I wonder… how many months would it take even Google to sort it all out now, if it wanted to? At some point, even if they haven’t crossed it yet, certain knowledge simply becomes lost forever.

Ads have become so deeply embedded into search results that even Google now can no longer tell the difference between them!?!?

Imagine Jesus Christ as a time traveler, going back from a dying planet to just about the dawn of both roads and also safer sea travel than previously, those two connecting what would become the entire modern world.

Jesus: like, forget all this “religion” crap about what foods to eat & where & when & with who, and like, just be excellent to one another dudes & dudettes

Everyone since then, especially those who borrow His actual fucking name to label themselves: um… how about “no”?

I avoided Reddit like the plague for the first decade - I knew that it had the potential to suck me in and I did not want that. But then during the pandemic, I kept finding myself going to it for answers, and then seeing how I could improve things, and then…

I noticed that at work I would say something “snarky”, which they did too but even so it’s like I was going too far. I typically did not enjoy seeing such things on Reddit, but as a mod I couldn’t block most of it without banning the person themselves from the entire community, so I felt that I had to put up with it - and it changed me, but not for the better. I mean not deeply or anything, but it normalized that style, which still was not good. And now for the same reason I’ve blocked lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml - b/c I don’t want that to come into myself. I am no fan of e.g. capitalism but “behead all landlords” seems to me a position lacking entirely in nuance or possibly even substance - like “okay Karen, why do you care what I do so much, and are ready to threaten literal violence unless I comply with your wishes?!”

Yes the mistreatment of all the app devs but especially him b/c he was so careful to document it was a big one for me too, though I glazed over that b/c in retrospect I had realized that I had already started thinking along those lines before that happened. Even so, that was the final straw that crystallized it and made me finally move off the platform. A watershed moment in history, for all of us I think. Well, to be more precise I gave up my mod position and went from checking r/popular quickly from like every few hours to only checking in on my former community once a week, then once a month, then… I can’t even remember how long it’s been now. For awhile I became more active in r/RedditAlternatives than I was in my niche community!:-) But there is only so many times that you can tell someone something before it becomes their choice to not listen, so I just stopped going there at all.

Anyway, the problem is not just Reddit’s toxic AF culture (vision, like bullshit, tends to flow from the top to bottom direction in a company), nor even entirely the for-profit model - though each of those has their own, unique bad things that they add into the mix - and in some sense as you alluded to the issue is social media itself. Like candy, it promises good things, and like candy if taken in moderation it can be absolutely fine (especially during a pandemic when social distancing, especially in countries like the USA where “flatten the curve” was somehow taken as a challenge to encourage doing the exact opposite, to “pwn the libs” or sth I dunno), however also like candy it can leave someone unfulfilled if we always turn to the “easy doomscrolling”, rather than allow our attentions to absorb longer-form content like say, a TV show, or even movie, or even a fully online & free college course like Crash Course World History.

Social media can wreck our lives! Or it can enhance them, depending on how wisely we make use of it:-).

https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb

This is an excellent article. I was just barely beginning to think (still subconsciously, i.e. still intuitively rather than focused) about leaving Reddit anyway, b/c of all its toxic BS, even prior to the blackouts and Rexodus, when I read this. I could not put it down!!!

But I had to, in order to go to work, and yet I picked it back up again ASAP and kept reading through lunch. And as a result, I gave up my mod position of two subs, left Reddit virtually entirely (though I partially stayed for a couple months to post about Kbin/Lemmy), and came here (the age of my current account does not match up b/c I was first on Kbin).

So yeah, it’s long, but like… it PERFECTLY describes what I was intuiting! That Reddit was trying to turn me into a pedantic, narcissistic asshole, by curbing my impulses whenever I wanted to be kind yet encouraging the opposite to let my dark side flow against someone in order to demolish their arguments. Long, detailed answers to someone with specific questions and pleading for answers were penalized, yet short quips like “u suk” got heavily up-voted.

But it’s not merely Reddit ofc, it’s also Twitter, now X, and FaceBook, and any for-profit social media that prioritizes “engagement”, e.g. talking rather than listening. e.g. why is Reddit’s search function virtually nonfunctional, and why can each sub only have a maximum of two pinned posts? (I almost started looking into what it would take to write a bot that would allow for a megathread of megathreads, which the native Reddit refuses to provide for, except I could see the writing on the wall that bots were going to be obliterated, so I didn’t bother.) Every single time such limitations line up with making new posts, their profits always magically seem to be increased - bc recall that ads are between posts, not between comments, so more posts = moar ads! Even if people stopped responding to people’s questions… although usually someone somewhere would at least try, so it increased “engagement” of the type that furthered profits, while decreasing it overall. Hence these items were never going to be fixed.

Hence Reddit was enshittified. e.g. in r/Android people would constantly ignore the begging, pleading, demanding, and threatening from mods to put requests for new phone recommendations into the weekly megathread… and some huge fraction of posts to it were always like “what phone should I buy?”, “what Android phone should I purchase?”, “Which model phone should I get?” (until they could get removed) - often with no other details given, somehow extremely often back to back, as if nobody else in the whole entire world existed with the same identical damn question, these childish minds (of whatever age) just continually blurted out their requests for attention, spamming the entire world and preventing serious discussions about Android, which basically had to move elsewhere - i.e. the kids got so noisy that the adults had to flee the room looking for a more contemplative quiet.

Which is why we all find ourselves here:-). But even here, the addictive nature of even not-for-profit social media still has its dangers, as too does eating too much food etc., it’s not the thing itself (once the profit incentive has been removed) but the amount that can be deleterious.

This headline would have carried a ton more weight if it wasn’t so extremely click-baity.

The ends do not justify the means?

I enjoyed seeing that on the RiF (Reddit Is Fun) app - it even helped me moderate a sub bc it would show the newest comments regardless of what posts they appeared in, so that a single new reply could be isolated out from the hundreds of older comments already in a post. Though those were available as well, being just a click away.

Another thing that drove people away from Reddit, besides the horrible ethics of its CEO, and also wanting to be in solidarity with content creators and mods, was how not only were the third-party apps killed off, but the official app just absolutely sucked in comparison. It provided only the tiniest fraction of the functionality found in those other apps - especially the ones preferred most by mods.

Not that the users left on Reddit care about such. All they seem to care about is the ability to doomscroll endlessly, but whether the content is made by AI, scraped from X or Mastodon or Lemmy, seems to matter not at all. Long live Reddit! No seriously, it might not even die at all at this point, just be relegated to obscurity while forever limping along, desperately attempting to achieve for Huffman the payday that he believes (unfounded on facts) he “deserves”.

Entirely separately from the message content, I find it so awesome to see the author acknowledge their potential biases right at the start! :-D

So much of journalistic integrity seems dead these days that I wanted to call that out as being good, even though it probably is mandatory, but even so… how many would actually do it?

deleted by creator

Oh uh… I was gonna say “don’t allow an over-reliance on any technology that could be hacked (by Cylons) and thereby become unreliable at any time”, but sure, we could add that one too! :-P

How quickly we forget the lessons that Battlestar Galactica tried to instill in us… :-D

I suppose it depends on your goals - for a child or pet, is it okay to lie to them or simply force the issue, whereas for an adult human, how far should someone go to remove from them the consequences of their own actions?

Interesting article about the changing language surrounding climate change. Like now it’s starting to become climate emergency/breakdown/crisis, but before any of that it was global warming, and in the 80s apparently it was “inadvertent climate modification”.

Never forget that behind the mobs is a controller.

If you say that 1+1=2 and they say that 1+1=3, what should be done?

The inverted Turing test, it would seem.

Beep boop I am smarter than you… 🎵

Bleep bloop you seem to me dumb as rock… 🎼

Nothing is ever so black and white or night and day as to be perfectly separable into binary categories - e.g. it tends to get dark at night, but a light sensor or timer could be confused by a moonlit night being brighter than a cloudy day, or like someone or an animal walking in front of the former and thus casting a localized shadow even on a fairly bright day.

Yes obviously echo chambers “work”, or else they would not exist. They are imperfect solutions to some of the real problems that people face. Perhaps we can come up with better solutions, which will require even more work, not because they are binary=“bad”, but rather bc despite working to solve some problems (kicking out trolls reduces the effectiveness of their campaigns of harassment tactics), they do not work well for other issues, namely they leave someone vulnerable to be misled into believing whatever the owner/admin/mod chooses to feed their sheeple.

And make no mistake: similar to hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml, Lemmy.ml is also very much of an echo chamber, as too is Lemmy.world. Though also the Lemmy code being offered to the whole world free of charge is quite friendly - both are true at the same time.:-)

Also true is that Lemmy.world blocking some of the worst behavior present on the Fediverse is helpful, even while that happens at the expense of it being an echo chamber. At some point, if 1+1=2 but some people disagree and say that it =3, and I mean VEHEMENTLY - and more to the point abuse the power control systems like anonymous downvotes on EVERYTHING that someone posts regardless of its own content - then yes, such people need to be banned. Not bc of their toxic beliefs, but due to their abusive actions. That much isn’t even evidence of an “echo chamber” effect - that’s just mandatory keeping a community alive rather than allowing all the members to be harassed and thus everyone quits.

The real problem, afaik, comes from there being far too few volunteers to do all the necessary work, hence those that do step up tend to be power hungry dictators. And yes, again, Lemmy.ml admins are known for exactly this - don’t pretend that everyone else is an echo chamber but they somehow are not.

Though personally the reason I blocked it is bc the users there, I guess bc they get used to talking only inside of their echo chamber provided to them, are far less well-behaved than the average across the Fediverse. I was able to delete so very many individual user blocks that I had made previously to blocking the entire instance, plus new people that now I don’t have to have the displeasure of getting to know them first before not having to see them anymore. Me refusing to listen CONSTANTLY to “b-b-but 1+1=3”, without my consent… okay call my solution an “echo chamber” if you like, but it’s just not fun or worthwhile (and frankly, it’s not an echo chamber, not quite, bc I discuss plenty of things that I do not agree with, with people who are polite:-).

Not all “opinions” are equally thought out or valid. And then yeah there’s agitprop too but I’ve been ignoring the intentional stuff in order to focus on useful idiots who simply don’t know themselves even what they are saying, but ofc agitprop would be an even more extreme version. Anyway, it’s a personal decision not a defederation - I’m not making any decisions for anyone else, just stating a preference, and sharing that thought and yes advocating for others to know that they can similarly enact their preferences, even if theirs happen to differ from mine:-). e.g., perhaps they’ll create an account on Lemmy.ml - that is their right and I would not dream of trying to stop anyone from such, though also I demand to be free myself to enact my own freedom of choices.:-)

The culture definitely changed - you are right about that. I was not there at the start as you were, but ultimately, how could it not have? EVERY culture changes all the time, and e.g. the Rexodus surely had a large impact even since we all left it. Though the burden of expressing that point clearly I suppose is on you, and the burden of understanding you is likewise partially on them, i.e. communication is a 2-way process. The difference is that you spoke first, and then when others challenged you as to what you meant, you ramped the matter up by several notches and accused the other person of literal brain damage. This was hyperbolic, and attacking the messenger rather than the message, and after that many people stopped listening to you any further, seeing how you were speaking emotionally rather than logically, or challenged you still further. The responsibility for what they say is on them, but the responsibility for what you said is on you.

And yes, some people literally do seem to have brain damage, but intended as light-hearted or not, you did jump to that rather quickly… and while I am seeing that you do not enjoy being judged, yet you were very quick to offer your judgement to the other person… Why worry about what children are saying about you? But yeah, you did call them brain-damaged, and again that part is on your shoulders.

You catch more flies with honey than vineager. Do what you will with that thought.

Lemmy isn’t run for profit - mostly (though there are some amounts of money involved, and moreover power & fame) - but being based off of Reddit still uses that identical model. And then similarly for Mbin, Sublinks, Piefed, Tesseract, etc. Someone would need to basically do all of having an idea for alternative mechanisms, and also write the code for it, and also start up an instance, and promote it to let others know, whereas a failure in any of those steps would prevent its acceptance by the global community. Plus while all of that is going on, all of Facebook, Threads, Xhitter, Bluesky, and yes Reddit can continue to innovate, possibly stealing the idea out from under someone and twist it to meet their profit-seeking needs, though conversely those also generate ideas that non-profit sources can steal from as well.

One example is Reddit’s automated CrowdControl (an optional feature available to mods of all subs) - instead of a mod needing to outright “remove” an unpopular comment in a post, it simply gets collapsed by default, thereby working against the trends to maintain an echo chamber by allowing people to post dissenting opinions in the identically same space as the majority of the community, who control what they want to see with voting. Similarly posts that are too lengthy could be cut off after a point, needing you to click to continue reading, but thereby allowing you to scroll past something that you don’t want to spend time on. But these are tiny things, and still many people wouldn’t bother making all that many comments that they know in advance will be unpopular, b/c what would they even gain from such? (besides a brief relief to get something off their chest, but how many can keep coming that way, for weeks and months and years?)

One reason for that is the power dynamics, which regardless of for- vs. non-profit organizations, still offer greater power to one “side” or the other of a transaction. Voting for instance is anonymous, whereas posting is not, hence voters (even lurkers!) have more power than content creators. All someone has to do is spin up their own instance, or join one of the many that do not require even so much as an email sign-up, and they can generate as many votes as they want, for “free”. As so many discussions have highlighted, “content creators” really are at a severe disadvantage, compared to unethical voters, mods, and ofc admins, especially for those first few vulernable minutes where it hasn’t received any upvotes yet. After all, *I* may offer fewer than one downvote per day, maybe per week, and also routinely sort content by New, but that’s not what others (seem to) choose to do. So should downvotes be rationed? Or the source made publicly viewable? Mbin does the latter btw, though as “reduces” not “downvotes” shared with Lemmy.

Which further illustrates the trend towards echo chambers: they tend to work, to cut out some of the bull crap - if you ban an agitator then all of their BS goes out the door with them, their downvoting, their harassment, their toxicity, etc. BTW speaking of harassment another example of unqual power dynamics is the sending of messages from different people - e.g. I did not know what ChapoTrapHouse was all about, so when I replied there and subsequently received messages from different users for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, and then again from something in lemmygrad.ml, I had no control at the time but to receive those notifications. I almost left social media entirely b/c that is an absolute waste of my time & attention, and by flooding me with unwanted spam they essentially took away from me the normal intended functioning of the notifications feature. But then the ability to block those instances was added, and now after blocking them + lemmy.ml, I enjoy myself here. The only way offered to me to not receive tens and tens and tens and tens of replies was to cut myself off from them, i.e. curate my feed which is if not full-on echo chamber at least is one step towards it. And yet… what other alternative is there? Ignore my notifications entirely? There are SO MANY of them, but only one of me, and this unequal power dynamic leaves me with no other choices - after all, it’s not like I can apply filters to my notifications, where I could still receive messages from them but just not treat them as the same, absolute highest-priority status that is assigned to every other notification also. Also, prior to the blocking of the instance they had the ability to live rent-free in my head, as I would need to read every one of those before I could know what it was about. This is not “fair”, nor equal, hence illustrating that echo chambers are not the absolute worst things in all of existence - rather, they are a poor solution to problems that are far worse (e.g. not having an echo chamber, perhaps rather having nobody at all in a community that remains willing to speak, or possibly even to lurk anymore, i.e. its death).

These are the tools that we have. If we want better, we need to make them. And this will require emotional intelligence that most of us seem extremely unwilling to ponder. e.g. one idea, which seems to sound to most people to be really bad, would be to implement what we already kinda do as humans, and assign greater weight to people based on their community-specific karma. This would be horrible for new people joining, but if someone has been posting half of a community’s content but then ten new people join, not posting anything at all but instead harassing the existing users and downvoting everything they see that does not match what they want, then those votes should count as “lesser” than the pillars of the community whose votes should count for “more”. New people can always start new communities of their own - ofc that gets back to the “discoverability” issue - but it would virtually eliminate some of the less-organized “noise” trends that so often pollute social media streams, similar to how anti-cheating or captcha devices work, as in if they can do as well as a human who knows the material, then that’s arguably more of a success more than it is a failure? :-P

But it would also come at a severe cost, of tying together a community’s content to its content creators. And yet… is that such a bad thing? It essentially distributes power from mods to the users, but not all users and rather those who contribute the most. But maybe this idea really is a horrible one - in which case, again, we would need to make a better one, somehow.

This must be why Trump said they people only need to vote one more time, and then they’ll never need to do so ever again.

One election, to rule them all… _{and in the darkness bind them}

Excellent references!

Btw, this article seems to perfectly describe the effects you are mentioning, e.g.:

That same attitude contributed to the development of an appallingly toxic and hostile culture online: As more people – many with silently held prejudices – flocked to a place where allegedly nothing mattered, they let themselves loose, flinging typo-ridden bigotry at any target that they could find. While the sentiments were occasionally decried and the writing errors were sometimes corrected, the retort of “It’s the Internet! Nobody cares!” was wielded with nearly constant frequency. There were certainly oases of reasonable and well-composed discourse… but as their populations grew, so did the volume of posts and comments that were offered from positions of apathy and ignorance.

… Before long, accuracy, quality, and correctness became optional requirements, and online audiences learned to expect mostly low-effort content instead of refined assemblages. …We ignore thoughtfully composed “walls of text,” but we electronically applaud memetic image macros and single-sentence references that aren’t inherently entertaining or insightful (yet are somehow still poorly written). When we amplify these things – using our likes, upvotes, retweets, and shares – we encourage the creation of more low-effort content, and in so doing, we send the message that higher-quality offerings are unwelcome and unwanted. That above-mentioned message isn’t necessarily what we intend, but it’s nonetheless what we say: Positive responses of any variety communicate more than just “I like this;” they also serve to mean “other people should see this” and “more of this, please.” The other implication, then, is that things which receive less attention – if only because they would have taken more effort to consume – aren’t as deserving of it. We may even state as much directly, downvoting or dismissing submissions that irritate us by either asking for too much of our time or challenging our expectations. In the end, the unified statement which arises from all of our indirectly expressed preferences is that only low-effort content will be accepted.

It is a fantastic article and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Edit: also it helps explain why this isn’t a problem seen merely with Reddit, but also Twitter/X, Facebook, Threads, and yes Lemmy (+Mbin/Piefed/Sublinks) too - it’s apparently rooted in human nature, thus would require enormous pushback to try to counter, while in contrast monetary profits tend to go along with whatever most easily aligns with our most basal natures. Sex sells, greed moar so, but laziness most of all.