I only use reddit anymore for the meta. It’s like a zoo. Its users are scarcely self-aware. I know this is conceited but whatever.

I think lemmy being a reddit clone is rather ill-fated but at least for now people generally still post like real human beings. There’s something strange about how dialog is basically an algorithm. Reddit is reached some sort of maximum where nothing you can possibly say will deviate the flow of comment sections from the pre-defined talking points. It’s like they’re all stuck in neurotic thought cycles.

There’s a video with Trevor Noah and John Stewart where they talk about how social media is a performance. It’s not a “town square” or whatever. It’s not really honest in good faith dialog.

That’s just another way of saying “move fast and break things”.

This is exactly how voat died. There may have been an ounce of legitimacy early on. It veered into blatant far right accounts posting every top post. It’s obvious this kind of thing happens on lemmy too. Especially on certain instances. For now at least the federation model appears to be doing its thing.

Thiel funded reddit. He’s had his hands in it since 2014.

This whole era of AI has certainly pushed the brink to existential crisis territory. I think some are even frightened to entertain the prospect that we may not be all that much better than meat machines who on a basic level do pattern matching drawing from the sum total of individual life experience (aka the dataset).

Higher reasoning is taught to humans. We have the capability. That’s why we spend the first quarter of our lives in education. Sometimes not all of us are able.

I’m sure it would certainly make waves if researchers did studies based on whether dumber humans are any different than AI.

I believed they were doing such things against budding competitors long before the LLM era. My test is simple. Replace it with China. Would the replies be the opposite of what you’ve recieved so far? The answer is yes. Absolutely people would be frothing at the mouth about China being bad actors.

Western tech bros are just as paranoid, they copy off others, they steal ideas. When we do it it’s called “innovation”.

I don’t know what you have in mind but the founders originally used bots to generate activity to make the site look popular. Which begs the question. What was really the root reddit cultures. Was it the bots following human activity to bolster it. Or were the humans merely following what the founders programmed the bots to post.

One things for sure, reddit has always been a platform of questionable integrity.

This is probably the most ethical you’ll ever see it. There are definitely organizations committing far worse experiments.

Over the years I’ve noticed replies that are far too on the nose. Probing just the right pressure points as if they dropped exactly the right breadcrumbs for me to respond to. I’ve learned to disengage at that point. It’s either they scrolled through my profile. Or as we now know it’s a literal psy-op bot. Already in the first case it’s not worth engaging with someone more invested than I am myself.

It’s not very wild when you realize you’re talking to addicts. The whole world is addicted.

its executive director of public safety, Chris Clem, who is a former US Customs and Border Protection agent who testified before Congress about border security last year and regularly appears on Fox News

So a bunch of chuds managed to take their weekend pedo hunting and turn it into a shitty startup.

Block is useless on lemmy. They can still cause a nuisance. Just becuase you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there…

People know what 4chan is. There’s no illusions about it. reddit and its derivatives are were the real trolling goes down.

Notice the “free market” vanishes when it’s a thing they don’t like. Suddenly we need strong authority to ensure it’s “fair”.

It feels like a warped in to another dimension. Did everyone start using only 5 years ago?

They want to virtue signal trivial social issues to avoid admitting they’re just plain conservative.

The music can come screeching to a halt for the US tech industry. They haven’t been innovating for a long time. Just relying on monopolization, rehashing old shit, or straight up VC baiting with useless garbage. The rest of the world needs to continue to realize they can do tech too. They can produce novel and actually useful things. Whereas the US industry has been strangling itself to death with anti-competition.

Especially with regards to AI. Once more others realize the milestone innovations in this field comes from academic research which is then taken by the private sector for profit. Others can realize and follow this path. They can spin up quicker than they think. With the education system being systematically dismantled in a pivot to identity politics protectionism over innovation, the future looks rather grim for the US. Bright for others though.

Attaching “tech” to everything makes it more palatable. Desirable even. It masks the fact that feudal lords are reinventing everything but with “tech”.

Forums were micromanaged far more than modern social platforms. Reddit is one of the “free speech absolutist” sites like its sibling 4chan. These were opposing paradigms to forums.

I’ve long contended that modern social media users would absolutely hate the old style forums. If people think subreddit mods and reddit content mods suck. They haven’t met the admin of Joe Bobs phpbb forum hosted from his garage. Joe Bob doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

I don’t think it’s a free speech problem. I think people have not only been conditioned to be content junkies. They’ve become addicted to being Greater Fuckwads.

Maybe nobody cares what you think and whatever your words are they aren’t that important. Social media has devoured peoples egos turning them into the Greatest Fuckwads. With social media everyone has a podium and everyone has very important words with billions of doomscrollers as an audience. Don’t you dare steppy my freedoms!!1!

Anyways I think the real test is whether people can handle a small forum with strict moderation and focused discussion. That will reveal who has half a brain apart from the fuckwads. I’ve seen people come to what are now basically private forums acting like a garden variety social media user only to get smacked down real quick. A sobering dose of reality for them.

This is the one area where blockchain could have been useful instead of greater-fool money schemes. A system where people can verify provenance of images or videos pertaining to matters of importance such as news stories. All reputable journalism already attributes their photos anyways. Cryptographic signing is just taking it to a logical conclusion. But of course the scary word ‘china’ is involved here therefore we must only contrarian post.

That’s how it is anywhere that doesn’t have any real moderation. There are those actively seek to harass anyone who isn’t right leaning cis hetero white male. Lemmy like every other modern social platform is an open air forum available to the entire 7 billion population of the world. Moderators don’t see 99% of the posts. And 99% of what they do see, they don’t take for than a few seconds to consider. The nefarious abusers are almost always more subtle than moderators give thought to. This allows harassment to run rampant. This is a fundamental issue with social media. As as I’m concerned it’s an intractable problem (brought you by free speech absolutist libertarian bros).

That’s as opposed to the traditional internet boards where posting was orders of magnitude lower volume. Site administrators and moderators cared about fostering a good community. Moderators saw a not insignificant portion of the content posted. Not just reports. Forum members used one pseudonym. No throwaways like the reddit/lemmy paradigm. What you posted was attached to you as a person. Therefore there was consequences to being an asshole. In other words deterrence.

Also I find it kind of amusing how they out themselves for their simpleton world view. I’ve noticed a pattern where they take superficial readings of a post to identify keywords/phrases. Then assign identity to that user. Then engage in harassment based on that.

For example say I posted something that was sympathetic to women. Ergo they assume I am a woman. And they engage the usual framework of belligerent replies appropriate to that assumed identity. I know for certain the key words in the second sentence of this comment already has triggered someone for sure.

Edit: The prior replies are just *chefs kiss*. I can’t tell if they’re being intentional or if they’re just that dumb. I guess that’s part of the fun isn’t it.