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Comment by sourcegrift | Hacker News Reader

Over on reddit people were debating whether cancer should be cured since it disproportionately affects rich people and it made me realise how far reddit has fallen. It's just a botnet now to manipulate elections.

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I'm certain that is not a mainsteam opinion on reddit, but by its nature you will be able to find arbitrarily stupid opinions in individual echo chambers

I am not so certain

Just spend 15 minutes in /b/ and everything else will feel better.

After we launched our startup, we had all sorts of folks reach out to sell their GTM services. I went with one group from Vietnam that would make engagement bait Reddit questions with some accounts, and advertise our product in the comments section with others. It was expensive but it worked

Do you think (or care) about the ethics of this sort of behavior? Do you consider it unethical and if you do, under what conditions would you decide to do it anyway?

Reddit is a huge danger to society. There's no doubt that subs about specific non political (and non popular) topics are hugely beneficial, the overall damage the echo chambers do still outweigh these benefits.

The way the voting system works at Reddit encourages group think and bubbles. All it takes is five more down votes than up votes and a comment or post essentially disappears from view. It's a design that actively avoids debate.

That's a huge misreading. Hiding comments in the UI empirically does not suppress discussion, if anything it actually attracts engagement. Lots of people are seeking the "wrong" to "correct" it.

Suppressed debate is almost universally due to biased/captured moderation teams aggressively using bans.

You're wrong, because if your karma fall below a certain number, your comments wont show up anymore. I can show you if you like.

People shouldn't be blocked from commenting because their karma goes negative. Spamming, hateful talk, etc should be a completely different system. Just because what you say is unpopular (in one place mind you) doesn't mean your words should be hidden.

Well, now that it's becoming "the community source" for LLMs it's becoming even more of a target for large-scale manipulation.

The flip side is that "fuck cancer" is a shibboleth there, to the point where a headline, "[Bad person] has contracted cancer" has every comment thread starting with "First, fuck cancer."

I would imagine the charitable characterization of that discussion is much closer to “awesome, this will mean the Peter Thiels and Elon Musks of the world will live to 150 while both me and my children will be dead long before this trickles down to regular people” vs. “we shouldn’t cure cancer”.

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