FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
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User ID: 757
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4d ago
I don't think this is necessarily true.
I do not believe for a single second that anyone in the history of the entire world has ever said "I have a great, on-topic and timely post to share with this reddit community, but my account is too new. I'm going to purchase an account with a pre-existing history so I can share this incredible post with a community that I have no pre-existing engagement with."
Spotting accounts like this harvesting karma is like spotting people who are in the middle of getting their robbery tools ready - the only purpose for what they're doing is so that someone else later on can break the rules while making them so money.
Reddit has a lot of silly or dumb rules... that's part of why this site decided to separate in the first place!
No? The Motte tried to actually avoid breaking the rules of Reddit, and we split because we knew that not actually breaking the rules wasn't going to be a defence against the eye of Sauron making sure that there weren't any visible communities of people talking about how lightning strikes seem to appear before the thunder - or at least that's how I recall it.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4d ago
Reposting something popular is pretty common, and I don't think it's particularly harmful even if it's a little annoying to see the same thing (but how many of us even remember Reddit posts from years ago)?
I think that there's a big difference between reposting good content and reposting someone else's post wholesale while pretending it is an original contribution for ulterior motives (political or pecuniary). Technically you're right when you say that it isn't particularly harmful, in the same sense that when you come home to find a thief picking the lock on your front door it isn't actually harmful because you were going to open the door anyway. Those accounts cause only minor problems when they're being created, but think about what happens when one of those accounts actually gets sold or otherwise activated - nobody is going to buy or create a fake account because they want to do something good for the original community. Whether they're trying to shape opinions/discourse or simply sell a product, they still cause damage to the social fabric and cohesion of whatever community they start sprouting up in.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
5d ago
Interesting post! Are you familiar with the idea of the Rescue Game? I think you might find the following article an interesting resource, because it presents an alternative perspective on some of the phenomena you're identifying here. Here's an article on the topic that introduced me to the concept - https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-14/american-narratives-the-rescue-game/
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
5d ago
I am, skeptical, that 'most people' would agree with the second formation.
Ever spoken to any vegetarians or vegans? Most of them would be more than happy to tell you about how much their life was improved by someone hostilely and aggressively telling them about the actual suffering their food choices were responsible for. I personally have changed my opinion on some issues because partisans actually showed me the cost in human suffering of my prior stance, and I don't think those people harmed or hurt me in any way.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
5d ago
Apologies for the delayed response - life's been rather busy lately. Feel free to just ignore this post, but I didn't want to leave your reply abandoned.
You're focusing on Amazon as a company
They're the company presented and they're the only operation with enough size and reach for this to be a viable option apart from maybe Walmart or McDonalds. Want to increase the amount of corporations involved? That's another layer of bureaucracy, investigation and opportunity for scams (you ever hear about the fake businesses created to harvest COVID relief benefits?).
It doesn't have to be Amazon, just any job that doesn't require a high level of previous training and education.
The job in question has to be one where you don't give a shit about the quality of the output (people don't tend to produce their best work when they aren't getting paid) and with no real importance to it, because there's going to be vast amounts of malicious compliance. What exactly is the big task that needs all this incredibly shithouse and actively hostile labour? You can't trust these people, they have no incentive to perform and every incentive to be so bad at their job they get fired. If getting fired for incompetence means they just get kicked off welfare, I hope you're ready for the political fallout of constant media interviews with single mothers and their starving children who lost their job and all welfare because the Amazon algorithm noticed them taking too many piss breaks.
The other aforementioned people you created to dismiss my idea don't necessarily need the program I'm proposing, it's not like those people are about to resort to criminal behavior or aren't going to be assisted by other government programs or are incapable of finding work themselves.
The other aforementioned people are the ones who are going to be included in the category of "incapable of finding work themselves" - you can't get away with using "about to resort to criminal behavior" as testable criteria without demonstrating precognition and accurate divination. You're going to have to come up with a dividing line between those people and the ones you want to target with your program - sometimes people, through no fault of their own, graduate in years like 2007 and your system needs to be able to account for things like that.
Could you expand on this? I feel like this is just rageposting instead of an actual example. Also, you don't necessarily need to put work on your resume if it's something temporary while looking for a permanent position.
I'm not sure if you've gone looking for a job recently, but having a big gap on your resume is something that hampers the average person's ability to get hired. If you're a hiring manager who's picking up some programmers, are you going to look at the resume of the person who was well off enough that they got to contribute to open source projects for a semester after graduating, or the person who was forced to go be a delivery driver and can't even make the interview on time due to their welfare requirements? (Of course if you allow people to quit their fake Amazon job to go take a job interview without sacrificing their welfare then they're going to be taking a LOT of job interviews with FreeMoneyFromCovid LLC). Having onerous work requirements for someone on welfare means they aren't improving their skills, can't travel for work and are going to have problems going to job interviews.
Of course you're under no obligation to provide an alternative, but poopooing something just because you don't like my general idea doesn't really disprove what I'm getting at, either.
More than just poopooing, this is pointing out serious structural issues with your proposal that I think play a large part in why this hasn't already been done. You just haven't thought through the consequences of a system like this, or put yourself in the shoes of a person who is entering the system at the bottom, and at the same time you haven't looked at the system from an adversarial point of view - and given that you're trying to turn these people into a source of free and easily exploitable labour, you have to be extremely careful that they don't have the ability to fuck things up and make your corporate partners go "These people are not worth employing even if we don't have to pay for them."
There's a reason that companies don't go drag a 20 dollar bill through the trailer park to pick up a bunch of cheap workers for the day. The "workforce" you're proposing to create with this idea is not just incredibly incompetent, but the few parts of it that are competent are heavily incentivised to fuck with the system in order to either escape it or fuck it up. No company is going to want to have to work with a bunch of gang-bangers that are forced to be in their office by law, and the actual "work" that these people generate is in many cases going to be actively harmful to the company's bottom line (though I'm sure some people will appreciate being able to pick up some meth from their Amazon delivery driver).
This is the actual main thrust of my argument against your proposal: the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Your program requires vast amounts of administrative overhead, has massive costs, potential for serious and egregious abuse, hampers the ability of good people to get real jobs and funnels taxpayer money into private hands that are already incredibly wealthy - and to top it all off, the workforce that results is so terrible that you will have to pay others to compensate for the costs of actually putting them to use.
This is the thought process of someone deciding to purchase a pre-existing account with karma in order to get around reddit rules as you suggested in your previous post.
Of course - but that doesn't do anything to change the point I'm making, which is that people pumping up fake accounts, whether to sell to others or use for marketing, is actually the act of preparing to break the rules in letter and spirit. Selling the accounts for these purposes is in fact bad by itself if you care about the community at all (I don't for the record, but c'est la vie).
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