/u/RIOP3L
They have a twitter with deleted crypto retweets.
They run this sub which is some gamer sub for LoL.
Some posts in there are suspicious, they allow posts attacking lgbt people
They post quite obviously negatively about fatphobia
They post explicitly transphobic things, they call people "soyboys".
They use the term sigma and beta A LOT.
There's even more financebro shit I can't be bother screening because I'm getting bored of looking at this account.
I do not think this subreddit should be promoted in any way whatsoever, and I really think it should be actively fought against.
I don't think it's really the "algorithm". It's just what gets intentionally promoted by capitalist interests. But maybe you're right, it's what gets recommended to people in their feed as well. But the main thing is that a subreddit is big and has lots of content (which is also astroturfed).
:same-picture:
Capital's goal in social media is to hold your attention as long as possible so that it can keep serving you ads. It does this by showing you content you're more likely to engage with. Clickbait, hot takes, etc tend to get more engagement than other content — angry comments, dunks, shares, etc — so it shows you more of that, so you interact with more, so it shows you more. If you're a content creator and you want to get clout or a cut of ad revenue or whatever, you post more outrage porn to do it.
Neoliberal capitalism is all about the diffusion of responsibility: it's the user's fault for engaging with shitty takes, The Algorithm is neutral and objective and definitely out of out control, and so on
Well put. This is one of the reasons why I no longer use social media like twitter/tumblr/facebook, and instead stick to places like Hexbear or small forums about specific topics.
Yeah I stay away from Twitter/Facebook and especially YouTube unless I'm looking for something specific.
Weirdly, I think tumblr is the one social media that doesn't fall into this trap as much since it's still got a chronological timeline and is utterly unmonitizable (see: yahoo buying it for a billion dollars and selling it for like 3 million dollars a few years later) but also I don't really know how to use tumblr so I could be way off-base there.
They still have ads and "recommended" pages, though it isn't as bad as the others because of being relatively unmonitizable. However, in an attempt to make it more marketable, they purged a shitton of LGBTQ+ resource blogs for the reason of it being "not family friendly", and despite claiming to get rid of all NFSW content, the pornbots are worse than ever, according to friends who still use the site.
Yeah it's definitely been going to shit, especially since the porn ban (which was in response to getting removed from the iOS App Store iirc, which is a whole other can of worms.)
Anything driven by ad revenue is a doomed project for sure, because the advertisers ultimately hold the power. But anything that collects payments from users is beholden to their payment processors, which frequently refuse to serve porn and sex work platforms and could expand to other "objectionable" content. The other option is cryptocurrency, which is an awful volatile currency that requires technical know-how and burning down the rainforest to use.
I hate capitalism
twitter is also mostly chronological, although they've been pushing the "home" feed still (they did back off a bit on that though).
I think it's worth pointing out that ads aren't necessarilly the goal, harvesting and bundling user data is as desirable an outcome as ad-revenue. I think the most accurate way to put it is Capital's goal is to draw value out of user interactions; whether that's seeing an ad or collecting a data-set about user preferences etc.