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Is Reddit evil?

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2018 11:48 pm
by The End

Re: Is Reddit evil?

Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2018 12:16 am
by CrowsNest
Is it evil to make humans think about death?

A much needed public service if you ask me.

Wikipedians clearly don't think about death enough - they do not envision themselves on their deathbed looking back over their life wondering if all that time being dicks, shuffling commas and generally ruining knowledge as we know it, was really a worthwhile existence. They also don't spend much time weighing up the possibility that their addiction can literally shorten their lives in numerous ways, up to and including a violent death at the hands of someone they wrongly assumed was just a user name on a screen.

Re: Is Reddit evil?

Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2018 6:42 am
by The End
CrowsNest wrote:Is it evil to make humans think about death?

A much needed public service if you ask me.

Wikipedians clearly don't think about death enough - they do not envision themselves on their deathbed looking back over their life wondering if all that time being dicks, shuffling commas and generally ruining knowledge as we know it, was really a worthwhile existence. They also don't spend much time weighing up the possibility that their addiction can literally shorten their lives in numerous ways, up to and including a violent death at the hands of someone they wrongly assumed was just a user name on a screen.



Re: Is Reddit evil?

Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2018 7:34 pm
by ericbarbour
I should post a note on this: in May they enabled a totally new user interface. And it became slower. Plus the front page is now openly full of fake-post and banner advertising. And I swear the front-page posts have gotten even more stupid:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatcouldgowro ... oms_house/

Re: Is Reddit evil?

Posted: Sun Jul 01, 2018 4:52 am
by The End
I used to think that Reddit was like ED and I never understood why it was so popular. But it just depends on the subreddits and how each sub-community is managed. Some are highly organized while others are like the Wild West.

Re: Is Reddit evil?

Posted: Mon Jul 02, 2018 6:25 am
by Strelnikov
ericbarbour wrote:I should post a note on this: in May they enabled a totally new user interface. And it became slower. Plus the front page is now openly full of fake-post and banner advertising. And I swear the front-page posts have gotten even more stupid:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatcouldgowro ... oms_house/


You can opt out of "New Reddit" (which was designed that way for tablets, though they won't say that) until they force everybody to use the newer crappier Reddit in a year or so. It becoming a worse website because u/spez (Steve Huffman) is desperate to make any sort of money from it, and I don't think it has ever broken even. That's why that scumhole r/The_Donald is still rolling on like a badly battle-damaged Tiger tank - it makes money through the Reddit Gold system because they have 624,909 "members" (I was made a member months after I was banned, so they might have a wardialing 'bot that "forces" accounts* to join, on top of the sockpuppets and 'bot accounts) and more importantly, Huffman is a Trump supporter. Reddit was built on fraud (Huffman and Ohanian created multiple accounts in the "beta stage" version of Reddit to goose the site along, when there were no comments allowed and it was just an aggregator of links) and this scammy Valve Steam online store mentality carries on today.

_____________

* Possibly random ones, but I am well-known to the lunatic who created The_Donald, jcm267 (aka Teh_Donald and a long list of sockpuppets) so maybe this was his sad sense of humor showing.

Re: Is Reddit evil?

Posted: Mon Jul 02, 2018 11:18 am
by CrowsNest
Do we know (or have persuasive reasons to suspect) if any of the rampant sock puppetry present in the early Wikipedia, was being done for the purposes of simply making the site look busy? As opposed to the usual reasons.

If we accept Jimmy was at that time still hoping to monetize, might he have gone that route? I can't see Larry having that kind of mindset, but one suspects to make such a thing work, he'd had to have at least given tacit approval. Early staff members might have also seen the need, for reasons of basic continuing employment, if not for activity linked bonuses. Again, it seems unlikely staff could have done so without tacit knowledge and approval from Jimmy/Larry, but I guess we can't say for sure they wouldn't have been able to hide it.

It wouldn't break any law that I'm aware of, and I've always suspected the only reason why WP:SOCKLEGIT contains a clause for internal testing, was as cover of any activity like this, were it discovered by someone whose palm hadn't sufficiently been greased. Never in my life have I seen an ordinary user trying to use that clause for the nominal reason it exists, not be blocked as an illegitimate sock. And yet it is still there, as part of the policy.......

Re: Is Reddit evil?

Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2018 3:15 am
by The End
A subreddit where people join in order to be banned. :shock:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17530 ... finity-war

Re: Is Reddit evil?

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2018 4:27 am
by The End
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/1758 ... t-feedback

“The nature of real-time, direct chat seems to be especially disarming,” continues ityoclys, in Reddit’s summary of the chat experiment. “Even when people initially lash out in frustration or to troll, I found that if you talk to them and show them you’re a regular human like them, they almost always chill out.”


And yet Wikipedia's IRC shows that having a "chat room" does not stop trolling.

Re: Is Reddit evil?

Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2018 4:53 am
by ericbarbour
The End wrote:A subreddit where people join in order to be banned. :shock:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/3/17530 ... finity-war

Oh, yeah, r/thanosdidnothingwrong. A case study in how a subreddit gets screwed into the ground by angry little boys. They now call that ugly purge the "Snap" in imitation of Thanos snapping his fingers at the end of the Infinity War movie. As if were an actual snap, to purge a subreddit of 500k users.....bet they enjoyed it, though. Little shits.

And yet Wikipedia's IRC shows that having a "chat room" does not stop trolling.

Seems to encourage it if anything. More rotten shit has been planned on WMF IRC channels than we will even know. Lots of it.