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

    • Awoo [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      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.

        • Awoo [she/her]
          ·
          4 years ago

          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.

            • Awoo [she/her]
              ·
              4 years ago

              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.