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I remember stumbling upon /r/antiwork a few years ago and being so happy I'd stumbled upon a thriving movement that so effectively criticized one of the core pr

• ignasheahy 5y ago
  >We need better alternatives to Reddit I am working on one - heahy.com, it's still very small and unfortunately mostly used for memes and porn :) I will try to do something about having more high quality discussions but probably some changes to design are necessary before doing any marketing.
• wldcordeiro 5y ago
  It's not Reddit specifically but those different subreddits growing to the point where the most "engaging" stuff wins and that always becomes the low-effort memes and stuff. Hacker News has had a slower decline in quality because it's like one specific subreddit in size and has pretty aggressive moderation of content in comparison. Your comment and the phenomenom it describes has been given the name "Eternal September" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    It's all in the moderators. They could delete meme posts or even filter posts and have some guidelines they stick to. Also, the “big” groups are almost all owned by the same cabal of 10-20 “super-moderators” that do it only for name recognition. I got pitched out of like 5 subreddits because I posted 1 comment in an anti-vaxxer sub to rebuke an obviously wrong anti-vaxxer rant. They didn't care, and after I cooled off I didn't care either when I realized those subs were all garbage anyway. I also sent them all strongly worded and curse filled responses to the most prominent “super-moderators” to let them know they are all garbage for blanket bans. One of them tried to get me pitched off Reddit and a Reddit employee that I know said the people over at Reddit couldn't care less about what moderator opinions are, and they don't really have any power outside their subs.
• sol_invictus 5y ago
  So what exactly is the alternative for selling your labour to someone else - and more importantly, one that is scalable to the general populace?
  • shadowgovt 5y ago
    Most anarchist philosophy starts from the idea that "general populace" is a bad idea to begin with. People should be living in small, hyper-independent communities. They sidestep the scalability question by asserting that a community of a few hundred (or even a few thousand) is already unnatural. (Not a philosophy I agree with, but one that I observe as pretty cornerstone).
    • sol_invictus 5y ago
      Localism should be encouraged more, I agree, but I just get the vibe these antiwork activists arent arguing for that, but rather for some subjective right to spend their days doing what pleases them while someone else provides the basic necessities for them.
  • JSavageOne 5y ago
    Let people work on whatever they want. People can still get jobs if they want. In fact, most people probably still will. Otherwise nobody would be working in countries where welfare isn't capped, which obviously isn't the case. Also just think back to all the rich trust fund kids and financially independent people you know (eg. multimillionaires). What percentage of them don't work anymore? In my experience, most continue to work even though they could just live off of their savings/investments. That's because they are free to work on what they themselves enjoy, rather than simply having to sell their labor to make ends meet. I wish everyone had that freedom. If it were not possible, then at the least it should be a goal we strive towards.
    • sol_invictus 5y ago
      I dont understand the logic in this at all. Is the idea to have some sort of free flowing money pool a la UBI that ensures all people can obtain basic necessities? If so, then what will ensure those necessities exist in the first place if the intent is to remove money as a tool of trade? You cant just make supply and demand magically disappear. This sounds just about as superficial as the dude on fox news who wants to walk dogs and teach philosophy as their profession. Surprisingly or not, none of the antiwork activists are queuing to work in rice fields or other gritty but absolutely necessary jobs.
• gavinray 5y ago
  >Universal basic income I'm going to sound like I'm being snarky here, and I promise I'm not. How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? I don't say this from a place of privilege. I grew up lower class trailer trash and have been homeless. Maybe I don't understand the concept fully but it seems a bit absurd and unfeasible
  • dymk 5y ago
    You tax a couple dozen ultra rich billionaires and a couple dozen ultra profitable companies. There's plenty of money. We don't need to print more. And each doesn't need the spare $20B anyways.
    • tomrod 5y ago
      I'm not sure this is true. Asset valuation is a bit tricky when you're an outlier. It's not terribly liquid.
      • dymk 5y ago
        Lucky, tricky problems get solved when there's a trillion dollars on the line. For the most part, this idea that taxing the rich is in-theory difficult is just an illusion created by them, to dissuade people from even thinking about it. And yet I have 22% of my equity sold and sent straight to the IRS every year. This is behind the scenes a complex multi-step process, and yet it happens like clockwork, easy as pie.
        • optimiz3 5y ago
          > And yet I have 37% of my equity sold and sent straight to the IRS You need a better accountant / portfolio manager.
          • dymk 5y ago
            Updated ;) ETR != highest bracket, ofc
• Buttons840 5y ago
  The memes won't form an organized political movement, but they will win mindshare for whenever that political movement forms.
• tomrod 5y ago
  I feel like memes become dominants when negative communication starts to overwhelm positive contributions. Deep thought is costly; creating and re-using memes are effectual communication for ever-decreasing depth of thought in high noise environments. Or something like that :)
• jcims 5y ago
  The key to reddit is avoid any sub with >50k members. For really slow subs you can tack /comments on to the URL to see where the conversation is. Just picking something at random, /r/goldmining hasn't had a story posted in 2 years, yet there is still some activity: https://old.reddit.com/r/goldmining/comments/ https://old.reddit.com/r/goldmining/comments/ (Doesn’t with with new layout)
  • wing-_-nuts 5y ago
    TIL, neat, thank you.
• monkeynotes 5y ago
  > We could already have this reality today if we just implemented a universal basic income This is at best naieve. How can you possibly reduce all of the complexities of a nation's multiple economic wants and needs to that conclusion? This is the problem with the movement, myopic and idealistic notions of being free from work. Universal income basically drives up inflation, if you give everyone a free $10 everything becomes $10 devalued. Money works partly because it is scarce and takes work to accumulate. Other people want to exchange their effort for yours. If there is no effort, there is no value. Even if the above is not true there are surely numerous other forces at play that don't fit in with your simplistic idealism. If you think it's the boomers keeping you down, wait until all the YouTube and social media players get into their 40s and see how they feel about giving away their wealth. People are greedy, selfish, family first, and tribal regardless of a generation.
  • JSavageOne 5y ago
    There are already many countries with generous welfare states where one does not have to work and could theoretically live off the government, yet they manage just fine. Even if universal basic income was a pipe dream (which I vehemently disagree with, and again point to the examples above as evidence that not needing to work does not lead to societal collapse), I don't see why enabling everyone the freedom to work on whatever they want should not be a goal. If it were up to me, taxes would be funded via land value tax (commonly referred to as the fairest and most efficient tax since there's no deadweight loss), and the proceeds would be distributed uniformly to the population as a citizen's dividend.
    • monkeynotes 5y ago
      Communism has never worked because the people in power who decide exactly how to divide the wealth fairly are humans and humans are greedy, selfish assholes. Who evaluates your land value? Also, if we all do what we want to do who is gonna pick up the garbage, who is going to slaughter cows for your burger that no one wants to flip? I mean, these are the easy things I can think of. Additionally any of the welfare states and experiments with UI are with small scale countries who have simpler socio-economic makeups. Try doing what you are prescribing in America where Trump, Bezos, and any number of psycho CEOs and politicians are doing very well for themselves. Not to mention the fundamental myth of America is bootstrap to individual prosperity. Edit: to expand on "doing what you want", what if what you want to do is build a huge multi national corp and accumulate stinking piles of cash and yachts? What are you going to say to all those folks?
• izzydata 5y ago
  I see this trend in nearly everything online. Anything that becomes sufficiently large will eventually decline this way. A lot of niche communities intentionally engage in gate keeping behavior which I suspect is to avoid ever succumbing to the de-evolution of their niche.
• mschuster91 5y ago
  > We could already have this reality today if we just implemented a universal basic income, but until the boomers retire from office that's just not happening. That won't be enough. Not just because there are an awful lot of Boomers and post-boomers who can't even go to retirement because they don't have a pension they can live on (which in turn is a problem because all the jobs that the Boomer pensioners occupy can't be done by younger people)... but also because the status quo is not a result of Boomers being Boomers (as group of people born in the decades after WW2), it's a result of how society itself is set up. In German, we have a saying "wer mit 20 noch kein Kommunist ist, hat kein Herz - und wer es mit 30 immer noch ist, keinen Verstand", roughly translated to "who is not yet a communist by age 20 doesn't have a heart and who still is a communist by age 30, has no common sense". Basically, society itself has over millennia evolved into acquiring wealth and disbursing that wealth down to one's children (which up to maybe a hundred years ago meant, the male children), and it's no coincidence that age 30 was around the age where young men and women bought their house and "settled down". And once you have that house, your car, your family after a decade of education and another decade of hard work... why would you be incentivized to allow others the same status as you have now, without them having to put in the same work? Why would you risk your freedom, your job, your investment, your assets and go on the streets and riot until the elite comes crashing down like it deserves? Of course, there are idealists who nevertheless take on that risk, and those who have failed the rat race or got left behind somewhere, but let's be realistic: the numbers alone are an advantage to the elites. The danger that modern Western capitalist society is now, of course, that it has allowed too many people to fall behind economical progress - which is what fueled the rise of right-wing populism across the US and Europe over the last decades. And I'm afraid that even though it may seem like we have passed over the worst (with Trump and Netanyahu getting booted out of office, BoJo going down in flames, even Italy's right wing being unable to put up a candidate)... I'm afraid that the events of the last six to eight years have only been a tiny warning and we are headed for something much bigger and especially much worse. The world needs to do a lot of change to hope to tackle the climate crisis... lots of the current standard that us Westerners are used to is simply unsustainable (e.g. always a wide selection of fresh, world-wide sourced produce and meat in the supermarket, cross-continental flights for under a hundred euros) which means that an already disgruntled population will have to cut back, and the population of poor and rising developing countries that sees the Western abundance on Instagram will not be happy to hear that they won't even get the chance of obtaining that wealth level.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  > technological advancement and automation should enable greater freedom for individuals to spend their time how they choose I work in ML. Antiwork seems like it takes its understanding of automation’s present capabilities from fiction, imagining that we could automate people’s basic needs today. We can’t. It’s as simple as that. People are working hard (the irony) on advancing the tech, but we can’t do that today.
  • CodeGlitch 5y ago
    I was going to say the same thing. Let's say your toilet breaks, who's going to come over and fix it? You're not going to automate a plumber in the next 50 years...
    • nybble41 5y ago
      You're not going to automate a plumber, but we can design plumbing systems which are less likely to have issues and/or are easier to repair for non-specialists, and thus reduce the demand for plumbers. You'll still need some for the exceptional cases, of course. Not that I disagree with the core point: There are jobs which are both necessary and very unlikely to be automated any time soon.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    It's more about class. The 1% are absorbing almost all the new wealth created and the rest of us get breadcrumbs and they -own- most of the government with occasional concessions lest the rabble rise up and overthrow them like in almost all civilizations where the powers that be eventually went to far. No one thinks we have robots that can replace all physical labor, low wage jobs. I think the 99% occupy wallstreet was headed in the right direction and that the powers that be have been using the media to polarize us all with poltical, racial, and political differences and keep us concentrating on our differences rather than our common enemy and the most valuable prize, self determination.
• chiffre01 5y ago
  Completely agree, the comment quality is generally low and has decreased over time. Ironically, sorting comments by "Controversial" often leads to the most insightful ones, it's still hit and miss and depends on the discussion topic.
• poorjohnmacafee 5y ago
  Circa 2016 Reddit became a political propaganda free for all with a ridiculous amount of shill accounts trying to incite others and diminish viewpoints purely on political lines. Serious money was invested by interest groups to eventually help shape Reddit into the hive mind it became. I watched this transition as a long time Redditor and I hated every second of it. Reasonable, discourse seeking people left Reddit in droves, the effect being that there's then a distilled concentration of politicized accounts, gen Z, and trolls. A few subreddits buck the trend, but frankly I kind of hate Reddit and hope someone makes a new one for the reasonable masses.
• xtracto 5y ago
  > I haven't browsed the subreddit in forever but just took a look, and it's sad to see it's just a bunch of stupid memes now. Every decent subreddit eventually devolved into a bunch of stupid memes. The September that never ends. This has been a problem in the internet since its initial days (in the Usenet for example). The problem with systems like Reddit (less so news.ycombinator) is that the "ethernal september" cultural shift gets amplified by content voting. Given that the masses have equal right to vote content, the "minimum common denominator" is the pattern that arises in the system. Sites like Slashdot or news.ycombinator try to work around this by giving voting powers to certain "filtered" populations (Slashdot algorithm was actually nice when I read about it). But I feel the current approaches serve to "delay" the inevitable path towards low-effort content, instead of cutting it from the beginning. The one thing that was nice about usenet is that all comments were equal, so there was no "amplification" of the low-effort content. I think for people to provide higher effort content, there should be some kind of incentive. Social incentives is what StackOverflow or Quora used to have, as well as Slashdot at certain level (you knew you were in a conversation with highly technical individuals). I also think that using real names would help.
  • thrashh 5y ago
    I personally think hacker news hasn’t fallen victim as much mainly because it’s so small in comparison. I feel like once any community starts growing faster than a certain rate, its core focus inevitably dilutes because there are not enough older members to impress the culture of the community onto newer members.
  • merdaverse 5y ago
    I'm not sure that real names would help much. Look at LinkedIn. Lots of personal details in each person's profile, yet it is still devolving into Facebook level low quality content.
• wonderwonder 5y ago
  How does UBI work if everyone just decided not to work anymore? How would it work if everyone involved in say medicine decided not to work anymore of if everyone involved in the military or border patrol said 'nope, I'm done'? Would we just print more money to give to the people that streamed over the border? What if the people that print the money or send the checks decided to quit?
  • alecbz 5y ago
    It wouldn't, but I'm not sure that would happen (everyone deciding not to work). Especially if UBI is only enough to live ~reasonably comfortably. I'd imagine a wide spectrum of people, some of which are fine with that level of income and don't really work much for money at all, some people who work part time, and others that keep working because they enjoy it/really want more money. It feels TBD how stable something like this would be, but feels fundamentally workable. I think you could at the least tune the amount of the UBI until it does become stable; I don't think the only stable value would be $0.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > How does UBI work if everyone just decided not to work anymore? If too many (which with any reasonable near-future level of productive capacity, and any level of UBI, is a lot short of “everyone”) people don't work with fixed nominal or dedicated-revenue-stream-based UBI, inflation erodes the value of UBI decreasing the lifestyle sustainable on UBI alone until enough fewer people opt out of work to stabilize things. With inflation-indexed UBI you get a positive feedback UBI -> price feedback loop, so don't do UBI that way. But mostly “what happens if too many people don’t work” is irrelevant to real-world UBI proposals: these tend to target a poverty-level income, replace existing means-tested poverty-support programs, and remove barriers to outside income that come with existing means-tested programs. As such, they structurally incentivize more people choosing to work than under the status quo system (and a move from under-the-table to above-board work.)
• UncleOxidant 5y ago
  There are some good, well-moderated subreddits - r/covid19 comes to mind. But the emphasis has to be on "moderated" - r/covid19 is very strictly moderated and that keeps it useful - a lot of doctors, virologists, immunologists seem to comment there. If that strict moderation wasn't there it would quickly become useless.
• themaninthedark 5y ago
  You absolutely do not have to sell your labor to someone else. If you learn to hunt, fish, farm and forage, you can sustain yourself. You can move to Alaska or the Canadian wilderness and do so. If you don't like the cold, there is the Amazon. There are people who live like this. The problem is: we want modern medicine, TV shows, cellphones, nice clothes, etc. Living is the fight against entropy. In order to live, you have to put in effort.
  • johnnyanmac 5y ago
    You inevitably have to pay taxes in a good 95% of the land, and you don't get to choose which plot of land you're born on. That's the kicker that prevents this "truly sustainable" life you propose.
• BobbyJo 5y ago
  > To me anti-work is the recognition that forced wage labor is not acceptable, and that technological advancement and automation should enable greater freedom for individuals to spend their time how they choose. We could already have this reality today if we just implemented a universal basic income, but until the boomers retire from office that's just not happening. It's not acceptable, but it is necessary. People always point to increasing automation and productivity, but they gloss over the fact that those aren't uniform. Most of the economy is only more productive because of other parts of the economy. A trucker today is only more productive because the stuff in their truck is more valuable, not because anything has changed about the job. We need just as many truckers, if not more, now that their 'productivity' us up. There are tons of jobs no one wants to do, but everyone needs done. What keeps wages in check for those jobs is that 1) they are low skilled and 2) people have to work, so the segment of people that have been unable to make themselves valuable in other ways trickle down into those functions. It's a harsh and shitty reality, but, until we have a big population of people laying around that love scrubbing shit off walls and drowning baby chickens, this is where we're at. It's wild to me that people don't see this. Literally every utopian uprising has been followed by an immediate famine. All that being said, uniform supplemental income isn't necessarily bad, but there is definitely a threshold where the harms out-weight the benefits, even for those it is intended to help.
  • JSavageOne 5y ago
    > There are tons of jobs no one wants to do, but everyone needs done. If these jobs truly are necessary, then wages would rise to the point where people would be attracted to do them. If truck driving paid as much as FAANG software engineering, I assure you there'd be no shortage of truck drivers (even if it required grinding a trucker Leetcode). Higher wages further incentivize automation, or alternative means of coping. Truck driving for example will most definitely be automated within the next decade or two. If chickens became so expensive, then more people would opt for vegetables and subsistence farming (actually I heard it's feasible to have a pet chicken in one's apartment. There's your morning eggs).
    • BobbyJo 5y ago
• nameisname 5y ago
  The organization itself has become very user hostile as well which I think has played a large part in the overall quality drop. There's a reason everyone links to old.
• mgh2 5y ago
  Reddit (or any social network for that matter) was never meant to attract the same quality crowd and comments as HN. Social networks, in their design, are destined to degrade over time no matter how much technology is used, because it is a refection of the collective corrupt human nature. I thought Linkedin was an exception until https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30215033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30215033 HN is not a social network and hopefully stays that way. The slight degradation you see might be due to COVID, where people flooded online in general. But you can still find great content because its core community and function remain fundamentally the same since inception. Note: I mainly use HN as a information filter and research tool.
• lamontcg 5y ago
  And leftists continue to self-sabotage... I don't see any problem with where r/antiwork wound up. Look at what the right wing does tactically to get their message across. They setup forums which are gateway drugs, which offer watered down cryptic messages where they go around joking to "hide their power levels" and shit. If you remember the nazi babytalk subreddits that were all about "frens" you know what I mean. That is effective outreach of propaganda efforts. They do it because it works. Leftists had a great, popular tool here with the new r/antiwork which nudged people one very small step in the leftist direction. Leftists should embrace that for it became and the function it was serving. Instead it sounds like you're going to burn it down because it is insufficiently pure. Even if they're only talking about how and why their boss sucks and they want a new boss, you should focus on the fact that you've created a common place in the public where everyone can start commiserating on how their bosses suck. That's not a zero. It just also isn't the glorious workers revolution I guess so we have to burn it all down. EDIT: looks like there's been a switch in the mod group and the people currently running the show are actually NOT taking a hard line and are more in line with exactly what I'm talking about: https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/sm4l3z/update_on_moderation_and_policy_transparency_post/ https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/sm4l3z/update_on_... The linked youtube video in there is pretty short and good as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhHCf6eEGzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhHCf6eEGzw
• wombatpm 5y ago
  Perhaps we need anti Twitter —Where comments need to be at at least 280 characters to encourage explanations and discourse. I self censor in this regard where I start many replies, but discard them if all I have typed is two lines of witty snark.
  • double_nan 5y ago
    Your comment is 202 non space characters :) But I like your point nevertheless!
• mantas 5y ago
  > To me anti-work is the recognition that forced wage labor is not acceptable Good. Then it should be acceptable to let people starve. Why feed someone who can't accept that he has to contribute to society?
• glonq 5y ago
  Agreed, reddit was once a [r]evolutionary platform but nowadays is broken in ways that it can't/won't fix.
• aww_dang 5y ago
  >...similar to Hacker News in comment quality (which has also lowered significantly). I watched the site devolve... Imagine if HN could have pro-free market articles in the same volume as submissions like this. Every day there's a submission from Jacobin, The Guardian or something truly partisan (some might say deranged) like this Medium write up. Yet, laissez-faire articles are immediately flagged. The comments fill with drivel about Koch brothers or "the oil companies funded this". >We need better alternatives to Reddit, or Reddit needs to fix the mess because the post/comment quality there is straight trash there. All the default homepage subreddits are trash. Yes HN, a site for entrepreneurs. A site for people who like to build stuff, ideally profitable things which can sustain them. A site with only one homepage for both people who would like to build. HN, a site not just for visionaries and entrepreneurs, but also those who demand that work is slavery? When I say 'not just for', I should clarify. The site's editorial position is to promote these communist diatribes and shadow ban mises.org. >...everyone must effectively sell their labor to someone else (unless they're rich enough to opt out, or clever enough to create some business or invest their way out).
  • TraceWoodgrains 5y ago
    Hm? Would you mind expanding on why and how you feel my piece is hyperpartisan? I'm neither a leftist nor particularly sympathetic to them; my own economic preferences usually lie pretty firmly in the neoliberal camp. Your comment seems to be calling my piece a "communist diatribe", and I'm struggling to see where you got that impression.
• johnnyanmac 5y ago
  >We need better alternatives to Reddit, or Reddit needs to fix the mess because the post/comment quality there is straight trash there. I've looked for years but nothing's popped up. Everytime I saw a lead it had other issues either with population, or cultural problems which would make it even worse than reddit. I don't even want a true reddit alternative per se either. Just a subspace where I could talk about games and anime and not feel like I'm walking on landmines just because some people see a one-off potentially offensive scene and think suddenly that games/anime are the source of all problems. >All the default homepage subreddits are trash FWIW, defaults aren't a thing anymore. It still is in spirit because the design of reddit means the old defaults still have the most subscribers. But new users aren't instantly being thrown into gifs/videos/earthporn/etc.