filtering out the astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's filter list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, by astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee to their clients that their posts will make the front of r/all for everyone.
I'm amused by how over the top it always is. A high-scoring submission on my local Reddit gets maybe +70 votes. Then, some random political-related submission —and it's only ever political-related—will have +2000 votes. They're so overt that they don't even care.
Well, if broadly popular organic posts net about 100, I would expect organic partisan posts to have a ceiling of +50. Still, more realistically, the net would be about zero because half the people would downvote them.
But, somehow, partisan posts in one direction always seem to net over 1000 or 2000, yet partisan posts in the other direction net about zero.
Even with a skewed distribution, I would only expect maybe +20 to be the ceiling.
> the net would be about zero because half the people would downvote them.
Why would you assume that? It's a fallacy to assume that political opinions are evenly distributed. People seem to agree that different sites attract people of different political persuasions. A post that gets highly upvoted on Truth Social might get highly downvoted on Reddit, and vice versa. That's not astroturfing, that's just self-selecting communities.
> partisan posts in one direction always seem to net over 1000 or 2000, yet partisan posts in the other direction net about zero.
Again, it depends on the audience. This is not a new phenomenon. 50 years ago, you would get a different response to certain political statements depending on whether you made them at a Grateful Dead Concert or at a meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police. Why should today be different?
> I would only expect maybe +20 to be the ceiling.
Why? People feel strongly about their political believes. It's polarizing and engaging in a way that a post about crockpots or guitar strings isn't.
If a submission appeals to random people browsing r/all, i.e. politics, sex or memes, then it can get way more upvotes than a niche topical submission.
For example one of the top r/aviation posts is a meme about airbuses with "slutty eyeliner" (87k points), and it far outpaces shop talk type submissions like "why does the landing gear not get retracted at the same time on this 777?" (2k points)
Posts from a regional subreddit, where world events seldom happen and traffic and roadways are the prime topics of conversation, are not making it to /r/all or the front page.
Yet political posts get +2000 out of nowhere and an influx of commentators who don't usually comment in that regional subreddit or don't even likely live there.
You're incorrect, this is the normal way that the reddit algorithm functions, it promotes highly-engaging content from niche subreddits.
The top post of all time on r/toledo is about a police officer harassing a woman. It's highly engaging but not overtly political. It has 100x the upvotes of a normal r/toledo post about traffic or what have you.
One of the top posts of all time in r/sanjose is a video of someone trying to jimmy a hotel door open using a hook contraption. Highly engaging, not overtly political.
These were the first two city subreddits I checked. It's literally just how reddit works, highly engaging content bubbles to the top and can reach a much larger audience.
Why does it ONLY happen to political posts, and why does it ONLY happen to posts that reinforce a particular viewpoint?
Either this is the design of the black box "algorithm," or it's not real engagement. There's no need to miscorrect me about something so hamfisted and overt.
There was a recent panic/hysteria there about banning Twitter from many subreddits because of hate speech. It was incredible how quickly people were begging to have a website banned when they could either choose not to visit it or down vote posts they didn't like. Really soured things for me by illustration how much the median values changed from when I started using the site.
This was about Elon's "Nazi salute" and both so incorrect and blatantly astroturfed I haven't returned to Reddit out of disgust.
A ton of near-dead subreddits with no activity and no reason to link to x.com for any reason suddenly had thousands of people show up demanding links to x.com be blocked like it's an everyday problem for the sub.
The quiet beneficiary of this campaign are those who benefit from Reddit's groomed narrative and their competing platform Bluesky.
The Texas subreddit recently got "taken back" by normal, older mods. It had been run by an account "annatrashpanda", who banned anyone critical of the Democrats, who let generic copy/paste national memes take over the board, and so on. I see they have now deleted their account. This all happened about two weeks ago.
I say this as a liberal, the artificially partisan takeovers of local subs is a real thing. It's one thing to ban trolls and consistent shit-talkers from a community. And frankly it's one thing to have some bias. But it was just so obviously hostile, and I was happy to see the sub get back some authenticity.
> When I publish my next piece I will personally write you an email, with some of my thoughts on the post.
‘My next piece’? Maybe for a part of a book or a long article, but for a blog post?
The next oddity, ignoring ‘personally’, which is inappropriate for a mailing list, is ‘…with some of my thoughts on the post’; you’re going to send me a piece with some of your thoughts on the post?
I’d expect more accurate phrasing from a med student.
Edit: tone down the criticism, I wrote without much thought that some one made the site; my apologies if I came off as overly critical.
The blog has been running since 2022 under a different domain name. It was then focused on economics, as the archive suggests. I'm currently migrating articles from the old host.
Well, this looks legit, as this is a real domain registered in 2022, but I still don't get why would you make a new post on a freshly registered domain after a 3-year pause and immediately submit it to HN.
AI commenting on AI commenting on AI commenting on AI...
But yeah, X, LinkedIn, and the rest all feel like the bots and content farmers have taken over.
I believe the pay for engagement incentives make people be as controversial as possible just to earn money. Imagine you are in a low-income nation, you pretend to be from the USA, you could earn a higher daily income by posting engagement bait. It is in your interest to upset as many people as possible and then set up counter bots to argue with your fee earning bots.
Seems like it. I went to church today for the IDK consecutive Sunday and it was all right.
Not the "Western civilization is declining because the kids stopped going to church" church but a church full of old hippies and young queers. It's been fun, sometimes I get takeout on the way home
I'm also tending my own website, which nobody else has write access to, so that I can link people to information I've vetted myself. Can't link it without doxxing myself sadly
Likewise been going to synagogue. I would hardly call myself a religious person. Far more a nihilist who thinks we should try and do good if it is truly all pointless. I think the meaningfulness and the sense of community is nice. It’s typically better than being glued to the kinetoscope
I've used ChatGPT enough that I can almost immediately tell when a post is a bot. It has such a familiar cadence and style. The em dash is a pretty good giveaway too, but just the overall writing style is so easy to identify. And it sucks how many of these highly upvoted "clearly written by AI" posts there are.
> An AI-powered bot pretending to be a human, lamenting AI-powered bots who pretend to be human, to gain human trust, so that it can covertly market AI-illustrated books
It’s a typical get rich quick scheme on Amazon. Generate garbage books or “illustrate” classics. I keep seeing adds about it on youtube.
One of the more engaging themes today is alienation, AI, society being fractured, etc. so they figured to use that. I’d give them some points for “cleverness”, but even that is LLM generated most likely.
Kind of interesting that I spend way too much time on Reddit but have not seen this. This is likely because I mostly read small and specialized subreddits and avoid junk like I am allergic to it or something. I would never have found the fake book link in the article, for example. Just a contrast, but given that some are saying the Internet is gone and it is necessary to leave it is potentially interesting to note that it isn't that way for all. Possibly some psychosocial equivalent of buoyancy and swimming ability?
I suppose that's debatable but the point is the site is heavily moderated, something the owners can manage without volunteers for now because it doesn't appeal to the mainstream. I think your post is interesting and should have stayed, for what it's worth. I think it's a topic worth discussing but alas, many people just thought you were a bot as well. It really highlights the state of things.
After Reddit's API fiasco 2 years ago, things started to degrade really fast. Today, everything is more bland, less insightful comments and more aggravated/toxic comments. I mostly visit due to habit and mostly I feel worse afterwards. It wasn't like that.
Even on communities like r/woodworking, which used to be a bunch of nice people. I mean, how can you be toxic and a woodworker at the same time? Sure, occasionally you'd get someone that hammered his thumb but that was the exception.
389 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadSo there's really no solution here. Disengage from places like Reddit; that's about it.
For a while I just used hacker news. Then I picked up TikTok. It isn't horrible but I sometimes have to be careful because the feed will start to try and feed me stuff that's just brain rot.
I recently decided to take a break from reddit, and may yet make that break permanent. There is still some good stuff there, but it's getting rarer and harder to find in a sea of spam.
https://i.imgur.com/nXp5cpk.png
My account is 18+ years old with 100k+ of organic karma evenly split between posting and commenting. I was an active moderator for both my local country sub and part of the moderator reserves program.
It was not clearly explained.
>Thanks for submitting an appeal to the Reddit admin team. We've reviewed your request and your appeal will not be granted and your ban will remain in place.
>-Reddit Admin Team
>This is an automated message; responses will not be received by Reddit admins.
It's really a bummer to lose an 18+ year account that I've accumulated so many friends and community relations, and one that is tied to a common public nickname I use on socials and is literally tattooed on my arm. So I figured I'd wait a year and request again.
https://i.imgur.com/yrDqe1x.png
I engage with real people on various discord servers instead nowadays.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43664383
It didn't hit the news tab yesterday, only "new", because my account is newly registered. So I reposted it one more time.
Beep boop.
> Are reposts ok?
>If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I will keep that in mind.
https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
What is real… am I just a bot?
Oh god… I’m a bot.
LLMs can practically pass the Turing test in this context so on one hand, this should become worse, but on the other hand we are not that far from where the LLM comments are about as worth as the random real ones anyway. And if you want more than this level, you have to curate better.
This has its own problems, obviously, but there is something to a monied-interests-unfriendly set of cultural shibboleths.
As long as they got a timer, so the bots react "between 10 and 30 mins later" and they got a limit to "5 interactions per day", otherwise, if some-five coders forget those limits, and we end up having 5 bots interacting within a 1ms of the 'previous post', Reddit will run out of storage space :)
The default experience there is terrible these days but it's still salvageable for now.
- sent from a human
/s
Yes, I am aware of this theory fairly well.
> The top comment mentions something called "Dead Internet Theory": the belief that most online interactions are automated loops of bots communicating with eachother.
That's what a bot would say!
But seriously, I think we'll see some social networks start pushing a "verified human" tag soon enough... if it wasn't for the fact they earn tons of money from bots that provide a steady supply highly upvoted / impressed / engaged with / ad view generating content.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if Reddit itself is behind bot networks. But we'd need a whistleblower to verify that conspiracy theory.
They're among us.
First they polluted email with spam. Then they polluted search results with SEO. Now they pollute forums with crap like this.
For a brief moment in the 20th century, small pockets of middle-class people in the West forgot this basic fact of the universe, but people the world over still suffered. Leaded gasoline. Big tobacco. Cults. Big oil. Big sugar. Violent ideologies with seven-digit body counts. ...All of this happened while we were enjoying our nice suburban lifestyles where we could "leave our doors unlocked."
It never stopped, but it never started, either. Radium water. Snake oil salesmen. The Claque. Papal indulgences. Debased and shaved coinage. The greatest engineer of the Roman period, Hero of Alexandria, made numerous devices that performed "miracles" so temples could extract donations from visitors. I'm sure if they were around today, those same ancient corrupt priests would be shilling memecoins.
This behaviour isn't even unique to humans.
Ever since the first bacterium with a defective metabolic pathway started taking excess production from its neighbours, there have been cheaters. Ecologists call it the Black Queen hypothesis: if the other guy is left holding the bag, then you can invest more of your own energy into reproducing, until there's no more slack in the carrying capacity. Cheating is literally an evolutionary strategy.
To be part of the world you must be resilient to the evil that is baked into it, even when it comes to your doorstep.
If a platform can't or won't offer the tools to limit abuse, go find or build a new platform that can.
For an example mixed with a bit of irony, a few months ago, I submitted a link to a content obfuscator (meant to target site scraping bots) that I wrote. One of the replies was from a brand new account, that hasn't posted before or since, with a fairly obvious LLM take:
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517774:
At that time, there were a whole bunch of flagged-dead comments from newly-created accounts that had compound-word usernames (such as the text I linked to above from 'earlydeveloper'.) So, if these are people manually writing those posts, I understand the behavior even less than the bot hypothesis.
BRIAN: I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand?! Honestly!
GIRL: Only the true Messiah denies His divinity.
BRIAN: What?! Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the Messiah!
FOLLOWERS: He is! He is the Messiah!
s/messiah/LLM/ig
I read a report that 49% of internet traffic in 2024 was bots. I believe this will increase significantly this year.
We (humans) are a minority now.
After this last election, I think political groups realized local subreddits were underutilized and have regrouped accordingly.
While I still trust some appended Reddit searches on Google, I'm losing faith there too. Product/service recommendation threads are really easy to manipulate.
My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.
The last 2-3 years this issue just became worse and worse.
Reddit is fantastic for memes though. There are some hilarious subreddits out there. But I rarely engage, just consume.
The reason for deliberately antagonizing them, and eventually banning them, was that /r/The_Donald's moderators were directly telling their membership to upvote specific posts so they'd rocket to the front page. "Inorganic results", "vote manipulation", "gaming the algorithm", whatever you'd like to call it.
So the admins had a reason to ban it, even if no doubt they and most of Reddit's users saw Trump supporters as "the enemy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Prominence_on_Red...
Also, as this article has reminded me... 'member that time Spez admitted that he invisibly edited users' comments?
https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...
There would need to be extensive evidence to convince me that the subreddit wasn't just botted. Threads would get thousands of posts extremely quickly, and there would sometimes be only a handful of comments. I don't really believe organic users were spending their free time refreshing "new" just in case a new post was made that required an immediate upvote.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/4fh8s9/this...
Normal humans tend to upvote things that are already upvoted. But normal humans don't tend to look at the incoming stream of posts.
Ordinary T_D users were refreshing the subreddit's front page. Mods stickied the posts they wanted to rocket to the top. This got them past the hurdle where very few people look at /new to give those all-important first few upvotes. Ordinary T_D users upvoted the stickied posts. The mods then unstickied them less than an hour later, because now they're "organically" at the top of T_D, and the upvotes continued to pile in, rocketing the post to /r/all
Meanwhile, all the other subreddits weren't playing this game, so their users votes were split across multiple posts on their subreddit's front page. And mods of other subs use sticked posts for administrative notices, which are worded as such and tend not to get upvoted much... but if you were to sticky a normal post, users would upvote it. But stickied posts aren't eligible for /r/all... unless you unsticky them. Oops! T_D successfully gamed that oversight.
EDIT1: Also... as the comments in the link above reminds me; it used to be that any post could be stickied, e.g. normal link posts. It wasn't necessarily clear that they were stickied posts. What changed after the T_D manipulation is that sticky posts were renamed "Administrative Notes" and had to be text posts and had to be coloured differently from normal posts. Before that change, they weren't distinguished that way. Now perhaps the subterfuge by mods makes more sense?
EDIT2: WIRED's postmortem on T_D - it was cunning mods, not bots.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-hate-fueled-rise-of-rthe-don...
On the other hand, there aren't simple technological fixes to social problems. T_D's mods remained tricksy and continued to work their userbase to upvote and focus - in ways which didn't breach the sitewide rules on manipulation - and still kept hitting /r/all
But yeah, using the sticky system to force posts to top of mind was super effective back then. It's all coming back.
Flaired only threads, so many bans and and hundreds of deleted posts on your average thread for anything against he MAGA party line.
You see the same phenomena on /r/all, which isn't personalized.
I deleted my account ages ago to break my own habit.
You have to remember that there was some pretty nutso tariff news right about the same time, not that strange for it to be highly represented on the front page.
That's not the whole truth. Subreddit Moderation is the key point that's vulnerable to abuse. I block all political subreddits. My blocklist has 120 entries. 10 of those are of inherent political nature. The rest is just like /r/pics - enshittified rage bait about Trump.
Then it returned with a vengeance.
A consequence of years of reddit allowing its mods to shadow ban centrist voices.
It’s hard to see how reddit escapes this mess. They need more normal people and less political zealots, but the site is already so far down the echo chamber path that its overt political partisanship scares off potential new normal users from participating.
I don't see why they would. Rage drives engagement, and they just got the number one rage inducing factor back into public office for the next 4 years. This form of engagement also works better on progressives I think.
I think Kamala actually did have the lead in Reddit's demographics.
So much anti-Kamala and pro-Trump stuff in the communities that are supposed to be strong for her.
That Kamala did as well as she did was really shocking to me. I mean it wasn't close, but Kamala couldn't even make past the very first debate in 2020 and her list of accomplishments is basically nothing. I never met anyone in real life with an actual compelling or supportive argument for her. At best it was "she's not Trump".
Taking Biden out and having no primary is probably the worst thing Democrats could have done.
I'd argue the 15 years of identity politics that both led to Harris as VP and prevented them from being able to commit the faux paux of possibly passing her up by letting their constituents decide if they liked her was their worst decision.
Using the 1/9/90 split [0] for creators/commenters/readers, it seems farfetched to suggest that reddit accounts (which benefits readers making an account to curate subreddit subscriptions) can't follow this pattern where many legitimate human users do not comment often.
[0] "The 1% Rule", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record
In my experience, Reddit can be an okay place for niche hobbies until the reddit becomes semi-popular. Then it's a lost cause for anyone but newbies posting the same question every day and old timers who take pleasure in yelling at them.
Any real discussion is drowned out so the average post now is "bought these, new to the hobby, what do I do with them?".
The meshtastic sub is a good example of that. People buying hobbyist hardware, without doing any research. They probably saw some youtube video, hit the amazon "buy", then when it arrived, they're stumped.
Post a photo of your new gizmo: 300 upvotes. Video of you using your widget: 4 votes.
And in subreddits dedicated to actually making things, it's just hustling hustling hustling. With a small percentage of self-help posts like "how I spent 4 years in my boring-ass generic video game and nobody wanted it".
This is exactly what happened to all of the hobby reddits I enjoyed.
Any useful discussion was crowded out by 10 posts per week (or day) of people posting their newest purchase or asking a question that had been answered 1000 times already.
The useful Subreddits have mods who come down hard on these posts. They don’t proliferate as much if people don’t see them everywhere. It’s a lot of work for mods though.
A really great (awful) example of this that I saw was on the typewriters subreddit (which is already 90% people posting pictures of the same 5 or so overhyped machines):
In the 1950s, Royal used to give out gold typewriters as part of a writing contest.[0] I saw one of these come up on Goodwill’s auction site, saved screenshots for my records and followed it closely, since I knew bids would get really stupid really fast. Sure enough, winning bid was around $1500.
About two weeks after the auction ended (about the time Goodwill’s very slow shipping takes), I saw it pop up on the subreddit, exact machine, identical scratches, blemishes, and all to the one I had screenshots of. The post title? “Found this at my local thrift store for $50. How’d I do?”
That was enough to finally make my delete my account and seriously question anyone who thinks Reddit is actually good for niche hobbies.[1]
[0]https://www.antikeychop.com/gold-royal-quiet-de-luxe-typewri...
[1] Well, that and the fact that and the fact that I was probably going to lose my mind if I earnestly gave detailed advice on repairing a machine I had personally stripped and reassembled, only for someone to get upvoted to the top for posting a confident pseudo answer about some mechanism—that may or may not even exist in that machine—that they only faintly understood from a general YouTube video that they only half watched.
It takes a lot of effort to moderate a subreddit. People will post stuff all day, in large volumes.
Who's going to be willing to do that? Sure, some will just be nice people with a ton of free time, but many will definitely be political activists (or even state actors at this point) who have something to promote.
This. On forums you recognize members by their funny avatars and the hyper specific advice that they have (useful or otherwise). Stickied posts like "timbit2's Guide to Vintage Frobulators" or "New to Frobs? Not Sure Where to Start? READ" abound. There are usually decades of easily-searchable posts accumulated. People reply to your threads helpfully. The marketplace forums are full of well-cared-for gear.
On Reddit you get a lot of beauty shots and question posts with replies like "bro just get the new Vinculum x Chadbert420 frobber. Shit is [fire emojis]". There's usually a woefully out-of-date wiki or sticky that you can only access from one interface or another. There's no sense of community, just upvotes of pictures for clout.
Of course these are contrived straw men versions of their respective communities but in my experience they're correct more often than not. I have been dipping my toe into various Discords that seem to have a better sense of community but Discord doesn't seem to lend itself to longer-form content as forums do... I wonder whether this is something the Discord platform could be augmented to facilitate.
Now I think that it's a perverse incentive that requires very heavy handed moderation to not suck (AKA more free labor), and that time decaying posts can discourage quality, in-depth discussions.
Corollary: necroing forum threads isn't necessarily bad.
I've always agreed with this. It was usually considered bad etiquette at best on forums, but I never really understood why.
So what changed or what makes this place different? I would argue it's not the forum software but rather run differently, not placing in charge of every subreddit a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.
Or maybe the forum software does suck and some just naturally migrated to a text-only low-bandwidth version of Reddit?
Speaking of which, does anyone know if there are any good articles/documentaries/exposés on reddit moderators? I really just want to know what one is like.
It's an interesting question. Primarily, I think it's because HN doesn't allow you to downvote instantly or even after a lengthy period of time. I think it's tied to total karma, but someone would have to provide more information there. Regardless, that single change probably makes a big difference.
Compared to Reddit, I've had some comments go into the tens of negative karma points within five minutes of posting. It wasn't because it was low quality, but because it wasn't the "correct" view to have in whatever subreddit I was engaging in. The downvoting there is practically militant.
However, as someone who usually holds a minority view on HN, I don't think the system here is perfect either. Usually an echo chamber forms because the dissidents don't last long and leave. If you reward the ones that stay the longest with downvote capabilities, it would explain my general experience quite well. But again, it's nothing compared to Reddit.
Note: I recognize this is a conversation on karma, which has a rule associated with it, but I hope we can make an exception here given it's a good faith discussion between Reddit/HN :)
According to https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented "After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment."
I often wonder whether "limited downvotes" scheme would work: (let's say) 30 downvotes per 24h are free to use and after that each downvote decreases your karma by 1.
There’s several natural filters that promote healthy communities - Highly informed users, Active mods, Small community sizes, “Get stuff done” type conversations. In essence, communities where it’s easy to identify BS, and discourage navel gazing, have high signal to noise ratios. They are actively hostile to lazy posting.
A good example of this type of community is r/badeconomics, or was the last I checked, and askhistorians.
A separate note, There’s a 2024 paper that showed that that estimated that young adults spent a smaller portion their time online on high cognitive load reading. A majority of the time would be spent on “timepass” content.
Mainly it's niche/less popular. There is less of an incentive for outside interests to care.
Not having any real way for the audience to expand (there is only one "subreddit") definitely helps with that.
I dislike the voting mechanism here. It incentivises me to optimize my posting to things that will maximise the votes, rather than things I think will add value to the community, even if it's controversial.
On a forum, if I say something stupid/against-the-grain, I am called out by the forum members, or we have a debate about it. On HN and on reddit, I'm downvoted into oblivion with very little in the way of any discussion that helps me learn and improve.
The only thing that makes HN better than reddit for me is the community of like-minded people, a general respect for the rules, and the fact that here we have fantastic moderators.
But I maintain that the underlying _system_ that is managing discourse here is flawed in it's design. I wonder what HN would look like if voting was abolished, and /active was the homepage, where the most actively discussed posts are the ones that filter to the top of the list.
Forums were great too, but reddit made it really easy to get access to new niches quickly. Without having to join a new site, learn the forum slang and etiquette, etc.
Reddit is awful now though. IDK what the alternative is either. I'm in a few discords and Facebook groups that cover most topics but they both offer a much poorer user experience imo.
I would not describe the sub as toxic or anything, but it's literally impossible to get a dissenting opinion across on Reddit. Other hobby subs were the same.
Every single time I mentioned an opinion differing from the "hive-mind" consensus it was downvoted to hell, with no responses, counter arguments or anything resembling discussion. I would have liked to trade experiences but that's not possible.
While at the same time some of the other posters giving advice freely admit they don't actually have experience with what is discussed and are just repeating older posts.
There is no real value in that, and nowadays you can get mostly the same experience by just asking ChatGPT. Both have no clue and no real opinion of their own when it comes to details.
I take part in a few forums now, and it's a breath of fresh air. Much better experience and a lot more personal as well.
I'd propose having a separate UI for users to agree/disagree, vs. for users to flag rule breaking posts, like spam, flamebait, insults and so on. The agree/disagree count would just display a vanity number, but the rule-breaking UI would actually downweight the article or comment. You could audit occasionally and remove voting privileges from people abusing the rule-breaking UI as a "Mega-disagree."
But it isn't worth reading anything else anymore.
I really doubt most of it is astoturfing. You can find bot accounts, obviously. However, the Reddit hivemind has a very intense echo chamber.
Everyone learns very quickly that if you write something that doesn't match the popular opinion of Reddit, you're going to get downvoted quickly. Strike a nerve and you'll even get angry private messages or people going through your post history and trying to extend their argument into old comments.
Large forums have always been like this. You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight. You just can't compete with someone with infinite free time and a lot of anger to get out. Eventually they all sync up to drive away differing opinions
> You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight.
These people are also masters at toeing the line of forum or subreddit rules when trashing others, constantly baiting people to cross the line in replies and get themselves moderated. It's worse in forums where downvoting isn't available.
There have been discord servers made public where the entire point was to game the reddit algorithm to favor one political candidate.
The number of subreddits that do this is small. Hardly representative of typical Reddit behavior.
Everyone knows by now that /r/conservative isn’t a real subreddit because it’s “flavored users only”.
However, too many people make the leap from “astroturfing exists” to “everything I don’t like is astroturfing” way too quickly. It’s right up there with accusing people you disagree with of using ChatGPT or being paid shills.
The truth is, a lot of subreddits are the way they are because that’s just what Reddit’s user base thinks, not because a shadowy cabal is making them say those things.
I read a post from a former reddit admin a while back that was talking about they managed that. Apparently they had one sticky post each day, and sticky posts are blocked from being on the frontpage but since they'd change the main post each day, once they un-stickied it, it'd immediately get picked up by the algorithm for the frontpage, inadvertently gaming the whole system.
It's just so blatantly, demonstrably, obvious the level of manipulation which was targeted at the sub. Somebody, somewhere, added it to a list of subreddits to be manipulated. But you can't even discuss it there, because how are you going to use a compromised communication channel to communicate about how it's compromised?
The majority of the population seemingly can't even notice that sort of communication manipulation, it's gotten so sophisticated. Bot accounts used to be much easier to detect, now they all have very cleverly built-up account history and posts that are near indistinguishable from humans. And of course not all manipulation is bots/AI, there's coordinated shill/sockpuppet/astroturf campaigns with real people being tasked with doing the manipulation.
The smart people have already left and gone on to the next place, which will never be allowed to grow large enough or significant enough without the propaganda fire hose eventually being turned on it too. The only way to fix things is a radically different framework for communication.
What do you think that might look like?
But the five vote options (insightful, interesting, funny, off-topic, troll) were _useful_. Having a feed based on the score of votes plus friend bonus, friend-of-a-friend bonus, foe penalty, friend-of-a-foe penalty gave me a super news feed I stuck with for almost a decade.
I could see a more complex voting rule set being helpful. But basically, it was really good until it wasn't, and that was a problem of the people behind the scenes there, and not the system itself.
HackerNews is comment driven, but does a decent job of facilitating discussions - but not particularly deeply. Reddit is similar. Forums are much more amenable to linear, deep, discussion between a few parties, but can also facilitate comments. Both have their place on the internet, and I don't think that forums are necessarily the answer to everything, but it feels like a lot of people left those communities to end up in Reddit and that's a shame.
If you reply to an earlier one, the UI will handle it and show a new branch where that conversation started. I'm not a huge fan of typical mailing list web UX and usually view flat, but it's so common that I guess a lot of people like it. My opinion is probably biased from years of using/running forums, so I'm much more used to that UI.
I think newer systems like Discourse will formally track replies to you (versus a new message in the overall thread), while legacy forums like PHPBB usually just quote-reply.
its not that. they realized: a) that folks were filtering out the astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's filter list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, by astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee to their clients that their posts will make the front of r/all for everyone.
But, somehow, partisan posts in one direction always seem to net over 1000 or 2000, yet partisan posts in the other direction net about zero.
Even with a skewed distribution, I would only expect maybe +20 to be the ceiling.
Why would you assume that? It's a fallacy to assume that political opinions are evenly distributed. People seem to agree that different sites attract people of different political persuasions. A post that gets highly upvoted on Truth Social might get highly downvoted on Reddit, and vice versa. That's not astroturfing, that's just self-selecting communities.
> partisan posts in one direction always seem to net over 1000 or 2000, yet partisan posts in the other direction net about zero.
Again, it depends on the audience. This is not a new phenomenon. 50 years ago, you would get a different response to certain political statements depending on whether you made them at a Grateful Dead Concert or at a meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police. Why should today be different?
> I would only expect maybe +20 to be the ceiling.
Why? People feel strongly about their political believes. It's polarizing and engaging in a way that a post about crockpots or guitar strings isn't.
For example one of the top r/aviation posts is a meme about airbuses with "slutty eyeliner" (87k points), and it far outpaces shop talk type submissions like "why does the landing gear not get retracted at the same time on this 777?" (2k points)
Yet political posts get +2000 out of nowhere and an influx of commentators who don't usually comment in that regional subreddit or don't even likely live there.
The top post of all time on r/toledo is about a police officer harassing a woman. It's highly engaging but not overtly political. It has 100x the upvotes of a normal r/toledo post about traffic or what have you.
One of the top posts of all time in r/sanjose is a video of someone trying to jimmy a hotel door open using a hook contraption. Highly engaging, not overtly political.
These were the first two city subreddits I checked. It's literally just how reddit works, highly engaging content bubbles to the top and can reach a much larger audience.
Either this is the design of the black box "algorithm," or it's not real engagement. There's no need to miscorrect me about something so hamfisted and overt.
A ton of near-dead subreddits with no activity and no reason to link to x.com for any reason suddenly had thousands of people show up demanding links to x.com be blocked like it's an everyday problem for the sub.
The quiet beneficiary of this campaign are those who benefit from Reddit's groomed narrative and their competing platform Bluesky.
I say this as a liberal, the artificially partisan takeovers of local subs is a real thing. It's one thing to ban trolls and consistent shit-talkers from a community. And frankly it's one thing to have some bias. But it was just so obviously hostile, and I was happy to see the sub get back some authenticity.
And this is the second of only two posts there, with the first supposedly being written in July of 2022.
All of this leads me to a reasonable suspicion that this person is actually the one who made the post they're complaining about.
I feel like the Old El Paso girl might have an opinion.
> When I publish my next piece I will personally write you an email, with some of my thoughts on the post.
‘My next piece’? Maybe for a part of a book or a long article, but for a blog post?
The next oddity, ignoring ‘personally’, which is inappropriate for a mailing list, is ‘…with some of my thoughts on the post’; you’re going to send me a piece with some of your thoughts on the post?
I’d expect more accurate phrasing from a med student.
Edit: tone down the criticism, I wrote without much thought that some one made the site; my apologies if I came off as overly critical.
This is common phrasing, even for blogs.
None of the other phrasing is out of place, either.
I think you're mistaking different phrasing preferences for LLM use.
You don’t really have to get it, to be fair. If it was, to give an example, a poorly thought-out decision, then you’re just picking on them for that.
Honestly, the situation was just too absurd/twisted/funny not to write about. I also had nothing to do yesterday so that helped.
I'm gonna write a part two about everyone turning against me, thinking I'm a bot haha.
But yeah, X, LinkedIn, and the rest all feel like the bots and content farmers have taken over.
I believe the pay for engagement incentives make people be as controversial as possible just to earn money. Imagine you are in a low-income nation, you pretend to be from the USA, you could earn a higher daily income by posting engagement bait. It is in your interest to upset as many people as possible and then set up counter bots to argue with your fee earning bots.
Not the "Western civilization is declining because the kids stopped going to church" church but a church full of old hippies and young queers. It's been fun, sometimes I get takeout on the way home
I'm also tending my own website, which nobody else has write access to, so that I can link people to information I've vetted myself. Can't link it without doxxing myself sadly
It’s a typical get rich quick scheme on Amazon. Generate garbage books or “illustrate” classics. I keep seeing adds about it on youtube.
One of the more engaging themes today is alienation, AI, society being fractured, etc. so they figured to use that. I’d give them some points for “cleverness”, but even that is LLM generated most likely.
Even on communities like r/woodworking, which used to be a bunch of nice people. I mean, how can you be toxic and a woodworker at the same time? Sure, occasionally you'd get someone that hammered his thumb but that was the exception.