This comment was in a post about a guy who openly spilled secrets then got fired.
https://www.reddit.com/r/golf/comments/1dynric/rip_to_the_augusta_ama_guy_yesterday_who_was_not/
To be fair, people stopped after starting a witch hunt for the Boston bombers and identifying the completely wrong people. It may very well be the case that they over corrected, but there is at least a good reason for the change overall. (also corporate interests I suppose, fuck them though)
I’m not sure one has much to do with the other. I completely agree that the Boston bombing investigation was a witch hunt, no argument here. But witch hunts target individuals, and individuals are entitled to a certain degree of privacy which one would hope would protect them from an uninformed mob.
But airing your employers’ dirty laundry is whistle-blowing. It should be protected, especially if the industry secret is anti-consumer, dangerous, or illegal. And importantly, a corporation isn’t an individual, so they shouldn’t benefit from protections for individuals.
It’s tempting to think that we don’t see the Name and Shame posts actually naming and shaming because of Reddit’s interests with advertisers. But I think it’s also just as likely that users don’t want to be identified leaking secrets - likely due to the litigious nature of their employers.
You don’t even have to make up things like this. The amount of “Name and Shame” between fucking people working on different fucking web browsers (Brave and Firefox) or different versions of de-Googled Android (GrapheneOS, DivestOS, /e/OS) that are all ostensibly open fucking source.
It happens constantly.
I just got a warning and [removed by reddit] because I told a dry cut story about turkish coworkers of mine harassing women and queer people and talking about stuff like “buying wifes” from their home country as an answer to someone posting a similar story. I got warned for “promoting hate and violence against marginalized groups”. I made no generelizations, promoted no violence or hate. I actually got upset because of my coworkers doing exactly that. This is not the internet as I know it. Where you get censored because you talked about something that happened in your life.
As a Turkish person, ooph. Sorry you had to deal with that.
We’ve got some nice coming from Turkey, but also a bunch of shit heels. These days the latter outnumber the former, sadly.
Because there is no discernable difference between you telling an honest story about your Turkish coworkers and a racist using online anonymity to rile people up against minorities.
I think that should be decided by the readers of the comment not by reddit. Unless I actually incite hate or violence. Or maybe if I had a history of leaving comments like that. But it was the first time I talked about it. Or if my account was new or a bot. I don’t like to assume the worst about people just because they criticise something adjacent to a controversial topic. That’s how problems get swept under the rug and never solved.
Except if you leave it solely to the readers of the comment, the communications platform is still flooded by racists and bigots of all stripes. Sure, a lot of their comments are downvoted, but by giving them a platform you’re giving them a way to degrade the quality of the platform they’re on, drive away reasonable users and eventually take over and shit up the place unrestricted. Just like the nazi bar story.
Downvotes are nowhere near as effective as moderation when it comes to keeping hate off of a platform. Sorry if you posted something in good faith and moderation censored you, but that doesn’t make moderation as a concept wrong.
(Also, I kind of agree with you that there should be more signals available to moderators than just “does this comment mention race negatively”. However, I’m not sure you want reddit scoring what kind of person you are and attaching that score to every moderation action.)
Well not if you strip it from all context and the nuance of OPs specific word choice.
Because I could tell a story about my Turkish co-worker that ends like:
“my co-worker of specific race is doing dodgy shit and it’s so harmful for the whole community that he’s doing this, especially with how much anti-ethnic group hate is going around, he’s giving everyone a bad name and I’m worried his behaviour as an individual aashole who happens to be race is going to start a spree of hate crimes against others who aren’t doing anything wrong, because most people aren’t, my co-worker is”
And I would argue that this story is fundamentally different from just leaving it as “my Turkish co-worker is doing dodgy stuff”.
I’ve been on reddit since the fall of digg. It was a wild time that’s for sure.
I remember when they had reddit meetups. I stupidly brought my toddler thinking it was going to be family friendly. The places they hosted were peoples workplaces. One guy rented a limo. Beer was given away for free. Some women walked around shirtless and one creep was taking videos. Feeling unsafe, I left. Then I got a email about how the hosts were looking for the creep because he may have committed a crime, and was asking for money to pay for the broken office equipment.
Wild time.
I’ve been on Reddit for 15 years and haven’t really noticed any shift for the most part. The only thing I find unbearable is the amount of bots and karma whoring reposting that goes on. The culture I feel is the same.
That’s wild. I’ve only been there 5.5 yrs and I’ve noticed dramatic shifts in the culture as it’s become popular and profit focused
Same, I was on it for more than a decade. There’s definitely been dramatic shifts. Dunno what small community that other poster stuck to to not see any changes over a decade and a half, but it must have been fun for them.
I used to on for about 10 and noticed a dramatic shift but on the other hand for years I was only looking at gaming subs then started looking at the more common ones. So that could possibly be part of it but it still seemed to get worse over time to me.
14 and change, it definitely had multiple, noticeable shifts.
And if you didn’t notice, you probably only stuck to a handful of communities, because they changed how the front page works several times, and what communities are default. All of those changed the feel by a lot.
Each change may not have affected each sub equally hard, default subs turned to shit, subs that got turned off of default finally got the reality check they needed, and when they started banning entire subs, there were noticeably less shitty people from time to time as they pruned.
Again, if you stuck to smaller subs, or even mid sized ones but didn’t interact a ton, or just didn’t log on every day, I could see how you may not have noticed.
They definitely ramped up moderation, and the administration got a lot more heavy-handed over the last few years, clearly (in hindsight) in preparation for the big change last year.
I was never part of any of those controversial subs like fat people hate or watch people die.
I never went to /all/ either.
Just stuck to regular subs like news, fitness, some niche hobbies etc. If anything, the niche hobby subs got better since there was more people. Fitness did get overly moderated but I just moved to fitness over 30 sub instead and it was fine.
Some of the bigger subs became shit shows, but they were kind of like since their inception.
Firing Victoria was annoying since I think she did good AMA. Getting rid of third party apps is the biggest shittiest thing that I experienced which is why I came to Lemmy in the first place.
I’ve been on Reddit for 15 years and haven’t really noticed any shift for the most part.
That simply isn’t possible. Reddit changed dramatically since the Digg V4 exodus. The site itself has been constantly updated and redesigned / re-engineered adding and removing tons of functionality at least three times. The politics have literally swung all over the place from “tech-bro libertarian” to “conservative” to “progressive”. Content has changed radically in both scope and focus (AMAs are out while corporate run subreddits are in) and leadership has been all over the place.
Politics themselves have changed a lot over the past 15 years - I’m not sure if that has anything to do with the sub. Hell, even I changed from Republican to Democrat in that time frame.
I still use old.reddit and it’s pretty much been the exact same except for a few ads that RES takes care of anyway.
Definitely agree with the AMAs. That’s not going to change no matter the platform however and not exclusive to Reddit.
Idk man, there were real communities where folks knew each other back then. There’s very little of that anymore because moderating those subs is a thankless full time job and the rest got massive. /r/CripplingAlcoholism is a good example - back around 2010 it was a close-knit group of drunks, by 2018 or so it was just a swamp.
/r/CenturyClub and the related subs were some of the best places on the internet back ~15 years ago. I deleted my old account that was in it ages ago and haven’t bothered rejoining since I passed the threshold, but even what, 8 years ago when I did that it was already way different.
Game subreddits went way downhill, too.
The overall quality of the site is much worse than it used to be.
I remember when I could post to the firefly sub and banter with the same 20 or so people every week, then one day something hit the front page and a flood of people came in.
Everything turned from thought provoking discussions about what little lore we did have and overanalysing every episode, to “this is what the actors do now” and “here’s an image with a quote from the show” maybe an art post of original content here and there.
It was a Wild West but I’m not sure the Lemmy community would have liked it much - there was a lot of content in the “offensive to everyone” category and people generally didn’t mind as long as it was contained in its own subreddits. That doesn’t seem to be the attitude of “kids these days”.
Not to mention that one time they made a woman a CEO just to ban the fat people hate sub because it was making the whole site look bad and then fired her to pin the decision on her just being a bitch feminist
The big Lemmy instances are constantly inundated with posts to defederate from unscrupulous instances, which to me seems like a stronger version of siloing off content than what early reddit was like.
Lemmy has recreated forums with additional steps is how I put it. Nothing to do with the tech but fragmentation. My front page is just 10 or so different posts reposted in some form or another 5 servers each with their own version of the sub.
Seems to me it’s almost entirely aligned with ideology for most folks, which…idk is kinda a feature?
Most of the calls I’ve seen to defederate haven’t been because of an instance’s content, but rather because of an instance’s users being the problem.
E.g. hexbear getting the boot during the period where some of its users thought it was hilarious to brigade other instances and spam giant emojis of a well endowed pig shitting on itself.
I agree, people on the internet sometimes come across as selfish. The problem is that it always is about if they like it or not and only care about their morals.
However, it might be different for lemmy.
The internet was so much better before the advertisement industry jerkoffs figured out how to access it. May they all drown in a cesspool of their own waste for eternity.
May they all fall asleep sunbathing on their yachts… and wake up redder than a traffic light.
It was great before the dot com bubble burst. Even obscure fan websites had paid advertising. Even for a while after, is was great and still usable mostly because corporations hadn’t yet figured out how to completely monetize the internet.
Message boards and forums were the extent of online engagement. I miss it.
You must be thinking of a different for com bubble, like OG was like 1995 to 2002. 2002 including the bubble bursting. Gems include the amazing sale of broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5 billion! Like 10k per user of broadcast.com! In 2002 even companies like Cisco lost well over half their stock value and a ton of online seller website disappeared.
