cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/37870004
reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.
another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.
size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.
we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.
Reddit was always shitty from when
The only reason the jailbait sub came down was do to main stream media pressure - if you missed jailbait was a “SFW” sub for posting reveling photos of other people’s children to be gooned over. It was voted “Subreddit of the year” in 2008
the mod who ran jailbait was an ICON on reddit for years and he also modded dozens of other equally questionable subs
The insane redditor backlash to them banning FatPeopleHate sub - which for those who missed it was a sub dedicated to posting photos of overweight people without their knowledge so the internet could mock them. This was mostly made up of - yes you guessed it - mostly photos of fat women getting mocked.
Leaving up the BeatingWomen sub that is specifically for posting videos of women getting beat up for 10+ more years after jailbait came down.
leaving up the Creepshots sub, a sub dedicated to upskirt and down-shirt photos of unsuspecting women, for YEARS and only taking it down due to to it hitting the main stream news and forcing their hand. This sub was also modded by the Jailbait mod.
the RAMPANT sexism and racism as thinly veiled intellectualism that has gone on for DECADES
Ghislaine Maxwell was a moderator on worldnews- I cannot back this claim up so I am removing it.The API thing and forced logins is probably one of the least shitty things this site has done.
Cannot agree more. That was shitty, but the turds had already filled the bowl.
This what I came to associate with reddit.
This kind of very super shallow toxic intellectualism that consisted mostly of call-and-responses opinions play-acted in weird rituals really wore on me. Even the more organic conversations were more like people just slapping opinions at eachother.
Not that we’re immune to ANY of this. Our smaller scale and decentralisation sidesteps the issue a bit, though. For now anyway.
I dont think it is likely to deteriorate in the same way. The mainstream service algorithms reward engagement and make no value judgments about the type of engagement. Since its easier to get engagement by spouting bombastic false claims and unsupportable opinions, that is the bulk of what you see.
Lemmy barely rewards engagement, if at all, so the perverse incentive to be a jerk on purpose is simply just not there. Surely, drawing a broader audience will shift discussion toward humanity’s lowest common denominator, but it doesn’t actively encourage that particular bad behavior, at least.
Tbh Reddit was bad because of lack of censorship is a take. Reddit is bad now because of censorship. It is a really great example of a time when slippery slope was not a fallacy.
The issue is really that it’s not really possible to do good moderation (i.e. censorship) at scale.
When the site is centralized, all users have to get the same basic experience. That means someone needs to decide for the entire world what’s allowed and what isn’t. It isn’t just whether you’ll have porn or no porn. It isn’t just whether you’ll have hate subs, or subs dedicated to violence. It’s where you draw the line at politics. Is sexism allowed? What if it’s just a sort-of sexist joke? Can people talk about Nazi ideology? What if it’s a sub for historians?
What makes something like Lemmy better is that each instance can make their own choices of where to draw the line, and other instances can decide whether to federate with them or not. That way an instance running in Germany might have different ideas of where the lines is when it comes to Nazi imagery, and sex, and violence. One in New Zealand might have completely different ideas. If you’re a user from NZ the NZ instance might match your tastes better, but if not, you’re free to sign up for the German one.
Subreddits basically acted like that in the early days of Reddit. Nobody is making anyone go to any subreddit no?
You’d still see them pop up in /r/all or similar spots that showed big posts from other subs.
Yep.
And lots of the users on your site will be idiots with think historians talking about Nazi Germany are Nazis and have a idiot extremist stance that any reference to Nazi Germany must be wiped from the history books or something.
The whole feddit thing awhile ago was wild. It’s German hosted, so abides by German laws, and people here accused them of being being biased/censoring content, but it was literally illegal for them to have Nazi content, but folks were spamming Nazi imagery as criticism of Israeli, and when the admin/mods took it down they were ‘pro genocide’.
the world has changed. the free speech idealism of the 2000s internet is dead. reddit was founded by people with libretarian ideals, but those quickly change when money replaces ideals.
If anything our broader culture has seen ideal erosion across the board, as money has taken supremacy as the only ideal worth pursuing.
I used to buy guns through r/gunsforsale.
You forgot the Slavetrade sub. Where they’d post pictures of women that appeared to be have been tortured in cages for sale.
I didn’t know about this sub but now am horrified and unsurprised.
SVU shit happened there. It wasn’t just actors or consensual bs from some freaks. It was, compare that girl to the girl on the missing posters on vicap and the fbi missing people posts shit.
Then the Arabics found the place. They began auctions of their “concubines” giving their real cell numbers.
you realize that’s like a whole fetish thing right?
Totally - “jailbait”, beatingwomen, rapingwomen and creepshots were also fetish subs. The more you know 💫
No, women/men getting in cages and acting like slaves is a fetish thing. It’s part of BDSM practice for some folks, including the physical abuse. Some folks like being hit. I’ve dated women who I had to break up with because they wanted me to beat them, spit on them and etc. and treat them like a slave, and that wasn’t my thing.
But keep equating it to abuse, if you want? Just because you find something distasteful doesn’t mean it wasn’t produced by consenting adults who actively seek it out and derive pleasure from it.
I am sure it was the content from consenting adults that got the sub banned https://www.reddit.com/r/slavetrade/.
Listen - I am not saying you can’t have fetishes and consenting adults cannot enjoy fetishes together, I am saying reddit is a cesspool of people trying to play off horrific abuse as fetishes and this is very well documented.
reddit is made of people, yes.
do you think those types of things were unique to reddit or something? i just get so confused when people make these things, like… what is your thought here? reddit should have never allowed this stuff ever in the first place, and that they ever did at all ever, means reddit is forever awful and horrible, and so is anyone who ever used the site, even if they lurked?
or are you just morally grandstanding here or something?
Is this not the thread where we are talking about reddit being shitty? Is there some reason you feel like you need to defend reddit so hard for slave trading?
Yes, I am 100% morally grandstanding here. Jailbait, BeatingWomen, RapingWomen, Creepshots and YES SLADETRADE should have been banned before they even got started. Doubling down I also think BlackCrime, AsianFemaleHate, DailyStormerCom, JewExtinctionFetish, PicsofDeadkids, SexwithDogs, GOREgousWomen, ProED, and many many other subreddits should not have even been around long enough to even make the list of banned subreddits.
wait what the fuck? they’re all crazy, but you must be making that last one up.
Internet search on “Ghislaine Maxwell Reddit moderator”
i did. seems like i was right to be suspicious.
ok, I’ll stand corrected on the one count that the only convicted pedophile of the Epstein class was moderating on one of the largest socially acceptable pedophilia sites on the internet. But some might be able to guess how i lean on that unfounded claim.