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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

> How exactly did it happen in /r/antiwork? Casuals found it. You know — the people who use the internet to laugh at funny memes rather than treating every post as a blow in a grand ideological struggle.

That's the very force of the reddit hivemind. I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all, so they get a constant influx of people aligned with the reddit mean opinion, which in turn changes the original community.

As long as the popularity of a subreddit is below a certain threshold, it gets to foster specific discussions on whatever fringe ideology you are interested in, but it never stays that way for long.

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> That's the very force of the reddit hivemind. I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all, so they get a constant influx of people aligned with the reddit mean opinion, which in turn changes the original community.

That's what I like about 4chan. In a sea of ungodly acidic garbage lies a golden heart of contrarianism. The posters will argue for a side one day, and 2 hours later will vehemently adopt opposite arguments. Some of the best leftist arguments I have ever read came from /pol/.

4chan argues for the sake of arguing, and I think that is absolutely beautiful in today's environment of everyone taking everything so seriously.

It probably has to do with the post incentives. On Reddit, if you get downvoted into oblivion, your post disappears even if you get thousands of comments. On 4Chan, the more active the post, the more it gets bumped to the top. So being inflammatory on one makes your post disappear, and on the other it sends it to the top of the feed.

This explains Twitter too. Even before the infamous trend-boosting algorithms get involved, being more controversial gets you more retweets and more chances to be seen. Tumblr used to be the same way and its users had similarly controversial/aggressive politics.

Reddit is grossly overmoderated. You have a vote system that enforces a hivemind by itself, on top of a normal moderation system that deletes an enormous amount of content, on top of automated moderation banning posts if you use this or that word, on top of a shadowban system on top of a global content policy system.

The result is that only stuff that the majority of users allow will get displayed.

> Reddit is grossly overmoderated

I think bigger problem is poor moderation. Most of the mods are driven by some agenda and even propaganda.

Instead of focusing on quality, they focus on how their subreddit content can be aligned to their agenda.

Any user who doesn't comply, gets banned. Since roughly only 1% user actively engage in a subreddit, update macha end with Eco chamber.

That's why controversial and new are the only worthwhile comment sortings on Reddit.

I used to love the 4chan-style contrarian attitude until, in high school people I knew were killed in Iraq. Then I started to realize that those kinds of nihilist attitudes have real-world consequences. Since then, that attitude has become mainstream (or perhaps just my awareness of it) and following has been a constant trail of death and misery. I can't not take it seriously anymore when my friends and loved ones are dying and turning on each other.

As far as I can tell, 4chan is vehemently against the current neoliberal wars. They laughed their asses off at the US abandoning Afghanistan and are questioning why the NATO has to be in Ukraine at all. Perhaps I misunderstood your tone.

That definitely wasn't the impression I got back when I frequented it but I'm glad if they're more antiwar now.

I am not familiar at all with 4chan and its functioning, but if I remember correctly there is no "they" in 4chan, similar to the "Anonymous" group... everyone can go into 4chan, sometimes a radical leftist will go there, next day a radical rightist will post. Is there actually a "cultural leaning" in that site?

Of course there are a cultural leanings at every "place". What kind of people frequent that place?

HN is no different. Anyone can come here and make any argument.

> 4chan is vehemently against the current neoliberal wars.

I'm sorry, what exactly makes the current wars neoliberal?

If we're assigning blame for nihilism and Iraq, let's not forget that WaPo, NYT, CNN, ABC, FOX and the rest of the pro-war media bear orders of magnitude more responsibility than fucking 4chan.

Oh I fully agree, that's what I mean by that attitude becoming more mainstream. Just growing up I saw that expressed more fully on 4chan before I saw it being adopted elsewhere.

4chan didn't even exist when we invaded Iraq. And the justification for invading Iraq was anything but nihilism, it was a bunch of patriotism and xenophobia wrapped in religious crusade. By the time we invaded we had killed (and acknowledged killing) a million children due to sanctions.

I can't make the connection you make. When people were protesting against the Iraq War, they were told that they didn't believe in anything. I don't understand personal tragedy as an argument against 4chan; everybody you know is going to die eventually, and virtually everybody you're speaking to has known two people who died prematurely and preventably. I, in particular, don't understand people who traveled to kill instead being killed as an argument against humor.

The idea that a 4chan that didn't exist created Judith Miller is bizarre.

I feel like contrarian techniques adopted by sane mind at cooperatively manageable scale (of zero) is great, but IMO users of reactive contrarianism that eventually emerges just deserve downvotes as external means of value judgement. However that leads to communal polarization, and to solve that, regular exposure events would be necessary ... I admire Reddit, at least for its architecture.

iPhone September filled the internet up with people that never had "don't believe a single thing you read there" driven into their skulls. 4chan posting was and is a performance act. The attitude isn't the problem, pretending like context isn't a thing is the problem.

When the internet media and regular media merged one of two things had to happen. Either expose how much of a performance act the old school media was from jump street. Or make the idea of believing everything online at first pass a reasonable position to have.

Q anon grew and continues to exist precisely because it is in the best interests of "respectable" media outlets to not teach media literacy to their consumers.

>"I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all"

The /r/popular and /r/all pages are intensively manipulated by a constellation of leftist activists. Have you ever noticed just how often the same "screenshots of tweets" submissions from people like AOC end up being reposted ad nauseum across several subreddits that basically share the same message - and most importantly - moderators and power users?

The site itself leans left, I wouldn't call that manipulation, simply people voting on content they like.

However, you are onto something.

Almost every single post on r/MurderedByAOC is made by u/LrlOurPresident, and those posts hit the front page on a nearly daily basis.

Funny you mention u/LrlOurPresident, as I was tempted to mention that user specifically but didn't so my post wasn't too wordy. Their previous account IrlOurPresident was banned for manipulation but the admins don't seem to care in this situation.

> Almost every single post on r/MurderedByAOC is made by u/LrlOurPresident, and those posts hit the front page on a nearly daily basis.

Do you see the same content when browsing in an incognito window?

I ask because I've long suspected Reddit tracks even logged out users, and generates a front page showing them more of things that keep them on the site.

The world itself leans left - at least compared with the US Left/Right divide, and younger people (who are more likely to be on reddit) lean left.

Obviously the site itself leans left.

It's pretty clear from things like Bernie, the rise of antiwork, etc, etc, the site doesn't exactly align with the mainstream DNC talking points nearly as nicely as the front page and popular subs would make you think.

If the NFL craps astroturfing all over the online sports community that still constitutes manipulation even if the occupants of the sites in question were marginally more predisposed to those ideas than the general population. What the mainstream left does to Reddit with their astroturfing is no different.

s/The world/The educated, english speaking westerners who post on reddit, generally found in Western Europe and North America/

I'm not sure Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are hugely fond of progressive politics.

> The world itself leans left

No, by definition, it does not lean in any direction on the political compass.

> at least compared with the US Left/Right divide

More precisely, the overton window of the US goes from center to the far right.

>"Obviously the site itself leans left."

There's a difference between a large amount of users who lean left making posts and comments that align with their views and what looks to be an obviously coordinated effort from a few dozen powermods and powerusers who seem to work 365 days a year to shape the content and discourse of the site through what appears on the frontpage and in the default subreddits.

When conservative subs (like the pro trump ones) started hitting r/all and r/popular, they were very quickly banned, using (unevenly enforced) rules.

It's well known that SRS engaged in brigading, but they'll never be held to the same standard as those with ideologies that are less sympathetic.

Reddit corporate is exceptional at making you driven and angry, literally "engaged" with the website. Keeping Reddit account for fun stuffs only or leaving Reddit altogether, for couple months to years, or to never to return, is a great idea at every point of baseline spacetime that the Earth possibly traverse through.

Don't you think those Redditors are a bit too often bit too dumb to argue with? They ARE! 9/10ths are corporate shills and half of them are bots and the rest are complete boneheads, yeah yeah I agree wholeheartedly. Why not relieve yourself of duties and use that extra time to morally ascend yourself a bit? Watch them run into walls and cry from couple miles away. MSMs are gonna cover them, you won't be missing single bit of it.

Just quit. Click "logout". Going back is as easy as buying a pack of cigarettes and lighting it.

> but it never stays that way for long

It can stay that way, but it's a hard decision to untick these boxes: https://i.imgur.com/E2G9SUh.png

Too early and the sub dies, too late, and you'll wish it died.

TIL, I didn't know that reddit allowed mods to opt-out of /r/all.

The new option happened around 2014-07:

https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/2a32sq/experimen...

Apparently, there were some subreddits that got bombarded with unwanted comments which prompted the new feature.

I don't think most moderators don't know this option exists.

It's located on a page that you only visit once to set up the subreddit, or to make large subreddit changes. (On old reddit, not sure about new reddit)

To Reddit's credit, they have been adding new features over the years to help separate communities and ensure they are somewhat able to maintain their culture.

E.g. Crowd Control which limits the posting / commenting abilities of individual users based on their history or other heuristics.

>E.g. Crowd Control which limits the posting / commenting abilities of individual users based on their history or other heuristics.

Aren't you of the opinion this could be misused?

How so? It's a black box algorithm owned by Reddit Admins. Moderators only have the ability to set the threshold, with very vague terms (low, moderate, high, or something similar)

If admins wanted to disappear a viewpoint, it would be a lot easier to just autosuspend the accounts, or shadowban without a trace.

Just because the admins can do (and have done) worse shouldn't make Crowd Control an acceptable measure by comparison. If anything, I'd say a black box algorithm dictated by the admins is worse than the preemptory auto-mod banning that goes on in a number of political subreddits. I have little confidence the admins won't eventually use it to police subs at a mass scale without the need of the moderator.

The one sub I know opts out of r/all is r/nfl. Which is kinda strange for such a rather non controversial topic, but judging by the treats on r/all probably wise.

Off topic, but my tin foil hat theory of r/antiwork is that this a massive psy-op being pushed by some other nation state. Reddits algo easily helps snowball and propagate ideas that are promoted by users within the sub. It is the perfect playbook to destabilize labor markets in a foreign country.

It's possible, but I don't consider it plausible at my current level of understanding.

My null hypothesis is that there are some really loud people on the internet who like to talk loudly about their unpopular ideas. And they're unaware of how deeply unpopular those ideas are until their little corner of the internet suddenly gets mainstream public attention.

So my thinking is the origin story of the sub is definitely organic. However, it is an easy win for a bad actor to push the narrative that a handful of loud voices are shouting about for their own interests.

Occam's razor. The parent comment is very likely right, it's probably just angry people posting on the internet.

Perhaps, if you consider, there is genuine feeling of resentment among a large portion of the population trying to survive, and that resentment stems from actual material conditions in the labor market. And a community focused on that could garner actual popularity?

How did the foreign nation state convince reddit to put /r/antiwork in /r/all?

Perhaps "casuals" are simply a product of the content they consume, which is determined by the algorithms of the platforms they consume.

Maybe there's something about Reddit's algorithm and mechanics that predisposes it to low effort neutered meme content. After all, the default Reddit homepage subreddits are all trash (by the way this isn't unique to Reddit, same goes for say Youtube).

This is why we need platforms where users actually own their data, and can customize their own algorithms and UIs (ie. what web3 hopes to solve).

Reddit is a powerful tool for automatically dumbingdown/nullifying any ideology that deviates from the mainstream.

Simply by exposing conversations to the greater mob. No fascist master plan required.

It's like removing the fence from around a garden.

> it never stays that way for long.

I'm seeing this happen now, with r/streamentry.

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