This is something I’ve been wondering for awhile: if I were a mod on Reddit, and was being threatened by the admins to bend the knee, as it were, my response would likely be to remove any and all tools i had put in place to help me moderate, and say, “goodbye.”
I’m sure there’s something I’m just not understanding, but why isn’t this happening?
Because people really don't want to lose the time and investment they've put into building these huge communities.
It's like if the king just decides that your really healthy neighborhood and community, that you're a community leader in and are constantly defending against the shittiest companies and groups dumping garbage all over and ruining and harassing the residents (and whatever the equivalent to blocking posters of illegal things is), will suddenly charge you an extreme amount of money to do your volunteer job, and the clubhouse leaders/owners and other businesses an insane amount of money just to use the land (because the king wants that land to put up billboards instead) - because he wasn't making enough money on them before, but only because he wasn't charging them any money. And in reality, the king wants to sell the kingdom to China for several billion dollars and just wants to show how much money can be made from the billboards instead of the businesses and community centers.
Man. Fuck u/spez. Outcast that mofo rather than the platform. I wish somebody would just coup his ass, but everybody in his sort of position just always ruins it. Always. So it's the system, not solely him; it's the goal of... Internet Platforms. It's literally the same problem with government anywhere: if you have a monarchy, eventually, they'll do shitty stuff and eventually try to ruin it.
Your question has been asked even in the Roman forum, and even for millennia before. Perhaps there is no solution - perhaps its an integral part of the human condition. But we will never stop searching.
There's no solution in the same way that there's no "solution" to winning rock-paper-scissors. The cycle is endless because the desire to be in control is a key part of human nature, whether that be an authoritarian "I want everyone to do what I say" or a more oligarchic "I accept that there's others at my level, so we can cooperate so that everyone else does what we say", and any attempt to change those systems requires an equivalent amount of force that can all too easily lead one into side-tangents of trying to keep said force focused.
As a side note, Machiavelli identified the cycle in politics in his "Discourse on Livy" - a powerful and strong-willed individual takes power (e.g. Caesar or Napoleon), his descendants wield power with less and less efficiency until in time the aristocracy seize the reins, and they get more and more corrupt and out of touch until finally the people rise up and enforce some level of democratic sway. Unfortunately, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, which is exhausting, and so over time things run down until some powerful and strong-willed individual takes power and it all starts again. It's not purely linear - an aristocracy can be subsumed into a strong individual leadership (e.g. the popes in the 19th century grabbing power back from the cardinals) and a king can be overthrown by a democratic uprising (e.g. Louis XVI of France - though technically it did go through a brief aristocratic moment, as he re-convened the parliament to try and get around the nobility who wouldn't fund his wars, indicating his powers had weakened). But in general we oscillate between these three modes of social organisation because of the difficulty in centralising power and in then keeping it from being corrupted (i.e. using it for selfish purposes) once it is centralised.
TL;DR: The sunk cost fallacy. It's the tendency for people to carry on doing something even when abandoning it would be better for us. Because we have invested our time, energy, or other resources, we feel "it would have all been for nothing" if we quit now.
Marvelous things are happening over at Reddit. Spez has locked himself in the company doomsday bunker and told everyone he'll come out once his "real" work friends get there. To watch the brush strokes of the maestro as they shape the future of so many unpaid laborers.
For anyone who like me has never heard of "temu", it is said to be some sort of chinese "fast fashion" website which might/probably traffic in the products of slave labor. Presumably in a way which exceeds other "fast fashion" but my investigation was quite shallow.
It's like the home goods version of fast fashion. Unfortunately, a lot of the products on temu are the same Chinese made products you will find elsewhere at a higher markup. Especially if you still buy from Amazon. It's kinda annoying to see people turn their nose up at temu but happily buy JABXBSJ or whatever weird ass Chinese company name products on Amazon.
Hell, even if you're buying expensive ass home decor or clothes a lot of it is cheap stuff made by workers paid poorly in shit conditions.
Buying used has become the only moral option at this point. There's still a few products made in the US that are worth the money, but a lot of ones that used to be popular have moved their manufacturing to other countries now also.
I wish more people understood this. Secondhand quality is vastly superior to brands new crap. Older second hand can be even better. My not have a bunch of fancy features but it'll last at lest the rest of your life if cared for.
But so many just can't get past the stigma of "second hand".
No it’s cheaply made clothes that people wear for a couple months while something is fashionable and then throw it in the garbage after it fades/tears the third time they wash it or they get bored
Apologies if this is stupid or should be obvious (I’m very new to Kbin/Lemmy). IIRC, I just paste that link into any kbin or lemmy search, correct? I tried doing that but I just get 505 errors every time…
even though that sub is like the most annoying and sanctimonious place on reddit, I am sad for these people that they are losing their forum. where else will people express their anxiety over wasting lemon seeds by throwing them away? or congratulate each other on the ecological benefits of purchasing complicated, unfix-able gadgets to perform simple and infrequently performed tasks?
I'd been a reddit user since 09 or 10 and never once had a bad interaction with a mod... I don't understand all the hate. Yes I'm sure some aren't the nicest but I'd wager most are good folk managing communities with the good intentions.
Had a couple bad experiences with the r/Linux mods, but other than that most of them are fine. I think users don’t really grasp what mods do, and the amount of internet sewage they have to sift through. And when they’re doing a good job, the users don’t notice it in the first place.
I'm wondering if Reddit will just be a place for AI/bots to create/replicate content, and the people (read: "normies"/people who don't care what social media website they use as long as they can consume content) there will be interacting with said bots. All that just to drive traffic and appease shareholders.
Not sure if I'm just paranoid or if this is the case. I know that there are cases like this, but I wonder how deep it goes, or if it has been like that for a long time.
Wellp, long gone are the days of me typing a question and ending it with "Reddit", now it's 100% Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon.