Reddit’s strength has always been its community

There’s something nobody talks about much when it comes to reddit. It’s that the internet has moved past community. It now revolves around monetized “influencers”. Nobody fosters community for the sake of it anymore.

Reddit has outlived its time. It’s apparent they’ve been trying to evolve with the times but the platform isn’t fundamentally geared towards this coporatized era of the internet. They’ve been trying to pivot the platform into social media style. Users now have profiles with avatars, bio text, followers/subscribers. There’s now a social graph. The big picture with these things is they’re trying to make it into a corporatized social platform like all the rest.

The problem isn’t reddit itself. It’s the internet that isn’t geared towards community anymore.

The “first they came for…” quote is probably more damaging than people realize. They don’t systematically make more different people the problem. Everyone is fair game at all times whenever it’s opportune.

So they voted for the guy with a galactic scale ego.

They appropriated /u/borat. It was an inactive account which was removed and given to the producers of the film to use for an AMA when it was released.

spez, kn0thin, and reddit the company as a whole have zero scruples. There are no rules but what they say at any given moment. It’s subject to change at any time.

Influencer is a fancy word for salesman. Instead of going door to door like grandpa did in the old days, they stream directly to your device.

Colonialism seems to leave quite a mindfuck on local populations themselves. The young people I knew from Hong Kong (at the time since this was a long time ago) considered themselves British. Ethnically Chinese yeah but if you asked they were British. If the locals can be propagandized by invaders it’s pretty easy to convince western zeitgeist that Hong Kong was anything but an occupied region of China.

Much of the world has gone insane with capitalism. Why am I paying like $10-$20 for friggen USB cables when I can get it from China for a few dollars. Probably the actual cost. A few dollars for the product. And what like $15 to whatever millionaire/billionaire dudes who need keep padding their ridiculous game breaking stats.

People can’t even tell anymore because the goal posts have shifted so far. The anchoring bias has normalized the price to $20. Much lower prices seems like it must be cheating or something right. Has to be the only explanation. Can’t be anything else. Nope.

You mean virtue signalling. That’s their cute little phrase for it.

It’s easy to do if you just ignore all the inconvenient facts and pretend you’re more righteous than others.

How the flap of a butterfly wing can change history.

Crisis actors. They have gotten quite good at this thing.

VR has the same problem smartphones and tablets did until the Apple revolution. Consumers don’t care about technical details which nerds get stuck on. The technology simply isn’t there at the moment.

Right now VR is and will remain for bespoke applications. It will remain so for many iterations of technological advancement until miniaturization beyond anything anyone can ever dream of right now. The technologically inclined can reason about relatively insignificant details like transistor count or whatever. Consumers don’t care. Just like they didn’t care about tablets or even touch screen devices in general even though commercial products existed long before the iPad and iPhone. Nobody gives a shit about technical details. The final product from a layman user perspective is all that matters. Jobs knew this was the ultimate goal. The rest of the tech industry continues to struggle with internalizing it.

Even if they scrimp and save to produce a pleb model. It’s still just a bespoke device. A glorified screen that might have a few neat uses. People will then put it aside and forget about it.

Evidently given the state of affairs whatever share of “most people” has been tipping away from a balance.

Call it unchecked greed. Call it nobody wants to work anymore. It’s two sides of the same coin. The framing is just hurting someone or others feelings. The underlying problem is the same. Too many greedy people don’t want to work.

It falls under a greater problem of our time. Everyone thinks they can be clever by becoming a passive income earner. So we get things like middle men which has been increasing the cost of things because every hand needs to grab a cut along the way. We have people becoming landlords slowly amassing rental properties which created a bigger and even life long tenant class. We get economies that revolve around stock markets pivoting industry from productivity to shareholder profit.

I don’t know if this is a trigger phrase like it is on reddit but it’s true that nobody wants to work anymore. Societies require people to work to keep things going. Can’t have everyone sitting on their ass waiting for others work for them.

Nobody wants to talk about it because nobody wants to be the sucker that didn’t get a leg up on everyone else. So everyone plays along with this massive collective cognitive dissonance.

He was weak but they couldn’t adjust his mic levels? That was weird.

This is the same kind of framing Google used when they were considered the little guy on your side as opposed to big evil corp.

He’s sleepy from all that hard work.

Isn’t this generally how the big tech firms generate dark profiles on people? Of the people who don’t explicitly exist on their database. Take the intersection of data from family events. The people not in their database of known profiles are also likely family. Do the same for friend events. Take the intersection of those peoples interests. You’ll be knowing a lot about someone who never told you anything about themselves.

You can run but you can’t hide. Crazy times we live in.

The internet had a social contract. The reason people put effort into brain dumping good posts is because the internet was a global collaborative knowledge base for everybody.

Of course there were always capitalists who sought to privatize and profit from resources. The source materials were generally part of the big giant digital continuum of knowledge. For the parts that weren’t there we’re anarchists who sought to free that knowledge for anyone who wanted to access it.

AI is bringing about the end of all this as platforms are locking down everything. Old boards and forums had already been shuttering for years as social media was centralizing everything around a few platforms. Now those few platforms are being swallowed up by AI where the collective knowledge of humanity is being put behind paywalls. People no longer want to work directly for the profit of private companies.

Capitalists can only see dollar signs. They care not for the geological epoch scale forces of nature required to form petroleum. All that matters is can it all be sold and how quickly. Nor do they care for environmental damages they cause. In the same way the AI data mining do not care for the digital ecological disaster they are causing.

More over it’s a thought terminating cliche when someone says, “<thing> existed before so why’s it suddenly a problem?”. It seems to be yet another out of the bag of rhetorical tricks that wipes the slate of discourse clean. As if all the arguments against it suddenly need to be explained as if none of it had any validity. Not only that but the OPs are often seemingly disingenuously naive. It provides the OP with a blank slate to continually “just ask questions”. Where every response is “but why?” which forces their interlocutors to keep on elaborating in excruciating detail to the point where they give up trying to explain minutiae. Thus the OP can conclude by default they were correct that it’s not a problem after all because they declare nobody has provided them with answers to their satisfaction.

Same shit different era. Always gotta be persecuting somebody.

Also when Silicon Valley copies and steals they get praised as revolutionary innovators.

They already have their own x86 chips. They’re a few generations behind the cutting edge. They’ve been catching up fast which is why the US and EU have been shitting their pants trying to wage cold war. All of a sudden ramping up the China bad narrative out of left field when not long ago they were trying to work with China rather than against them…

Much of the manufacturing difficulty we hear about with western industry is achieving highest yields possible of the most powerful chips to please ravenous shareholders demanding flawless profit gains every quarter. Capitalism problems in other words. It’s much different when your goal is merely to produce computers for government office use. You can still use old computers for the majority of computing needs.