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So I am still not sure what to think about this in Schmittian terms. Will this hamper the power of jannies to continue to turn Reddit into a woke echochamber?
no, because this just affects apps
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The fact that this is where the conversation always goes is telling.
This is a blanket change that affects a great many people of all political ideologies. You might as well ask if a planet colliding with the Earth is harmful to Globohomo.
I think the analogy is more like maybe this is the meteor that kills the dinosaurs so the mammals can thrive.
Nope, not at all. This change is uniformly impacting everyone, and there is no reason to think "powerjannies" are likely to leave and get replaced by people who are more sympathetic to the average person here.
Everyone on Reddit. Reddit is not the world. Reddit is completely owned by Blue team, 100% top to bottom. Therefore, from a strict culture war perspective from a Red teamer, anything bad that happens to Reddit is good. Doesn't matter if it's mildly annoying a small percent of users or burning the whole company to the ground, it's still good.
I don't know why people pretend that Reddit has any pretense to neutrality when our whole forum left Reddit specifically because of their hostile rules and censorship regime.
Reddit has roots that are... well, not Blue Tribe. Ron Paul fans, the entire violentacrez stuff, rDrama. More of a public square, at least.
I'd be curious to read a narrative on how we got from point A to point Z.
And cladistically speaking, all humans are fish because we descended from them.
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Ah yes, how could I forget to celebrate bad things happening to people who disagree with me? Truly, not a sign that every slight lives rent-free in my head.
Your post is a bit on the snarky and sarcastic side, but I do see the point a little bit. If we're keeping a little perspective, this is still just an internet forum we're talking about. There are many thousands of them, constantly getting created and destroyed for any number of reasons. The worst "bad thing" we're talking about here is a moderate number of people being a little sad for a few weeks until they find a new place to post on the internet. It doesn't exactly hit my sympathy threshold.
And you might want to check out, say, /r/ShitPoliticsSays. It's full of heavily upvoted posts on Reddit default subs usually wishing things considerably worse to Red teamers than losing their favorite internet forum.
It's not just that. It's the fact that people here act so blindly hateful some times that they will celebrate literally anything if you frame it as hurting the "Blue tribe". Doesn't matter how far you go to the right, it's all about hurting the left.
We call that waging the culture war, and the reason I call it out here is because we're supposed to be above that fucking shit. What the fuck is the point of having a platform where people are supposed to set aside their biases if people get upvotes for doing the exact opposite?
Goddamn, this place prides itself as having better discussion norms for freer debate, and yet the number one thing I see here are a bunch of slaves parroting the same talking points every single time. You point to the existence of /r/SPS, but I literally hate their kind as well! The difference is that I never expected any better from their kind.
So why would you be upset if reddit is destroyed if you "hate their kind" so much? Wouldn't it improve the quality of the internet?
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This is plainly false. The API changes mostly affect third-party app users, and moderators that rely on bots/external tools that depend on the Reddit API. Users of old.reddit.com or even new.reddit.com aren't directly affected.
I always assumed that phone users made Reddit worse for people interested in information and discussion: following external links is harder in apps so this discourages citing sources or reading external resources, phone screens are too small to read long-form content, and writing detailed messages is hard. Consequently I imagine app users disproportionately write one-liners and upvote memes and short comments (the opposite of what people do on The Motte).
I think reddit without phone users would be an improvement over what it is today, even if it doesn't fix the moderation problem.
I misspoke, but my general point is that there's probably not a disparate impact on the political makeup of either the users or mods.
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They will if there’s no influence to be had. What’s the point of being a powerful mod of a site that very few people know exists? Would you want to be a powermod on Saidit where the average post gets maybe 1,000 views and 6-12 comments? What kind of influence could you have when you can’t get attention?
Reddit is not going to die even if the TPAs all go away. There's hardly a better platform for communities to gather in one place with easy discoverability of related communities. The people at AskHistorians have said that they constantly debate this and most don't like the idea of having to go to one site just for that. Reddit has inertia and network effects on its side.
July 1st will come and go, and I guarantee most of the big subs will remain right where they are, doing the same as they did before the change.
I kinda disagree. There are other similar communities, they’re smaller now, but if people discover them and choose to move on, then the communities will move to wherever they want to. Saidit and hubski both have fairly easy to use and have good interfaces. Snapzu is kinda interesting because the original post can have more than one article attached.
Besides all that, it’s happened before. MySpace was big until Facebook started, Digg was the original of the Reddit type community, Usenet was probably the ancestor of most social media. If things get bad enough then communities will absolutely move to better places.
People mostly seem to be looking at federated alternatives, instead of the ones you mentioned. I'm not sure why exactly.
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If anything, the more sympathetic people are more likely to go dark and get replaced by reddit admins eventually.
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I don't use reddit because of powerjannies. It makes no difference to me if it goes down in flames. I am asking about the possibility that reddit might become usable again.
This change is neutral towards them. There is no biasing towards them because the fundamentals of moderating have not changed. The only possibility of it changing is if many of them en masse resign and are replaced by those of a different political alignment. I consider that to be unlikely.
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As someone who's actually modded I'd say the exact opposite will happen. Third party apps were important quality of life additions for mods to even do their job on a basic level.
Your question is a bit like being upset that police policy mandates they target certain areas and asking if taking away their radios and cars will make for better cops.
Ah. But I'm in the Defund the Jannies camp. I do believe that a lawless wasteland is better than the carefully curated echochamber we have now. If you're telling me the mods won't be able to do their jobs, that's a plus for me.
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Nothing, short of a Musk-at-Twitter style purchase and purge, can do that. The best this could do, barring that, is make it a mostly-empty woke echo chamber.
I really do find it hilarious that people think Twitter is that much different with Musk at the helm as far as Trust & Safety goes. It's basically more of the same, but Musk found a great way to appeal to right-wingers by talking about "free speech" and stuff. Twitter was already the most free speech media, nothing in T&S really changed much except for Trump being unbanned.
What is the point of posting something so easily disprovable?
The guy who said that subreddits always banned for wrongthink has the possible excuse of not being old enough to see it first-hand, but noticing the decline of twitters censorship requires a much shorter memory.
because it's pretty obvious unless your idea of "free speech" is literally just posting slurs. 4chan has more rules and will ban you for a lot less than Twitter ever would
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much more crypto spam, more ads . I see major signal boosting and recommendations of anti-woke content .
hardly. conservatives were getting banned for all sorts of dumb or contrived reasons pre-musk
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Leagues of people who were banned are now posting there unimpeded. That alone is not "more of the same".
Community Notes are great too, if only because they wrest away control of the idea that "fact-checking" is a leftist thing.
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there's definitely more signal boosting of certain content on twitter now. just a few weeks ago there was a kerfuffle over musk retweeting interracial crime statistics
Musk also allowed the showing of "What is a Woman" (and apparently got rid of or lost ANOTHER Trust and Safety head over this). And he signal boosted it on his own account. And he posts anti-trans memes. Saying nothing has changed on Twitter is ridiculous. I expect it all go back once his new MSM CEO takes over, but for now it's different.
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Given how much Reddit relies on volunteer work, it probably wouldn't survive that. On the other hand, once anti-spam is sufficiently automated...
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