This comment was in a post about a guy who openly spilled secrets then got fired.
https://www.reddit.com/r/golf/comments/1dynric/rip_to_the_augusta_ama_guy_yesterday_who_was_not/
Yeah, I remember… But I also remember nearly a decade of shills and astroturfing. Fuck Reddit.
nearly a decade
It was the god damn 2016 election, wasn’t it? That’s the period when I noticed the rapid decline.
For me, it became undeniable after the gamestop fiasco. I used to sub to wallstreetbets way back before all that. It was one of the last genuinely funny places on the internet. I’m lucky, i got in on those shares at £45 and sold at roughly somewhere round about £420.69.
After the day the price shot up to that, the place was just flooded with bots trying to get anyone to spend their money in any place but gamestop. You even had some mugs trying to short silver which, for anyone not in the know, you’d need about all the money in the world to do that.
But yeah, now, everything going on there is going to be ultra analysed by every fund in the world. Oh, they also fired all the admins and replaced them just before the flood gates opened.
I think its then that people saw the potential for flooding reddit with bots and shills.
I remember there was an alt right leaning silver collecting sub shortly after. They were convinced it was going to shoot up a billion times in value. Like Gamestop was supposed.
I think you’re right. Sadly, none of them have any idea how ultra manipulated the price of things like gold and silver are.
I mean, it has appreciated in value since then but if you caught it wrong, with a load of futures, expecting it to “shoot to the moon”, you’ll lose everything which was the plan. It was literally firms and funds trying to cover the losses they made on gamestop.
I think it was before that.
Reddit is commercials disguised as content. Political parties use ads/commercials to spread their message. 2016 I think was annoying and helped people to see it for what it is.
Like that one video of the girl jumping onto a trampoline. She drops down on it, comes up and when she comes up there’s an energy drink in the bottom corner facing the camera. Looks like a natural video but it’s a paid commercial that also didn’t pay reddit and therefore we all watched many commercials for free without the company paying for any server time, bug fixes or
Bug fixes or… what Melvin? Bug fixes or what?!
foozeball tables.
I miss it. I came over right after Digg died, almost half a decade before 2010. Thought it was the ugliest site I had ever seen and found it super confusing.
People did largely speak their minds though, lots of controversial posts and uncensored humor, yeah it was nice, but the change in Reddit really mirrors general cultural changes too, it was more driven by Gen X and older millennials, more tech driven, and more what people would call edgy.
It was the wild west not so much because Reddit specifically was, but because that’s what broad tech bro Internet culture was. We also had relatively unmoderated Xbox Live and online gaming and other things that are hard to explain to folks now.
What we would call social media existed, Digg called it Social Bookmarking for a Digg / Reddit / Slashdot model. Myspace was just giving away to Facebook, Twitter was getting off the ground, and chat rooms, like Yahoo chatrooms and Geocities were so unhinged back then.
2005 is around the time that Yahoo started looking major ground to Google when just a few years prior it was the undisputed default search engine.
Neat to think about all this again.
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The internet was so much better before the advertisement industry jerkoffs figured out how to access it. May they all drown in a cesspool of their own waste for eternity.
May they all fall asleep sunbathing on their yachts… and wake up redder than a traffic light.
may the last thing they ever smell be chloroform
It was great before the dot com bubble burst. Even obscure fan websites had paid advertising. Even for a while after, is was great and still usable mostly because corporations hadn’t yet figured out how to completely monetize the internet.
Message boards and forums were the extent of online engagement. I miss it.
I can’t stand people who use Discord as a support platform… Absolutely nothing comes up in internet searches, and then you have to try to find an old discussion, or ask the same question as 50 other people. It’s dumb.
I was on here and called out a billionaire that fucked over me and my company because they didn’t want to pay what they owed. I named, I shamed, and assholes on here defended the billionaire.
I think that I started using Reddit around 2014~5 or so. For me the cultural shift shows two things:
- Any online community financed by adbux will eventually prioritise advertisers over its own participants.
- Unless you have tools ensuring transparency of the process, people with power over the others’ speech will misuse it to defend their individual interests, instead of the community’s.
I just got a warning and [removed by reddit] because I told a dry cut story about turkish coworkers of mine harassing women and queer people and talking about stuff like “buying wifes” from their home country as an answer to someone posting a similar story. I got warned for “promoting hate and violence against marginalized groups”. I made no generelizations, promoted no violence or hate. I actually got upset because of my coworkers doing exactly that. This is not the internet as I know it. Where you get censored because you talked about something that happened in your life.
As a Turkish person, ooph. Sorry you had to deal with that.
We’ve got some nice coming from Turkey, but also a bunch of shit heels. These days the latter outnumber the former, sadly.
These days the latter outnumber the former, sadly.
It feels like that lately no matter where you happen to live.
One of the nicest people I know is Turkish. We’ve never met in person, but we’ve been online friends for over 20 years. I wish people who stereotyped Turks when people act like this knew him.
It’s been like that ever since China/Tencent invested. I noticed soon after that investment there was a huge degradation in freedom of speech on the platform.
Because there is no discernable difference between you telling an honest story about your Turkish coworkers and a racist using online anonymity to rile people up against minorities.
I think that should be decided by the readers of the comment not by reddit. Unless I actually incite hate or violence. Or maybe if I had a history of leaving comments like that. But it was the first time I talked about it. Or if my account was new or a bot. I don’t like to assume the worst about people just because they criticise something adjacent to a controversial topic. That’s how problems get swept under the rug and never solved.
Thank you for being reasonable and understanding how life isn’t black and white.
gets banned for using black and white
Except if you leave it solely to the readers of the comment, the communications platform is still flooded by racists and bigots of all stripes. Sure, a lot of their comments are downvoted, but by giving them a platform you’re giving them a way to degrade the quality of the platform they’re on, drive away reasonable users and eventually take over and shit up the place unrestricted. Just like the nazi bar story.
Downvotes are nowhere near as effective as moderation when it comes to keeping hate off of a platform. Sorry if you posted something in good faith and moderation censored you, but that doesn’t make moderation as a concept wrong.
(Also, I kind of agree with you that there should be more signals available to moderators than just “does this comment mention race negatively”. However, I’m not sure you want reddit scoring what kind of person you are and attaching that score to every moderation action.)
I don’t think Moderation as a concept is wrong. I also filed an appeal, so i’ll see what they say after taking a closer look. But I sense a huge problem of people not being able to understand any nuances in this topic. So they just leave the whole thing for the extreme right as their talking point.
Yes and FURTHERMORE, POE’S LAW EXISTS
and it’s NOT actually “just” about parody - it’s all too often impossible to tell honest anecdote apart from ideological rhetoric.
Poe’s law doesn’t mean ban anything that’s edging a bit close to what you think it is. It’s like arresting people for a crime they didn’t commit but because they act suspiciously according to the eye of the authority.
How would you solve problems pertaining to immigration when you can’t talk about experiences. There is actually a large problem of parallel societies in germany that has been rampant for decades because no one wants to talk about it. I mean like people doing what I talked about in my comments or not learning the countrys language in decades and having no contact to native germans. I my comment I was actually talking about people who were born here and their familys lived here for generations. In western europe in general it’s driving people to the extreme right, because no one dares talk about it in a normal and legitimate way. Censorship only makes these problems worse. There needs to be a way to talk about this topic with some nuance, not just blatant hate rhetoric.
The nazi bar story is retarded. To buy into it is to forfeit all your advantages against the obnoxious minority, such as being vastly greater in number, and being able to exercise critical thinking abilities. The nazi doesn’t drive anyone away, people make the choice to do so themselves, when in fact they should challenge and confront at every opportunity. All the idea does is empower bad actors and agents provocateur and deny the agency of individuals. To borrow from Nicholas Taleb: it’s a very fragile concept.
PUBLIC SHAMING WORKS ON BULLIES
To be fair, people stopped after starting a witch hunt for the Boston bombers and identifying the completely wrong people. It may very well be the case that they over corrected, but there is at least a good reason for the change overall. (also corporate interests I suppose, fuck them though)
I’m not sure one has much to do with the other. I completely agree that the Boston bombing investigation was a witch hunt, no argument here. But witch hunts target individuals, and individuals are entitled to a certain degree of privacy which one would hope would protect them from an uninformed mob.
But airing your employers’ dirty laundry is whistle-blowing. It should be protected, especially if the industry secret is anti-consumer, dangerous, or illegal. And importantly, a corporation isn’t an individual, so they shouldn’t benefit from protections for individuals.
It’s tempting to think that we don’t see the Name and Shame posts actually naming and shaming because of Reddit’s interests with advertisers. But I think it’s also just as likely that users don’t want to be identified leaking secrets - likely due to the litigious nature of their employers.
I got permabanned instantly from r/mildlyinfuriating because an idiot mod read the word “criminal” as “black person” and assumed I am racist.
That shit hole can die in a fire. Mirror their content over here(it isn’t theirs) and let them bleed out.
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Wonder if it was AwkwardTheTurtle.
Literally no way for me to tell and no path to fixing it. Even 10sec of viewing my post history on there would have revealed I was in no way using it as a dog whistle or the like. It was the most absurd thing ever.
Had another on r/whitepeopletwitter. I just pointed out a statistic, got permabanned. I replied asking what rule I broke, because I legitimately could not tell. They reply was “what did you intend with that comment” (I intended to inform, and was in line with what was being said, literally nothing else) and I asked “I was banned for you assuming I had ill intent that I can’t even figure out how you got there? Ok, what rule does that break?”. I then got a reply that said "you are muted from contacting this mod for three days, any further contact will be reported as harassment…
It is absurd and not worth the effort. That site is so poorly run. No mod oversight once a community gets big…you get the same punks with an agenda and power trip.
Now i get random ban, even if i have legitimate use.
I just comment around, nice word. Reddit AI decided that i am spamming.
Trip the spam filter once in 2 day.
Yeah just like in the Wild West, we used to all die of dysentery.
It was a Wild West but I’m not sure the Lemmy community would have liked it much - there was a lot of content in the “offensive to everyone” category and people generally didn’t mind as long as it was contained in its own subreddits. That doesn’t seem to be the attitude of “kids these days”.
Not to mention that one time they made a woman a CEO just to ban the fat people hate sub because it was making the whole site look bad and then fired her to pin the decision on her just being a bitch feminist
Bruh the Ellen Pao hate was fucking insane. People like to pretend that Reddit got worse post-Trump or gamergate, but lbr the deplorable behaviour was always there, it just wasn’t “political” yet.
remember when space dicks would get front page. or imgoingtohellforthis
The big Lemmy instances are constantly inundated with posts to defederate from unscrupulous instances, which to me seems like a stronger version of siloing off content than what early reddit was like.
Most of the calls I’ve seen to defederate haven’t been because of an instance’s content, but rather because of an instance’s users being the problem.
E.g. hexbear getting the boot during the period where some of its users thought it was hilarious to brigade other instances and spam giant emojis of a well endowed pig shitting on itself.
Even in 2010 the front page was a shitshow. The smaller communities are generally their own thing but i’d say reddit often did more harm than good.
But … the Boston Bomber.
Guys, we found him!
We did it Reddit!
I’ve been on reddit since the fall of digg. It was a wild time that’s for sure.
I remember when they had reddit meetups. I stupidly brought my toddler thinking it was going to be family friendly. The places they hosted were peoples workplaces. One guy rented a limo. Beer was given away for free. Some women walked around shirtless and one creep was taking videos. Feeling unsafe, I left. Then I got a email about how the hosts were looking for the creep because he may have committed a crime, and was asking for money to pay for the broken office equipment.
Wild time.
I’ve been on Reddit for 15 years and haven’t really noticed any shift for the most part. The only thing I find unbearable is the amount of bots and karma whoring reposting that goes on. The culture I feel is the same.
That’s wild. I’ve only been there 5.5 yrs and I’ve noticed dramatic shifts in the culture as it’s become popular and profit focused
Same, I was on it for more than a decade. There’s definitely been dramatic shifts. Dunno what small community that other poster stuck to to not see any changes over a decade and a half, but it must have been fun for them.
I used to on for about 10 and noticed a dramatic shift but on the other hand for years I was only looking at gaming subs then started looking at the more common ones. So that could possibly be part of it but it still seemed to get worse over time to me.
I unsubscribed to all the gaming subs around gamergate, holy shit everything went downhill so quickly and never really recovered. We’re seeing the effects of it to this day.
I refused to participate in gaming communities online for a long time after that, only looked at my RSS feeds for news/official announcements. The migration to Lemmy last year has me participating in them a bit more again, as long as I don’t tell anyone I’m playing a Nintendo game, lol.
Gamergate??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)
Literally the event that accelerated the bullshit “Woke Video Games” pushback we see mouth breathers spewing in gaming spaces today. I believe this is what spawned r/KotakuInAction and the whole “It’s About Ethics™️ in Gaming Journalism” as well, but someone correct me if I’m wrong.
These exact talking points and methods were then taken up by the alt-right to propel the culture war into the mainstream, and welcome to 2024.
I’ve been on Reddit for 15 years and haven’t really noticed any shift for the most part.
That simply isn’t possible. Reddit changed dramatically since the Digg V4 exodus. The site itself has been constantly updated and redesigned / re-engineered adding and removing tons of functionality at least three times. The politics have literally swung all over the place from “tech-bro libertarian” to “conservative” to “progressive”. Content has changed radically in both scope and focus (AMAs are out while corporate run subreddits are in) and leadership has been all over the place.
Politics themselves have changed a lot over the past 15 years - I’m not sure if that has anything to do with the sub. Hell, even I changed from Republican to Democrat in that time frame.
I still use old.reddit and it’s pretty much been the exact same except for a few ads that RES takes care of anyway.
Definitely agree with the AMAs. That’s not going to change no matter the platform however and not exclusive to Reddit.
I still use old.reddit and it’s pretty much been the exact same
15 years ago there was no karma system. 15 years ago there was no Reddit rewards like Gold. Neither of those two things are related to old.reddit.com but they both had major impacts on the website but yeah, sure, “Nothing has changed in 15 years.”.
Karma has been on Reddit since I created my account. In fact, it’s been part of Reddit almost from the very start. How did you come by your information?
As for Reddit gold, it was introduced in 2010. But what relevance does gold have to content? It seems pointless and neither adds nor detracts from the anything other than people’s bank accounts.
How did you come by your information?
I should have specified Comment Karma. You’re correct that Post Karma has existed from Day 1.
Bringing in Comment Karma had a downside, it fed the trolls. You can see in this post here, from about 9 years ago, when Reddit had finally had enough of negative karma trolls (people trying to get the lowest comment karma possible) and stopped tallying it after a certain point.
Things sometimes get a bit blurry for me after all these years. I’d been on there so long I remember when Reddit added the ability for users to create sub-reddits!
But what relevance does gold have to content?
Reddit Rewards, like Gold, provided a visibility boost to both Posts and Comments. The_Donald famously abused this to keep the Reddit front page full of MAGA content. It eventually got so bad that Reddit Inc had to introduce emergency FP content filtering, something they’d resisted doing for years, while they rejiggered the algorithm in order to stop it. It was subsequently abused on comments all over reddit to keep something visible that otherwise would have been auto-collapsed due to downvotes. It was famously abused again because it was possible to send messages to someone, even someone who had blocked you, if you sent them a Reddit Reward.
Speaking of changes there’s another one. User blocking. Reddit didn’t have that 15 years ago either.
Reddit was a long and wild ride and a lot of things changed after I showed up in April of 2008.
God, remember Ron Paul? Those were the good ol days
14 and change, it definitely had multiple, noticeable shifts.
And if you didn’t notice, you probably only stuck to a handful of communities, because they changed how the front page works several times, and what communities are default. All of those changed the feel by a lot.
Each change may not have affected each sub equally hard, default subs turned to shit, subs that got turned off of default finally got the reality check they needed, and when they started banning entire subs, there were noticeably less shitty people from time to time as they pruned.
Again, if you stuck to smaller subs, or even mid sized ones but didn’t interact a ton, or just didn’t log on every day, I could see how you may not have noticed.
They definitely ramped up moderation, and the administration got a lot more heavy-handed over the last few years, clearly (in hindsight) in preparation for the big change last year.
I was never part of any of those controversial subs like fat people hate or watch people die.
I never went to /all/ either.
Just stuck to regular subs like news, fitness, some niche hobbies etc. If anything, the niche hobby subs got better since there was more people. Fitness did get overly moderated but I just moved to fitness over 30 sub instead and it was fine.
Some of the bigger subs became shit shows, but they were kind of like since their inception.
Firing Victoria was annoying since I think she did good AMA. Getting rid of third party apps is the biggest shittiest thing that I experienced which is why I came to Lemmy in the first place.
Idk man, there were real communities where folks knew each other back then. There’s very little of that anymore because moderating those subs is a thankless full time job and the rest got massive. /r/CripplingAlcoholism is a good example - back around 2010 it was a close-knit group of drunks, by 2018 or so it was just a swamp.
/r/CenturyClub and the related subs were some of the best places on the internet back ~15 years ago. I deleted my old account that was in it ages ago and haven’t bothered rejoining since I passed the threshold, but even what, 8 years ago when I did that it was already way different.
Game subreddits went way downhill, too.
The overall quality of the site is much worse than it used to be.
I remember when I could post to the firefly sub and banter with the same 20 or so people every week, then one day something hit the front page and a flood of people came in.
Everything turned from thought provoking discussions about what little lore we did have and overanalysing every episode, to “this is what the actors do now” and “here’s an image with a quote from the show” maybe an art post of original content here and there.
In Japan, we have to be careful because a company could sue for reputational damage (even if the claims are 100% true and provable). Same for some other examples like posting a pic of someone with his mistress or basically anything with their face.
Wow I see the Shogunate is still alive and well. Sounds like it’s still feudalism over there… And all the kids love Japan and want to live there… Propaganda is a hell of a drug!
Perhaps it’s bad to judge an entire country on a single, fairly minor shitty law.
I would not call anything about a law designed solely to prosecute whistleblowers “fairly minor”
A fairly minor and shitty law that influences all public speech about other people
