Maybe instead of Torvalds taking lessons on how to be less of an asshole, he should be teaching developers how to be more like him.

The world needed the open internet to bootstrap the digital revolution. It wasn’t possible without the sum of humanity working altruistically to build the Library of Alexandria of software. No private entity could have possibly done it. It truly is an under appreciated marvel of the late-20th/early-21st century. FOSS contains the knowledge of software that runs the world. Now that such a thing exists I could totally see organizations (loosely speaking) wanting to conquer or ransack it. It’s quite clear by now there’s faction of tech with a tyrannical bent. I’d put them whoever they might be exactly as possible culprits.

The average person makes under 100k even in reddits favorite high cost of living tech hubs where their six figures is pretty much makes them equivalent to the people on skidrow. It’s amusing how when they were struggling college students the bar for rich was millionaires. Those who’ve made it rich themselves the bar for rich person moved up to billionaires. So now they have to wax philosophic, “what exactly is ‘rich’?”. You got rich. There being richer people than you doesn’t change that.

Explain the same executive compensation minus tech and people will have their pitchforks out. But it’s tech so which has a different set of standards because it’s the internets darling.

Running their mouths on Discord. Using Patreon to profit from (not) piracy (but everyone knows it is). Reckless display of hubris.

I don’t think this is going to tank like everyone says. Those that hold that opinion are too heavily basing this on personal feelings toward the platform. Reddit isn’t geared toward those individuals anymore. They successfully pivot the platform towards the broad swath of social media users. The market will be pricing reddit based on this. Not whether or not you personally think it’s still a site worth using. The more opinionated geek crowd was never profitable and reddit inc doesn’t care about them.

At this point social media users have grown so weary of their main platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Enough to have mass adopted reddit especially during the pandemic years. Reddit has been capitalizing on that to give people something that seems fresh to them. For all your own years of baggage you personally hold over reddit, the broad market of social media users do not care. They just want their big multi-forum app to entertain them.

The market will not price reddit based on your personal idpol issues with the site. Of which everybody across the spectrum seems to have some sort of stick up their ass. Reddit has survived all those “reddit moments” over the past decades. The platform has actually proven incredibly resilient. The nature of reddit is that it isn’t any common identity anyone can point to really. There is so much representation across the board. Users hate other parts of reddit rather than reddit itself.

The big social platforms have consolidated power over the internet. There’s no competitors. reddit being the forgotten stepchild is having its time in the spotlight right now. The fediverse ecosystem is too raw and too technical for the casual user right now.

The company basically has to keep mods placated to keep on keeping the lights on. They did survive the API protest. I think to them that was actually a litmus test for the IPO. So far we have seen there is no shortage of sycophants lined up. Subreddits are valuable and there has been and will always be those who want to be internet feudal lord.

A lot of people do take issue with reddit but overall the userbase they are selling, that broad social media userbase, they did not care about such issues as the API whatever gabagool. They don’t even know what an aye pee eye is. They just wanted their app to go back to normal. And it did. And reddit resumed operation as normal.

They got $136k funding from an original goal of $10k. Did it go to their head?

Social media tech bros sell “humanity” the same way cigarette companies sold glamorous lifestyles.

They both use celebrities to portray fashionable a lifestyle. They both know the net negative health effects and ignore it because it’s directly tied to their bottom line. They’re both are at odds with researchers. I’m sure if one were to dig deeper there would be a lot more parallels.

The Facebook whistleblower was huge news in mainstream media. Then they rebranded to Meta and successfully buried the story. The aggressively anti-humanity.

Smoking rots your body. Social media rots your mind.

Why is reddit regarded so highly this way? It’s always been a second rate board to me. Like yeah there’s some technical discussion there. Even notable names might post there. But it’s the social media version of technical side of the internet. It’s generally full of garbage that requires heavy doses of skepticism as bad info often gets visibility. There is no recourse since the nature of reddit engagement is ephemeral. The proverbial concrete sets shortly after the post/comment is made.

I suppose the state off affairs have deteriorated so far that search engines don’t even index the internet properly anymore. Actual discussion boards and websites are basically darknet these days. Internet indexes for all intents and purposes don’t exist today. Search engines a glorified index links to each others social media platforms. Even then the bulk of results are online shopping spam.

What a mess.

For any topic I actually want to dive into I do not use reddit for anything more than initial discovery. Social media by nature commoditizes content to serve the masses by appealing to the lowest common denominators. The bulk of the content never goes below surface level.

I’ve looked at the site but I don’t contribute anymore. I’ve made a few comments telling people to look at another site for answers to their technical questions. Dropping seeds that will branch away from reddit.

The popular sort for Canada increasingly resembles voat. When it was becoming overrun by the far right dog whistles. The signature right wing botted subreddits seem to be a mainstay on the top sorts. That says a lot about how it’s going.

It is majority bots. I got the groundhog day feeling too. So a few years ago I started looking at the account that post rather than the posts itself. There’s a simple pattern. The account is registered but lays dormant for a couple months. Then it becomes active and starts reposting top ranked post of all time from subreddits. Their comments are copy pasted out of replies to old posts.

It’s inexplicable why the real human users put up with it though. At some point the zeitgeist stopped having baseline expectation of content quality.

More recently there’s a newer phenomenon where clickbait stories (“My (45M) wife (18F) of 5 years left me everything but the icecube trays AITA”) are posted by brand new accounts. Except all those subreddits don’t allow brand new accounts to post. So it must be the mods are selectively approving them. They are farming outrage with stories (most likely fake) meant to maximize user activity.

That wasn’t an attempt to be disingenuous. It was to mark a reference point in your text. You’re trying to extrapolate arguments where there may or may not be any. That’s no better than how reddit is.

I’m not certain their point was the anti echo chamber thing. In other words the phony “free speech” thing that means you have to let bigots ply their rhetoric.

Do I think people can go too far and literally only surround themselves with “yes men” socially?

Reddit has serious problems localized extremum. To detach it from politicization take the 3D printing subreddits for example. For a while they were convinced it’s the second arrival of Jesus. At one point it was said every household would have this appliance. Like a washing machine or refrigerator. You must conform to the talking points. Cryptocurrency is a recent one. There is no talking like normal people in those subreddits without being faced with scripted rhetoric. Real life isn’t like this. In real life people don’t talk like stump speeches.

Pay to use. Then they sell your data. Double dipping.

Nope. Reddit orphans posts and comments from accounts. I don’t know the hows or whys.

Last week I stumbled on a 15 year account who tried to do a full wipe before abandoning reddit. Their last and only comment in their profile is their farewell message. Except when you Google search their username it shows their content is still there. Just not associated to their profile page anymore.

I make throwaway accounts. Push code. Disappear forever. Come to find out nobody ever looks at it anyways.

I could see the paradigm shifting over the years on reddit. They don’t approach the internet as a knowledge base but a personal assistant chat. That’s when I knew the value of the site was on the down swing.

Their workflow would be open to the public. The organizational structure doesn’t want things like this out in the open.

It seems like post-2010 users see the internet as a completely different beast. Those of use who know the world wide web as it was in the before times have this mental image of it as places we built.

Post-2010 they seem to have a mental image of spaces that snapped into existence. They have no concept of every day people in real life making a new forum/board/subreddit then seeding the content themselves. Over the years fostering a community. Building up the network effects.

I saw so many comments on reddit from ignorant indifferent users saying just open another sub then. Who will do that? Who will foster it? You? To which they’re like, ‘lol no’.

Such is the corporate internet. Users of the corporate internet see communities as big established companies with store fronts open 24/7. Always stocked, always clean, up kept by invisible staff out of sight out of mind. That’s not how any of this works…

Years ago reddit put aside a cardinal rule of the internet: Don’t feed the trolls.

It was worse off for it from a user perspective. It’s been great for investors though.

Very nice. I don’t understand the paradigm where everything is spaced out and there’s useless sidebars wasting space.

I general why does there have to be static sidebars that are rarely used. It causes the content body to be squeezed into tiny space. I will use the left menus when necessary which is not every single page view. In particular the right panel on lemmy and reddit have become cognitive blindspots. I will read the board description and decide to (or not to) click subscribe once. Otherwise it’s like how my brain ignores my own nose.

Why did web design become this way?