wingdingspringking
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User ID: 1348
wingdingspringking
5d ago
To your point (and @haroldbkny 's ), I agree that public opinion was never completely dictated from above. The "market of ideas" so to speak, is actually more like a testing ground to see what ideas resonate with the public and what do not. But the consolidation of news papers and publishers under the likes of Hearst and Pulitzer brought about a situation where the people at the top had a large say in which of these "publicly resonant" stories were allowed to propagate. And over the following century, it largely stayed that way. Of course there were smaller publishers and other communication channels, but the majority of public discourse was under the thumb of these gatekeepers.
We have just gone through an era in which there were essentially no gatekeepers. Anything that was emotionally resonant enough "went viral" on social media and entered into the public zeitgeist. Look at what the results have been.
wingdingspringking
6d ago
I agree with most of your criticisms of reddit. But I don't know if it is particularly indicative of anything about the human condition. I think, rather, that it says something about the type of person who comments on reddit threads. The number of reads that reddit gets dwarfs the number of posts and comments by orders of magnitude. And the number of people that actually spend time reading reddit posts is just a tiny fraction of humanity.
I think there are two take aways from this. The first is that it is worth thinking about why only a tiny fraction post things. My guess is that posting takes effort, and people are very hesitant to put forth effort for no reward. The people that do end up posting are often some combination of very unusual or very unbalanced. More often than not, I think it may be the later. People who's lives are going well don't spend their time angrily yelling at people they don't know and will never know about minute differences of opinion.
Which brings me to my second point, that the culture of much of the world was dictated for about 15 years by those exact, maladjusted posters. From around 2010 up until very recently, the collective opinions that these people coalesced around were pumped into the mainstream by journalists, media companies, and news networks that couldn't resist a cheap and easy source of material that was pre-optimized to be as tribalizing and divisive as possible. While there was a culture war before then, almost all the ideas debated on this forum and across society as a whole crystalized into their modern form during this era. I guess now that bots are starting to out-post humans by wide margins, this will probably change, and we'll move back to a world where majority opinions are dictated from above rather than from the grass roots. But the scars from it will last a long time. In the end, it really makes the optimism of the early internet era look utterly absurd in hindsight. Who in their right mind thought that letting anyone message everyone would possibly lead to good outcomes?
I agree that the reddit of 2010 bore very little resemblance to what exists now. That the free speech ideals of its origins were still somewhat visible in the culture of the site. But at the same time, the cracks were starting to show. You mentioned a bunch of fringe subs that ultimately got banned. But if you want a story that better parallels the evolution of reddit as a whole, the (then) fringe sub to look at would be /r/SRS. Do you remember them? The brigading? The purity tests? The militant extreme feminism? Sound familiar?
/r/SRS was the prototype for what reddit was to become. Not the grey tribe free speech absolutists. They may have started reddit, but ultimately they lost. In fact, the founders of reddit lost in the most stereotypical ways possible for idealistic young grey tribers (Steve Huffman decided getting paid was more important, Aaron Swartz got crushed by the leviathan of the state, and Serena Williams made Alexis Ohanian her bitch).
Now that same vein of militant feminism has wormed its way into everything. Not just reddit, but most of the internet and liberal culture as well. You remember the debates during the early 2020s where the left leaning people hid behind the fact that there was no clear definition of "woke" in order to claim that it didn't exist. Well, fine tune an LLM on early 2010s /r/SRS and /r/TwoXChromosomes and its world view would be pretty damn close to the mark.
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