Yeah, I remember... But I also remember nearly a decade of shills and astroturfing. Fuck Reddit.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah just like in the Wild West, we used to all die of dysentery.