Every few months I go dip my toes back into posting on reddit for some reason. Maybe it's because I'm a bit of an idiot who never learns, but to my credit it's never overtly political stuff or concerning current events. Don't want to give myself an aneurysm, after all. Usually it's just a mix of hobby stuff and a variety of subs for tv shows I'm watching.
Commenting isn't too bad for the most part, but for some reason posting really sucks. Maybe I'm just sharing a thought I had, a cool idea, maybe a theory for an ongoing tv show, posted in a friendly and conversational way that is by no means signalling I'm looking for an argument. Then I hit post and within a few minutes I'm instantly reminded that reddit isn't a shithole just because of its politics, but also because its userbase is full of scumfuck, pedantic assholes.
My posts always gets downvoted to 0, and I suddenly have like three or four users picking apart everything I said in the least generous way possible. Comments don't seem to have this problem, which makes me think the new filter on subreddits is populated disproportionately by the worst of the redditors. It is these people who disproportionately decide which posts blow up and which posts don't.
redditors have three modes:
- overused joke Markov chain (and my Axe!)
- unhinged YouTube pedant that makes 7 hour videos about how Glass Onion has plot holes.
- Sherlock Holmes extrapolating your whole life's history from a 5 line post and most likely judging you for the things they made up in their head (AKA the AmITheAsshole mindset)
Don't listen to them, Glass Onion and Knives Out are both pretty good. They're not mindblowing, genre-redefining cinema - but they're good movies worth watching that get bonus points for being in what is currently a criminally underrepresented genre.
yeah, I liked them both! I understand and respect that people interact with media in different ways, but some of the criticism I've seen of Glass Onion in particular is pretty eye roll inducing, and honestly make me wonder if it's not just a vestige of Last Jedi backlash
truly a novel theme, and one best explored by a movie treating its audience as as dumb as the dumb rich people depicted by the movie.
It was definitely weaker than the original but if you're able to watch movies for fun it's pretty good.
This is why we are very purge happy in r/TheDeprogram.
So many people can't help but just be dicks to each other especially when the subject is communism/communist adjacent even other communists.
Complaining about other communists is one of the most important parts of being a communist
:lt-dbyf-dubois:
We really nailed the approach here: ban quickly, but freely allow people to make new accounts and keep posting.
You throw out the feds and wreckers quickly and have some real pushback against "too online" behavior. Some regular posters will get banned, too, but (1) it's an opportunity for them to consider their posting habits, and (2) if they get the overall moderation strategy and aren't too online they won't get bent out of shape over it.
demographics - some proportional split of bots, US military, tech workers , some disaffected proles with an education who failed to secure their rightful place in the hierarchy - with the vast majority being from the anglosphere and some from the rest of 'the west'. Also, the structure of the site with moderators - and disguised reddit staff - policing. In other words, its a forum made up of the contributions of enforcers of the western hegemony and class hierarchies. The middle of the pyramid - kick down & lick up - given a voice, and unsurprisingly its pretty vile.
its likely that most moderators, certainly the so called super-mods, are paid staff. The vast majority of people don't have the time or inclination to do that kind of thing, certainly not without renumeration. I imagine there are exceptions, obsessives or hobbyists or idealogues, but even then such people need to have the time to do this kind of thing, which means they're certainly not coming from the bottom of the pyramid nationally or globally. With the structure of that site being what it is - silos of information/contribution policed by anonymous accounts - it looks to me a lot like an informational warfare experiment, one big psyop.
targeting the demographics it does - originally and most notably tech workers, but broadly the PMC - makes sense because they have skills and educations and a place in the hierarchy that make them somewhat useful/dangerous to a state. Like they target academics, not via that site of course but in other ways.
edit; I forgot to mention another common category of user/poster/moderator, the grifter. The merchants and artists and scammers looking to promote their brand/show/product etc and sometimes denigrate that of their rivals. This is more difficult on reddit because of the relative anonymity but wherever people gather the vultures circle too.
Don't worry if your post does blow up nothing is answered and then someone makes a pun and that's all the thread is about afterwards
I'm convinced well over 50% of Reddit is bot posts. It's designed to make people feel angry and frustrated, and give up on resisting power. After all, Reddit was one of the main reasons for the Trump disaster happening. Never again.
What's beautiful about reddit isn't just that there are sophisticated bots that attempt to act like humans. The humans dumb themselves down enough to appear bot-like. There's a convergence point, and almost every post and comment on that site has reached it.
After all, Reddit was one of the main reasons for the Trump disaster happening
What? That's ridiculous.
You forget that r/The_Donald dominated /all day after day after day. The memes were devastating and the corporate media was caught in lie after lie. The establishment was utterly blindsided by the internet. After the election, they got serious about information control. Coincidentally, that's when the censorship push got going in a big way.
<10% of Americans use Reddit on a monthly basis, it's not clear what percent of them were aware of TD, swayed by it, or voted at all. I appreciate the election was close, but to say it's a significant reason seems a bit of an overestimate.
If it wasn't important, it wouldn't have been censored and broken up after the election. QED.
The FBI goes after 5 person mutual aid groups. Repression does not indicate efficacy.
That's a piece of evidence to consider, but it's definitely not QED. Perhaps more like it was just alienating current users and causing Reddit as a corporation strife, so they stopped it.
Literally just yesterday on one of the "China wants it's spy balloon back" threads there was like 10 straight posts when sorted by new of "Finder's keepers" or something to that effect all posted within minutes of each other and all identical. Definitely feels like bots
sounds like yankees, 5 yanks in a room see a way to shoehorn a (really obvious) cultural touchstone they'll stumble over each other to say it
i've made the [obvious joke comment] second quite a few times even here lol
Honestly, agreed. No one under 50 talks like that in real life, except for a certain kind of university student whose brain has been fried by the same media
EDIT: And guess what? That persons favorite pastime is usually making people mad!
I suddenly have like three or four users picking apart everything I said in the least generous way possible
This behavior is encouraged by the upvote/downvote algorithm. It's encouraged on this site too, to be clear, but heavy moderation and a relatively homogeneous site culture prevents it (you can see the same effect at play in the "good" subreddits, like askscience). Join Reddit and you will either be turned into the kind of pedantic asshole you see everyone else being, or you will forever be the one being pedantically assholed at.
I browse reddit only with the Stealth app to see posts about my hobbies and major news stories. That way I don't have to have an account.
I think an algo with a heavy bias towards new and randomly-chosen content is the way to go. Have upvotes make content more visible, but have a hard limit on how many "popular" posts can exist at once, something like 1 popular post per hundred random posts (the more populated the community, the higher the threshold should be). This makes karma farming difficult to impossible, and means that most comment threads should only have a couple people in them.
Reddit is a garbage website full of cops and sock puppets. Its impossible to scroll r/all without finding massive amounts of racist, sexist, chauvinistic imperialist posts. Why would I log on a website in my free time to talk to cops? I don't talk to cops without a lawyer. Reddit is little more than a state department cut out now, I really don't see the point of having an account and posting.
I use teddit for looking up threads and for checking what racist ass shit is being shoved down our throats this week. I can't even pretend there are real people on there anymore, because it doesn't matter
I go on Reddit to ask the music community certain questions, usually I know most of the answer already, I'm just looking for details. Every single time, theres several people with dead wrong answers or even "this looks useless why bother with this" until someone comes in with the real answer. They take such offense that you are questioning their absolutely wrong answer in the nicest way, it's so frustrating.
They take such offense that you are questioning their absolutely wrong answer in the nicest way
Happens here on occasion, too. We must kill our inner redditors.
Redditor is question/debate bro stuff we should be engaging in contradiction analysis like the chinese do
and I suddenly have like three or four users picking apart everything I said in the least generous way possible.
I go on reddit to pick apart everything and be as argumentative as possible. Chapo just isn't the place for bad faith discussions
I dread ever having to ask a question on Reddit or just about any forum because it's either you get no responses or you get people calling you slurs for daring to ask. The only good experience I've had with posts (aside from here where all my posts are non-controversial and woke) was the super helpful Krita artists forums.
