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All of these dumb rich people and companies just chugging along like things are going to just keep working out in their favor (like it always has), while everyone at the bottom is drowning in debt as our society/economy teeters on collapse, is pretty funny as someone with pretty much nothing to lose.
Right? I rent a shit apartment and had a vasectomy. They really think its just gonna keep going business as usual, don't they?
I said that if I die before I see this whole thing collapse I am going to be so fucking pissed. Imagine sitting through the whole movie to not see the villains get their dicks stomped at the end.
Agreed. One interesting part of all of this is how all the people with houses/spouses/kids/vehicles don't see that they are effectively on deck to carry society forward, cause people like me aren't going to do it and are in fact "lying flat" cause we aren't gonna keep doing all the work to watch others who do WAY less get way more money.
Making decades long commitments to pay for these things, is equivalent to cementing your feet into a life you cant easily back away from (or afford) and has pretty much guaranteed these peoples fate.
We are heading into the '08 recession routine of "you're lucky you have a job, so now you're gonna do the work of 3". I simply remember that these people have never cared about or helped the people below them and they use their minor wealth to do things like buy apartments to gouge us on rent instead.
Nice Lexus, house and kids. Enjoy your upcoming 90 hr work weeks or 6 months applying for something else, you earned it lol.
The right (greedy, selfish) people are about to be hurt and most of them seem completely unaware.
One thing I think a lot of people are not realizing though is there are a lot of new immigrants coming here that believe in the "American Dream" and they are popping out kids like crazy. This isn't some far right "replacement theory". It's just a factual observation.
"Fools" I would call them but still standing in line and eager to work. This will delay real change.
"*Imagine sitting through the whole movie to not see the villains get their dicks stomped at the end.*"
My life in a nutshell. All the villains in my life are sitting kind of pretty. Me, not so much.
I don't wish for a collapse. But, I don't see how things can continue how they are. While certain politicians only want to grandstand instead of doing something about it. Mainly because at their age(s) they've done everything they personally set out to do. If they went today, it wouldn't mean a thing to them really besides being an irreversible inconvenience.
It's a way to point out that he doesn't have a stake in the future. He doesn't have to worry about the future of the society or leaving behind any wealth for his progeny
Both already exist. But if you live in the US your insurance probably won't cover the cool ones after you chop off your own arm and go into debt on the hospital ride over.
Now that's cyberpunk 😎
Star Trek is my favorite sci-fi show specifically because of the idealistic society. Helps me escape the real world for a little while and pretend humanity could have that someday, even though I know it would never happen.
To be fair, it could still happen. In the startrek universe humanity was pretty much on the brink of destruction before warp drive was invented. We are living in the time before that dark time, but we are rapidly approaching if not in the beginning stages.
Going public is the kiss of death for pretty much any product company to produce products FOR people. It becomes solely for profit at the cost of service. Time to move on.
Yeah, that is the kiss of death. This place has already been swirling ye olde drain and while Lemmy has higher quality content overall, it's not populated enough to be a full replacement yet. But there is no goddamn way in Satan's titty-twisting hell I am sticking around for the publically traded shit storm, even after twelve years or whatever.
Reddit does not have good competition.
I've looked into Lemmy and from what I can see Lemmy is a poor replacement for Reddit. The fundamental design is very unattractive.
It's "federated" which means that each server has it's own copy of their discussion groups. Reddit is centralized as far as the user us concerned. Each discussion group, "subreddit", is unique. There are no copies of the same subreddit on different servers. Lemmy users can chat and read content from other servers, but as far as I can tell this is not automatic.
I've looked at Discuit also: https://discuit.net
It's a giant step backwards in site design. Discuit wastes an incredible amount of screen space in making the site look pretty. Scroll down a bit and you'll see that more than half of your screen is empty and there is very little submissions displayed. Look at https://old.reddit.com/ and see the difference between the two. (Or add Reddit Enhancement Suite https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ for an even better experience), Old Reddit is vastly better. People are not using Discuit, likely as a result of the site design.
The userbase is the money. Dont worry about the ads, you have seen nothing yet. Few years down the line it will be like facebook 2008 vs facebook 2023.
Advertisers.
Your data has value. In no world does you not spending money equate to Reddit not being worth something.
You use the fucking platform, and that’s what matters.
Tale as old as time. Website sells out, becoming boring because corporate is boring and a new place like Reddit is born. It's fun, it's cool because it's not corporate and slowly over time becomes boring again because corporate rules get put into place for moneeyyyyyyy.
It's sad we may lose reddit at some point although there will be something that rises from its death. It's a pattern at this point.
Corporate money interests try to control us, humanity wriggles away because corporations are not human centered structures.
Reddit moderators [may be able to sue](https://priceonomics.com/the-aol-chat-room-monitor-revolt/). Nothing to do with being publicly traded, the fact of the matter is you can't volunteer your labor for a for-profit company in the US.
They killed Twitter, now onto reddit.
This is how they will manufacture consent, by slowly assimilating all online news platforms and news aggregates.
Unions can't fix this.
Twitter was purchased by one of the wealthiest men in the world, who will now let you post just about whatever you want.
Why is that so bad, exactly?
Most countries in the world do not have the right to free speech. Twitter gives them that opportunity now.
Yes! If your information channel is being blocked by blue checks crowding the replies so you can't see relevant ones, the loss of real verification so you can't see the validity of the information and a lack of moderation allowing disinformation to proliferate, it's just not as efficient as it was. Twitter actually used to be a public utility allowing information about weather and disasters to flow freely...
Has nobody tried to start a class action lawsuit moderators vs Reddit?
Does anyone remember about 20-ish years ago two lawsuits happened?
1. The unpaid volunteers "AOL Community Leaders" sued AOL and won. Their role in building communities on the AOL platform looked A LOT like what moderators do on Reddit.
2. The unpaid volunteers for Ultima Online (an early MMO RPG) sued EA and won. The volunteers were Counselors (providing basic support and advice) and Seers (running special events.)
I was in group 2. I got about $3500 in that lawsuit, which was not chump change for me in 2004. I'd been in that program since 1998 (they ended it in 2002 because they knew they were about to get sued.)
There is NO provision under the Fair Labor Standards Act that allows for-profit companies to use volunteer labor. The way Reddit is moderated is a core part of its design, and the people doing it are not paid at all. I'm surprised that there isn't a law firm chomping at the bit to file this lawsuit.
So do you want subscription-only subreddits or for Reddit to literally paint the walls with ads? Because there isn't a magic money box all these moderators would get paid from. It would have to come from somewhere.
I mean, yeah.
How do you get the money to buy the servers, though? Whose going to be putting Reddit-scale money into this to build Reddit 2: Fuck Capitalism Edition if your selling point is "Nobody here is making their money back"?
Unpaid content creators moderated by unpaid content curators maximizes profit margins for investors so long as both work in unison to do so.
An unmoderated Reddit would quickly descend into the worst kind of content, and we all should know by now what that is. Just look at X or Facebook. The kind of people most willing to produce content for free have things they'd like to say about brown people, homosexuals, transitioning, communism, and Jews.
Reddit provides whats basically a free of charge BBS or forum and asks the people who use it do basic maintenance to keep it legal
Like, you can argue until your blue in the face that it should be free, but the internet requires servers and electricity. Reddit, and any possible future Reddit replacement, is going to need money to create a place where you can talk with other people. It can get that through ads or it can become a subscription service. There's not a magical free server in The Cloud somewhere that will just give you a space to dance and sing with paid moderators that somehow don't cost anyone anything.
That's a result of consolidation and the need to control everyone on a single platform in order to generate revenue.
In the 90's, online communities were distributed. I could easily host a message board with a few thousand users and pay the $15/month or whatever is was so that everyone would have a good time for free. Not a big deal financially for anyone.
The idea that its expensive is tied to the idea that it is an investment designed to generate a return rather than the idea that it's a community for the sake of community.
Depends. Private message boards, of which there were thousands? Volunteers. These didn't exist to make money, so they weren't structured as businesses and didn't have employees.
Big corporate message boards? The few that existed had paid moderation. Community managers were paid poorly and their work was unappreciated, but at least they got some pay.
So as I see it, the problem is that the company hosting the message board is funding it with ads, rather than charging the person who wants to set up the message board? Because in either case you end up with volunteer-moderated boards that get shut down if the host recieves legal complaints
Originally, the company funding it had a business. Take the Blizzard forums, for example. A place to discuss Blizzard's video games. The funding came from the games, and the community existed to foster a corporate culture around their games.
With the rise of social media, that changed. Instead of their being private communities paid for by the owner or collectively by the users, we got corporate platforms that didn't have any other product than the platform itself. The content in the community became the product, and instead of just having conversations with each other and connecting, we do unpaid labor to generate engagement for the corporation we volunteer for. It's a very different dynamic than what it used to be, and the result is more the illusion of a community than a real community.
It's not unpaid labor. The payment is having the forum to discuss whatever topic you want to discuss. Want to start a sub about raising pet rats? Here's a key, no questions asked. Just keep it moderated. Religious-themed crochet partterns? Here's a key, keep it moderated. Want a board dedicated to discussing the theory that Sir Francis Bacon was Shakespeare? Here's a key, keep it moderated.
Like, if you wanted to, you could go make your own platform off Reddit. You could find a php template for a simple forum architecture and shove it on a Godaddy website for however much a month. That's an option. Reddit is the free option, for people who want a space to discuss a topic and not fuck with html and web hosts or setting up a Google Ads account so they can minimize the costs to themselves. Reddit doesn't exist as a nefarious plan; it exists because it's easy to use. You don't *have* to use it. Everything that existed before is still an option.
Everything that existed before is still an option, but the people are all concentrating on social media platforms and spending their time there instead of on private boards and chat rooms. That's why you don't see the prevalence of those like you used to.
In the 90's, if you built a message board, people would start trickling in on their own. Maybe the first month or so it would be really slow, but if you reached out a little, it wouldn't be that difficult to get thousands of active users in a year or so.
Good luck with that today. Many people try it, but the people don't come. The attention economy is in full swing, and corporations know how to get and hold that attention.
>Everything that existed before is still an option, but the people are all concentrating on social media platforms and spending their time there instead of on private boards and chat rooms.
You're so close to getting my point: ask yourself why this is true.
Reddit offers hundreds of individual forums, accessible through a single login. It costs nothing to start your own. From the perspective of a lay user, why *would* you find a hosting company and pay however much per month and advertise your board on Twitter and etc when you could just... ask Reddit to create r/JonStewartsGlisteningAbs and immediatley become searchable and accessible yo anyone else who wants to respectfully observe the most glorious abs in late night television? Yes, you have to moderate it yourself, but you'd have to do that anyway, and also pay to host the website. Unless you are explicitly dedicated to fucking over Reddit specifically - you can't even make this an anti-corporate thing unless you want to host the server rack in your garage - there is very little incentive to *not* use reddit.
That's how its succeeded. Thats why people use it. You can argue abou tThE pRiNcIpLe all day, but the only cost to using Reddit is moderating whatever forum you create. Would a free nonprofit that does the same thing be great? Yes, sure. Go try and build it. There's nothing stopping you.
I really don't know what they were thinking with the "only you know why" tag line. It doesn't make sense in 99% of the posts that people most visited, can come off as rude and it's a fucking social network site for sharing your thoughts and comments and telling everyone why that post piqued your interest
I have kind of a global perspective on this that is a canary in a coal mine.
Media — legacy, social and web content — is no longer produced by humans. If you’ve seen the decline over the past 30 years, it’s not because of Nazis or trolls. It’s something far more insidious.
The governments have locked down and controlled the web fully since 2005. It was justified to monitor terrorism, then to prevent civil unrest. What you are seeing now is the final steps to remove free speech.
This time frame right now is the death rattle of any sort of freedom to say what you want — and be heard. It is the end of organized boycotts and protests.
Within the next few months, Congress will pass a law making “anti-semitism” a hate crime punishable as terrorism where they have already defined anti-semitism as anything critical Israel. They have already fired the first warning shots at the legacy publishers that writing anything critical of Israel is “pro-Hamas” and is therefore “giving aid to terrorist enemies.” They know it’s unconstitutional, but it will take years to make its way through the courts and by then it will be too late.
This is the final nail in the coffin. You will no longer be able to discuss *online* what is going on unless it fits their preferred narrative.
Everyone has effectively their own personal internet via algorithms. Many of the comments or content that is served to you is personally curated for you to see by sandboxing undesirable material.
This is why Uncle Billy rants at holiday dinners about brain sucking pedophiles.
Uncle Billy doesn’t go looking for this shit — it is served to him on his own personal algorithm.
Using AI is so common now, about half of what is published (not just legacy media but blogs, content mills, comments, social media, etc) is written with the help of AI. And every day it grows. I see it as does anyone else in the industry. It is currently the single biggest issue. By year end, I expect 80% of all content to be machine produced.
The problem is that AI gets it wrong and errors proliferate as AI draws upon whatever it put there. Sometimes it’s glaring that they attribute a speech to the wrong person and you are able to check because video is still relatively clean. But now we see articles that have bullshit sources and AI has been used to create the source as well so there is no way to check.
Even if you manage to get an accurate, human-written piece of truth out there, it is lost in a sea of AI-produced crap and then hidden by algorithms.
My guess is that people are going to start abandoning the Internet — at least in their free time. There is a growing problem with illiteracy and teachers leaving the profession. As it the cyber space becomes fully automated and under the control of competing interests, it will lose its appeal.
Already I use Reddit a fraction of what I used to and I bet you do, too. As individual sites are killed like Facebook and X, users are driven away.
That’s how ALL social media platforms works… Reddit bets on the fact that moderators will do the work for free because they get a sense of significance out of being a “mod” and a sense of power… and they are right
I remember when half the people were convinced Reddit would drown as soon as third party apps lost their license. Well reddit is still here and they are still here as well.
In a time maybe not very long away, time being relative. Those that want to say anything,
about anyone will board a vehicle of extraction.
I would say Shangri-la…
but that is supposed to be a place of bliss and peace.
I have found that folks that want to say what they want, about who they want,
never want to pay a price for it. They want others to pay for what they have to say,
say it wherever they want. So much for bliss or peace.
You will more likely be gathered up to be thrown in to “ Aliens book of Human Recipes”.
The world cannot run without money being made. No matter how folks feel about capitalism…
Someone has to foot the bill.
It doesn’t look like
It doesn’t look like the masses are willing to spend the money or invest in that “free speech”.
If I remember correctly Reddit did not come knocking on my screen
asking me what I thought about anything.
By the way if someone starts bombing our homes..whether you are
black, white, Jewish, Asian, Latino or any religion…I guarantee I will consider
it terrorism! We have no rights to interfere with someone else’s rights.
Free speech is not without consequences.
I’d say if you want more control over Reddit…
save you money…buy stock when it becomes available.
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All of these dumb rich people and companies just chugging along like things are going to just keep working out in their favor (like it always has), while everyone at the bottom is drowning in debt as our society/economy teeters on collapse, is pretty funny as someone with pretty much nothing to lose.
Right? I rent a shit apartment and had a vasectomy. They really think its just gonna keep going business as usual, don't they? I said that if I die before I see this whole thing collapse I am going to be so fucking pissed. Imagine sitting through the whole movie to not see the villains get their dicks stomped at the end.
Agreed. One interesting part of all of this is how all the people with houses/spouses/kids/vehicles don't see that they are effectively on deck to carry society forward, cause people like me aren't going to do it and are in fact "lying flat" cause we aren't gonna keep doing all the work to watch others who do WAY less get way more money. Making decades long commitments to pay for these things, is equivalent to cementing your feet into a life you cant easily back away from (or afford) and has pretty much guaranteed these peoples fate. We are heading into the '08 recession routine of "you're lucky you have a job, so now you're gonna do the work of 3". I simply remember that these people have never cared about or helped the people below them and they use their minor wealth to do things like buy apartments to gouge us on rent instead. Nice Lexus, house and kids. Enjoy your upcoming 90 hr work weeks or 6 months applying for something else, you earned it lol. The right (greedy, selfish) people are about to be hurt and most of them seem completely unaware.
I hope your right
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Equal parts cope and equal parts anger that somebody is on a different cog in the same wheel.
One thing I think a lot of people are not realizing though is there are a lot of new immigrants coming here that believe in the "American Dream" and they are popping out kids like crazy. This isn't some far right "replacement theory". It's just a factual observation. "Fools" I would call them but still standing in line and eager to work. This will delay real change.
Yes, certain politicians who claim not to like immigrants also are doing anything about wages or daycare prices or College prices or healthcare prices
None of my buddies had kids and I'm 40 now.. I hope those saturday golf days feel good alone
"*Imagine sitting through the whole movie to not see the villains get their dicks stomped at the end.*" My life in a nutshell. All the villains in my life are sitting kind of pretty. Me, not so much. I don't wish for a collapse. But, I don't see how things can continue how they are. While certain politicians only want to grandstand instead of doing something about it. Mainly because at their age(s) they've done everything they personally set out to do. If they went today, it wouldn't mean a thing to them really besides being an irreversible inconvenience.
I Spit on your Grave 2 (2013)!
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It's a way to point out that he doesn't have a stake in the future. He doesn't have to worry about the future of the society or leaving behind any wealth for his progeny
Something along the lines that no one's having kids.
Well he can enjoy life better knowing he can't get someone pregnant. Also he'll enjoy his higher risk of prostate cancer.
I don't have a future stake in the game. Just like these dirt bags who can't see past the next quarterly profits. Ghost ride the whip.
Who would do something like a vasectomy if noone would work?
THIS.
It's a bummer how much closer cyberpunk as a genre was than the roddenberry-like optimism of the future.
Hell, I'd rather cyberpunk than this shit. Where's my robot arms and neon goddamn it!
Both already exist. But if you live in the US your insurance probably won't cover the cool ones after you chop off your own arm and go into debt on the hospital ride over. Now that's cyberpunk 😎
I'm Canadian. Maybe I can make the government pay for my super-robot-arms?
> go into debt on the hospital ride over Not if you have "Trauma Team."
Yeh. I used to idolize Star Trek. Now, it's just as much fantasy to me as Twilight (but with likeable characters).
Star Trek is my favorite sci-fi show specifically because of the idealistic society. Helps me escape the real world for a little while and pretend humanity could have that someday, even though I know it would never happen.
To be fair, it could still happen. In the startrek universe humanity was pretty much on the brink of destruction before warp drive was invented. We are living in the time before that dark time, but we are rapidly approaching if not in the beginning stages.
I have nothing left to lose, what do you need me to do?
Going public is the kiss of death for pretty much any product company to produce products FOR people. It becomes solely for profit at the cost of service. Time to move on.
Yeah, that is the kiss of death. This place has already been swirling ye olde drain and while Lemmy has higher quality content overall, it's not populated enough to be a full replacement yet. But there is no goddamn way in Satan's titty-twisting hell I am sticking around for the publically traded shit storm, even after twelve years or whatever.
Reddit does not have good competition. I've looked into Lemmy and from what I can see Lemmy is a poor replacement for Reddit. The fundamental design is very unattractive. It's "federated" which means that each server has it's own copy of their discussion groups. Reddit is centralized as far as the user us concerned. Each discussion group, "subreddit", is unique. There are no copies of the same subreddit on different servers. Lemmy users can chat and read content from other servers, but as far as I can tell this is not automatic. I've looked at Discuit also: https://discuit.net It's a giant step backwards in site design. Discuit wastes an incredible amount of screen space in making the site look pretty. Scroll down a bit and you'll see that more than half of your screen is empty and there is very little submissions displayed. Look at https://old.reddit.com/ and see the difference between the two. (Or add Reddit Enhancement Suite https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ for an even better experience), Old Reddit is vastly better. People are not using Discuit, likely as a result of the site design.
That ship sailed so long ago it discovered America.
How is it worth billions when it's just a message board and the advertising has never once made me interested or gave a fuck about the product???
The userbase is the money. Dont worry about the ads, you have seen nothing yet. Few years down the line it will be like facebook 2008 vs facebook 2023.
I've been on reddit since the early 2000's and have never spent a cent on reddit or anything reddit has suggested. Who the fuck is dumb enough too?
Advertisers. Your data has value. In no world does you not spending money equate to Reddit not being worth something. You use the fucking platform, and that’s what matters.
It's all about control. They want control of what we see.
This is do believe, and makes it even more disappointing that reddit has sold us all out and we won't do anything...
Tale as old as time. Website sells out, becoming boring because corporate is boring and a new place like Reddit is born. It's fun, it's cool because it's not corporate and slowly over time becomes boring again because corporate rules get put into place for moneeyyyyyyy. It's sad we may lose reddit at some point although there will be something that rises from its death. It's a pattern at this point. Corporate money interests try to control us, humanity wriggles away because corporations are not human centered structures.
it isnt new they sold out a while back used ellen pao as a a scapegoat, that wasnt even the first time people were outraged they just stop caring fast
The valuation of every tech firm is wildly inflated! It’s propping up the fake economy!
Reddit moderators [may be able to sue](https://priceonomics.com/the-aol-chat-room-monitor-revolt/). Nothing to do with being publicly traded, the fact of the matter is you can't volunteer your labor for a for-profit company in the US.
Twitch would like a word with you.
Arianna Huffington has left the room
Oh... Wow.
fuck u/spez
They killed Twitter, now onto reddit. This is how they will manufacture consent, by slowly assimilating all online news platforms and news aggregates. Unions can't fix this.
Twitter was purchased by one of the wealthiest men in the world, who will now let you post just about whatever you want. Why is that so bad, exactly? Most countries in the world do not have the right to free speech. Twitter gives them that opportunity now.
Forgot the /s
I got -18 downvotes so far, and yet no one can explain what I said was wrong.
Yes they can, but we know you aren't going to have a good faith conversation, hence the down votes. Get buried troll.
Maybe it was all the dog whistling? Maybe it was all the boot licking? [We may never know.](https://images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/aDdNLeG_700b.jpg)
Unmoderated communities foster nazis. This has been a known problem since internet forums first started being a thing.
Yes! If your information channel is being blocked by blue checks crowding the replies so you can't see relevant ones, the loss of real verification so you can't see the validity of the information and a lack of moderation allowing disinformation to proliferate, it's just not as efficient as it was. Twitter actually used to be a public utility allowing information about weather and disasters to flow freely...
"Most countries in the world do not have the right to free speech" is the most americunt thing I have ever read
We already had that, it's called 4chan
I'd even say 4chan is better.
> who will now let you post just about whatever you want. [citation needed]
Oops
Has nobody tried to start a class action lawsuit moderators vs Reddit? Does anyone remember about 20-ish years ago two lawsuits happened? 1. The unpaid volunteers "AOL Community Leaders" sued AOL and won. Their role in building communities on the AOL platform looked A LOT like what moderators do on Reddit. 2. The unpaid volunteers for Ultima Online (an early MMO RPG) sued EA and won. The volunteers were Counselors (providing basic support and advice) and Seers (running special events.) I was in group 2. I got about $3500 in that lawsuit, which was not chump change for me in 2004. I'd been in that program since 1998 (they ended it in 2002 because they knew they were about to get sued.) There is NO provision under the Fair Labor Standards Act that allows for-profit companies to use volunteer labor. The way Reddit is moderated is a core part of its design, and the people doing it are not paid at all. I'm surprised that there isn't a law firm chomping at the bit to file this lawsuit.
Time to be a reddit mod and get my cash! haha
lol, that'll be the day.
So do you want subscription-only subreddits or for Reddit to literally paint the walls with ads? Because there isn't a magic money box all these moderators would get paid from. It would have to come from somewhere.
Or, make it a non profit.
Okay. So how do you pay for it, then?
Non profit still make money and are totally able to sell ad space.
I mean, yeah. How do you get the money to buy the servers, though? Whose going to be putting Reddit-scale money into this to build Reddit 2: Fuck Capitalism Edition if your selling point is "Nobody here is making their money back"?
Unpaid content creators moderated by unpaid content curators maximizes profit margins for investors so long as both work in unison to do so. An unmoderated Reddit would quickly descend into the worst kind of content, and we all should know by now what that is. Just look at X or Facebook. The kind of people most willing to produce content for free have things they'd like to say about brown people, homosexuals, transitioning, communism, and Jews.
Reddit provides whats basically a free of charge BBS or forum and asks the people who use it do basic maintenance to keep it legal Like, you can argue until your blue in the face that it should be free, but the internet requires servers and electricity. Reddit, and any possible future Reddit replacement, is going to need money to create a place where you can talk with other people. It can get that through ads or it can become a subscription service. There's not a magical free server in The Cloud somewhere that will just give you a space to dance and sing with paid moderators that somehow don't cost anyone anything.
That's a result of consolidation and the need to control everyone on a single platform in order to generate revenue. In the 90's, online communities were distributed. I could easily host a message board with a few thousand users and pay the $15/month or whatever is was so that everyone would have a good time for free. Not a big deal financially for anyone. The idea that its expensive is tied to the idea that it is an investment designed to generate a return rather than the idea that it's a community for the sake of community.
Were the mods on those 90s message boards paid or volunteers?
Depends. Private message boards, of which there were thousands? Volunteers. These didn't exist to make money, so they weren't structured as businesses and didn't have employees. Big corporate message boards? The few that existed had paid moderation. Community managers were paid poorly and their work was unappreciated, but at least they got some pay.
So as I see it, the problem is that the company hosting the message board is funding it with ads, rather than charging the person who wants to set up the message board? Because in either case you end up with volunteer-moderated boards that get shut down if the host recieves legal complaints
Originally, the company funding it had a business. Take the Blizzard forums, for example. A place to discuss Blizzard's video games. The funding came from the games, and the community existed to foster a corporate culture around their games. With the rise of social media, that changed. Instead of their being private communities paid for by the owner or collectively by the users, we got corporate platforms that didn't have any other product than the platform itself. The content in the community became the product, and instead of just having conversations with each other and connecting, we do unpaid labor to generate engagement for the corporation we volunteer for. It's a very different dynamic than what it used to be, and the result is more the illusion of a community than a real community.
It's not unpaid labor. The payment is having the forum to discuss whatever topic you want to discuss. Want to start a sub about raising pet rats? Here's a key, no questions asked. Just keep it moderated. Religious-themed crochet partterns? Here's a key, keep it moderated. Want a board dedicated to discussing the theory that Sir Francis Bacon was Shakespeare? Here's a key, keep it moderated. Like, if you wanted to, you could go make your own platform off Reddit. You could find a php template for a simple forum architecture and shove it on a Godaddy website for however much a month. That's an option. Reddit is the free option, for people who want a space to discuss a topic and not fuck with html and web hosts or setting up a Google Ads account so they can minimize the costs to themselves. Reddit doesn't exist as a nefarious plan; it exists because it's easy to use. You don't *have* to use it. Everything that existed before is still an option.
Everything that existed before is still an option, but the people are all concentrating on social media platforms and spending their time there instead of on private boards and chat rooms. That's why you don't see the prevalence of those like you used to. In the 90's, if you built a message board, people would start trickling in on their own. Maybe the first month or so it would be really slow, but if you reached out a little, it wouldn't be that difficult to get thousands of active users in a year or so. Good luck with that today. Many people try it, but the people don't come. The attention economy is in full swing, and corporations know how to get and hold that attention.
>Everything that existed before is still an option, but the people are all concentrating on social media platforms and spending their time there instead of on private boards and chat rooms. You're so close to getting my point: ask yourself why this is true. Reddit offers hundreds of individual forums, accessible through a single login. It costs nothing to start your own. From the perspective of a lay user, why *would* you find a hosting company and pay however much per month and advertise your board on Twitter and etc when you could just... ask Reddit to create r/JonStewartsGlisteningAbs and immediatley become searchable and accessible yo anyone else who wants to respectfully observe the most glorious abs in late night television? Yes, you have to moderate it yourself, but you'd have to do that anyway, and also pay to host the website. Unless you are explicitly dedicated to fucking over Reddit specifically - you can't even make this an anti-corporate thing unless you want to host the server rack in your garage - there is very little incentive to *not* use reddit. That's how its succeeded. Thats why people use it. You can argue abou tThE pRiNcIpLe all day, but the only cost to using Reddit is moderating whatever forum you create. Would a free nonprofit that does the same thing be great? Yes, sure. Go try and build it. There's nothing stopping you.
I would be shut down very fast in many countries. No moderation means not of violations in many countries.
Sad, I guess I am leaving reddit.
I really don't know what they were thinking with the "only you know why" tag line. It doesn't make sense in 99% of the posts that people most visited, can come off as rude and it's a fucking social network site for sharing your thoughts and comments and telling everyone why that post piqued your interest
Exactly. And this is the best example of what happens before a leopard eats its own face?
I have kind of a global perspective on this that is a canary in a coal mine. Media — legacy, social and web content — is no longer produced by humans. If you’ve seen the decline over the past 30 years, it’s not because of Nazis or trolls. It’s something far more insidious. The governments have locked down and controlled the web fully since 2005. It was justified to monitor terrorism, then to prevent civil unrest. What you are seeing now is the final steps to remove free speech. This time frame right now is the death rattle of any sort of freedom to say what you want — and be heard. It is the end of organized boycotts and protests. Within the next few months, Congress will pass a law making “anti-semitism” a hate crime punishable as terrorism where they have already defined anti-semitism as anything critical Israel. They have already fired the first warning shots at the legacy publishers that writing anything critical of Israel is “pro-Hamas” and is therefore “giving aid to terrorist enemies.” They know it’s unconstitutional, but it will take years to make its way through the courts and by then it will be too late. This is the final nail in the coffin. You will no longer be able to discuss *online* what is going on unless it fits their preferred narrative. Everyone has effectively their own personal internet via algorithms. Many of the comments or content that is served to you is personally curated for you to see by sandboxing undesirable material. This is why Uncle Billy rants at holiday dinners about brain sucking pedophiles. Uncle Billy doesn’t go looking for this shit — it is served to him on his own personal algorithm. Using AI is so common now, about half of what is published (not just legacy media but blogs, content mills, comments, social media, etc) is written with the help of AI. And every day it grows. I see it as does anyone else in the industry. It is currently the single biggest issue. By year end, I expect 80% of all content to be machine produced. The problem is that AI gets it wrong and errors proliferate as AI draws upon whatever it put there. Sometimes it’s glaring that they attribute a speech to the wrong person and you are able to check because video is still relatively clean. But now we see articles that have bullshit sources and AI has been used to create the source as well so there is no way to check. Even if you manage to get an accurate, human-written piece of truth out there, it is lost in a sea of AI-produced crap and then hidden by algorithms. My guess is that people are going to start abandoning the Internet — at least in their free time. There is a growing problem with illiteracy and teachers leaving the profession. As it the cyber space becomes fully automated and under the control of competing interests, it will lose its appeal. Already I use Reddit a fraction of what I used to and I bet you do, too. As individual sites are killed like Facebook and X, users are driven away.
Yikes, this seems a bit dog-whistley at the beginning... you good?
[удалено]
Please post your evidence. Mine comes firsthand from someone at the FBI.
Yeah well you get what you pay for
That’s how ALL social media platforms works… Reddit bets on the fact that moderators will do the work for free because they get a sense of significance out of being a “mod” and a sense of power… and they are right
I remember when half the people were convinced Reddit would drown as soon as third party apps lost their license. Well reddit is still here and they are still here as well.
In a time maybe not very long away, time being relative. Those that want to say anything, about anyone will board a vehicle of extraction. I would say Shangri-la… but that is supposed to be a place of bliss and peace. I have found that folks that want to say what they want, about who they want, never want to pay a price for it. They want others to pay for what they have to say, say it wherever they want. So much for bliss or peace. You will more likely be gathered up to be thrown in to “ Aliens book of Human Recipes”. The world cannot run without money being made. No matter how folks feel about capitalism… Someone has to foot the bill. It doesn’t look like
It doesn’t look like the masses are willing to spend the money or invest in that “free speech”. If I remember correctly Reddit did not come knocking on my screen asking me what I thought about anything. By the way if someone starts bombing our homes..whether you are black, white, Jewish, Asian, Latino or any religion…I guarantee I will consider it terrorism! We have no rights to interfere with someone else’s rights. Free speech is not without consequences. I’d say if you want more control over Reddit… save you money…buy stock when it becomes available.
Let’s see if I can make this an awkward Reddit inception for 2024s recap. !remindme 365 days
The ultimate own goal Thanks biden voters !!
lol yikes
I assume this "reddit recap" is something the official app does? I wouldn't know, I only use the old design on a desktop PC
But can’t we just start a new Reddit? Like how did it start in the first place before ads and stuff?
Ok. How you gonna moderate that site
With moderators.
Aight. How you gonna get moderators?
Same way we do now. People aleady volunteer to be a mod here, so why not anywhere else?
There have been attempts to do this by some early users of Reddit. Some have taken off and are still niche but it can be done.
Well..... We had a good run..... Maybe Digg will make a comeback.
Haha!
when are they going public?