The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos
medium.com
medium.com
Pretty much since the day I found out about reddit in... 2008-ish?, everyone in the online communities I knew thought it was filled with awful pseudointellectual teenagers and college students, that the upvote/downvote system was horrible and encouraged people to post low-effort content, the moderators were overzealous and clueless, and in general there was no sense of community due to the size of the site + lack of individual identifiers beyond usernames, like avatars and signatures from a typical internet forum of the day. Basically, reddit is just as bad today as it was a decade ago.
But I'm sure for people who had their first internet-social experiences on reddit, they remember it a lot more fondly.
I will concede that objectively speaking, "new Reddit" is an abject failure (and the fact that old.reddit.com continues to exist is a testament to the such) and that it's much more heavily astroturfed by major corporations now.
Millions of creators on sites like YouTube and others never get credited or viewed even though their stolen content goes viral on bootleg accounts. It's a huge problem. Even replies and posts from other sites are hijacked for the same purposes now.
It laid the ground work for content theft going on everywhere now...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a4geZL2xmM
And that is the stuff behind subs blocking youtube and the strict self-promotion rules.
Content theft on the internet is as old as the internet.
Reddit has even gone as far as to prohibit posting of OC by creators themselves by banning their posts and accounts when they post their own work, calling it "self promotion", while other accounts violate the rule with obvious immunity. They also ban subreddits after they are cultivated and curated too, many times for no good reason. I understand that spam needs to be controlled, but how moderation occurs on Reddit, it's totally not conducted in a normal nor reasonable manner at all.
Edit: In addition, just recently she managed to ward off a blatant thief and finally drive traffic from another hit to herself. But the income lost to the thief in the first few days? Forget about it.
The other major subs are also filled with shallow/unsubstantial content
But if you keep out of those it is usually ok
Also there's always old payment methods where crypto/NFT/digital payment services or even a bag of cash can be used under the table, though nobody can or would want to prove that of course, and of course it's not presented as fact because I have no stake whatsoever in reddit nor desire to see it made less skewed like it used to be in the past.... I've already given up on it myself, long ago when they banned me for no reason and took my sub.
Look carefully at each video you watch on any platform from now on for what products, slogans, and logos are placed in them, and the links/comments that are posted in the comments. There is advertising going on in the majority of reddit posts for something, even if most people don't know it. A lot of the time, even the music used in content is often being subtly imprinted across multiple sites so that it becomes an ear worm as a low-key psychological marketing tactic.
Many major companies are putting out completely engineered "low budget" home videos as ads, they're no longer marking paid ad posts as sponsored, and companies are regularly hiring the most popular and trusted creators to inject subtle advertising cues into otherwise organic looking viral videos. I'm pretty sure that most of what we see on social platforms with paid advertising options now is either staged/funded/enlisted/sponsored production, bot driven content, or low key psychological marketing. This does not include HN based on what I've observed, because they don't sell ad-based post boosting (as far as I know).
OC creators struggle often in futility to break past algorithm ratios just to be seen by small audiences if they don't have massive sums of money to pay for advertising for each post they make on each platform. Getting to the front page without the right funding may be damn near impossible by now, fair enough though, there are a lot of other users competing against you that have copied your style, branding, and/or content, so "F" it, maybe we're all doomed/
does it require it or provide it as an option?
as far as I know you can submit image URLs just fine. gyfcat and imgur videos are regularly on r/all.
hosting multimedia content provides a better experience. does it have downsides? yes. just with google's AMP.
a bit offtopic, but tiktok creators' fund is already shortshelling creators. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAZapFzpP64
and this endless reposting of viral content ... well, it's ongoing since we have viral content. is it great? of course not, but it's not like the reddit CDN somehow changed anything with regards to this problem.
youtube has contentID ... "creators" are free to organize and advocate for reddit/IG/tiktok to introduce it (or lobby US/EU/China to mandate it or whatever)
A lot of content creators spam Reddit to get clicks and eyeballs (obviously). Some subreddits have nearly become 100% YouTube threads. As a result some subs/admins have started to craft tighter requirements for the links posted to bring some sort of balance back to the content.
Are there non traditional communities like Tildetown that you enjoy?
It's likely now all just a random assortment of content from whoever pays the most for ad promotions on their posts, without violating community standards and policy, and occasional celeb posts here and there... of course.
The algo likely only does light duty when something bad on the platform makes the news... They have to make sure paid ads run as promised, and a lot of people buy ads, there is likely no more space for unpaid algo picks, as the Internet now runs 24/7 worldwide with over 8 billion potential customers.
In fact TikTok is widely said to have the best algorithm for determining someone's interests.
If you're someone like a musician, makeup artist, or web developer (for example) TikTok floods you with success tips, tutorials about how people went viral, with tips on pay for promotional ads on the platform, and a constant stream of thought leadership programming to keep you struggling and spending time and money on growth. It's quite hostile to anyone who just wants to develop listeners and viewers, or anyone who wants to market a product independently. Big businesses can just have a meeting with TikTok reps, pay a fee, and get prime promo placement. When you run a small business, without lots of employees, managing social media presence becomes a huge mountain to climb, and TikTok won't meat with you unless you're very popular or wealthy (and willing to spend) already.
Everyone on the platform has a different perspective, TikTok's algo is good at determining that and maximizing what can be earned from each user, but it's not fair nor transparent at all, and it creates a situation where no one can question things because there are others that will always say their TikTok experience is "going just fine". User experience all depends on the user's personas.
Sounds like the ideal opaque platform to brainwash people with "organic", shallow and easy to watch content.
The perfect backdoor for an open society.
Truly a missed field goal... Someone responsible should be spoken to rather harshly about this dereliction of duty, and the db should be at least reverted back to it's 2010 state. heh. :/
It's been an arduous process but I've managed to replace Reddit with a few forums, HN included, that are still alive to this day.
And I've completely banned myself from Reddit. It's hard given how much information is stored on that site.
Without your presence amongst the people on that platform, and with the condemnation and final-judgement people like yourself dole out... how could you expect them to ever be any better or things to improve over the course of a decade?
Team values have all but disappeared. That is the real issue at hand.
We need to be finding leverage and educating them on how to think critically, while providing them with support and encouragement of lifestyles which improve their intellectual abilities. Not put them down and shut them out.
You may disagree - you may believe that there needs to be a culling like a lot of the entitled wealthy class, but that's just naive weak thinking from a group of individuals who couldn't build or run something themselves if their life depended on it. They're essentially nothing more than spoiled children living in a bubble. They have no foresight.
Old fashioned forums are still far and away the best 'system' for this, they're just not 'popular' enough any more, particularly with Facebook providing groups within their massive walls.
HN still keeps to its 'niche' well enough, much as forums have their usual genres that allow for clear moderation and purpose/values.
Our predecessors have homogenized products and services, reducing quality and efficacy - in many cases effectively shadow banning certain types of quality or goods, e.g. food which contains a ton of cancer causing chemicals, or video games which prey upon vulnerable youth and adults VS organic sustainably locally farmed fresh produce that empowers people and brings them together and video games that provide emotionally, socially, and intellectually rewarding experiences of a lifetime.
Developing for the lowest common denominator is the work of an MBA or Economist. It's parasitic behavior of an individual who actually has ZERO interest in the companies services or products or what they actually do for their fellow citizens, and instead do everything they can to divert from those goals in order to steal money and get away with it, effectively.
In the case of Reddit - they pretend to be too much, to do too much, while in reality when you weigh the damage they do to society and themselves VS. the profits they make. The point is, which I think you were making, is that they are catering to a very low bar in order to earn more money at the cost of damaging the foundations upon which their business stands, their own life as well - by damaging and corrupting, or driving away communities who would otherwise be empowered and empowering others (including the MBAs & Economists own families and friends).
The opportunity cost is rapid advancement of technology and stability of social systems, as well as the possible prevention of mass extinction events or prevention of fully blown dystopian realities. These people are literally trading a Jetsons like, badass future for.. short term parties on yachts because they can't get it otherwise. Do you see what I 'm getting at? If these people, these 1% "elites" and "leaders" in our society would just be team players instead they would most likely have the ability to go to the store in just a decade or two and buy themselves a brad pitt body, or a space alien brain, or cure any disease, or buy a perfectly pristine plot of land on the moon or mars (most likely less time than that because things tend to advance at exponential rates when people work together without so much impedance).
This is why I wish more people would start debating with these obscenely rich and powerful people because the people aren't going to cut it in this day and age. We live in unprecedented times where reaching a critical mass with just a bunch of uneducated people is simply no longer effective due to the tools of mass manipulation and fake news that there are. It's also reason to get your hands dirty with undereducated and underprivileged reddit users. All you have to do to get through to them is (A) use their language and (B) balance it out with validation, acknowledgement / mirroring / positive reinforcement of their good logic and behavior. They learn VERY quickly this way and can become formidable allies in a short time.
If we want to do this, we need simply to illustrate for the rich "elite" the opportunity costs of continuing down the path they're on. They are not intelligent business persons when you consider these costs. It's actually insane. It's like trying to compare a $48,000 salary in the early 2000s (after 2001) to infinity. There isn't a comparison, it's just stupid business practices all the way down. HOWEVER, we know they aren't exactly unintelligent either, so to say it's impossible to reach them and convince them is just silliness. They will wake up to it they just need someone they'll listen to, to explain it for them using their own language.
You're not making any sense at all and it seems like you've just completely shifted subjects to the algorithm and what makes it to the top.
I wonder - are you under the impression that you have to have a big following or be at the top to influence people? In that case, you should think about how you view top posts and reddit and realize that your target audience isn't bots or necessarily clandestine orgs, but people who could be considered low hanging fruit or "on the fence".
In fact it is best if you are a nobody. It's how you choose to use your words and how good you are at cutting through all the conjecture and b.s. logical fallacies. It's quite effective and doesn't require hardly any effort.
Your attitude, no offense, stinks it would seem. You basically skipped over everything I said, haven't appeared to consider any of the points I made and then switched subjects.
Are you debating here in good faith? Because it really doesn't seem that way at all based on your entire response.
Yes "Education" requires patient teachers, but it also requires a very specific environment without all of the above. You don't have to look to social media platforms for it cause that's not where education happens.
The main thing right now is bots. Endless copying & reposting of submissions, and even wholesale copy/pasting comment replies. The reddit staff have to know about this as it's been going on for a while, but seemingly don't care.
When I started on Reddit there was already an element of things having changed, a move away from niche technology discussion towards lowest common denominator stuff and discussion by meme.
In general this was fine as you could just move to smaller subreddits, and the bigger pages had fun cultures that permeated the others and gave it all a sense of unity and shared interest even when you were in your bubble.
The difficult change I've seen in the past few years is the rising number of hate and harassment subs, and Reddit tolerating them. If you scroll through the top of /r/BanFemaleHateSubs or /r/AgainstDegenerateSubs you'll see how bad things have become and how unsafe the general environment is.
It's not that discussion has become worse in an Eternal September way, it's that discussion has become openly threatening, with innocent women having their pictures and social media links shared for strangers to discuss rape and murder fantasy, and this gets 10s of 1000s of subscribers and Reddit routinely ignores reports about it.
In my view this is just a symptom of the wider populace gaining access to internet forums and the cultural shift mass internet usage brought. As in, there have always been darker corners of the internet, just that the people who frequented them had to have some level of nerdiness/geekiness and {nerds}∩{violent racists} is smaller than {whole population}∩{violent racists}.
Back in 2010 there would be discussions about places like /r/jailbait, about the tradeoffs between free speech and public safety etc. Now there are subreddits openly sharing child pornography with links to the social media accounts of the children and their families, and Reddit auto responds that these things don't violate their usage policies when reported.
The r/BanThisandThat subreddits are little more than morality police. Many of those posts will take statements out of context or regard any "cis-het" sexual fantasies as threatening to women.
> It's not that discussion has become worse in an Eternal September way, it's that discussion has become openly threatening, with innocent women having their pictures and social media links shared for strangers to discuss rape and murder fantasy, and this gets 10s of 1000s of subscribers and Reddit routinely ignores reports about it.
Firstly, social media accounts aren't secret. Anyone who publishes to a Twitter or FB account cannot claim a retroactive right to privacy. The other contention I have is that Reddit should not punish a written expression of thought merely because it's unpalatable to a certain section of its userbase. Pandering to a moral minority sets up a precedent for the most loudest performing "victims"-of-the-day to decide what everyone else is allowed to say, hear, or think.
Call it morality police if you want but it's targeted sexual violence against minors and women who don't consent. I guess your morality and mine don't align. If I'm in the "morality minority" on this one then that's very sad and I would encourage yourself and other members of "morality majority" to reflect on how women are treated in your society.
Out of interest, would you mind sharing your Facebook or Instagram profile here, so that someone could share you pictures on a subreddit for rape and murder fantasy about you, linking back to the account? It's only fantasy right, would be a shame of the morality police ruined the fun.
I'm all for illegal and non-consensual content subreddits to be banned. That's not all the mentioned "Ban This and That" subs are asking for, so I won't accept their moral opinions beyond the issues of non-consenting and illegal materials. They are prescribing a sexual morality, one which I, and I think many reasonable people, disagree with or at least have qualms with. If you don't believe me, r/BFHS seems to be a hotspot for anti-kink and anti-porn activists who suggest that women with kinks need to "heal"[0]. If that's not moralizing, I'm not sure what is.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/BanFemaleHateSubs/comments/unaa88/c...
The function of the community is to draw attention to outright abuse that is happening on Reddit in the open. That is a broad mission and will definitely attract a range of people. Some may be moralists or however you want to paint them. Does that mean we should turn away from them or what do you suggest?
Maybe you could join the effort and be a voice of the reason you believe in and speak out against what you perceive as unhealthy "kink shaming" and ensure the topic stays on hand against things that are definitely not "edge cases" (which from my experience is the majority of what's posted).
No doubt it's imperfect "at the edges" but what isn't? It seems dangerous to draw attention away from _the huge issue in the middle_.
Some actors will use it as advertising space but I don't think the blame for that should be put onto the shoulders of those fighting it.
Do you have an idea of how this issue could be avoided without turning a blind eye?
Like how r/tumblrinaction got banned recently, the members of the sub didn't report themselves for racism and transphobia.
I agree though that just about all changes made to the reddit website itself have been for the worse. Perhaps the story of digg.com will play out again?
An Subreddits can only help you towards alternative mainstream until they grow too big.
But bottom line is that perhaps the single most disruptive event an online community can experience is a large sustained influx of new members. It just will not be the same before and after.
This is also why the 'powermods' are so damaging: without proper, attentive moderation an influx of new users invariably leads to a decline in quality.
Half the subreddits in /r/all are so homogeneous that it's impossible to tell if a post was in /r/muderedbywords, /r/nextfuckinglevel, /r/damnthatsinteresting, /r/unexpected, etc.
And that's not to mention all the bots...
I wonder if this is done on purpose, to nudge people into thinking of individual users not as people but as voices of a "hivemind".
Even today, usernames are de-emphasized in the UI in contrast to names of threads or subreddits. That's most prominent on the front-page ("r/all") where posts don't show the usernames at all, only the names of subreddits - producing the odd impression that the subreddits are authoring the posts and not individual users within the subreddit.
HN's UI is sort of similar on the first half: Users are de-emphasized here as well, but there are no subreddits to emphasize instead. Though I think it would be interesting if someone made an alternative frontend for HN that presented threads in the style of an old web forum, with user identities shown prominently
I think it works frightenly well sometimes. Ask yourself:
- How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year?
- How many people do you know on HN?
> - How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year?
- None that I remember, thank goodness. One man's conversations are another man's flame wars.
> - How many people do you know on HN?
- At the very least, knowing HN users' affiliations and posting tendencies is key to quickly blocking unwanted ideological noise, whether it concerns international politics or programming languages.
This is IMO the approach that makes the most sense. Let users ignore other users, rather than enforcing bans/shadowbans on the whole userbase.
While I personally would rather not block anyone, I think everyone should have the ability to police the content they see, but in most cases not what other people see.
On HN when I like a users comment I will go through their post history, and if enough of their comments are of good quality, I add their comments to my RSS reader through hnrss. Reddit does this slightly better, where you can add users to your 'friend's list' and then they give you an option to see the latest comments from all of your friends. Both ways do context of the comment poorly.
The other thing I do on Reddit is have thousands of sub-reddits filtered out through RES. Basically anything bigger than a million subscribers is useless, and often even 100k is to much.
The comments were often equally low effort with memes and weak jokes rising to the top. This was especially infuriating in places like /r/askreddit where the only chance of seeing replies that weren't clear fabrications or jokes was to specifically ask for serious replies.
There were really only 2 ways for a subreddit to be good. It either had to be small and relatively close-knit or it had to have rules against low effort content and solid moderation enforcing those rules. But since communities will naturally grow as people find them and because people hate when moderators remove their posts, Reddit ended up exactly where it was destined to.
the success of this comment is a far better illustration of Eternal September
They don't even touch on the Eternal September of reddit. Every thread is full of the most mundane observations possible, lazy puns, entirely expected The Office references and sayings which have been said literally thousands of times before -- followed up by someone going "this is the most perfect comment" all of which is wildly upvoted.
It feels like it is being botted by a simplistic lazy circle jerking ML text generation algorithm. Maybe it is. But it is definitely drowning in https://xkcd.com/1053/.
Right now, here's the process for browsing a subreddit on mobile without the (ads and tracking loaded) reddit app:
1. Navigate to subreddit. Find out which of two (non-NSFW) or three (NSFW) "experiences" reddit decides to give me on mobile.
2. Depending on experience, jump through hoops including random "get the app!" prompts, failures to load content, failures to load nested comments, and outright refusal to display all the content in a thread unless I install the app.
3. If on an NSFW subreddit, and on about 50% of "unapproved" non-NSFW subreddits: Be blocked from viewing any additional content by an unremovable prompt. (Often, content loads in before the prompt, so you enjoy about 30 seconds of looking at your content before it's blocked.)
4. Give up, and go to old.reddit.com, which is ugly and not designed for mobile, but at least works okay.
Desktop isn't much better, but I have long had browser extensions installed that redirect everything to old.reddit.com on most of my browsers, so it becomes less of an issue.
If reddit took away my ability to use old.reddit.com, I'd probably stop browsing the site within weeks.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenmayay...
I use i.reddit.com for this. (Thank goodness it still works.)
who's the new reddit ? :)
Fully FOSS, private, and all ads removed.
[0]: https://f-droid.org/packages/ml.docilealligator.infinityforr...
[1]: https://github.com/Docile-Alligator/Infinity-For-Reddit
It's a death knell when someone creates an alternative frontend for your website because the usability is so bad. Libreddit did just that for Reddit. It fixes/removes all the bullshit that Reddit introduced in the last 10 years.
Wait, are you kidding? I thought you were talking about using it on desktop. New reddit is literally unusable on mobile. This is what it looks like for me (https://imgur.com/a/pa07d2c). New reddit isn’t just unusable, it is literally nonfunctional. I can only imagine it’s been deliberately destroyed to drive people away from the web over to the app. They do something similar with links. All links from new reddit have their underscores "escaped" with \. Basically they corrupt the URL. If you’re on old reddit, you get these bad links and have to fix them yourself, but new reddit does it for you, of course.
https://apps.apple.com/app/stopthemadness-mobile/id158308293...
1. Use rif is fun for Reddit (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....), or other third-party apps.
That doesn't mean moderation is an easy job, or that it shouldn't be done judiciously or consistently, but it can't be abandoned.
It started around 2015/16 and it was very clearly visible in all subs.
One is banned, the other promoted. Not just on Reddit but on many social media.
The left had a nationwide movement named "Occupy" and the Democrats and most media approved.
The right did it once and the same people all lost their minds.
Violent? The only violence on January 6th was between police and protestors. There was plenty of similar violence at Occupy protests, but the Occupy protests also had other kinds of violence, like Sexual Assaults Reported in 'Occupy' Camps[1]
Insurrectionist? "The FBI at this point believes the violence [on January 6th] was not centrally coordinated...there was no grand scheme...to storm the Capitol and take hostages."[2]
Sympathizers within the government? Like Obama?[3]
An attempt to disrupt the normal functioning of government? Yes, both were. That's actually a common protest tactic - protesters generally argue that a protest has to be disruptive to be effective.
1: https://abcnews.go.com/us/sexual-assaults-occupy-wall-street...
2: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-fbi-finds-scant-e...
3: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-risky-embrace...
The establishment media (millionaire mouthpieces for billionaires) is not going to assist any movement that actually threatens the establishment.
Occupy Wall Street was 2011.
The crucial difference between January 6 and Occupy Wall Street is that the members of Congress and the Vice President were inside the Capitol Building on January 6, whereas no elected officials were in Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street. If the break-in of the Capitol had occurred while it was empty, that would have been a different matter, still serious, but not giving the appearance of a coup attempt.
The best example is perhaps the occupation of the Wisconsin state capital:
> Thousands of protesters rushed to the … Capitol Wednesday night, forcing their way through doors, crawling through windows and jamming corridors...thousands of pro-union activists — many bused in from out of state — rampaged through the historic building in an effort to stop a vote on collective bargaining reform legislation.
...
> during the course of the occupation, Walker received a steady stream of death threats against him and his wife, including one that promised to “gut her like a deer” and one threatening to kill his sons. Police found dozens of .22-caliber bullets scattered across the Capitol grounds. The occupiers drew chalk outlines of fake dead bodies etched with Walker’s name on the floor, and carried signs that read “Death to tyrants,” “The only good Republican is a dead Republican” and one with picture of him in crosshairs with the words, “Don’t retreat, Reload.”
...
> House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) praised the occupiers for an “impressive show of democracy in action” and tweeted as they assaulted the Capitol that she continued “to stand in solidarity” with the union activists. In other words, Democrats were for occupying capitols before they were against it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/14/democrats...
I'm not sure why you keep mentioning 2016? The Wisconsin protests were also in 2011.
Anyway, in Wisconsin they were protesting a proposed bill. It wasn't a coup attempt.
I'm actually a Wisconsinite, so I'm very familiar with this.
If you read the linked Wisconsin State Journal article, you'll see that the protests were peaceful. "Police and protesters continued to get along, with no incidents reported and no arrests." It wasn't actually a "break-in". What happened was that there were already some protesters who had been inside the Capitol for some time, and then a much larger crowd showed up that night and wanted to get in, because there was a vote on the bill scheduled soon. The police were initially reluctant to allow the larger crowd to enter but decided to allow them. There was no violence.
https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/article...
Again, the issue isn't really protesting legislation in Capitol buildings. In general, that's a legitimate democratic activity. The issue is the safety of the members of Congress and the VP from a crowd on January 6 who wanted to overturn the results of the election that was about to be legally certified.
And that bias is probably why it fails to mention the death threats, violent rhetoric, chalk outlines, forcing lawmakers to flee, etc.
All that in order to stop, not merely protest, passage of the bill.
If we're to believe that lawmakers in Washington were in danger on January 6th, despite the complete absence of any violence against lawmakers, we should also believe the lawmakers in Madison were in danger. Death threats should be taken seriously regardless of partisanship.
> And that bias is probably why it fails to mention the death threats, violent rhetoric, chalk outlines
Heh. It was an article published Thursday morning about the events that happened Wednesday evening. Of course it doesn't mention everything in the grand context. Do you not understand how news works?
I would also note that this is the article linked from the Washington Post article that you linked.
> forcing lawmakers to flee
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Democratic lawmakers voluntarily, intentionally left Wisconsin for Illinois in order to prevent a quorum.
> All that in order to stop, not merely protest, passage of the bill.
Heh, this is just a bizarre statement. Why would you protest a bill if you weren't trying to stop its passage? Of course they were trying to stop its passage. Aren't there bills that you don't want passed?
> If we're to believe that lawmakers in Washington were in danger on January 6th, despite the complete absence of any violence against lawmakers
Another bizarre statement. There was no violence against lawmakers because the lawmakers were evacuated from the building while the Capitol police were trying to hold back the crowd.
> we should also believe the lawmakers in Madison were in danger for the same reason
No, because protesters were actually in the Wisconsin Capitol when the bill was passed. There was booing, but no violence.
> Death threats should be taken seriously regardless of partisanship.
Agreed, and the police do investigate them. But a lot of politicians of both parties get death threats, and most of them are just rhetoric. There were no assassination attempts on Scott Walker, and he personally wasn't even in the Capitol, as he was the Governor and not a legislator.
> There were no assassination attempts on Scott Walker
Nor were there any assassination attempts on January 6th.
> the lawmakers were evacuated from the building while the Capitol police were trying to hold back the crowd.
It took me a moment to realize you were talking about Washington, because the same thing happened in Madison: The senators hid under a stairwell, out of view, while the police ordered a city bus to pull up in front of the building. Officers then formed a human wall on the sidewalk, parting the sea of protesters and creating a pathway for the senators to reach the bus. Once the senators were on board, “the mob on the street began punching the windows and shaking the vehicle. … The police told the senators and staff inside to keep their heads down in case a window shattered.”
That, by the way, is what I was talking about when I wrote "forcing lawmakers to flee".
Honestly, it's like the WaPo article and the madison.com article are describing different events, except they aren't, just two perspectives on the same event.
The Washington Post article is literally labeled an "Opinion" by the Washington Post, and it was written by Marc Thiessen, who coincidentally co-wrote a book with Scott Walker: https://www.amazon.com/Unintimidated-Governors-Story-Nations...
Talk about obvious and undeniable bias!
Both are undoubtedly guilty of selective reporting.
But let's be clear, are you accusing the WaPo piece of lying, not merely choosing what to cover?
Act 10 had been covered extensively by the Wisconsin State Journal for the previous month. You wouldn't expect every new story to say every single thing. It was already a familiar issue to us all.
> But let's be clear, are you accusing the WaPo piece of lying, not merely choosing what to cover?
I would say exaggerating. Take it from Republican Representative Glenn Grothman, who was there for both events. "It never reached that pitch (during Act 10)."
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2021/01/08/wisconsin-act...
During the Wisconsin Capitol protests, Grothman was personally surrounded by protesters, who chanted "Shame!" at him but didn't harm him physically. There's even video of this.
"Grothman downplayed the situation and told the paper he didn't think he was ever in any real danger."
I do think we've strayed very far off topic, which is supposed to be Reddit...
"More than 250 people have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement who were trying to protect the Capitol, including more than 85 accused of using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer. Others have been accused of assaulting members of the media, including one Associated Press photographer, or destroying media equipment."
A trivial google search turns up this newsweek article, which lists half a dozen people indicted for firearms, including one who also had more guns than he could wield himself as well as molotov cocktails stashed in his van. https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-were-there-armed-protest...
Also interesting that a handful of bad people carrying guns make everybody else a criminal. Is that the world you want to live in?
Every movement or protest has people who resort to violence. Whether actual protesters, or whether infiltrated by someone looking to discredit the movement.
Law enforcement is famous for it, and there are quite a few vidoes of them trying to 'start shit' so they can escalate.
I don't know whether guns were used at Capitol Hill, I don't really care. It was an attempted violent coup. By the protesters, not infiltrators.
I think the world has lost its marbles.
Anyway, I stand by my initial position that it is disingenuous to act so innocently amazed that people might regard an angry violent mob storming the capitol with a gallows chanting to hang the vice president as an insurrection.
But as it is, it's unclear who won the election without fraud.
No it isn't.
Other states have similar problems.
For example, one is left to wonder why /r/drama was forced to shut down because the admins considered them a nuisance, yet left-leaning subreddits engaging in vote-brigading and other equally disruptive behaviour are still around.
I'd be remiss to claim that it's purely a left vs. right thing. But if the Aimee Challenor debacle was any indication, they have a clear list of people they like and people they don't like. And if they don't like you, for whatever reason, they eject you from the platform without any recourse.
http://www.thewebcomicfactory.com/comic/the-antiwar-comic-in...
You will not convince me that stealing TVs from target during riots that let to many unjustified injuries and deaths is about seeking justice.
I’m not even American and this was completely obvious.
Please let’s not pretend we don’t have extremism on both sides of the political compass.
I have witness this behaviour on HN many times as well since this website leans overwhelmingly left; try saying anything remotely controversial and watch the downvotes ensue. I intentionally avoid speaking about my own views openly here out of fear of repercussion; especially because many users on this website run businesses and have the power to ruin my career and my livelihood.
If it weren’t for dang, this place would descend to chaos just as well.
There certainly were bad actors. I saw a police van lit on fire. But from what I read in the papers, these were prosecuted and out of staters coming to NY to basically get their rocks off. The overall movement was peaceful.
Saying that you are sticking to your lying eyes is not productive to the conversation when you are responding to someone else with a first person account too.
Try having what used to be the standard opinion about a certain topic less than 10 years ago and expect to be banned. Not just by moderators but by admins.
Any light criticism or joke results in a subreddit and site wide ban.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCynical/comments/hovdsi/just_...
Pointing this out would get you banned from Reddit extremely quickly.
Not a criticism, just an observation.
There are also Pushshift-based sitewide search engines: redditsearch.io is made by the Pushshift creator but doesn't show deleted content. ihsoyct.github.io does, but is unreliable, often randomly missing some comments and posts in any one run of a query.
With the amount of constructive comments/posts removed for seemingly no reason nowadays, and the blight of users overwriting and/or deleting helpful, otherwise anonymous comments when making privacy purges, I find it now more pleasant to browse with all deleted content shown than without.
It's not that they are pro or against the trans issue (they're an "edgy" sub, that I do remember), it's just that the mods don't want their sub getting nuked by the admins and, as such, staying as far as possible from that trans subject is the best course of action.
>I'd hate to be the one to have to tell the minority picked last that their civil rights isn't scheduled until 2050.
Can you give me a specific example related to that, as in, name a minority that hasn't yet had their 'civil rights' granted?
Because my take on what's going on kinda aligns with the guy above, there's been a mass push for stuff that isn't any kind of accepted by the general populace (and affects fractions of a percent of people) and it's caused a blowback effect when people get sick of having micro-minority issues make daily headline news when their lives are getting measurably worse.
If you were talking about extending basic civil rights to groups that were measurably disenfranchised I don't think you'd be seeing the same pushback.
Instead we see 'drag queen story hour' repeat x 10. You don't have to be any kind of conservative to realise that drag shows and culture aren't well understood by the mainstream population and that a lot of people are going to get the wrong fucking idea and be annoyed as hell but the left just keep hammering it over and over again, like, it's NOT HELPING YOUR CAUSE. I can see it isn't helping. I can see it's going to create resentment and increase divisiveness. Why can't they see that? Are the walls of their bubble that thick? Do they have that much contempt for the average person?
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-are-the-proud-boys-so-af...
Unless you're complaining about far right terrorism or intentionality divisive mainstream media coverage, you've completely lost me.
>I'd hate to be the one to have to tell the minority picked last that their civil rights isn't scheduled until 2050.
Can you give me a specific example related to that, as in, name a minority that hasn't yet had their 'civil rights' granted?
1: https://old.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/vjpvsa/in_honor_of...
The freedom to have discussions on topics you want in restricted spaces is not censorship, folks. And it’s (unfortunately) a thing that happens when your space is open to the entire global Internet.
That's fine, but Reddit shows users their removed comments as if they're not removed [1]. Users don't have a chance to migrate to another group or platform if they don't know they're being censored.
> The freedom to have discussions on topics you want in restricted spaces is not censorship, folks.
I would agree with you if the platform were upfront with users about what gets removed. Unfortunately at this point it isn't.
You have to stop looking at it from the ridiculous and childish private\public perspective and start looking at it in terms of right to exit and availability of alternatives. If a small, 1000 km^2, irrelevant country bans something, that's not a big problem because the residents can easily move out or otherwise subvert the ban. If a giant corporation with monopolistic control of its niche bans a thing and treats certain users unfairly, that's a much more serious violation of free speech. It's all about how easily you can get alternatives, once you reach a certain usage/alternatives ratio, you don't have the right to be "Private", you must be forced to be fair.
The public\private thing is a sort of "Stories for Children" heuristic that used to approximate the truer underlying dynamics somewhat decently, before bad faith authoritarian fan boys milked it into oblivion with cliché "Just build your own X bro" mindless slogans. The original idea being that 'public' things are usually things like states, courts, police forces and other societal structures that are usually very difficult to exit or be free of. While 'private' things are (the cliché example goes) things like gas stations or coffee shops, things you can easily exit and replace. The heuristic obviously breaks down whenever the private entity in question is $GIANT inc.
I wouldn't see a problem with all of that if people knew their comments were being removed. But, Reddit hides that from users, even going as far as showing you your removed comments while logged in as if they're not removed.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/vjpeia/roe_v_...
Not only was my main account suspended, they banned my 2 alt accounts as well as my wife’s account. Any account that logged in from my home IP was permanently suspended without recourse.
All because I said “i don’t think masks are as effective as you guys do” in a covid sub.
To be fair, Reddit's search is completely broken. The only way you can get decent results is using Google...
This is why reddit leans heavily socialist/communist/anti-capitalist (moderated by people who believe moderating for free is more important than a real job).
Its a rabbit hole to dive into, but once you dig deeper you realize just how much political manipulation is occurring, not just in reddit mind you.
Its tearing apart society.
Hacker news doesn't suffer from this, thankfully, the moderators do not think its appropriate to manipulate or outright silence any viewpoints dangerous to the reputation of their ideologies. Which is why we're allowed to have these types of discussions here in the first place. On reddit, however, I have written statements that have been moderated away I presume "for the safety of the public" as if the public could not decide on its own. Don't assume that everybody on the planet agrees with that kind of sentiment. Go out there and talk to your right wing nutjob friends. They have differing opinions. Just because you don't see them on reddit doesn't mean they don't exist, nor that they are not normal people with normal opinions either.
You can label it a conspiracy theory if you want. But that doesn't eliminate the presence of the facts from which the conspiracy theories have arisen, nor does it eliminate the the presence of covered up removal of those facts for the sake of engineering truth.
You are just unaware of the world beyond the veil of your lived experiences. But it doesn't help that your emotions are so tied to your defense of your ego.
What is "the message"? What are the "viewpoints dangerous to the reputation of their ideologies"?
It also seems weird to directly compare HN, Reddit, and "other forums" as if they are all the same thing. Reddit has hundreds of millions of users and millions of subreddits. HN is probably fairly comparable to a mid-sized subreddit but neither is really that similar to a "classic" web forum.
Yes, since you're going to bring up a generalization in my argument in order to dismiss the whole thing, let me clarify it with more words than would have been acceptable in the first post. There are free-speechly(for lack of a better word, since liberal means authoritatian these days) run subreddits as well authoritatively run subreddits. Hacker news is like a free-speechly run subreddit with moderation to reduce spam but not opposing viewpoints. A whole universe of subreddits out there. I should have been more careful to keep my argument less leaky, but largely most mainstream subreddits suffer from an ideology protecting regime.
Well run or not is not, that's a matter of opinion. You probably think those reddits you defend run by authoritarian reddit mods who believe in silencing "viewpoints dangerous to the reputation of their ideologies" is well run. I happen to think it approaches the fervor, passion, hope, zeal, and spirit of the third reich.
What are these ideologies? Ive already mentioned one. Communal vs Capitalistic beliefs. Reddit moderating is a job for people who believe in contributing to the community, and thats a good thing inherent to human nature, but a gaping flaw when we move so far past dunbars number that it wouldn't even register when looking at the whole. These very good ideological beliefs thus left unchecked in an environment it wasn't meant for transforms into the thing we see today where communal maintainers feel threatened by non-communal actors and often take the dark side of abusing their power to maintain order through authoritarian means. A complete removal of discussion of outside ideas because they threaten an ideology that only works when everyone plays along.
I'm not here to discuss that topic of communism/capitalism or any other "ideologies" though. Just here to point out that the rules that govern the system self selects personalities that gravitate towards ruling through certain means. That's the "conspiracy" that is observable in real time.
They've done a FUCKLOAD of dumb stuff. A truly phenomenal amount. Some of the issues stem from just growing and having your crowd change and EVERY marketing company out there working to control your content, but they have very impressively managed to make a baffling number of stupid decisions.
But, you can opt out. It's dumb that you need to, it's dumb that they don't understand what they have, and that they're making what's currently failing (yet another facebook), and yet there's still a large variety of ways to make it not totally fucking awful.
You can still just go to the subreddits you tolerate and ignore the rest, you can still browse in old mode, and you can block most of the ads and nonsense pretty trivially. It was very very smart of them to leave in that option, which while the most obvious fucking thing in the world to a person, is a near miracle for a company.
Not forcing the new design (and a couple of other anti user practices) is one of the best decisions they ever made, and if you've EVER worked in a company rolling out a redesign that's supposed to up engagement and revenue, you have got to understand just how fucking rare anything like that is.
I do wonder when it'll all go to shit finally, and I wonder what will take it's place (i've looked for the reddit of digg for reddit, and haven't seen much potential), but right now every day they don't force the redesign is a damn near miracle in a company of that size.
it loads twice as fast, though, and doesn't prioritise images over information, so I see the upside, but I do think a lot of the commentary here is nostalgia and just what people are used to
A very long time ago I was an avid slashdot reader (I had a 5 digit account long lost). I briefly went to Digh fir bit, and remember very early on visiting this "reddit" thing that was the new nerd thing.
I remember loading the page, browsing a bit and moving on because of the ugly unusable UI that it had (not even sure if it has subs at that time).
Fast forward all these years later, and I'm active on reddit but exclusively use the old.reddit version. The new one feels overloaded with stuff and my brain cant handle it.
As you very well say, it's mostly a matter of our brains getting used to it. Now I go to slashdot And their comments system seems so broken. When at the time it was pretty good.
The one thing I miss is the ability to quickly post as AnonymousCoward, instead of the throwaway account bullshit
This is, to me, the clincher. Is old reddit perfect? God no (i sometimes block certain elements to clean it up), but the information density is vastly better.
I read/scan quickly and don't care much about images. I can very quickly see if there's anything of interest on the page i'm on, and then move on to something else, or queue up a few comment threads to read through in other tabs. If there's an image, it's usually trivial to quickly zoom in to look at it rather than even bothering to load it again (hit or miss depending on quality).
It's obviously not perfect, but I don't think it's just nostalgia. I legit desire something fundamentally different that what new reddit is trying to offer. I'm looking for a website i wouldn't mind quickly browsing from the terminal using keyboard hotkeys, not something that I swipe forever on my phone with. Even on the phone though I prefer old reddit (was best on firefox for mobile with blockers but i'm back on apple so i need to look into my options.)
Someone like me just wants more text based/information dense screens that can be quickly navigated and then drilled into if i desire more information/content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8chan
and I don't visit it either because I am too old but who would want to fight qanon would probably need to. I salute them.
These things do not last. /r/changemyview tried it too, their website is also gone.
That said, I'm not sure how many of the problems are problems with reddit itself vs how many of the problems would still exist on other platforms even if reddit didn't. Forum moderators have always had a reputation for being napoleonic idiots who abuse their power for extremely petty purposes. The problem of corporations and wealthy celebrities buying out moderators and admins to push their narratives and silence criticisms of their products[1] could easily have happened on webforums.
There's an unfortunate drive towards centralization in online communities these days that we'd all be better without. I personally think fediverse is the best solution to this as it centralizes communities without centralizing the actual platform, but I'm not so confident it will succeed when it's up against well-funded and well-established platforms like facebook, reddit, etc.
[1] i don't have any real proof there's a monetary interest involved, but I'm perma-banned from /r/startrek for saying that the creators behind "Star Trek: Picard" and "Star Trek Discovery" probably aren't even fans of Star Trek based on the shows' many discontinuities with their predecessors, and it makes me wonder if the mods are on paramount's payroll or something. This should not be a controversial statement after how terrible the most recent season of Picard was.
Definitely resonates with me as mostly a life-long lurker. HN is on a very, very short list of online communities I actually post on and engage with. Never got into reddit, left social media long ago.
Some mods are power tripping, but also the value of a user is now near-zero. As long as you don't piss off too many, your subreddit will be fine. Especially for popular keywords - it's like owning "startrek.com", people will find it.
Subreddit owners can't actually make money in most traditional ways (so yeah, they may be paid behind the scenes), and there's a strong anti-monetization culture among Redditors, which is hilarious given that it's a for profit company that makes money off everyone's content. They still see it as an underdog online community. Newsflash, Facebook users also think they're enlightened on an exclusive platform/group.
Setting up a forum has never been easier - even security wise. Yet even that is too hard for people, so centralization is what we get. Hell, it's too much of a pain even for companies (for different reasons) - I still can't believe they shut down NotebookReview Forums - I was a long time active contributor. Surely no one in their right mind does that? Surely the decent Google traffic is worth something? Apparently not! Now I look suspiciously at TechPowerUp and Level1techs Forums...
I hope Reddit's asinine Facebook inspired user acquisition strategies will lead to its downfall, but I don't know... too many people have/make accounts. Hell, people make Facebook/Instagram and even Pinterest accounts, so clearly gating works. Maybe once they decide to disallow indexing by search engines? But then again Facebook is doing fine...
Discord is even worse - contributing unique information publicly (apparently that's what users believe, that it's "public"!) on chat platforms? I don't even know why people started doing that.
Being _permabanned_ suggests that they've done something particularly egregious. Either that, or their behavior is indistinguishable from a spam bot.
Or perhaps you work as a Reddit mod and can't feel empathy for normal users any more... meh...
I'm personally of the opinion that, with respect to net neutrality, "service provider" should be interpreted as liberally as possible so that CDNs, hosts and SaaS platforms are subject to it instead of just companies that provide layer-3 internet access. And maybe the law should even be expanded so that it applies to financial institutions.
In so many situations now, platform code is written with a certain intent in mind, but then administered later by replacement employees who have no indication of the end result of what controls do...
These sites often assume that one user persona can accommodate a user base full of multiple different personas and motivations, and they brutally punish anyone that goes outside of the personas they create as templates because their user bases are far too massive to care about individual user issues. It's now easier (and better for their bottom line) to just ban people than to properly address customer support.
I’ve been using Reddit since 2010 without issues, behaving poorly enough to get permabanned (which is different than being banned from a subreddit) is serious. There’s a story being left out here.
You can post pretty disturbing shit and still not even get your NSFW account blocked, nevermind having all your accounts permbanned by IP.
Social Media sites an apps work very hard to "beat up" independent business people, so that they are huddled into a group that needs to pay (somehow) every time they want to gain customers or awareness. It's crushing the entire world of independent business. It may not be a conspiracy per-say, but it's a very serious end result of how these apps are set up and administered.
The bank analogy was just a depiction of how difficult people who are trying to promote their work have it in just being able to develop their brand/presence on the Internet now within Reddit's eco system. Scammers and others who don't represent a specific brand don't have this problem, because they don't need to represent a consistent brand name, they can easily use burner and throw-away accounts to promote themselves...
If you run a web site for your company and it gets blacklisted (shadowbanned) all across reddit, you become extra-limited, because then not even people who like your product, company, or service can even post about it or mention it on Reddit. It completely limits and controls the possibility of normal business growth and opportunity for a LOT of people when a site or app grows to be that big/vital as a community. ShadowBanning also isn't apparent to the company owner, they can potentially keep struggling to break ground and never know that all of their posts are being muted.
Pretty sure that they just let an AI do it. There’s nobody actually checking or answering the appeals.
After more than a decade talking online, I finally realized that it's all pointless. It's not a fact, it's just my opinion.
I loved it since it was full of people who shared the same interests. I like that I helped people and they were happy. But ultimately, for me, it was a waste of time.
I now have a blog that I won't share anywhere, it's full of rants and posts on niche technical stuff and the few people who find it seem to like it. Comments are disabled and the only way to contact me is via email. A couple of people actually contacted me lol
I'll tell you how I got permabanned. First account was banned because I shared my experience with the German healthcare system on r/germany and r/europe. I absolutely despise it to this day. I'm forced to pay insurance just to get discriminated against and get zero help. I concluded that mandatory insurance means a stable stream of income for people who have zero desire to help anyone. So I ranted about it online, since I could not do anything real. Two comments triggered a lot of people because it got the account suspended, then banned. That was rather weird.
Second account was banned because I ranted about suicide, particularly how I hate myself for failing a couple of attempts and being a coward because of that. It did not sit well with the depression subreddits, and probably Reddit itself since it's a heavy topic and a turn off for advertisers.
So, uh, yeah, third account. I posted about suicide again... in retrospect it's pretty cringe and I know complaining that much is pointless, but at the time I was pretty fucked up. Luckily, the account was suspended fast and then I received the permanent ban message.
So, that's what it takes, getting 2-3 accounts banned. I mean, yeah, what sane person has multiple accounts in the first place? :D
I made several new accounts just to have them banned almost instantly (Jesus, it's an actual addiction). So I gave up on it, thankfully.
I'm not saying the ban was unjustified, and I'm not mad at Reddit. Just my opinion, what I wrote wasn't worthy of a permaban, but yeah for those reading it I seemed like an asshole who loves to complain.
I used to write a lot of well thought out comments and posts, it's just that after years of it I got tired and jaded, my writing went to shit and I started shitposting and then complaining too much. No one wants that kind of customer. Yet I still participated. It's an addiction, there's no other explanation.
I appreciate that most big-enough programming language communities offer a Discourse which is self-hosted and you can choose to subscribe and reply in many manners.
Did they do this for everybody or only certain people? In my experience Discord is one of the few apps that doesn't constantly make me dig up my phone or help train some dumb AI image recognition every time I use it.
It really put a bad taste in my mouth, basically the mods saying: "you're only welcome here if you also agree with our political theory on stuff over there".
There’s all kinds of motivations for being a mod. I rarely find a sub where mods aren’t dealing with far more BS than they are putting out.
If I don’t agree with how mods handle a channel, I leave.
I think it’s important that we question the usefulness of blaming society for the lack of quality in “default” content. Yes, you’re funneled into these channels. Yes, Reddit is seeking to get people to consume them. Yes, the interest of advertisers override all others. Yes, Reddit constantly inserts unwanted subs into my feed.
Yet Reddit is still a place I can curate to the subs that align with my interests & values. it’s not dead yet.
I don’t expect any social media platform to give me the defaults I want. I’ve accepted that I can take responsibility for the content I consume.
What I’d like is to build tools that enable people to more easily filter for that content. I believe we need stronger filtering tools, not weaker.
This is where I do wholeheartedly agree with author - the loss of Aaron and RSS feeds was the end of the cyberpunk movement in the browser based web.
I don’t know if web3 genuinely offers a second chance, but I do know that I will continue to want the ability to learn from thoughtful people of all walks of life. That requires the ability to filter out everything else. At this point, I’d rather select keywords to filter than to surface & happily pay for the privilege.
I’m so tired of being spoon fed the empty calories of outrage.
The larger problem is that most subreddits are moderated by a handful of people, whose interest is expressly _moderating_. They don't care about the community. How could they, they have so many? And the power absolutely goes to their head.
We praise exec wisdom and foresight a lot, but in reality, the people who come in an sit for years in exec positions when no new innovation happens are just reacting to profit indicators and protecting the company for as long as they serve, while leaving a bunch of headaches for the next guy who comes in.
This is the age of "don't rock the userbase" boat in tech. It's only companies that disrupt the entire social media landscape as we know it that wins next, but given time, they too will screw it all up...
All of it repeatedly just reaffirming the true genius of MySpace Tom.
Regardless of the content of your responses/posts, you get banned.
The premise of creating via raw moderator power, a safe space for teenagers on an anonymous internet forum that encourages throwaway accounts is ridiculous.
It would be like getting mad that a school prom doesn’t allow any adults inside. I’m sure there are good adults , but I doubt the intention of random adults and would rather have a whitelist of what adults are allowed.
Given the incredible breadth of services available to those individuals & yet the very real evidence that it continues to be a significant societal challenges, it’s worth considering the role a supportive community of random strangers play.
You can’t post any pro Israel news on /r/politics.
Their definitely needs to be stronger guidelines in place for mods, especially as they become sizable.
Seems sensible to me when anti-Israel news is pretty much banned everywhere else.
Getting banned from the covid-19 subs is also frighteningly easy as well. Any question about vaccine effectiveness or questioning “face coverings” and you’ll either get buried, comment removed, or banned outright.
Aside from not calling it a "cyberpunk movement", the people who work on such tech are still around. See: Mastodon, Pleroma.
This is revisionist romanticism. Reddit is just a collection of forums like the many hundreds of thousands that came before it, and continue to exist alongside it. Reddit is also so incredibly massive that making sweeping statements about its quality or composition is meaningless, what one consumes on reddit is really more a reflection of the individual rather than the site itself.
You can't ban a group that isn't a group. So the site grouped loose collections of people into what they called communities. And it became self fulfilling as groups define themselves by what they are not as well as what they are.
The admins also started actively policing subreddits, and shuffling uncooperative mod teams.
Perhaps Reddit was never a bastion of 'independent thought', but in the beginning (after subreddits came into being) there was an understanding that communities were independent.
But eventually they started getting bad press (e.g. /r/jailbait) and the 'jannies' started refusing to work for free (e.g. blackouts), so they decided to quash anyone causing them grief.
Most of the popular subreddit's comment sections have top rated comments being something totally predictable and sarcastic.
Right now the top post on r/news is [1]
Contrasted to the equivalent story on hackernews: [2]
There isn't anything remotely thought provoking in the top rated comments on reddit as there is on hackernews.
It seems to me this isn't due to censorship or corporate influence, but purely due to the fact that the reddit post has 100x more upvotes (and therefore more viewership) than the hackernews equivalent.
In the pockets of reddit that have a small but active community, I think it's easier to argue that the original essence and charm of reddit is still very much alive.
I'm skeptical that even without all the corrupting factors mentioned in this article, that reddit would ever be a place for the masses to engage healthy discourse and speech
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/vjpfbh/supreme_court_...
I found the comments on that hacker news thread predictably awful, like all even slightly political discussion on hnews.
People trying to one up each other with edgy comments on why the ruling is actually a good thing and how smart they are.
A display of privilege and of a real lack of empathy
But it's a good place to see where the wind is blowing in terms of the ongoing radicalization of white men.
You keep crying about white men and fascists while being a complete dick. You even called someone with a good point an FSB employee. Half your comments are flamebait.
If you hate it so very much why are you here, much less participating?
And there are also subs which disallow snarky "fuck this country"-kind of takes.
The fact that Reddit didn't have a decent mobile app until a few years ago is unbelievable. Indie-developers were shipping a better reddit mobile apps than the company.
The only reason I can see is monetization, with your own app you can control the user engagement better.
I specifically don't use their app because I explicitly don't want all the fluff features they've added over the years. That's also why I still use old.reddit.com.
Reddit makes money through ads. Charging for API access and expecting third-party app developers to build an entire ad platform is not possible. The tech is incredibly difficult to build and then you have to actually get advertisers to use the platform (btw - this is something that Reddit is still failing at versus Facebook/Google/Twitter).
Something like 50% of Reddit's traffic is from mobile users. If Reddit wants to add new features for these users, it's impossible to do so if all the users are using third-party apps.
Bunch of other reasons that I can enumerate in a bit.
If you let third-party apps provide a UX for your data, the app developer will naturally try to make the bext experience they can for users. The first step to doing that is to ditch all the ads. Now you're paying all the cost to host and serve the data, but the third-party app is killing your income.
It is true Reddit is a pile of garbage, but it was a worse pile of garbage when its community was posting kiddie porn and creating 'N-chain' comment threads.
All of the major subreddits have gotten watered down because that's what happens when 29 million users (r/pics) are voting on comments. Communities change fundamentally when they scale up. The answer is to seek out smaller communities.
The smartest thing the Reddit admins every did was to create subreddits. At the time, everyone on Reddit criticized them for it. Users wanted to be able to have a single link get posted to multiple subreddits with a single discussion, so that subreddits would behave like tags. But the admins said that, no, the whole point was to create separate distinct communities that could flourish on their own and they were absolutely right.
They were right only because their goal was to increase the number of users to the largest extent possible.
> everyone on Reddit criticized them for it
... and they were also right, because at the time reddit was a community for mostly tech news, similarly to what HN represents now. Creating the subreddits led to the tech part of the community to be splintered and then get more and more watered down as time went by. It's sad.
As a user of reddit I would like to isolate myself from these people as much as possible, which is now somewhat possible by blacklisting subbredits. But sadly the people themselves are vastly over represented in the wider community and having to suffer through chains of memes and hot takes, vitriol and all around non good faith discourse is making me go less and less into the comments of interesting posts because I don't really want to subject myself to all that negativity.
In my opinion, the overall effect is negative, despite the existence of diamonds in the rough communities here and there.
PS. I am saying these things as a long time reddit user and as a dev that tries to build an alternative link aggregator and discussion platform for communities to move to. :D
That said, it also seemed to me like it's (maybe intentionally?) designed to promote bad faith communication[0]. Combine that with the Eternal September phenomenon it seems like an place of inevitable decay; whatever subreddit there is struggling against entropy.
I think I saw an add about "Reddit: the Frontpage of Internet" but I think a more apt catch phrase would be "doormat"; all the rude, dirty people stomp all over it to get to the internet house. The mattress is mud ridden and smells.
And the design of it is like a room without any windows with a broken AC making it humid, mold ridden and hot. And it was made right next to a Highschool and gives free entrance vouchers to the students. Some subreddits might try to carve out a space in the room, keeping it clean and everything but when most people coming in is bad faith and the room is so hopelessly inhospitable, it's just a matter of time.
[0] https://consilienceproject.org/endgames-of-bad-communication...
You want to know why the web is so bad? Because it's slowly become acceptable to treat your users with complete contempt by interrupting and "nudging" them into being surveillance cattle.
A worrying trend is new communities using, or existing communities migrating to, Discord.
Any interesting subreddit immediately falls to the lowest common denominator without aggressive moderation. /r/askhistorians is a good example of the level of moderation a subreddit needs to remain sane as it grows.
People like to complain about gatekeeping, but societies build gates for a reason. I would like a forum that actively encourages gatekeeping and bans users who consistently post low quality comments.
Bullshit travels twice around the world before the truth gets its boots on.
It does not have a side, or an agenda, or rarely even a purpose beyond the exercise of control over others. It's trolling, period.
So as soon as you decide you wamt to optimize for growth over exclusivity, you are DOA because shortly (in startup time) your platform will become 99.99999% bullshit.
You don't need a deeper look into why Reddit or any large site that optimizes for growth descends into chaos.
It's user generated content, mostly by people who hate their lives, hate society and hate others, aided by the traditional media they link to.
By the time I saw that reality is different and so much better than the doom I got on Reddit, it was too late.
I don't understand. How could you make a life-changing mistake by reading the news?
Sadly somewhat common. And you can talk about it almost nowhere, due to "transphobia"
So, during Brexit times, I read (and wrote) a lot of r/europe, r/ukpolitics, r/brexit. Which at the time were cesspools of doom, every little thing was a catastrophe, and I believed it. I started thinking "I need to get out", that was on my mind fucking 24/7.
Then I lost my job partly because of Brexit (drop in exports to EU, company decided to lay off a bunch of people), at which point I was convinced the UK was going to shit and I was gonna get locked in, kicked out or some weird shit.
So, yeah, I left the UK without bothering to apply for pre-settled status, just abandoned everything. Those Reddit subs played a major part in it - I've thought about it a lot and it's a reasonable conclusion.
The reality is that the UK is the best country in Europe if you speak English and like your freedoms. It has not gone to shit, and it's unlikely that it will. I know poor Brits love to complain, but they're just not seeing the opportunities. It was by far the easiest country to settle and make a lot of money in. And the food is great - people who say otherwise are either snobs who only talk about restaurants, trolling or have never stepped into an ASDA lol
Anyway, don't be a dumbass like me. Just do yourself a favour and don't read r/politics, /r/news, worldnews, national subreddits, and just most general subreddits. If you see a lot of doom and gloom, abandon it.
You’re the one hating here. I wonder what your "reality" is like.
[1] Unfortunately, there is no better alternative.
At this point the only good forums I am aware of are this one and Bogleheads, apart from a few still-decent parts of reddit that aren't completely astroturfed by corporations or packed full of lower-level midwits (i.e. any subreddit with a subscriber count close to or over 500k).
Anyone else know of good places to read online?
If you follow no news or politics related subreddits, its a wholesome and friendly place (mostly) like it always was.
The mistake is thinking news and politics make good talking topics on the internet, on massive platforms like that. Headlines are the only thing people read, theres no genuine discussion, just people screaming as loud as they can, hoping their opinion ends up being the loudest.
It's a shame that you have to go out of your way to make it a decent experience.
It's been a while since I've created a new account. Do you still need to manually unsubscribe from 50+ subreddits?
First, I have no idea what Reddit the company has been doing since basically every addition to the site in over a decade has been garbage and has made the site worse to use. The site is basically unusable without the old.reddit.com style, their media hosting is worse than imgur or any of the other alternatives, their app and mobile experience is worse than any number of free alternatives, and besides that I don't know what else the have done except gamify posts with their awards system.
The second problem is how communities on Reddit and the internet as a whole are structured, incentivized and evolve. So many of these communities are unable to check themselves (which generally requires very good moderation), and with incentive structures like upvotes and awards, posting is gamified where people post things they think others will approve of and will reward, which causes communities to become monocultures as everyone else just leaves, is downvoted into oblivion or just banned from the subreddit. These communities basically become filled with people who have the same opinions and circlejerk about them in ways that affirm their opinions and disparage ones that oppose them, causing them to slowly become detached from reality. It creates a community of people who basically become unable to discuss things with people who don't share the same opinions, which then carries over to interactions outside of those monocultures. Lots of these people just dont have the ability to even talk to others with differing viewpoints now.
The best communities and best conversations I have had online have been those that offer a lot of off topic discussions within interest based communities. Support group/ identity based communities need very strong moderation because they are much more susceptible to "radicalization" if that is the correct term.
And if we judge reddit with 4chan the "free" speech platform, you will notice that 4chan is plagued with extremism and anti-social views, which in some ways is because they don't censor and is 100% anonymous to each user.
Personally some censorship is good to not allow the patients running the asylum, but also make sure you don't overreach.
AFAICT Swartz never said or wrote why he attempted to download all of JSTOR. Even close friends like Lawrence Lessig only speculated as to what he may have been wanting to do with that data.
But I suppose this kind of lazy writing and lack of standards is what passes for news these days at the New York Times' router that could have conceivably forwarded the packets for this medium.com article.
What’s the purpose of this article? It doesn’t bring anything constructive, it’s just trying to make it look bad, and discourage people from going there.
It doesn’t say what should be done to improve, what healthier site we should visit instead. It’s only negative.
"No matter what you believe in, wisdom isn’t achieved living inside a bubble of utopian ideals."
Oh yeah ideals are bad, surely, wisdom is better. I wonder what kind of "wisdom" he has in mind… He won’t tell us either. Sounds like this article has an agenda, which involves convincing people that Reddit and ideals are bad.
Reddit is doomed, and will go down into chaos because of ideals, values, mods and corporations. Hmmm that sounds familiar. Replace "Reddit" with anything and that’s your usual anti-system "wisdom". It didn’t bring me any new information.
It looks like Reddit is generally too pro-western values for the tastes of the author… And he had to tell the world about it.
If you think moderation is bad, let me remind you that you are here on a forum with moderation, and I’m glad it’s the case. By your standards, this forum must be as bad as Reddit, and must have an agenda.
The first problem is that thoughtful and interesting content rarely attracts many readers.
The second is that if many readers show up, the discussion quality is going down. So there would need to be strong centralized censorship to downvote the low quality posts and prevent accounts that play the populism game to gain traction.
The basic problem with Reddit (and all eternal Septembers) is that new users change the culture that made the site interesting in the first place. The reddiquette and the HN rules might have been followed strictly at first, but they fall to the wayside due to a lack of enforcement. Moderation does not scale.
My proposed solution is to assign weights to users such that bad actors cannot come in and exert influence on the site, through a modified ELO-like ranking system. You as the founder set a base set of rules that you know you can follow, like never downvoting substantive comments that you disagree with, and then you just use the site with care to not get sloppy with the rules. Your ELO (and those in your special known-good-actor clique) is held high, at least until you reach a critical mass of users where it becomes unnecessary.
The kicker is this: every vote by another user on the site is now a “match” against all users on the site that have a higher ELO that have voted on it, and you treat their vote as a draw if they vote the same, or a loss if they downvote.
Powerusers aren’t actually the problem, so long as you have the right powerusers. The problem is that powerusers are able to sell their account and exert influence for profit (ie: astroturfing). But with you as the baseline ideal user, and with your interests always being the longevity of the site, the possibility of corruption goes down.
The other change I would make to Reddit is to have a predefined Usenet-like hierarchy with community-provided tags for niche topics that would otherwise fall through the cracks. Opinion-oriented communities (/r/bluepolitics, /r/redpolitics) facilitate one-sided boring conversations.
> bastion of independent thought was never a thing, nor is it possible for reddit-type platforms.
The mechanics of voting and karma organize content as groupthink, and the divisions of subreddits structure grouphink by type of content with mods that enforce their vision of the type. There is very little you can do for independent thought in this content if mods aren't actively trying for that (and they never did). What you get is content decided by the average person interested in some field, with added selections of moderation. This can be good for a few things but thought or indepth conversations aren't one of those.
WSJ is paywalled isn't it? Like as in no one can read the article.
> I only recently found out that Ghislaine Maxwell, wife to Jeffery Epstein, ran one of the most powerful Reddit accounts on the website. In fact, it was the eighth-most popular account by karma on Reddit.
Spooky X-Files music.
Different communities seem to go through various periods of success, and my experience has been that it's just as often the fault of a lack of moderation as it is from moderation itself, but MOST often, it's the scale of the community.
Once a community reaches a certain size, moderation is just impossible for the handful of volunteers who do it.
Either way, the article strikes me less as "reddit is declining!" as it is "oh man, things changed and I don't like it."
There’s nothing in there about Reddit making moderation policies
The Internet doesn’t have a limit on the number of web sites. You want to say something, get a $2/month shared hosting plan and post HTML, or lease fiber and run your own server farm, or do any number of things in between.
Ultimately these days it suffers from massive mainstream adoption and use, and all of the moderation and scale problems that come with that(including the much griped about design problems and struggles to both monetize and maintain usability). But under it all it's still just a large collection of forums of all sizes, with some intermixing, but also a lot of non-mixing. If you participate in a handful of niche interest subreddits, and this is all logged into the site (where you can permanently set the old look as your UI complainers!), you will never see all the crap that's happening on the oversized main subs and it's great. Just a place for basic forum-like functionality and interest sharing.
Yeah, advertisers want "brand safety" and having the most neutral and inoffensive topics possible (and nothing controversial) is what enables that. Censorship arises organically on the advertiser-based web, which many users of this site have had a hand in creating.
The other big problem is that Reddit hides the fact that it takes every step possible to limit users in order to protect it's bottom line... That's textbook bad business.
I always used to love how open it was. Don't communities were toxic sure but there were lots of fringey subreddits with people really enjoying themselves. For example exhibitionism. Conde Nast are trying to clamp down on this a lot to make it more mainstream palatable. IMO this is when such platforms start to decline though I have to admit reddit has so far lasted longer than I expected (especially when considering predecessors like Digg)
Forget running a sustainable business with your customers at the heart of it, the new way is going just fine.
It's more of a place to share useless time filler to be scrolled on a phone, and a place to have mostly useless fights(As a time filler).
Nobody really likes it enough to call it entertainment, it's just a pacifier.
I hope it changes direction and becomes a better public forum. We need more of those kinds of environments.
The semantic web? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
You can’t have an exodus without a destination
IRC channels are still great too, I learned a lot lurking in places like #linux on freenode.
They lied to advertisers by inflating viewership numbers 35x higher than reality. They sold their top broadcast mechanism to these advertisers, but repeatedly told the viewers that what they were witnessing was community-created content. The "algorithm" had a built-in caste system which was manually manipulated and curated by admins, while they directed mods to convince the community they don't even have the ability to manipulate the rankings. They even allowed the sexual proposition of minors to take place on a daily basis, while both mods and admins were fully aware of it -- never mind the reports, they were sometimes in the chat while it was happening. They permanently banned anyone who discussed any of these issues, without hesitation.
And this list is just the tip of the iceberg of Reddit's Black Mirror-esque methodologies. The moderators are extremely loyal to the admins, because there are significant perks involved, not least of which being that moderators have notably become a hiring pool. It's no coincidence that the mods who are the most willing to lie are the same people finding employment within the company.