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Reddit feels very Soviet lately. Everything is heavily manipulated and it seems like users are aware of that fact but are powerless to change anything.
by BitwiseFool 6y ago
Reddit feels very Soviet lately. Everything is heavily manipulated and it seems like users are aware of that fact but are powerless to change anything.
- ryandrake 6y agoThey can always just stop using Reddit. Digg went this way, too, and it ended badly for them.
- andrewzah 6y agoWas digg as big as reddit is now? The issue for me is I don't know of other good places for long-form discussion and good link aggregation in general. Most of the time in smaller subreddits there aren't really any issues. What alternative is there to /r/AskHistorians? Etc.
- postalrat 6y agoBig as in #1? Yea.
- ncallaway 6y agoSure, but there's #1 in a market with 4% control of the market, vs #1 in a market with 85% control of the market. The absolute rank doesn't really tell you where the next closest competitor is.
- postalrat 6y agoIs facebook and twitter in the same market as reddit? Digg was pretty big for the time. The competitor I used the most back then was slashdot and I'd say digg was considerably bigger.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y agoI think history has shown us that “too big to fail“ isn’t a real thing. That “big enough to get a bailout” is real, but I’m not sure if this would apply to Reddit’s future. I have an idea that the future will not be in content silos and volunteer moderation by power hungry people... but I certainly don’t know how to get there so I’ll wait. I suspect the future will be “subscription lists” you join that block things people you generally agree with flagged, but this may bubble issue like we have now.
- root_axis 6y agoThe "market" in this case is completely nebulous and demonstrably not zero sum. For example, the appearance of tiktok did not shrink YouTube, FB, reddit or any other big site.
- nonbirithm 6y agoThis is the saddest thing, in my opinion. Everything is a content silo. To get "genuine" opinions on anything relevant to the past six years I have to append "site:reddit.com" to all my searches. It seems that setting up independent phpbb communities has fallen out of favor with the convenience of starting off with a much larger audience. But the downsides of letting a single org host and moderate all of these communities are apparent. I mean, their tagline "the front page of the Internet" screams arrogance to me, in the face of what Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the Internet to be, and yet it's probably not wrong at this point.
- dannyw 6y agoThe web not having frictioness and anonymity-preseving single sign on is one of the biggest missed opportunities.
- Shorel 6y agoIt was destined to be as big, yes. There is no popular alternative now, but something could appear eventually.
- yawaworht1978 6y agoStackexchange and maybe Quora.
- ok123456 6y agoPeople revolted against Digg because their redesign was a mess. Reddit's redesign is an equal disaster and viewing it on a phone is impossible because it employs dark patters to force you into an app. Yet, there's no proportional response in this case.
- robertoandred 6y agoPeople didn't revolt against Digg because of the redesign, they revolted because Digg gave publishers priority over the site content instead of users.
- ok123456 6y agoThe site was a broken web 2.0 mess. This is what caused the most dissatisfaction. How things were sorted on the main page, obstensively to stop from getting botted, was a secondary concern as most people just read and don't comment.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SheinhardtWigCo 6y agoThey had somewhere better to go. Does reddit have any notable competitors in 2021? I know there are plenty of unsavory clones of the site for people who aren't welcome there, but is anyone actually lining up to take a shot at beating them?
- arbitrage 6y ago> lately haven't been around reddit for long then, have you
- BitwiseFool 6y agoI used "lately" in order to avoid having a back and forth debate about a specific timeframe. The heavy information manipulation has been happening for years, but it feels especially strong since 2018. I know it was happening well before that but the admins and powermods have been especially craven as of this last year.
- andrewzah 6y agoIt definitely has gotten much worse in the last few years. From Spez silent-editing users posts, to reddit employing an "Anti-Evil Operations team". I've been using reddit since ~2012.
- xqyf 6y agoThey never recovered from the Diggification. So weird to remember it from 2010 and think that it would eventually host the_donald and other white supremacy subreddits that sealed its Eternal September.
- uvnq 6y agoThe_donald wasn't white supremacist. When they moved to their own site they clamped down on that garbage pretty hard. I've seen anti-black or anti-jewish posts heavily downvoted with swathes of negative comments. I don't support everything they do, but empirically, that seems pretty out of character for a white supremacist forum
- collyw 6y ago>the_donald and other white supremacy subreddits The Donald wasn't a white supremacist subreddit.
- xqyf 6y ago
- afavour 6y ago“Soviet” feels like a dramatic overstatement.
- Rebelgecko 6y agoHave you seen the new feature where subreddit visitors get quizzed on whether or not a sub contains undesirable content?
- afavour 6y agoDo you know how actively free expression was repressed in Soviet Russia? Do you know about the gulags?
- inglor_cz 6y agoNot the OP, but a person born in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and with personal recollection of the late Soviet Bloc. Obviously Reddit has no possibility to throw you in prison or execute you with a shot to the neck, but regarding the things that they can do against free expression of their users, they do not seem to show much restraint, especially if they can get away with it. On this particular shitstorm, they will be faced to backpedal, yes. People hate pedophiles with passion.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lordgroff 6y agoNot having lived in Soviet Union, but having lived in a communist system, and am old enough to very much remember it, I think you have a very mistaken idea of repression of free speech in those systems post-Stalin. So how did it work? It worked by intense social and governmental pressure, whereby expressing a thought that was "forbidden" led to incredibly overexaggerated offense and incredulity that someone could think WRONGLY like this (pro capitalist, anti worker, bourgeois, etc). In fact, I have to say that over time, living here in Canada, I feel increasingly like that sort of totalitarianism lite is increasingly becoming familiar, where any even very minor dissent in thought is quickly shouted down as racist / transphobic / insert-X-phobic / anti immigrant, anti-whatever, even if said thought may bear no reasonable resemblance to supposed offence.
- mountainriver 6y agoYeah I got off it, haven’t missed it. It seems to be a reflection of the Soviet totalitarian mindset the far left is taking nowadays.
- unethical_ban 6y agoNot that it relates to the article (the blackout is a very transparent action) but I agree. The manipulation of content to the front page and /r/all is more and more blatant and without repercussion. And more and more subreddits are becoming "safe spaces" where challenging a narrative gets you banned - See /r/conservative, /r/LateStageCapitalism, /r/OurPresident, /r/BlackPeopleTwitter, etc. The refrain of "just create your own subreddit" is not practical to combat the indoctrination being manipulated to the top by these orgs. IIRC commondreams.org is behind the /r/AOC and /r/MurderedByAOC subreddits entirely.
- heterodoxxed 6y ago| commondreams.org is behind the /r/AOC and /r/MurderedByAOC subreddits entirely. Do you have evidence of that?
- unethical_ban 6y agoNot at the moment, no. I recall reading it on another reddit and being sufficiently convinced, for what that is worth. The mod of those subs is /u/IrlOurPresident, and the submissions are restricted to pretty much only that account. That is where to start to trace down the claim.
- heterodoxxed 6y ago| for what that is worth. Not much. | That is where to start to trace down the claim. I can't find any link between that user and commondreams.
- unethical_ban 6y agoJust noticed it's L, like /Lrlourpresident (because the I account got banned). And look at the submissions, and the vote count of submissions. I do not have the comments I read several weeks ago available, but in my many years on reddit, I have no doubt there is clear vote manipulation occurring. inb4 "those are different things", I know.
- standardUser 6y agoThe subreddits I frequent seem utterly unchanged. Reddit is a big place. I understand that people refer to some ambiguous cross-section of "Reddit" as a shared space we are all aware of and can generalize about. But I don't relate to that concept at all.
- asdff 6y agoI don't know. From my big subs to the smallest ones, it seems like the signal to noise ratio is at all time lows. Bots and spam really do pollute the site a great deal.
- standardUser 6y agoI'm literally afraid to even mention the subreddits I like because apparently they have been spared this fate and I'd hate to draw any attention to them!
- ytq11 6y agoI recently retired (before this drama) a 12-year-old Reddit account with close to a million combined karma. This line, that individual subreddits defy any concept of Reddit identity, needs to stop. The overlaps between moderator groups and users, as well as the impact to ALL subreddits from decisions by the administrators, mean it is completely fair game to talk about Reddit as a singular entity. The notion that individual subreddits mean Reddit Is What You Make of It is useful only to distract just like you’re (unintentionally) doing here. It helps deflect some of these situations by having folks who unsub all defaults saying “looks great here!”
- testfoobar 6y agoI miss humor and authenticity from old reddit the most. E.g. the classic: "I also choose this guy's dead wife." or the AMA with the vacuum repair guy. These days just about any popular thread that I wander into, I see wide swaths of "deleted" comments. I'm sure they were deleted for many good and valid reasons. IMHO, reddit's aggressive moderation suppresses spontaneous comments and is off putting to lurkers. The wittiest comments are likely spontaneous. And lurkers are not likely to engage in a discussion if they feel it may be off topic. So we miss out on spontaneous humor and the random insights of brilliant people. All of this makes reddit a sadder experience.
- Akinato 6y agoI'd argue that it's not Reddit's aggressive moderation, but that Reddit is now so popular that the racist, illegal, fickle beast that can no longer stay on topic. If they weren't so aggressive, they'd have a much bigger problem of everyone thinking they're a cesspool of hatred.
- Spivak 6y agoYour phrasing could be a lot better but I think your main point holds some truth. Just like the conspiracy equation that models the difficulty of keeping a secret in terms of the number of people involved the same principal applies to online communities that have a significant number of hateful members but try to fly under the radar. It gets harder and harder for the community to moderate their members that /unjerk and then it snowballs once the seal is broken.
- Number157 6y agoReddit was great for a long time even when it was one of the largest most popular sites on the internet. Then it became a political platform for the US democrats.
- Spivak 6y agoKinda sorta. Reddit is an odd place on the internet. It's on average really really conservative but full people who distance themselves from the political identity of "conservative" or "Republican." Reddit is where you go if you begrudgingly vote Democrat but think that liberals and progressives have gone too far. I do wonder what the political landscape is going to look like in the next decade if/when Republicans realize that there's huge huge swaths of young and young-ish people they could easily convert if they just dropped all the gods & guns & murica branding and gave up on social issues.
- raverbashing 6y agoThe amount of astroturfing (or just unchecked trolling) certainly seems to have gone up
- drunner 6y agoI feel the same way about reddit that I feel about google search now (like many others it seems according to the HN thread the other day). It is only useful to me for very, very small subs that act like enthusiast forums of old.
- duxup 6y agoI think the note should be added that the subreddit moderators can be just as 'soviet' and disconnected from the actual sub users.... I was a part of a few subs where sub moderators chose to participate in some reddit protest and go private. The response to closing the sub temporarily, by the users you see in the sub was nearly 100% negative and a series of moderators who nobody ever sees came out to defend their choice simply demonstrated how disconnected from the sub they were (some didn't even seem to know the sub rules...). There's a weird multi level stratification on reddit with admins, mods and users and I'm not convinced any of the 3 see eye to eye / understand each other.
- mik09 6y agoa good place to check is who's investing in reddit for the last few years. spoiler alert it's not aaron schwartz. i've been shadowbanned from r/news quite a while ago and started engaging in other forums like saidit. saidit had a couple waves, i was kinda the first wave, eavding various reddit bans. that's about a year or two ago. then during the election there was a second wave, and then when r/superstraight got banned, another wave (sigh.) then when gab got attacked, when parler got nuked, we got more and more people.
- sidlls 6y agoThe politics subreddit is among the worst. It seems like it is essentially run by operatives of the DNC. (I’m entirely non-partisan: I believe both major parties are right-wing parties, and neither serves our public interests well).
- astrange 6y agoIf you think the US Democratic party is right-wing you should see literally all European political parties, who all hate immigrants and love economic austerity. https://twitter.com/mcopelov/status/1374544227300999169 https://twitter.com/mcopelov/status/1374544227300999169 (At one point a Nordic politician asked Bernie to stop calling them socialist.)
- lettergram 6y agoThere is the ".win" community - https://patriots.win/ https://patriots.win/ https://communities.win/ https://communities.win/ Which does have a more classic feel.
- Zeratoss 6y agoIt certainly has a more bigoted feel.
- preordained 6y agoThat's part of being uncensored. Small price to pay, IMO
- uvnq 6y agoThe first link is pretty conservative if that's your interest. They sometimes share good leads to information/news from primary sources, which is pretty useful imo. Especially stuff that is not reported on or shared outside of conservative circles. For example, links to the uncut bodycam footage of the George Floyd incident as soon as it was leaked by the Daily Mail. As always it's best to be skeptical of the information you hear online.
- root_axis 6y ago> Everything is heavily manipulated and it seems like users are aware of that fact but are powerless to change anything. Is there any popular link aggregator on the internet that this doesn't apply to?
- pugworthy 6y agoI think it really depends on what subreddits you frequent. Me personally, I find it a refreshingly fun place. Same with Twitter This is probably because I'm focusing my participation on subs where the users are unified by a similar interest in an area of creative expression and participation. Follow controversy, anger or FUD and you'll just get sucked into it in a sort of meta way. Anger because of the anger, controversy because of the controversy, FUD because of the FUD.