Maybe instead of Torvalds taking lessons on how to be less of an asshole, he should be teaching developers how to be more like him.

The world needed the open internet to bootstrap the digital revolution. It wasn’t possible without the sum of humanity working altruistically to build the Library of Alexandria of software. No private entity could have possibly done it. It truly is an under appreciated marvel of the late-20th/early-21st century. FOSS contains the knowledge of software that runs the world. Now that such a thing exists I could totally see organizations (loosely speaking) wanting to conquer or ransack it. It’s quite clear by now there’s faction of tech with a tyrannical bent. I’d put them whoever they might be exactly as possible culprits.

Running their mouths on Discord. Using Patreon to profit from (not) piracy (but everyone knows it is). Reckless display of hubris.

I don’t think this is going to tank like everyone says. Those that hold that opinion are too heavily basing this on personal feelings toward the platform. Reddit isn’t geared toward those individuals anymore. They successfully pivot the platform towards the broad swath of social media users. The market will be pricing reddit based on this. Not whether or not you personally think it’s still a site worth using. The more opinionated geek crowd was never profitable and reddit inc doesn’t care about them.

At this point social media users have grown so weary of their main platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Enough to have mass adopted reddit especially during the pandemic years. Reddit has been capitalizing on that to give people something that seems fresh to them. For all your own years of baggage you personally hold over reddit, the broad market of social media users do not care. They just want their big multi-forum app to entertain them.

The market will not price reddit based on your personal idpol issues with the site. Of which everybody across the spectrum seems to have some sort of stick up their ass. Reddit has survived all those “reddit moments” over the past decades. The platform has actually proven incredibly resilient. The nature of reddit is that it isn’t any common identity anyone can point to really. There is so much representation across the board. Users hate other parts of reddit rather than reddit itself.

The big social platforms have consolidated power over the internet. There’s no competitors. reddit being the forgotten stepchild is having its time in the spotlight right now. The fediverse ecosystem is too raw and too technical for the casual user right now.

The company basically has to keep mods placated to keep on keeping the lights on. They did survive the API protest. I think to them that was actually a litmus test for the IPO. So far we have seen there is no shortage of sycophants lined up. Subreddits are valuable and there has been and will always be those who want to be internet feudal lord.

A lot of people do take issue with reddit but overall the userbase they are selling, that broad social media userbase, they did not care about such issues as the API whatever gabagool. They don’t even know what an aye pee eye is. They just wanted their app to go back to normal. And it did. And reddit resumed operation as normal.

They got $136k funding from an original goal of $10k. Did it go to their head?

Social media tech bros sell “humanity” the same way cigarette companies sold glamorous lifestyles.

They both use celebrities to portray fashionable a lifestyle. They both know the net negative health effects and ignore it because it’s directly tied to their bottom line. They’re both are at odds with researchers. I’m sure if one were to dig deeper there would be a lot more parallels.

The Facebook whistleblower was huge news in mainstream media. Then they rebranded to Meta and successfully buried the story. The aggressively anti-humanity.

Smoking rots your body. Social media rots your mind.

Well I checked back. I also went to wipe the last bits of posts from a couple accounts. Soon as the scripts got done running…

Uh oh! We have suspended your account due to suspicious activity.

Why is reddit regarded so highly this way? It’s always been a second rate board to me. Like yeah there’s some technical discussion there. Even notable names might post there. But it’s the social media version of technical side of the internet. It’s generally full of garbage that requires heavy doses of skepticism as bad info often gets visibility. There is no recourse since the nature of reddit engagement is ephemeral. The proverbial concrete sets shortly after the post/comment is made.

I suppose the state off affairs have deteriorated so far that search engines don’t even index the internet properly anymore. Actual discussion boards and websites are basically darknet these days. Internet indexes for all intents and purposes don’t exist today. Search engines a glorified index links to each others social media platforms. Even then the bulk of results are online shopping spam.

What a mess.

For any topic I actually want to dive into I do not use reddit for anything more than initial discovery. Social media by nature commoditizes content to serve the masses by appealing to the lowest common denominators. The bulk of the content never goes below surface level.

Private chat rooms has been my guess for a number of years. The internet got too public. Big boards aren’t practical anymore.

I’ve looked at the site but I don’t contribute anymore. I’ve made a few comments telling people to look at another site for answers to their technical questions. Dropping seeds that will branch away from reddit.

The popular sort for Canada increasingly resembles voat. When it was becoming overrun by the far right dog whistles. The signature right wing botted subreddits seem to be a mainstay on the top sorts. That says a lot about how it’s going.

It is majority bots. I got the groundhog day feeling too. So a few years ago I started looking at the account that post rather than the posts itself. There’s a simple pattern. The account is registered but lays dormant for a couple months. Then it becomes active and starts reposting top ranked post of all time from subreddits. Their comments are copy pasted out of replies to old posts.

It’s inexplicable why the real human users put up with it though. At some point the zeitgeist stopped having baseline expectation of content quality.

More recently there’s a newer phenomenon where clickbait stories (“My (45M) wife (18F) of 5 years left me everything but the icecube trays AITA”) are posted by brand new accounts. Except all those subreddits don’t allow brand new accounts to post. So it must be the mods are selectively approving them. They are farming outrage with stories (most likely fake) meant to maximize user activity.

Free speech versus civility. Say what you want but don’t think you won’t get punched in the face for being an asshole. On the internet you should absolutely be able to get punched in the face. The virtual version of that is being modded. Which is apparently tantamount to human rights violations these days so mods have had to walk on eggshells. It’s no wonder the old guard have been leaving in droves.

There was never a time in the past when you wouldn’t receive a digital face punching for being an ass. As time went on people started giving up on reddit. Especially mods who cared to foster communities people wanted to use. Mods became glorified bot operators. “Automated customer service lines” as someone else said. And so the trolls have completely run amok on that platform. Usually there is no getting hold of a real human moderator. Other times they’re so checked out they themselves get trolled into banning anyone but the griefers.

Because reddit is largely devoid of expertise by now. This is talking in circles. The point is that the user base well stocked with a healthy breadth of knowledge is able to call out bad posts. We both agree subreddits aren’t working. It is for these reasons. Relying on sole expert moderators doesn’t work.

The user base was supposed to be the main arbiter of such things.

Mods weren’t ever supposed to anybody but janitors. That isn’t in a derogatory tone. The anonymous userbase was the original value proposition of reddit. The expertise came from random nobodies. Usernames didn’t matter on reddit because nobody looked at it. It seems this is long forgotten history from a time when the internet was primarily IT nerds.

By the time mods were becoming somebodies, reddit was past its prime. Once the power structures started forming it was over. As we’re seeing now reddit is hinges on single point of failure. The expertise among the userbase has gradually left the platform long before this API stuff. A long slow process years in the making.

Internet janitors are a dirty but necessary job not unlike the real world. Somebody has to scrub toilets and pick produce. People are a-holes on the internet who need to be put in their place. Reddit has long since become too hoity-toity for that. Now mods are supposed to be experts in their field. Too high to be digital toilet scrubbers. Too scared of “muh free speech” to janitor the Greater Fuckwads anymore. So reddit is an asylum run by the inmates. Expertise can’t be assed to contribute to a dumpster.

On another note. The imgur purge has also contributed to the barren wasteland of reddit content history. So many dead posts.

That wasn’t an attempt to be disingenuous. It was to mark a reference point in your text. You’re trying to extrapolate arguments where there may or may not be any. That’s no better than how reddit is.

I’m not certain their point was the anti echo chamber thing. In other words the phony “free speech” thing that means you have to let bigots ply their rhetoric.

Do I think people can go too far and literally only surround themselves with “yes men” socially?

Reddit has serious problems localized extremum. To detach it from politicization take the 3D printing subreddits for example. For a while they were convinced it’s the second arrival of Jesus. At one point it was said every household would have this appliance. Like a washing machine or refrigerator. You must conform to the talking points. Cryptocurrency is a recent one. There is no talking like normal people in those subreddits without being faced with scripted rhetoric. Real life isn’t like this. In real life people don’t talk like stump speeches.

Pay to use. Then they sell your data. Double dipping.

Nope. Reddit orphans posts and comments from accounts. I don’t know the hows or whys.

Last week I stumbled on a 15 year account who tried to do a full wipe before abandoning reddit. Their last and only comment in their profile is their farewell message. Except when you Google search their username it shows their content is still there. Just not associated to their profile page anymore.

The grassroots internet is a thing of the past. Linux is not spared from this. People expect to open an app that’s full of content for them to infinitely scroll.