> I can’t imagine anybody has time to do all the random stuff they’re being accused of.
Employees are probably not happy but they are still working. And you can literally find a page offering paid reviews in seconds, add an item to _a basket_ and pay with a credit card
Absent evidence, for the HN front page, yes.
Secondly the CEO has a history of posting fake user engagement himself or at his command in order to show more popularity than actual. He does this.
You’d look at twitter bot replies and say the same thing huh
Reddit today after collective forgetting: "What do you mean companies use dark patterns?!"
Which makes me wonder why y'all prefer to believe that reddit itself is buying reviews from black market bot farms in a giant conspiracy, rather than those dark patterns just being, you know, effective at pushing users to leave low effort reviews?
something more obvious right now given how bad the astroturfing campaign is. one word reviews?
everyone knows Reddit is vulnerable to a thousand cuts right now, its the perfect time to do so
I’ve seen that in a lot of crypto projects, because people consistently develop a parasocial relationship with the founders and then try to digitally harm them after the founders dont do what they expect
this looks and acts like the same thing
> something more obvious right now given how bad the astroturfing campaign is. one word reviews?
I imagine one doesn't have a good way of making sure they'll get good, quality fake reviews from farms in 3rd world countries. But also, it's about as bad (in terms of PR) as spez's communications and interview so
The r/de subreddit is still in blackout, so I can't really provide a working source right now, but once that ends, you can check it out here: https://reddit.com/r/de/comments/13orxh0/milde_interessant_r...
The one exception is a company that asks employees to review their employer. They seem to verify that the reviews are coming from actual employees.
In 2020, for some reason Reddit went hard on just... loony shit. Things like pushing the redesign even though it was blatantly not ready for use, switching their mobile site for some completely dogshit PWA that doesn't even function properly 75% of the time. In terms of community, they started putting people older Reddit had pretty much exiled for being horrible on the emergency mod reserve list (which notably led to them putting a thrice accused rapist on the mod list for /r/rape, who only deleted their account after completely different drama linked them back to their old identity). They also hired a convicted pedophile as an admin, mentioned her by name and surname in the announcement of her joining and then tried to double down when people expressed discomfort when they found the conviction (and even banned people for pointing it out).
Similarly, things like April Fools went from "niche fun tech thing" to "next marketing campaign". Older Reddit had things like The Button - simple in premise, utterly byzantine, entire community was user-invented. Newer reddit just has completely given up on doing anything like that, the closest it came was trying to redo /r/place, and it failed completely (since e-celebs knew it was coming and began mobilizing their userbase to hijack it).
They also completely gave up on trying to moderate spam when COVID-19 began; it's now all up to the mods of individual subs to get rid of it. Reddits admins don't bother banning spam accounts anymore, so mods have resorted again to using shared banlists just to get around repost karmafarm bots.
The company is completely floundering when it comes to community management and it's hard to keep presuming it's not malice when it's this consistently bad. Buying 5 star reviews for their apps is genuinely not out of the managements ballpark.
> In a way that continues or has continued for a long time.
Merriam-Webster offers the following two:
> continuing or occurring again and again for a long time
> always present or encountered
For"chronically" to mean "extremely" wouldn't make sense as to the root of the word, either.
> to a very great extent; extremely: chronically stupid drivers, she was chronically indecisive.
Whether it makes sense or not, the dictionary agrees with both options.
In the same vein as this debate, OED considers irregardless to be a proper synonym for regardless.
It drives me bonkers. I'm cool with neologisms if they add value -- but a 400-year old[1] neologism that's merely a longer way to say something we already have a word for is still too young for me to consider valid.
[1] https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2020/01/disoriented-disor...
Unrelated, but what should I do about these children on my lawn?!
People usually say mid to things they think are bad, not middling. Or they believe that the thing is bad because it is middling. A poor descriptor...
For certain cases this might not be a particularly arrogant position. For example - it might be reasonable to decide you only have time to watch exceptionally good films.
Describing people as mid sounds delusional and/or sociopathic to my ears though.
Once you start to notice that, once pop culture starts to alienate you, you're old.
And there's no more obvious sign that you're old than complaining about modern slang.
> This is a boring legacy tech company who’s best selling point is being a discussion forum for the chronically mid.
This insult isn't about the comments on Reddit, it's about the people on Reddit. "Chronically mid" means that the people are average and will always be average. The comment is arguing that Reddit is low-value and part of their argument is that the people using Reddit are low-value "chronically mid" people. Everyone can judge for themselves whether downplaying the value of millions of people is offensive or not.
His real problem is that he cast his lot with the “strongmen” (such as Elon). Now he can’t walk that back without appearing weak and (even more) incompetent to his investors. It really sucks to be him right now!
Like it or hate it, Reddit can run however Reddit wants, and the vast majority of its users won't care, basically no matter what, as long as the core value prop (endless scrolling of relevant content) remains.
Subs going dark for a few days doesn't materially move the needle to the owners of Reddit, and in fact I'd bet a lot of the "normal" users are only dimly aware of how, why, or even if it happened at all. Regardless, if they are aware, they're probably mad about it, and want their content back.
Mods have no control here in the long run, users who are upset have no control in the long run, so the only hail mary chance they have is creating chaos, so that's what they do. Steady hands at the wheel are the antidote, and we'll see if spez has what it takes. So far no, but it's not over.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
The only thing you have to risk is if you somehow get discovered and your reputation takes a dive, but Reddit's already made it extremely clear that they take their current users for granted, so from their perspective there is probably 0 perceived risk and a reasonable potential upside if they believe their review score can help drive more signups tomorrow. So basically you're looking at a low effort, low cost, low risk, mid+ reward type task.
[0]https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1x6iyo/til_t...
[1]https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/tv2lmx/redd...
[3]https://old.reddit.com/r/place/comments/twfvl6/the_truth_in_...
I've been a redditor since day one and I can't figure out what this sentence is supposed to mean. Can you flesh this out some more?
What is chronically mid?
Is this a new feature i'm unaware of?
I think his attitude biases his thinking, though. But I guess I can't truly understand how an alpha like him thinks :)
That was such a hilarious, irreverent movie. Can anyone even get away with making movies like that these days?