YSK: Condé Nast Parent Company is a Major Owner of Reddit, You Should Avoid their Publications (Wired, Ars Technica, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue,...etc) as Much as Possible.
I started to notice some thing weird while using Reddit, every link post from Condé Nast owned news outlet was getting a high amount of upvotes and awards while other publications had a very normal rate of awards( usually zero, with the exception of the sponsored ones) and upvotes.
That when I started to investigate this matter till I found out about this.
They are boosting their publications on Reddit on the major subreddits. They are trying to give their publications a advantage over all the other news outlets.
They have the ability to kill the other news outlets if they keep doing that. Avoid them as if your freedom is dependent on it.
I don't know if it applies to this or not, but Reddit top posts absolutely love Newsweek, which is a garbage clickbait, pump and dump articles as fast as possible, and now seeing this, it wouldn't surprise me if there's something going on.
Agreed. 404Media has been extremely good at covering anything from random niche communities to major data leaks. The only thing stopping me from becoming a paying member of their work is the (in my opinion, high) $100/yr price tag.
I'd also recommend following independent journalists like Ken Klippenstein. He does good work, and frequently releases documents that the rest of the media refuses to publish more than snippets of.
While I sort of agree. I’m just gonna say, you ain’t gonna find anything mainstream western media that doesn’t have major ties to unethical corpos unless you basically force yourself to only use AP and the Guardian (and even then, pretty sure they still have dodgy ties, just it’s not as visible since no direct “ownership”.)
Propublica is an excellent nonprofit investigative journalism organization. They have a strong track record of holding powerful companies accountable and achieving real world results/consequences. They often partner with local news organizations to help give them good content and there's never a paywall either.
Yes propublica is amazing. But I wouldn’t necessarily call them mainstream. They are mainstream amongst journalists, nerds, and leftists. But not really apart from that.
Consider The Guardian's campaign against Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite. Or their many character assassination pieces against Julian Assange. These campaigns serve the interests of the Zionist lobby and the US empire, respectively.
If you are critical of modern imperialism and capitalism, then The Guardian and AP do not have good takes on many issues. Currently, The Guardian publishes articles critical of the genocide in Gaza, which is the only correct position to take on the issue. However they have served Zionist interests in the past and carried water for US warmongers.
While they get on the bandwagon when critical mass gets unstoppable they also manufacture consent for empire.
The Guardian publishes articles critical of the genocide in Gaza, which is the only correct position to take on the issue. However they have served Zionist interests in the past and carried water for US warmongers.
You can be independent and still carry interests of Zionistd and US warmongers, both knowingly and unknowingly. You have every right to be skeptical because of previous publications and also every right to share that here, not trying to argue there, but there is no such things as always having the correct position. Every media outlet will at some point publish something questionable. My point being, you should never swallow news as a definite truth also when you're trusting a certain source in general.
Ars Technica has always been very upfront about it whenever they cover news related to reddit. It's certainly not ideal, but Ars Technica remains a very good website for tech news
Yup, as long as the current staff (by and large) are still at the helm of the Ars orbiting HQ, I'll continue to go there. I've lost too many other good tech news sites in the last decade, I can't lose another one.
Ars technica is full of shit, too, as soon they're even slightly off the tech trail. Even while on the tech trail they're massively untrustworthy as soon as their owners' interests are involved. I've kicked them out of my RSS reader long ago. If they really got something exciting I'll get to know via slashdot, mastodon or feddit. Still I'm suspicious as I at least one time caught them intentionally spreading false information.
Yeah, the conde owner bit isn't news to anyone, just cause this one guy never looked. Are is fine and it will be as long as the current people are there. Until it gets looted and the staff laid off it is fine. Eric Berger navigates a bit of a tightrope because he has high level access to Musk but can't be too direct about asking anything other than rockets, even though the political part is affecting the space part a lot right now. I do expect that just like Polygon it will eventually be gutted but nothing lasts forever.
Somehow, they actually are a good source for political news. The tech press (them and Wired) have been some of the best at covering the second Trump Admin. Possibly because it's crawling in tech bros, and the tech press already knows how to deal with them.
Isn't it funny how theres always a company that nobody has ever heard of behind every big brand that everybody knows about?Containerised liability assigned to nonexistent entities.
This is how the USA works now. Not just unethical companies and monopolies but super monopolies and upright evil companies. If you ever want to make yourself mad Google EssilorLuxottica, it is the largest eyeglass manufacturer, sunglass manufacturer, eyeglass retailer ... and believe it or not it also owns Eyemed eye insurance. It's not the biggest eye insurance company ... yet.
Heck the name of the brand doesn't have to be the same as the name of the company.
It is also standard practise to do in basically every country. It helps with liability, but it also helps when you want to sell parts of the company and can help for tax reasons as well.
I have seen companies with similar structures who only have a couple of hundred thousand euro of revenue.
It's a holding company that owns conde nasty and the local paper, on Staten Island. It's not a conspiracy. It's a wealthy conservative publishing company.
"You don't need a formal conspriacy when their interests converge."
"It's a big club, and you're not in it"
George Carlin
That being said, very likely that - like Xitter - they intentionally amplify activity that benefits their interests. We know for a fact that Reddit was founded on astroturf.
Interesting fact: when lowtax was forced to sell somethingawful to one of his moderators that got bitcoin rich for 400k he revealed during the negotiations that conde nast attempted to buy somethingawful for 13 million dollars around 2006 or so. He turned them down because he “was still having fun with the site”
After the sale was completed the mod looked into it a bit more and realized in that same timeframe conde nast ended up purchasing a majority stake in reddit for a very similar amount
Imagine how different the internet would be if “the front page of the internet” was a hacked up vbulletin site from 2003 filled with 40 year old IT dorks and run by a guy that was so afraid of paying child support that he literally killed himself
When I hear "Conde Nast" I think about that scandal with the Bon Appetit Youtube channel and how they were discriminating against their non-white chefs.
My advice to people who see my post here is to spread awareness about this widely as much as they could.
They own the social media and they own the news. They are going to control people thoughts and fuck the whole journalism industry ( Bankrupt competitors) if they kept doing this.
Why am I not surprised? I stopped having any trust in that platform when they killed 3rd party clients. I would suggest everyone to leave reddit and watch it implode from afar.
Yes, it stings. It's a habit. You still have nice subs in there, communities that make you happy. But you're fiddling as the ship sinks. That's the metaphor, isn't it?