Marvelous things are happening over at Reddit. Spez has locked himself in the company doomsday bunker and told everyone he'll come out once his "real" work friends get there. To watch the brush strokes of the maestro as they shape the future of so many unpaid laborers.
This is something I’ve been wondering for awhile: if I were a mod on Reddit, and was being threatened by the admins to bend the knee, as it were, my response would likely be to remove any and all tools i had put in place to help me moderate, and say, “goodbye.”
I’m sure there’s something I’m just not understanding, but why isn’t this happening?
There's no solution in the same way that there's no "solution" to winning rock-paper-scissors. The cycle is endless because the desire to be in control is a key part of human nature, whether that be an authoritarian "I want everyone to do what I say" or a more oligarchic "I accept that there's others at my level, so we can cooperate so that everyone else does what we say", and any attempt to change those systems requires an equivalent amount of force that can all too easily lead one into side-tangents of trying to keep said force focused.
As a side note, Machiavelli identified the cycle in politics in his "Discourse on Livy" - a powerful and strong-willed individual takes power (e.g. Caesar or Napoleon), his descendants wield power with less and less efficiency until in time the aristocracy seize the reins, and they get more and more corrupt and out of touch until finally the people rise up and enforce some level of democratic sway. Unfortunately, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, which is exhausting, and so over time things run down until some powerful and strong-willed individual takes power and it all starts again. It's not purely linear - an aristocracy can be subsumed into a strong individual leadership (e.g. the popes in the 19th century grabbing power back from the cardinals) and a king can be overthrown by a democratic uprising (e.g. Louis XVI of France - though technically it did go through a brief aristocratic moment, as he re-convened the parliament to try and get around the nobility who wouldn't fund his wars, indicating his powers had weakened). But in general we oscillate between these three modes of social organisation because of the difficulty in centralising power and in then keeping it from being corrupted (i.e. using it for selfish purposes) once it is centralised.
Is this new to post-blackout reddit is or has it been this way for a while. Top post of r/all is a tweet from like 2 years ago about a "current event" that no one has talked about since then and 100% of the comments are talking about this like this topic is the focus of today's or any recent time's 24 hour news cycle. Nearly 30K...
I feel what we’re seeing is a lack of OC from actual humans, that is being filled in by your standard karma farming bot. Doubt we’re at the AI filled posts time yet. Thinking those will be less obvious, and show up over the next couple months. So glad I’m part of a site without user karma. It means reposts are likely from passionate users rather than bots.
I've been saying it for a while now. Noticed it years ago, but it's now becoming very obvious due to reddit being more empty than usual. Here's a comment I made about it last week:
Reddit right now is like a car crash. It's hard to look away. However, there's a very good reason not to engage, the debate on reddit has become more artificial than most realise.
Reddit's inflated numbers by using bots and fake accounts since day 1. A quick google will result in articles where they admit as much. We all know reddit's had increasing amounts of bots, posting content and increasingly comments, but I don't think people realise how bad it's become.
It's not even that time that reddit's blog accidentally posted about Eglin Air Force base being one of the most reddit addicted cities. I think everyone knows (foreign) governments engage in influence operations online, and that this includes reddit. Even if it's just on an intellectual level, without truly realising that they've been semi-regularly interacting with bots while arguing on reddit. I also don't think anyone's naive enough to think that plenty of political content isn't artificially upvoted or promoted. Same thing goes for product placement.
But the recent shit storm just illustrates reddit the company is part of the problem. Recently, I've seen twenty different accounts post the same comment about not needing third party apps, and dusting off their laptop.
When you're visiting reddit, you're no longer even watching a car crash. It's a simulacrum. An imitation of what's actually happening.
And it's been like this for a while. I've seen naive redditers engaging with bot comments under bot promoted content, posted by bots on more than one occassion.
Reddit has become worse than a hentai date simulator. I don't think anyone who plays those is particularly proud of it. But what to think of the lonely people who engage in reddit discussions with bots, and think they've had a genuine social interaction?
I had noticed a sharp decline in quality. It was a kind of frog in boiling water situation, where more and more content was from Twitter, tiktok, poor ragebait about us politics....
I remember I went to reddit because that is where content from other platforms had originated. That stopped at some point
I think that while Reddit's user count has been rebounding since the blackout, their level of content submitted has cratered as a result of the admin actions. All of my feeds that didn't participate in the blackout have slowed and/or stalled there. I believe Huffman made everyone rethink about posting there, and as the content dries out, so will the userbase.
Once the third party tools die next month and the ability to sift through the content drought is reduced to the standard Reddit interface, we're going to see a black hole effect that will accelerate the slow heat death of r/all. The content submitters are clearly moving to other platforms, and the explosion of content and users on kbin and lemmy is a testament to this dynamic.
It's clear that admins are re-submitting popular content to try and blunt the fallout, but it speaks to greater failing - Reddit no longer has the trust of its users, and the sense of a coherent, save community space to contribute to has been broken beyond repair.
You can't replace that with AI, but it's pretty funny to watch them try.
Interesting follow-up to this - Reddit locked me out of the main account I've been using for the past 2-3 years a week or so ago. It had been my totally normal, all over the site account with lots comments etc. The only out of the ordinary thing I did in the couple of days leading up to the lockout was call out what I thought was an AI bot arguing with me about the subreddit blackouts and wonder whether new Reddit was just going to be essentially what your link says. It's the last comment that account will ever make I guess...
I don't even care about the API prices and I used to use the official Reddit mobile app before migrating.
I've been looking for an open source Reddit like platform since the Twitter drama started and people started migrating to Mastodon, but there wasn't much content on them, until now, so I jumped on the band wagon.
A lonely guy playing a creepy hentai game gets some sexual gratification from his time spent interacting with a piece of software and is at least somewhat self-aware. He knows it's just software, even if he 'married' his bodypillow.
Meanwhile there are increasing numbers of people unaware they're regularly interacting with bots online, not realising one of the reasons social media is making them sadder is because they've atttempting to fulfill their need for social interaction with a facsimile thereof.
It's not unlike Idiocracy, where they give the plants Brawndo instead of water, then wonder why the plants are dying. Vast swathes of the world are feeding their social needs with social media brawndo.
I feel the same way.
As an Apollo user, I didn’t immediately leave since I wanted to see if some agreement would be done.
But the way they treated the devs is insulting, I work on IT and know a bit of how complex and time consuming this is; doing all this work just to be considered a parasite to be cut, and seeing how horrible the AMA was; really showed Reddit’s true colors.
Currently liking this federated initiative, big potential and less company ruining agenda. Very comfy here.
r/ZeroWaste mod talks about ongoing "plague of bots" spamming comments at an extremely high rate (media.kbin.social)
Top of r/all (old.reddit.com)
Is this new to post-blackout reddit is or has it been this way for a while. Top post of r/all is a tweet from like 2 years ago about a "current event" that no one has talked about since then and 100% of the comments are talking about this like this topic is the focus of today's or any recent time's 24 hour news cycle. Nearly 30K...
Minecraft is leaving Reddit (media.kbin.social)