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/
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.
It’s been like that ever since China/Tencent invested. I noticed soon after that investment there was a huge degradation in freedom of speech on the platform.
I miss it. I came over right after Digg died, almost half a decade before 2010. Thought it was the ugliest site I had ever seen and found it super confusing.
People did largely speak their minds though, lots of controversial posts and uncensored humor, yeah it was nice, but the change in Reddit really mirrors general cultural changes too, it was more driven by Gen X and older millennials, more tech driven, and more what people would call edgy.
It was the wild west not so much because Reddit specifically was, but because that’s what broad tech bro Internet culture was. We also had relatively unmoderated Xbox Live and online gaming and other things that are hard to explain to folks now.
What we would call social media existed, Digg called it Social Bookmarking for a Digg / Reddit / Slashdot model. Myspace was just giving away to Facebook, Twitter was getting off the ground, and chat rooms, like Yahoo chatrooms and Geocities were so unhinged back then.
2005 is around the time that Yahoo started looking major ground to Google when just a few years prior it was the undisputed default search engine.
Neat to think about all this again.
I’ve been on reddit since the fall of digg. It was a wild time that’s for sure.
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.
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.
God, remember Ron Paul? Those were the good ol days
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”.
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?
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.
The problem is when it is weaponized by corporations to bypass competition or by activists who are upset for one reason and get everyone to rally for an untrue reason.
Example: McDonalds has an employee write about their horrible experience working for Burger King which is a complete fabrication to get people to hate their competitor.
Example 2: supporters for Presidential candidate John Smith don’t like that Target has been donating to Smith‘s rival political party. Smith supporters fabricate untrue stories about Target’s working conditions to get people to boycott the store and hurt profits. This would lead to less money being available for donations from the store.
In all honesty, I do think Name and Shame is perfectly reasonable and should be done. But I still want to highlight some ways that it can be abused. I don’t think Reddit should use this as an excuse to forbid the practice but Reddit should do due diligence in proving the story is right like verifying an employee’s employment at the company they are shaming, for example.
I think that I started using Reddit around 2014~5 or so. For me the cultural shift shows two things:
- Any online community financed by adbux will eventually prioritise advertisers over its own participants.
- Unless you have tools ensuring transparency of the process, people with power over the others’ speech will misuse it to defend their individual interests, instead of the community’s.
