ChunkMcHorkle

The benefits of just listening to music I think gets overlooked.

Hard agree. And it’s a shame because we have more music at our fingertips now than ever before, from every possible time and place in history. I’m from an era (70s) when just putting a record on and listening to it all the way through was a thing, but I’m not sure how many folks realize today that music can be an event in itself: not as background, but as foreground. Putting it on, sitting in a chair, and just listening while doing little to nothing else.

It’s hard to get time to do it, but when I do it’s heaven. And it absolutely resets my brain in positive ways: afterward, I just feel good. I actually think it might qualify as an ersatz form of meditation, in that a person is not mentally attending anything else while doing this, just listening and letting the auditory experience wash over them. It’s difficult to quantify, but the benefits are very real.

That’d definitely piss off some powermods.

Keeping a handful of power mods and occasionally hiring them to be paid Reddit admins was a great way for Reddit C-suite to run most of the top subreddits while maintaining plausible deniability and the (false) appearance of impartiality. Admin got to control the direction of literally hundreds of millions of Redditors fairly directly through the powermods without ever looking like it, and in return powermods got to do pretty much whatever they liked without restraint or consequences.

For example, remember Aimee Challenor and how admin kept quashing that mess for weeks until it got Streisanded beyond their wildest dreams and it hit the media so that they were forced to act, pretending all the while that they didn’t know? And that was some sick shit. We can all point to various examples of overt rule-breaking behavior by powermods that Reddit did nothing about even when faced with incontrovertible proof, to the point that it’s kind of like their trademark not to do jack shit until/unless it hits the media, and then it’s all apologies and “we didn’t know.” Whatever.

The powermod arrangement was unethical and duplicitous, but clearly fantastic for both sides, which is why they never changed it. They made little noises with their mouths and words came out, but that’s literally all.

But now, suddenly, after all this time, Reddit admin sees a need to drastically reduce the reach of powermods, even though in 2023, it wasn’t the powermods that rebelled: it was all the thousands of others. For the most part the powermods proved their loyalty. And not only that, but with bots running most of the site and creating more than a little of the content, the actual reach of any powermod just isn’t what it used to be anyway.

In fact, Reddit’s not actually doing anything but making and enforcing a rule that no single mod can directly control the Reddit experience of more than 500,000 users, going by sub membership. It’s very new and very tight restriction of power and influence that applies to “less than 0.1% of active mods” going by the above post.

So why now? There is literally no reason for this mutually beneficial arrangement to end now after all these years . . . unless Reddit admin has something planned that they know will piss off even the powermods, and are trying to ensure that no single person or small group of people has the ability to lead an effective sitewide rebellion.

They’re planning something that the powermods could and would fuck up for them, is my guess.

So when the clock Reddit has set for this change to take effect, look carefully at what happens next, because this is neither arbitrary nor some newfound ethical concern they pulled out of their collective ass after all this time. There’s a reason. And whatever it is, I am personally thrilled to be nowhere near it, on a site where my desire to interact with other humans means I create content for Reddit which they use as a noose around my neck to control what I may say and to whom, and as a driver for ad delivery, while they scrape it, sell it to data brokers, and sell it again to train AI, all while denying me the ability to permanently delete my own words. Fuck Reddit. That place is cancer.

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No, individual vote fuzzing started years ago, and is a separate factor. This is new. What I am speaking of started within the last year, and involves the percentage upvoted to not dip below a certain threshold. To reiterate:

On old Reddit if you look up in the upper left of a post, it will give you a “% upvoted” figure, and that’s what I was referring to, just so we’re clear.

Left it, lol. There’s no place for genuine interaction over there anymore, or very little.

That actually makes sense to me. I’ll explain, but before I do I just want to say you are 100% right, people who are overpaid on benefits DO have to repay: unemployment, SNAP, etc. You weren’t wrong at all.

But again, that sub is run by LEOs, and LEOs tend to skew profoundly right in their beliefs and political leanings. One of the most common tropes among that group are Reagan’s welfare queen, and of course anyone on SNAP. You just made a real world, factual observation that involves someone on SNAP -not- being allowed to lazily suck freely at the national tit; to them it’s like you slapped Tucker Carlson upside the head and called him a useless twat. Not wrong, but of course they had to ban you, lol.

Like I said . . . badge of honor.

harassment warning on my account for calling spez a loser

Not a bad hill to go out on, lol

Posts can’t go below zero score

On old Reddit if you look up in the upper left of a post, it will give you a “% upvoted” figure, and that’s what I was referring to, just so we’re clear. But you’re right, in terns of actual (sort of) vote count, posts can’t go below zero.

There’s also artificial Reddit votes where someone upvotes and Reddit adds a downvote to delete their vote

That one is new to me. Though I do not doubt it: it goes hand in hand with all the other vote manipulation they’ve gotten up to lately. If I may ask, where did you see this?

I just got my first permanent ban from a legal advice sub

Lol, wear that as a badge of honor. I mean this seriously. If you’re talking about r/legaladvice, last time I looked there wasn’t a single real attorney in the mod list, and most of the mods are LEOs and ex-LEOs.

I am not at all surprised by you saying that you don’t break the rules, you behave well, yet you got a permaban from them: unless you’re just making legal shit up or in with the power mods you don’t last there.

When a place like that kicks you out, they’re giving you the highest compliment they have as humans to give – by telling you that you’re not like them and do not belong – even if that’s the opposite of their intention.

Like I said, wear it as a badge of honor. You wouldn’t fit on 4chan or kiwifarms either. But I bet you do just fine everywhere else. Take it as the high compliment it really is.

They’ve also done some fuckery with the downvotes. I noticed that right around the time of the mass exodus, certain comments could not be downvoted lower than zero, and posts could not be downvoted lower than some percentage in the teens (14% or 12% upvoted, something like that). Even Spez’s infamous town hall post where he laid all that shit on Christian Selig in June, which was literally getting downvotes in the thousands, never went below some teen percent upvoted, when in reality it had to be far fewer.

I got the same impression looking through the above post as well: lots of people disagreeing with the admin (who disappeared VERY quickly when asked anything of substance) but they somehow seemed to maintain a vote count in the single digits anyway.

I could be wrong about this second point, I haven’t been there in a while, but the first one I’d swear to: check it out on old Reddit if you’re interested.