I occasionally look at a few very niche subreddits, but for news, Reddit is complete garbage. Reddit has been kind of dead to me since 2016. They were the first big victim of the ongoing anti-free-speech wave that started in 2016.
/R/the_donald was consistently getting bullshit content to the front page using bots.
If you're pro free speech you'll need to answer towards the onslaught of bot based content generation and fake users
I had a weird one on Reddit the other day, and in thinking back, I rather wish I had saved it than just reporting it.
There were a comment under one post from 2 different users that was exactly the same. It was a somewhat well though out comment on the shorter side so it caught my eye. When I looked at both the accounts they had the exact same post history, but this was the only comment on the same thread. The other comments were dups of each other on different threads, and they didn't appear to post on the same posts anywhere else in their history.
There was otherwise no other information that would have pointed at them performing any bot like behavior.
I had a weird one on Reddit the other day, and in thinking back, I rather wish I had saved it than just reporting it.
There were a comment under one post from 2 different users that was exactly the same. It was a somewhat well though out comment on the shorter side so it caught my eye. When I looked at both the accounts they had the exact same post history, but this was the only comment on the same thread. The other comments were dups of each other on different threads, and they didn't appear to post on the same posts anywhere else in their history.
There was otherwise no other information that would have pointed at them performing any bot like behavior.
But eventually the push to gentrify reddit from the venture capitalists demanding profit on their millions made reddit corporate start banning even completely legit, but unprofitably controversial, subreddits. I left after they banned r/gundeals for having the temerity to exist and post links to and discuss firearms and firearm accessory deals online.
All the bot stuff you're talking about came well after the gentrification and switch to user profile centered posting to absorb the Facebook refugees. It seems like the Facebook bots just followed the Facebook users to reddit.
The problem is when a forum becomes a synthetic medium for shills.
It is absurd to say that the problem started with robot or mechanically generated content. They haven’t ever been effective or smart in developing content policies that work.
Just curious, how do you know for a fact that bots were involved in boosting the content? I mean, I'm sure that's possible, it's just that the level of energy/enthusiasm there among the users was extremely high to the point that I think it's reasonable to think that the subreddit's success was mostly just people being enthusiastic and wanting to upvote everything.
As far as bot based content-generation goes, that seems a little far-fetched to me given the level of humor and quality of the memes. Human humor to that level seems beyond reach of whatever technology was state of the art in 2015-2016 or even now.
I've watched this tab for many years because it strikes the right balance between new and interesting content.
During the trump election. Everyday there were multiple posts to the sub getting upvoted and this went on for months.
Also, multiple people analyzed the content voting for that subreddit and it significantly deviated from every other major subreddit.
I get you're trying to claim "there's no way to be statistically certain" but the evidence in the Mueller report and elsewhere makes it clear, internet propaganda is a real problem and is documented.
Here are 2 ways to look at this. There's no way to prove which viewpoint is correct, but anybody who spent time there will know exactly what I'm talking about.
1) One way to explain this is bots.
2) Another way to explain this is you actually saw genuine enthusiasm for the first time. As somebody who has spent a long time on the Internet, I've never seen a large forum like that devoted to some cause that was basically a 24/7 party-like atmosphere with genuine extreme enthusiasm and people having fun shit-posting, not worrying about political correctness, and making memes. If it was the case that the enthusiasm was indeed an outlier, then the level of activity would also be an outlier.
In light of actual evidence, how one interprets this is pretty subjective and minds are already made up. You be the judge, but I think the answer is obvious.
Dear Octonian, users were banned left and right for suggesting Covid was a lab leak or for making their case for why vaccines were problematic. It isn’t just banning if extreme ideas and race, sex, and religion.
They banned the president of the United States. It’s about power and controlling the propaganda messaging apparatus.
In this case the president repeatedly broke the rules by posting lies and dangerous misinformation. Even given that, his account was allowed to continue to break the rules for far longer than normal peoples would have been.
The owner(s) of the platform or service. As per the terms of service you agreed to in exchange for an account on that platform or service.
I'm just pointing out that the slippery slope argument of "who gets to decide what is an isn't disinformation" on a specific platform which always gets brought up in this case has an obvious answer.
The platform is pressured to arbitrate a certain way and is a political tool. Musk opening up speech will be a breath of fresh air.
The lab leak hypothesis - or rather the various theories and conspiracies that get grouped under that banner - remain just that as far as I know. I'm willing to consider it misinformation given that the obvious purpose of much of it was to implicate that the Democratic Party/WHO/Fauci in some kind of bioweapons conspiracy or feed off of anti-Chinese xenophobia. But certainly, given that it remains unproven, I would consider claims to the contrary to be misinformation.
And... what about them? Were they lined up against a wall and shot or something? Were they sent to camps? Were their homes raided and their literature burned? As far as I can tell discourse in this area never even faltered anywhere online, it continued and continues unabated still.
There is just the racism reddit moderation agrees with and the racism reddit moderation doesn't agree with, the misogyny reddit moderation agrees with and the misogyny reddit moderation doesn't agree with.
So when you're claiming that reddit moderations are reasonable, you're just claiming they agree with who you allow and who you doesn't allow being the target of bigotry.
I consider porn a form of misogyny for instance, reddit allows porn, and some very depraved form of porn, so don't claim reddit has reasonable terms of services and fights "bigotry", you just don't care about the former.
there is no "transparent gotcha attempt" and it's the op who is making an assumption by using the word "reasonable", it's a qualitative argument the OP is making and it's also called "projection".
it's like you're giggling behind your computer, attempting at rooting out imaginary trolls that only exist in your mind.
Of course they did make a value judgement, it's them qualifying whatever TOS on a bunch of depraved porn ridden websites in the realm of the "reasonable". Reddit made no such statement at first place anyway...
Not only are an alarming number of people against free speech, some of them are very powerful. One is even in charge of Biden's new Ministry of Truth.[1]
Also, I remember how 2 years ago the breaking story about the emails found on Hunter Biden's laptop implicating Joe Biden in a Ukrainian money laundering scheme was "completely made up by Russians" and talking about it got you banned from every major social media site. Until it turned out to be legit, which it always was. So would that have been banned due to racism or nazis or transphobia or...some other made up reason to justify banning the discussion of it?
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10760907/Biden-star...