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There was a brief period where the internet was shockingly stable. However, 'creative destruction' and churn is inevitable as the whole world continues to desir

There was a brief period where the internet was shockingly stable. However, 'creative destruction' and churn is inevitable as the whole world continues to desire a better internet. If reddit cannot productively use this to come out with a better product and commitment to its community, hence destroy the bad within itself, it should fall apart in favor of new services. I spent a decade+ actively on reddit, and I truly loved its hobby & local communities during that time. I deleted my account last week; I don't believe they'll change. Life is too short to spend it on things you don't love anymore.

empyrrhicist 3y ago
Seeing things change is honestly really exciting - I didn't realize how stale things had started to seem. Fragmenting into a bunch of smaller communities honestly seems kind of ideal.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  A bit elitist take, but I would be happy if the people who don't want to take a stance stay and the rest move on to more interesting places. Reddit can be reserved for ads and memes.
  - pokerface_86 3y ago
    [dead]
herculity275 3y ago
While it's far from over, the Facebook-Twitter-Reddit consensus does seem a lot shakier right now. I'm excited to see what the more fractured/federated social space of tomorrow will look like but I also feel like we'll come to miss some of the more contentious features of the current megaplatforms (e.g. centralized moderation).
- trostaft 3y ago
  I agree, particularly because I think smaller communities are a solution to the moderation problems that have plagued traditional megaplatforms. That or developing better NLP tools that are able to better understand human nuance in a comment. The latter could be a dangerous tool...
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    The smaller you are the less it matters. One thing that annoys me about Mastodon is that the medium amplifies angry toots, particularly about politics. I don't want to read anything where anybody active after 1945 is accused to be "a Nazi" or "a fascist" for instance. Because there are so many toots to read I have no problems losing some toots so if the model rejects some stuff because it is about a topic that people frequently write angry toots about that's fine with me. My smart RSS reader YOShInOn is already classifying 2000 articles on a good day, one of these days I have to update it so it can train more than one classification model. I'm pretty sure my model would work OK for angry toots if I can collect 5000 or so them which might be a lot to bear. An advantage of content-based filtering trained by the individual (as opposed to a corporation) is that it will not be so controversial because the people being filtered won't know that it happened. Someone on mastodon pointed out that this doesn't give backpressure for people to improve their behavior https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110526769345483257 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110526769345483257 but https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110527273094994515 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110527273094994515
    - paholg 3y ago
      So what do you call white supremacists who adorn themselves with swastikas?
      - PaulHoule 3y ago
        “Clowns” or “Dumbasses who want to get attention.” That is maybe 5% of the people who that N-word gets applied to. Mostly it is an attempt at dehumanization that follows very much the playbook of Herr Hitler himself. If the antics of the occasional Nazi cosplayer get blocked that is not collateral damage, it is a very good thing even if it off target. That stuff gets amplified so much that somebody else is likely to show up to counterprotest and pelt them with a bag of little bolts (a tactic that the Spartacus League used to great effect when the KKK showed up in Auburn, NY.)
antisthenes 3y ago
> There was a brief period where the internet was shockingly stable. However, 'creative destruction' and churn is inevitable as the whole world continues to desire a better internet. It's not at all evident the world actually desires a better internet. Even without corporate involvement, it's extremely obvious that a subreddit's size is inversely proportionate to the quality of its content and discourse (with perhaps extremely rare exceptions) In other words, when the "normies" start flooding something, the value of that takes a nosedive, because experts don't want to fight another battle on top of the battle of producing good content (which is hard enough by itself). > I spent a decade+ actively on reddit I've spent roughly ~5-6 active years, but then the combination of censorship and nosedive in quality of discourse that started ~2015, made me lose all interest in actively participating.
slowmovintarget 3y ago
Forgive me for picking on the phrase, but I believe this is result of Reddit owners engaging in destructive destruction.

empyrrhicist 3y ago

Seeing things change is honestly really exciting - I didn't realize how stale things had started to seem. Fragmenting into a bunch of smaller communities honestly seems kind of ideal.

karmakurtisaani 3y ago
A bit elitist take, but I would be happy if the people who don't want to take a stance stay and the rest move on to more interesting places. Reddit can be reserved for ads and memes.
- pokerface_86 3y ago
  [dead]

herculity275 3y ago

While it's far from over, the Facebook-Twitter-Reddit consensus does seem a lot shakier right now. I'm excited to see what the more fractured/federated social space of tomorrow will look like but I also feel like we'll come to miss some of the more contentious features of the current megaplatforms (e.g. centralized moderation).

trostaft 3y ago
I agree, particularly because I think smaller communities are a solution to the moderation problems that have plagued traditional megaplatforms. That or developing better NLP tools that are able to better understand human nuance in a comment. The latter could be a dangerous tool...
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  The smaller you are the less it matters. One thing that annoys me about Mastodon is that the medium amplifies angry toots, particularly about politics. I don't want to read anything where anybody active after 1945 is accused to be "a Nazi" or "a fascist" for instance. Because there are so many toots to read I have no problems losing some toots so if the model rejects some stuff because it is about a topic that people frequently write angry toots about that's fine with me. My smart RSS reader YOShInOn is already classifying 2000 articles on a good day, one of these days I have to update it so it can train more than one classification model. I'm pretty sure my model would work OK for angry toots if I can collect 5000 or so them which might be a lot to bear. An advantage of content-based filtering trained by the individual (as opposed to a corporation) is that it will not be so controversial because the people being filtered won't know that it happened. Someone on mastodon pointed out that this doesn't give backpressure for people to improve their behavior https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110526769345483257 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110526769345483257 but https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110527273094994515 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110527273094994515
  - paholg 3y ago
    So what do you call white supremacists who adorn themselves with swastikas?
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      “Clowns” or “Dumbasses who want to get attention.” That is maybe 5% of the people who that N-word gets applied to. Mostly it is an attempt at dehumanization that follows very much the playbook of Herr Hitler himself. If the antics of the occasional Nazi cosplayer get blocked that is not collateral damage, it is a very good thing even if it off target. That stuff gets amplified so much that somebody else is likely to show up to counterprotest and pelt them with a bag of little bolts (a tactic that the Spartacus League used to great effect when the KKK showed up in Auburn, NY.)

antisthenes 3y ago

> There was a brief period where the internet was shockingly stable. However, 'creative destruction' and churn is inevitable as the whole world continues to desire a better internet. It's not at all evident the world actually desires a better internet. Even without corporate involvement, it's extremely obvious that a subreddit's size is inversely proportionate to the quality of its content and discourse (with perhaps extremely rare exceptions) In other words, when the "normies" start flooding something, the value of that takes a nosedive, because experts don't want to fight another battle on top of the battle of producing good content (which is hard enough by itself). > I spent a decade+ actively on reddit I've spent roughly ~5-6 active years, but then the combination of censorship and nosedive in quality of discourse that started ~2015, made me lose all interest in actively participating.

slowmovintarget 3y ago

Forgive me for picking on the phrase, but I believe this is result of Reddit owners engaging in destructive destruction.