Reddit slammed by former CEO Ellen Pao for 'amplifying' racism and hate
cnet.com
cnet.com
The general Reddit hivemimd is basically:
- If you are not with us you are against us
- Whatever doesn't fit my view on the world is a big part of some kind of hidden agenda against the things I care about
That's the site. Also fueled by the downvote upvote system which makes everything worse.
- do and say everything needed to get karma points.
I've seen this happen with political views, operating systems, and even city subreddits.
I still find Reddit has some relevance for more “niche” interests. For instance bikewrench To help with anything bicycle maintenance related. Or woodworking where there are many knowledgeable and friendly users.
If you’re blocking ads and not playing the Reddit gold game, you’re not really giving Reddit any money. In an ideal world we’d get rid of Reddit altogether but that’s already a step.
Wait until they disable old.reddit.com and restrict the api to their official app only and they’ll lose all their users I reckon except the people arguing about politics.
>It feels like if you’re using Reddit for politics and news you’re doing it wrong. It’s a dumpster fire in that respect.
99.999% of Reddit users use it for that (just look at the front page). If you invent a tool and when you start testing it you see an overwhelming amount of the testers use it wrong, you can hardly blame the testers. The problem is your tool.
Groupthink, the mob-mind, is really a thing. There is a flipping point for all of us as individuals, where we become a greater unit of life.
Theosophy has an interesting word for this phenomenon, as it plays a part in the human world, in surprising ways.
https://theosophy.wiki/en/Egregore
Reddit is a purveyor of esoteric thought-forms, but is unfortunately run by materialists. This begets a great deal of turmoil for all involved - among, what has to also be respected, mass agreement. If you're "not one of them", reddit is a place to find others, just like you.
Arguments about a commons, not talking sides, and freedom ring hollow. I don't condone violence, but the kind of speech these sites allow and promote would get you punched in the face at the very least, if you couldn't hide anonymously behind a screen. People wouldn't speak the same way if they had to face their audience in the real world. All these platforms (and others) hand a megaphone to the worst of humanity. It's unacceptable. I'm done.
Many of those decisions were unfortunate in that they do not hold people accountable when they should be (eg: sociopaths, criminals, psyops, etc) and yet discourage good actors from interacting online (due to reputational damage, persecution by mobs, occasional murder, privacy concerns, etc).
Humans do not behave like walking garbage all of the time in the offline world. They do on social media, because of naive design decisions that we should probably change, if we want to survive as a species.
I can't imagine the amount of unjust damage they have done by just randomnly posting peoples photos and names online.
Take for example the "Karen" meme. Any suburbian mum who has a fit in a public space is now called a "Karen", and it's fine to post their video online to mock them and hopefully "get them fired".
A 5 minute mistake can cost you your career. That just doesn't seem like a road to progress, or a better world imo. Chasing absolute morality without a shred of empathy.
The website is the online personification of "Lord of the flies".
That's the sad state of reddit today from a user of 10+ years.
And that is the problem in a nutshell. The people who portray themselves as good (often for monetary gain) are so vicious that they provoke a counter reaction.
Previously leftists (or limousine leftists) fighting for something attacked politicians and institutions.
Now they attack regular people directly online and also offline -- Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" was unheard of in earlier times.
What you see in the right is a backlash. I wonder if some left hard liners (perhaps unbeknownst to themselves) are planted and financed by the right as agent provocateurs.
At that time some argued that Pao was a CEO hired for one mission: To take down that questionable content.
I don't know how many people are missing the underage girl photos in Reddit but the demand voices for it died of. Maybe it wasn't a free speech issue after all.
Maybe Reddit's or any large community's issue is the disproportional amplification of marginal voices, making them mainstream. It's not really about the idea that these voices have but about the amount of noise that they create giving the impression that there is a large demand for it and due to the mechanics of the community the fake demand brings up the supply. The sub in question, The_Donald, is not a place of free speech. It is heavily moderated to push a narrative but if you don't pay attention you may have the impression that this is an organic forum and people simply arrived at these hateful ideas after a thorough discussion.
Analytics also would catch on this and the obvious business decision would be to amplify that content that appears to be on-demand.
If you tolerate stuff like that, you are complicit. She took a hard fall for making those decisions and I think could've handled it better, but it needed to be done.
I use Reddit daily and every time I see suspicious users / subs I add them to my RES filter.
It's now hundreds of names long, but my front page of the internet gets to be the way I like it.
Of course, ideally you could block people in Reddit's own software, and said users would be flagged / banned if they appear on enough people's blocklists.
Everyone's filter bubble should be unique.