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/
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.
The problem is when it is weaponized by corporations to bypass competition or by activists who are upset for one reason and get everyone to rally for an untrue reason.
Example: McDonalds has an employee write about their horrible experience working for Burger King which is a complete fabrication to get people to hate their competitor.
Example 2: supporters for Presidential candidate John Smith don’t like that Target has been donating to Smith‘s rival political party. Smith supporters fabricate untrue stories about Target’s working conditions to get people to boycott the store and hurt profits. This would lead to less money being available for donations from the store.
In all honesty, I do think Name and Shame is perfectly reasonable and should be done. But I still want to highlight some ways that it can be abused. I don’t think Reddit should use this as an excuse to forbid the practice but Reddit should do due diligence in proving the story is right like verifying an employee’s employment at the company they are shaming, for example.
You don’t even have to make up things like this. The amount of “Name and Shame” between fucking people working on different fucking web browsers (Brave and Firefox) or different versions of de-Googled Android (GrapheneOS, DivestOS, /e/OS) that are all ostensibly open fucking source.
It happens constantly.
Reddit also gets a lot of blame for shit that actually came out of 4chan in that case. Though reddit definitely amplified it.
We did it, Reddit!
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.
Every country has some shit people. It’s inevitable. Just gotta hope us good ones make it better.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for being reasonable and understanding how life isn’t black and white.
gets banned for using black and white
Well not if you strip it from all context and the nuance of OPs specific word choice.
Because I could tell a story about my Turkish co-worker that ends like:
“my co-worker of specific race is doing dodgy shit and it’s so harmful for the whole community that he’s doing this, especially with how much anti-ethnic group hate is going around, he’s giving everyone a bad name and I’m worried his behaviour as an individual aashole who happens to be race is going to start a spree of hate crimes against others who aren’t doing anything wrong, because most people aren’t, my co-worker is”
And I would argue that this story is fundamentally different from just leaving it as “my Turkish co-worker is doing dodgy stuff”.
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.
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.
Lemmy has recreated forums with additional steps is how I put it. Nothing to do with the tech but fragmentation. My front page is just 10 or so different posts reposted in some form or another 5 servers each with their own version of the sub.
Seems to me it’s almost entirely aligned with ideology for most folks, which…idk is kinda a feature?
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.
remember when space dicks would get front page. or imgoingtohellforthis
RIP I_RAPE_CATS :c
Was in a couple of those offensive subs.
Opieandandthony Cumtown
Those subs had some hilariously talented shitposters.
I agree, people on the internet sometimes come across as selfish. The problem is that it always is about if they like it or not and only care about their morals.
However, it might be different for lemmy.
However, it might be different for lemmy.
Spoiler Alert: It’s not. The same people who want to silence anyone they disagree with are here as well. As Lemmy, really the Fediverse, continues to grow the purity tests and censorship will grow proportionally.
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.
Same. It was a really fun unique place for a long 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.
This is the other poster
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.
The comments alone were a huge shift.
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.
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
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.
Well, I missed Reddit until the mid 2000 teens, but I remember when the entire internet around 2000 was The Wild West. And I miss it, very much.
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.
You must be thinking of a different for com bubble, like OG was like 1995 to 2002. 2002 including the bubble bursting. Gems include the amazing sale of broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5 billion! Like 10k per user of broadcast.com! In 2002 even companies like Cisco lost well over half their stock value and a ton of online seller website disappeared.
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 remember when it was a teeming swamp of T_D memers. Afaik it is again.
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.
A fairly minor and shitty law that influences all public speech about other people
Not all, but definitely some, yes. And no, I don’t agree with it or like it.
Yeah, Japanese the press also is pretty beholden to government whims as well.
I think that combines another issue here (or two, one being cultural rather than legal, but that’s a whole other can o’ worms). Papers will report on certain things, but I don’t know where the line in. Some tabloids will report all kinds of shit and eat the cost of any judgement if it happens.
I would not call anything about a law designed solely to prosecute whistleblowers “fairly minor”
That’s not actually what it’s designed to do and whistle-blowing has a process that isn’t “run directly to the press”.
Reddit wouldn’t censor those names. People are self censoring on the big subreddits
There is currently a tiny bit of uproar over at r/irelandshittydrivers. A user took a photo of a work van that blocked two disabled spots. He sent the photo via Whatsapp to the company, which responded in a batshit crazy manner (for some reason, escalated it to praising Osama for 9/11). Naturally, the user posted the photo and the conversation to Reddit. Within a few hours, the company contacted Reddit and had the post removed. If a company with perhaps three customers per week can do it, what do you think large companies can do? Censoring user posts would be only the tip of the iceberg.
Did the company DMCA it? Or did the mods remove it? I can’t find anything on this.
Form yor own opinion. This is the original thread. A follow-up thread claimed that it was removed by Reddit admins because the picture of the van showed the company name and phone number. That thread included the fan with blacked-out identifiers and was allowed to stay up until users didn’t start identifying the company in the comments.
Sketchy
Reddit wasn’t mainstream then. Comments could go unnoticed for months.
Facts, the worst thing for reddit was the pandemic, it turned it into permanent summer-reddit, and it started being talked any in movies and shows. Now it’s awful
I’ve been on reddit since 2015 and I have no idea what you’re talking about
What shows have mentioned Reddit?
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!
PUBLIC SHAMING WORKS ON BULLIES
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.
I got permabanned for stating that if Jesus Christ came back today, Republicans would have him crucified, like the Pharisees.
To clarify, I know some Christians blame “The Jooz” for killing Jesus. But I was implying Republicans were like Pharisees in that they worshiped money, and that Jesus had fucked with the money, mainly in the temple. It’s in the fucking Bible, the only learnin’ they claim anyone needs. Except when they don’t like what it says.
Any intelligent person should know what I was saying. Jesus = sharing wealth, Republicans/Pharisees = not sharing wealth. Not “That dude hates Jews!” Which I don’t.
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.
I don’t think lemmy could withstand the onslaught of popularity that came with giving out “reddit hugs” to domains, and with lack of moderation the toxicity levels could easily soar. so just be careful what we wish for or the communities will become the things we hate.
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.
