I was a digg power user then transitioned to reddit when that all went to shit and my intended grift of making money through selling digg visibility disappeared.
I've run dozens of subreddits and still do although incredibly lazily like 99% of legacy reddit mods that have been in their positions for way too long.
I started the use of subreddits as hashtags via spamming /r/hailcorporate in response to every shill post on the site.
I even got a job in the game industry as an internet janitor too and have worked with EA, Ubi, Paradox, Sega and others. I firmly believe in that title for any online moderation and community management, all we do is keep things clean for everyone to enjoy an online space and ego in online moderation is a serious problem.
Ask me anything
I started the use of subreddits as hashtags via spamming /r/hailcorporate in response to every shill post on the site.
THIS WAS YOU?! 🤬
Yes. I'm not sorry. It was funny af how mad everyone got about it and we slowed down the crawling takeover of the site by brands for a while. At least I like to think so.
I loathe you. That was my reddit breaking point. FUCK! 👺
it really is though. sincerely. i got got. apparently by one of the best. lol
Whats are the most heinous examples of astroturfing you've seen on reddit? "Nuclear experts" in every sub after Fukushima? 2016 correct the record? How much funding do you think these efforts have?
I think it's probably Monsanto. There was multi-year period of time where unusual comments would show up in literally EVERY single thread with 10-20 accounts. Some of those accounts would also only ever show up on anything relevant to Monsanto.
It was insaaaaaaane how much of it there was. Utterly crazy. And people were STILL claiming we were nuts about it.
These people were literally sat at a computer all day doing nothing but sockpuppet reddit.
Tbf that was at least 1/2 of r/cth during the primaries. We practically took over r/ politics for a while. DNC controlled subs like rwarren were too ban happy to turf.
Digg collapsed because the redesign tried to build an entire service around power users that were hated and complained about, then to take the power user concept and to extend that to corporations. This is basically the norm on Twitter today but was HATED on Digg.
It would have succeeded if they'd sensibly made incremental change. Instead they tried to just completely change the entire site overnight and they paid the consequences. It wasn't even like just shifting around the existing way the site works like the Reddit redesign, it was a complete and total overhaul of the very concepts of the site. That does not work.
Any step towards a large goal in online communities must come through incremental steps over time. Communities accept that without blowing up.
Yep probably. I don't think they normalise through astroturfing though, I think they normalise by algorithm abuse to elevate what they want and lower what they don't want in order to change user behaviour and thought processes based on pursuit of shiny points.
The only "astroturfing" I'm sure they engaged in after the early days of reddit is that they (the admins) were responsible for the gold trains, and these days massive quantities of reddit premium. It costs nothing for them to give out and it normalises its usage to other users. I wouldn't be surprised if some of it was algorithmically rewarded to users based on meeting certain criteria and then add in RNG elements to obfuscate it.
I avoid the liberal political spaces like the plague so I'm not aware, I also focused my efforts specifically on corporate brands and advertising as opposed to party content.
I am aware of a number of neoliberal cabals though. Some that definitely have fulltime employed members performing work on reddit. One such cabal operates /r/enoughcommiespam and is spread across a number of other spaces that haven't taken off like shitneoliberalsays and succdem. There is also another cabal that stems out of /r/badunitedkingdom, with mods there engaged in subreddit takeovers and very serious activism, this groups has at least one paid member. Most are just ideologues and true believers.
How do you feel about the concept of "internet janitors" being represented visually by an anthropomorphic cartoon dog?
Nope. They do give mods gifts and freebies in order to make friends and open communications though, build relationships with them and giving them a feeling of having the insider-scoop will make mod teams very interested in keeping you on their good side, they know that anything bad for the company might sour the relationship and damage the access they get. In some cases mods will get invited to demo-events for unreleased games, companies will fly them out for this.
Did you ever get flown anywhere?
Do you know anyone involved in modding political communities? I refuse to believe that the Kafkaesque scissoring of the definition of politics is anything short of intentional. The way that ‘politics’ is defined broadly to include protests and labour movements where political discussion is disallowed, but defined narrowly to only mean electoralism where political discussion is permitted is bizarre enough to be intentional.
Did you ever get flown anywhere?
Nope I just got offered free shit. I rejected it. I know a few mods that did though, EA likes to do it.
Do you know anyone involved in modding political communities? I refuse to believe that the Kafkaesque scissoring of the definition of politics is anything short of intentional. The way that ‘politics’ is defined broadly to include protests and labour movements where political discussion is disallowed, but defined narrowly to only mean electoralism where political discussion is permitted is bizarre enough to be intentional.
Chapo is actually the first political community I've moderated and I've actually steered away from the politics space more towards hobby spaces here. I don't know if I'd be good at a political space, I'd be very tempted to suppress the right. I agree with you on that front but I don't think it comes from moderators themselves, it comes from modteams teams replicating what they see in media already - tv and newspapers already treated it this way. Nobody has broken the mold that they set.
I don’t know if I’d be good at a political space, I’d be very tempted to suppress the right.
I think that's kind of encouraged here.
Sure but what right is there to suppress here? The only thing that needs modding are people with raging substance abuse problems and people with a personal grudge that have turned wreckers.
Yeah, I thought that, but every time I take a look at the modlog it seems like there's a small fire every hour or more.
I like making things other people enjoy. I like communities. I feel good building something where loads of people come together and have a whole thing with one another. It's incredibly satisfying.
Are they still active elsewhere on the site? If they're active on the site it is basically impossible, if they're inactive for more than 30days you can do /r/redditrequest and the admins will hand over the subreddit.
This is the reason hundreds of subs have legacy mods that have been there for years who have lost interest in moderating and advancing the subreddit but can't be removed. They won't leave because they like the bragging rights of modding when they do fuck all anymore. They might have done something in the past, even been good, but have since just stopped for lack of interest.
This used to cause community uproar in the old days of the site and the admins actively encouraged "make a new subreddit" and having mass exoduses from one subreddit to another.
Over time this stopped getting encouraged and then all the reddit shit went down with witchhunts of people on other sites and doxxing. After that happened reddit said "no witchhunting" as a sitewide policy which was intended to only really be about doxxing and attacking people on other sites or real life, subreddits however took this policy and blanket applied it to anything and everything -- this included complaining about moderators on any subreddit which got deemed "witchhunting".
The result of these policy changes without guiding the mis-implementation of them by modteams was the entrenchment of mods and subreddits that can never be complained about and basically making it impossible for any new community to replace any existing community.
Never had one! I don't know if we have them in my country or if they have a different name. My microwave fastfood of choice is usually a cup full of noodles that taste like cardboard.
I haven't had a hot pocket in ages. Have they fixed the issue of it being scolding hot on the ends and ice cold in the center? Even with the sleeve, over nuking it caused it start spitting out of the edged and inedible for a solid minute after heating up, and that sucks cause I want it NOW
my microwave is so cheap. it only has like 12 buttons lol, i don't think it has that setting
how do I avoid hurting customer/coworker's fee-fees with punctuation like this: "can you send me a link??" to preserve my job without literally having an aneurysm over it.
I put uwu and owo in a lot of my messages to coworkers to completely disarm people... Probably wouldn't do that with any b2b customers though.
Lmao that's essentially how they read me chatting with a client and using "??" and "!!" at the end of my sentences. I think the most egregious example picked literally from the transcript is "They are the same!!"
In response I was essentially like "Look, bud, if that's coming off as rude or impatient, I can't help you because clearly you're putting a shit-ton more emotion into my written text than I am." But they referred to it as stone-walling and when I said in response "I wasn't trying to stonewall!!!" it only gave them more exclamation points to shake their head at and use as an example.
I always say something like, "When you have a moment, could you send me the link?? Thanks." To me, it isn't pushy and straight to the point.
Not sure if that is actually what you are asking but that works for me
Community management roles are almost all filled by people with portfolios or internally in a company. You either build up a lot of online experience building and managing communities or you come up through an entry level role like tech support and demonstrate internally to others that you have an interest and skills to do it. Take the opportunities internally to "wear many hats" and do work with the marketing team -- events are good for this as the company needs many bodies for events/cons and they're super tiring horribly long hours that everyone hates.
I do not recommend working in the game industry for very long though, it's extremely shit. There are some benefits though, I usually tell people to work in it for 2-3 years with the expectation that you will do nothing but work for those years then to get out and into something better. The reason for this is that career progression is FAST in these companies, you can move from entry level to important roles in just a couple years if you aren't a potato. You can do this then jump ship to a different industry where you'll get 4 times the pay compared to the same role in videogames.
What were your hours like when you were getting paid for it? Oh and were you making a livable wage
Hours? What are hours?
I worked whenever work existed which was 24 hours a day. The official work day was 9-6 but internet work never ends and to do the job well you basically have to function at all hours, especially with international timezones.
Every game company also places their offices in the middle of fucking nowhere. This is intentional. They know that employees will move in order to work in the game industry so what this does is create an environment where employees have literally nothing for miles around in order to force their entire social lives to be with work colleagues. Nobody makes a livable wage in the lower positions, only when advancing to middle and senior positions(and barely then), to make up for this everyone house-shares. So your worklife, homelife, and social life are your work colleagues. This is by design.
We need aggressive unions and gangs of comrades to go beat up tech executives, christ.
The problem with unionising these industries is:
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A lot of employees leave it in their first 3-5 years. These people enter the industry at 18-21 and are out by 25. This age group is hard to unionise anyway because they're still inexperienced with workplaces and believe all the shit they're told before going into the workplace. They genuinely think it's fair and you work your way up blah blah blah. Older more experienced workers are a bit more jaded. Tech people in particular are really fucking naive and think everything is done on data fairly.
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You progress in these companies really really fast and there's always a carrot to work for. Career progression is very real within the industry and people in entry level positions often move to senior and executive over timescales that are impossible in other industries.
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Everyone is working so insanely hard it's difficult for them to ever take the time to think. Also everyone loves games soooo they kinda think things are ok. There is plenty of fun to be had and this causes some issues. It's only when people get out of the industry and a regular work/life balance that they start to look back and see how horrendous it was even though they were having fun in parts of it.
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