Reddit’s automatic mesages on mod action were a positive and arguably necessary feature.
But if bans are long enough to annoy and short enough to frustrate, they basically are the warning. Less gun-to-your-head, more spritzing a cat in the face.
Yeah hey big thanks to whoever decided expanding images should be marked by a tiny dark greyscale icon in the upper-right corner and links should instead be marked by that too.
You’d set up these rules, and some tween edgelord d-bag would test you to see how much they can push.
You can just call those people buttheads and hit them with short bans until they get the message. Really, you can hand out 3-day bans like candy. It’s infinitely more useful than any form of 3-strike punishment game or kneejerk permaban.
Arbitrary is fine - there’s a reason we have humans do this. But any enforcement of bad rules will always suck.
“Be nice” is a bad rule.
“Be nice” is a recipe for failure, and it always winds up protecting mildly cautious assholes. If you see someone reply ‘so you think [insane garbage unrelated to parent comment]?’ and the accused shoot back ‘shut up,’ and you only remove the person brushing off that troll, your forum is for trolls. That is who you’ve protected. That is what you’ve encouraged. That is how things will go.
If you think the right answer is to always expend great effort peeling apart that disinformation, you do not know what trolling is.
It’s outright insane, in communities about serious topics. If your forum’s about knitting - yeah, you can expect and demand televisable language. The vibe is properly casual. But if you deal with politics then you’re going to get people being called subhuman, and if you don’t come down ten times harder on sneering bigots than their pissed-off victims, you’re not preventing abuse, you’re enabling abuse.
Trying to enumerate all the ways someone could deserve a time-out is a fool’s errand. You can be mercilessly rude with nothing but a thumbs-up emoji. Or “Great Save!” More importantly - some vitriol is justified. Be human, god dammit, and spend thirty seconds figuring out if someone’s being a crank or merely dealing with cranks. If you think there’s never any reason for one user to tell another where to shove it, then you are wrong and you should quit.
Individual photons behave the same way. As in, if you fire quantized packets of light at the double-slit apparatus, one at a time, they will statistically match what happens in bulk.
It’s so not-magic, photons will not only do it in the absence of a human observer, they’ll do it in the absence of other photons. We talk about waves and particles - but these are abstractions on the scale of our ancestral environment. The actual rules are downright wacky in a way we have a hard time reasoning about.
And that’s before shit like chromodynamics, which still sounds like something I made up.
RIP rs.4chan.org, which compiled every RapidShare and MediaFire link on any board. You could scroll through and snag anything that sounded remotely interesting.
99% of former Facebook users didn’t block ads - but they still left. They found other shit to do. People who’ve somehow never blocked ads still complain about ads. They still recognize how advertising shapes the things they like, and they hate it.
Nobody enjoys being interrupted with repetitive corporate bullshit. Nobody’s thrilled when three-minute videos get dragged out to ten minutes and one second, or when punchy edited conversations sprawl into rambling podcasts, or when recipes start with the chef’s life story. They don’t need to know why these things happen, to know they don’t care.
Even if, god help us, Youtube remains the video-hosting site - spacing out to hours of passive content does not have to be how people spend their time.
Maybe not right now. Maybe not next year. But they’ve decided to make everybody miserable, for a “business” that still won’t cause enough misery to turn a profit.
Meanwhile creators are censored worse than broadcast TV. Nevermind the effective ban on swearing - they can’t even reference concepts without a surveillance program declaring that their latest video doesn’t count, even though they’ll still slap ads all over that bitch.
Those people have things they want to share with an audience that wants to see. Any middleman can either help, or become irrelevant. Bandwidth is cheap. Some creators are just in it for the money… but the money is bad, on Youtube, and it’s getting worse. Patreon is more direct and far less stupid. As with all these lumbering ruins of 2010s internet media, the network effect of being the default will keep them relevant for a while, no matter what they do. Twitter’s on fire and it’s still not dead. But its prospects sure aren’t getting better… and not because people changed.
People are sadly predictable. These idiot robots exploit that masterfully, to a point, and then act bewildered when more pressure stops making more money. Like they forgot we can just leave.