Because we have Freedom of Speech, and people like convenience more than challenge. Lets take racism. While it should be fairly apparent that trying to lump any entire group of people all together without acknowledging exceptions is silly, its also very convenient to have a scapegoat you can blame your society’s failings on, instead of looking deeper at your own beliefs and how they might be contributing to your problems.

We can’t do away with the freedoms either, as they, alongside our checks and balances, protect us from totalitarianism. People generally consider education in critical thinking, the humanities and the scientific method to be the solution to all of this, long-term. But, others choose to exercise their own freedoms to attack education itself, which they are free to do.

So, it’s complicated. But in classic democratic fashion, the choice will be up to us in the end.

Listening to all the arguments means you’re going to spend a lot of time wasting your time on garbage. Freedom of Speech protects people’s rights to just make stuff up and get everyone else angry about it.

Within this environment, you can’t really expect anyone to just openly listen to everything. It’s just too much.

Freedom of Speech does not mean that everybody has to always allow all speech everywhere. If mom wants to kick you out of dinner for your speech, that is not a violation of your rights or the first amendment. She is within her rights to do that, if you are under her roof.

That said, I otherwise agree with you here. I also think it is incredibly dumb and counterproductive to try to take this “all or nothing” approach to community, where people are banned from one place just for going to a different one. This actually just serves to strengthen the thing you are trying to fight, as they are fueled by anger.

Yep, I completely believe it.

I’m fairly political myself, and it takes pretty hefty amounts of effort to remind myself to let things go and try to just keep a respectable level of discourse. And I still fuck it up all the time.

A lot of it is mechanical. I have far fewer tools here than I do with irl political activism, I can’t use facial expression or tone or anything. So it almost feels like negative sarcasm replaces all that or something, I don’t really know, I’ll have to think about it awhile.

It’s gotten worse over there.

Nice thing about the Fediverse is how difficult it is to really control, due to its decentralized nature. It’s unquestionable that some bad actors will acquire positions of power here, that’s just inevitable. It’s not an internet thing, it’s a life thing. Corruption.

But here anyone’s actual ability to dominate any particular subject matter is slashed down, just by the ease of creating nearly identically named duplicate communities.

It’s still possible, and will occasionally happen, but its just harder here.

I got one of those the other day, for a comment made over a year ago. I admittedly got a chuckle out of it, once I figured it out. I did send them a modmail first though, before I figured it out, asking which rule the comment broke. lol

It does oddly resemble corporate raiding behavior in some ways.

It really surprises me when anyone actually expects the underpaid, likely low-morale employee on the other end, who probably doesn’t like their company, to actually put in real effort, or even a measure of professionalism.

It’s frankly a grossly unrealistic expectation. You get like 120 seconds. If that doesn’t solve your problem, they’d vastly rather lose your business, since you’re a user that makes use of the provided support services, where the vast majority of people do not, and thus cost less than you do to keep.

Eliminating you from their customer base without causing too much fuss is simply their smartest move, if the goal is to boost short-term profits.

Because their algorithm has deduced that reddit results will get clicks. That is always the reason for everything engines do.

The more clicks it gets, the higher a result rises. Year, after year, after year. Every click is tracked. Every last one.

I imagine it began with specific questions and answers. Since reddit is the largest internet forum, anyone who has a somewhat obscure question needs a place to ask it. When someone else then punches that question into google, it’ll go to the only place it’s been answered so far, that niche internet forum.

Consider a video game question. “What build in whatever game is best for X?” Someone who wonders will ask in a game forum for that game. Every person after that, who wants that same information, will then be directed to where it now exists online–that post.

Also common with tech questions. “What does this error window mean and how do I fix it? My hardware is such-and-such and I’m running whatever version of the software” type questions.

New does not need to be exclusively technical, if that was necessary, very little would really be worth calling new tbf. The situation the technology finds itself in, at that moment, is imo a far bigger factor than any details of the tech itself. The social, economic, political and business environments, each matter more than actual technical nature of any tech, which is irrelevant to most people. What makes our situation particularly unique is the large influx of free users we get.

History is no longer a very good tool when it comes to analyzing the tech space. It simply moves too quickly, everything that happens is unprecedented in its combination of specific mechanism and social circumstances.

But we’ll see I suppose.

It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.

Obviously in our free world, people are free to enjoy the garbage and some will. But it creates an opportunity for others in the market, like us, to make a quality spot again, and pull users with that.

Agreed. This is very uncomfortable for us, but we’re going to come out much stronger for it.

Imagine the alternative–the devs just skipping through imaginary meadows, adding pleasant little features and taking their time, while the userbase grew and grew, and then we experienced a very major breach of trust and security.

That could’ve theoretically killed us. Now it won’t happen. Everyone is staring at their code and thinking “yep, security is important, that’s true…”

This is why the weekend DDoS attacks and frontpage vandalism don’t really concern me. With spez and Musk burning their services to the ground, we’re (along with other competitors, we’re not the only one) going to get a steady influx pressure for the coming months or even years. Shutting us partly down for a few hours every weekend does nothing in the face of this much stronger phenomenon. Whoever is doing it is basically pissing into the wind.

Welcome home.

You’re kinda asking the wrong people. How are we supposed to know? You’d have to ask them.

Probably get better results if you ask over there instead of here, it feels like most of us don’t check back. Personally I do, but I think I’m in the minority.

I guess you might get a lot of bot interaction over there though.

The final hurrah of r/interestingasfuck had some of the very best meme-ing I’ve seen in years. It’s all captured for posterity, everyone should scroll “hot” on there for awhile, at least once.

I mean, half the good subs are still gone. I can’t even use my home feed anymore, its half just video game subs now. Places like r/interestingasfuck were regular features in my feed that were pretty important to it being a pleasant experience overall. I balanced that shit.

Now its all fucked. I still have my account and still go there, to poke around and participate in some of those video game subs, where reddit is still clearly dominant. But hanging out has gotten kinda lame.

You know, I didn’t start using reddit apps for awhile, and I was a late reddit comer in general. So the official app was my first and only experience, I used it for years.

Yes it is just like that.