Where Trolls Reigned Free: A New History of Reddit
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Entire subreddits -- iamverysmart and similar -- which are devoted to finding people who made a comment which was embarrassing in some way, and publicizing it widely. One day, half of the videos on the front page of reddit (default page when not logged in) were random cell phone and surveillance footage -- people who don't know they were being filmed -- doing something dumb or being jerks.
Now, those people were genuinely jerks, but we've all been jerks at some point in our lives. Should that really become an internet phenomenon that will track those people for the rest of their lives?
We've got the political mobs too (the liberal mob and its feminist sub-mob tend to be particularly aggressive in ripping people apart, with similar but smaller communities on the right).
Nobody is going to find it by googling their name.
And many videos of people faceplanting going viral are actually going to be used to the effect of providing cred in that person's circles.
"Look I went viral! Hahaha"
That's people for you.
And some comments are questions about programming or accurate technical answer to them, but neither that, nor what I quoted, is relevant in this context.
If you really believe that argument, post the most cringeworthy video of yourself on the Internet. For the cred.
You're right that the way these things get found usually isn't by Googling. If something's on the front page of reddit, the most likely way is your friends or colleagues will run into it and pass it around. In smaller communities, that may continue for years.
But Google is certainly a way people will find it too, even if the name isn't in the post. Search engine 101: the way Google works is by looking at text in incoming links. If I have a few links posted on social media which say "Hey, chmod775 lost his temper in a restaurant and boy did he make a fool of himself," that's exactly what Google will point to. If this person isn't famous enough to have other high-profile pages about them, it's likely to be on page 1, or even the top link.
No. Don't put words in my mouth. That's rude.
I merely said that those videos generally have much less of a fallout on people's personal lives than they are often made out.
Think of it, the last 30 years of this man's life made a living hell all so people can laugh at his angry outburst. In no way was this good for him.
"Star Wars Kid" lived through hell in high school, it certainly didn't help him either.
Its fine for you who doesn't have to live through it to just laugh it off. But these viral videos cause real harm to real people.
Around 2015 everything changed: you were either transphobic nazi or morbidly obese surgically modified foul-mouthed thingy, who had zher own pronoun. There was no room for normal people anymore.
We have to get back to a place of nuanced, policy-based liberal democracy as opposed to ideological mud-slinging, or the fallout is just going to get worse.
1: Reddit was some place where all the worst of the worst people meet 2: Reddit was intentionally toxic. 3: Reddit was some singular hivemind, rather than small, clustered communities. 4: That there aren't any worse places on the internet.
However, even if the comparison is unfair, I much prefer lurking in HN. The reason is the same that makes an average guy feel unrewarded: Top comments here are usually insightful, well thought, and sitting on real knowledge. It makes for a vastly better reading experience, at the cost of a poorer "interactive" experience. I don't mind and, in fact, appreciate it.
On HN, unless you're arguing a point, comments and replies are usually about sharing insight. After the insight is shared, there's mostly nothing to say. You contemplate the insight, add your own, or move on. That's quite nice.
Uhh. one of the top comments for this story is this "insightful" gem:
> Sounds like the NYT is mad that all these internet kids don't want to pay for a subscription.
Earlier, popular content had links to endless malware.
Reddit always has been a cesspool. It’s simply symptomatic of a much broader societal cancer. I’m confident we will root out such problems in time, though.