The chronically online incels look for things to mass report. It’s part of their ongoing campaign to shove the Overton Window far right.
Reddits content moderation are cubicle farm employees that barely look at content; nevermind actual context or intent. They’re clearing tickets to make quota. Right wingers exploit this to control discourse.
You can try doing it yourself. Look for frivolous things to report as offensive. You can get quite a bit of things removed.
I’m posting this from Mars colony. Amazing isn’t it.
It feels like a warped in to another dimension. Did everyone start using only 5 years ago?
They want to virtue signal trivial social issues to avoid admitting they’re just plain conservative.
The music can come screeching to a halt for the US tech industry. They haven’t been innovating for a long time. Just relying on monopolization, rehashing old shit, or straight up VC baiting with useless garbage. The rest of the world needs to continue to realize they can do tech too. They can produce novel and actually useful things. Whereas the US industry has been strangling itself to death with anti-competition.
Especially with regards to AI. Once more others realize the milestone innovations in this field comes from academic research which is then taken by the private sector for profit. Others can realize and follow this path. They can spin up quicker than they think. With the education system being systematically dismantled in a pivot to identity politics protectionism over innovation, the future looks rather grim for the US. Bright for others though.
Attaching “tech” to everything makes it more palatable. Desirable even. It masks the fact that feudal lords are reinventing everything but with “tech”.
So the same MO as always. To take a stranglehold of the internet. “Creators” or “influencers” or whatever buzzword will be all over this as it’s an opportunity to monetize. I’m sure reddit corporate will be taking their piece of rent seeking of course.
The bigger implication that everyone always ignores is that this is going to lock users into the walled garden. Up to now posters have been driving people off site. The comic artists are a good example. They post their comics as image posts. They direct people off site to access more content. They will no doubt jump on the chance to have a paid subreddit. This is an attempt to kill off whatever sites the artist use. If they had some other service providing monetization then that company is probably panicking a little right now.
Where did this come from? Is this a precursor to pushing some blockchain shit or something?
It’s been like that since 2016. You’re saying it’s gotten worse? Oh well.
Besides. Belligerent conservatives have always been a core component of reddit. Doesn’t anyone remember much the left leaning atheism type of users were ridiculed. What I find more interesting than anything is how everyone even leftists accept the default view that reddit is center to left. While everything right leaning is a minority and an aberration. They’re not seen as actual reddit for some reason. Spoken of as if conservatives are outsiders. It’s bizarre. Old reddits favorite politician was Ron Paul. They were a bunch of Ayn Rand loving pseuds. How the hell does anyone get the remote idea that reddit is historically anything but at least right of center.
By the way Musk bots have been on reddit for a long time. Once upon a time the mods of /r/technology tried to limit the amount of musk posts on that subreddit. Otherwise they would be flooding the top posts of the subreddit all the time. The musk bots caused quite a scene. I think it led to that subreddit getting removed as a default. I might be remembering wrong though.
It did happen before the IPO. It’s been happening for several years. They have not been doing mass bans all at once. They’ve been surreptitiously taking down subreddits over the years. Mostly smaller ones that woujldn’t draw much attetnion. Looks like they went for the bigger targets now.
This isn’t a sudden change to ideologically align with the current US administration either. They have been at this for a long time.
It’s schrodingers social media platform. Simultaneously had an impact on the zeitgeist and none at all. Objectively speaking it did. The thing about reddit is it’s the one that everybody uses but nobody talks about using. So people have developed this strange cognitive dissonance. Where reddit seems to exist but also did not… because it’s required that reddit was peoples secret hideout so it can’t have been too popular because that would ruin its historical cachet.
And now the phenomenon has morphed into some other strange beast. Where reddit is right now undeniably a popular platform so that dichotomy can’t hold up anymore. Now people refer to reddit in the third person while being redditors themselves. Lately it’s very obvious seeing on reddit the users referring to “reddit” as if they aren’t themselves a part of it. This post is a very example of the phenomenon. Conservatives screeching about a fictionalized “reddit” in their head that is some kind of far left caricature. A thing that never existed. This kind of thing cuts across all kinds of intersections. People using “reddit” as a label for whatever the other side of the argument they have in their head with zero self awareness that they are “reddit” themselves.
The reality is that reddit is a sibling platform to 4chan. You cannot separate /pol/ from 4chan any more than you can separate the far right parts from reddit. To say reddit is left wing is as delusional to say 4chan is left wing. One can point to the lgbt board on 4chan and say, “look it’s the lefties”. Some how that is more digestible than selectively picking some lgbt subreddits as proof that reddit is left echo chamber.
The venn diagram of reddit, 4chan, and any given social media platform is a lot closer than people want to admit. Because apparently reddit is a secret that everyone has but nobody wants to cop to. And it’s also everyone’s favorite strawman. Except when it comes time to talk about the impact its had on the world. Then poof it doesn’t exist at all.
Yeah obviously we’ve completely lost the plot a long time ago. Nobody even remembers when tech was bands of ragtag nerds making something out of nothing. Now they are the rich whose only purpose to is extract more wealth. Tech what? Who even knows anymore.
That includes the average tech workers. If that angers you then you’re lost too.
Nobody has noticed that there’s more bragging about compensation than accomplishments. It used to be the other way around. Nerds eagerly showing off to anyone who will listen about whatever thing they cooked up. It’s been this way for the past long time long before this LLM AI era.
Well bluetooth doesn’t carry enough bitrate to accomplish this. Besides. Apple won’t and doesn’t need to because their AAC encoder is superior. There is no other bluetooth codec that comes even close. Every codec that claims to be the best one yet is more marketing than anything.
Vendors reframed the narrative for SBC to be dog shit so they can push their own as cutting edge new tech. In reality SBC isn’t that bad. The vendor codecs aren’t that good. And Apple has some kind of secret sauce in their AAC encoder that results in really good quality reproduction of audio.
As far as I’ve seen most of the gimmicky codecs are spins of existing old technology. AAC itself is old too but at least one vendor Apple has focused on making their implementation good. We don’t need another standard+1. We just need a common standard done well. If only Apple would open theirs.
Yeah it worked for the first part of internet history. You talked to people from all over the world.
Now people use the internet like a carnival freak show exhibition. They don’t talk to others. They scroll to gawk at what oddities and tap the glass and jeer at the inhuman thing. Social media is designed this way.
People aren’t as principled as they like to think they are.
The internet had always been full of those gun boner guys fantasizing about taking up arms against threats to freedom. Younger me had no clue they were the tyranny themselves.
There’s a whole thing in sports psychology about what happens when you give kids millions of dollars. Not only that but they are the top in the world at what they do. They were raised to believe they are a special breed of human. It’s not just the top pros who get multi-million dollar contracts. It can happen to the kids who don’t even make it pro too. It mindfucks a person.
I’ve been saying for a long time this kind of thing happens in tech too. I grew up with a lot of guys who’ve made various levels of success in tech from average guy to multi-millionaires. It happens. They really do live in another reality. I don’t think it’s much different between the pro-sports bubble and the tech bubble. They live and breath tech. It’s their whole life. Replace tech with sport. Not much different.
One notable difference is that sports actually recognizes this phenomenon. It’s a known studied field of psychology. They make an effort to engage athletes in the community and stuff. Things that keep individuals grounded in reality.
I don’t think such things exists for tech. If anything they believe whatever latest antics they’re up to is what helps the community and helps themselves keep in touch with reality. Because what the world needs is one more world changing app, another bright idea for a startup that is totally making the world a better place and absolutely not strip mining human sanity for profit.
This happened in the earlier years of Android. Developers were FOSS until people helped them get the app to a polished state. Then close it and charge money. Make a big push to promote the paid app.
My family mellowed out a lot after the parents of the baby boomers died. The boomer generation gets a lot of flak online but for us it was the prior generations who were problematic.
They have old/orphaned dependencies on their machine. It’s hanging on a by thread. They have no idea the packages have disappeared years ago. The house of cards is a bit flip away from collapsing.