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Reddit matters, unfortunately.
When reddit came out in 2006, I was instantly enthralled. I loved the branched conversation style over single-threaded forums like PHPBB that dominated the web before. It was a new architecture for conversation, a better one. Plus, it had a smart, techie community that was fun to discuss things with.
Fast forward to today, and the world loves reddit. It's ranked as a top-10 website by traffic. Reddit is the default place to find an intelligent discussion on any niche topic. Whenever I have a medical issue, or I want to explore a new piece of technology, I go to Reddit. When I want product reviews for a pair of leather boots, I go to Google search and type "Best men's leather boots reddit". The cutting edge LLMs are being trained on reddit content. It's an important piece of the foundation of web content.
Which is unfortunate that it's moderated so poorly, and that policy comes from the top down. You know what I mean. themotte.org is one of several diaspora communities that fled reddit due to its heavy-handed, leftist moderation.
It's incredibly frustrating to use. My politics are somewhat esoteric but definitely of the right. On an occasion I'm baited into a conversation with political valence and I'll state a right-wing argument, and more often than not my account gets banned. On X, I saw screenshots of an /r/askReddit post "Republicans, why are you voting for Kamala this time?" and it had had thousands of upvotes and comments. The equivalent self-post "Democrats, why are you voting for Trump?" was banned with zero comments. If a thread is allowed to live for a few hours that draws popular heterodox views, it results in the inevitable thread lock and thousands of deleted comments to prevent "hate"
From my memory, the leftward drift of reddit seems to have occurred over the last 10 years. It hit an inflection point with the election of Trump and the ban of /r/TheDonald. It accelerated again since 2020 with BLM. That was the year that the TERFs were banned en masse (a community that mattered to me, as it helped me get over my own trans-dreaming and be happy with my gender).
Reddit's politics reflect the fact that the company is based in San Francisco. But it is left of center for San Francisco, which puts it far, far to the left of the nation.
And it's a shame! I'd love a higher-quality general purpose discussion forum. The world needs it. When Elon liberated X, that provided an important venue for free speech. But X optimizes for a high-addiction feed of quick information bites. It doesn't allow for as in-depth discussion and community building.
What would such a forum look like? I have some ideas:
It would maintain the threaded format beloved by so many
It would be seeded by a high quality community, such as that found here or on LessWrong
It would have some sort of governance body that would maintain high quality of moderation for the main subs
The easiest, but not cheapest way to liberate Reddit would be to find a billionaire backer to buy it. It's a public company and its marketcap is a hair under $10 billion. The other alternative would be to try to get an alternative off the ground, perhaps building on active and healthy diaspora communities. It would be possible, for example, to give new users credit for karma they have earned on themotte or LessWrong. Selfishly, I would love a forum where I could ask questions to the high-functioning on-the-spectrum folks that populate these places. Reddit without the bottom half of its IQ spectrum would be a superior place for discussing nootropics, health, AI, and similar topics.
I'm a computer programmer. I care about providing community discussion forums. I've spent a good chunk of my life on them. I'm kinda bored at my day job and looking for a new adventure. What do you think?
I would love a new and better Reddit.
The problem with Reddit is that it is so incredibly easy to game and astroturf. /r/thedonald did it in 2016 and they were wildly successful. Then the admins put their fingers on the scale and banned them. Today, left wing shitlibs are doing all the same stuff but get away with it. The front page is all just low rent political memes now.
Major subreddits that used to have milquetoast funny content are just left-wing bot farms now: https://old.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/
And leftist activists have taken over abandoned subreddits and then game the rules to get their posts on the front page. One trick: if a subreddit has a post with an outsized number of upvotes it gets promoted. So, if a sub with only 10,000 users has a sub with 10,000 upvotes, the algo sees it as a valuable post. This must be the most important post in the history of this subreddit! Except it's just some Kamala is Brat meme on a subreddit supposedly about economics.
In any case, there are good subs out there. Slatestarcodex is still decent. Redscarepod is good. But mostly it's a wasteland. Bots and activists rule the day. It's a tragedy that anyone is exposed to this stuff.
I don't have the stomach to open these, but I can't get over how much text there is on the thumbnails.
Just living up to the stereotype that leftist memes are giant walls of text (that also utterly fail as memes).
Those are decoy memes. The real ones are the successful ones that everyone believes, like "ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN Trustworthy, Fox bogus". Or "climate change means we have to do everything the left wants", "inequality", "the rich are that way because they take from the poor" etc.
Sure, leftists control nearly every aspect of society. But can they add text to an image and make it funny? No, they cannot.
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