[Irenicus]

^^

From now on, I will have to check my drawer every night, as well as the underneath of my bed, to ensure Ellen Pao is not lurking with a sickle.

[262]

(10-27-2016 05:54 PM)Red_Pillage Wrote:  

Have any more reddit communities been shut down since this thread was created? Gawker has since died. Reddit should fold up soon.

Also, the TRP subreddit (as has been said many times) continues to get even worse. There was a thread about polyamory in there a few weeks ago, and 3 years ago it would have been laughed out of discussion. Now there's "poly alphas" in there posting about gettin' cucked on the reg.

[not-a-pua]

Why did Reddit become so popular? It's basically Usenet but controlled by one company. Easynews has Browser access for Usenet for years now. It's very hard to censor.
If someone built an even better interface for Usenet that scales - boom. Reddit could be gone for good.

[XPQ22]

(10-29-2016 11:53 AM)not-a-pua Wrote:  

Why did Reddit become so popular? It's basically Usenet but controlled by one company. Easynews has Browser access for Usenet for years now. It's very hard to censor.
If someone built an even better interface for Usenet that scales - boom. Reddit could be gone for good.

It became popular because users want the censorship. It's successful because of its "hive mind" safe-space nature, not in spite of it.

Initially people dumped Usenet because its distributed nature made it hard to moderate. That was fine back in the day when the Internet was mostly a university-controlled affair and the number of users was relatively small and could effectively self-police, but once the 'net blew up and any jackoff with a modem could start shitposting anything they liked anywhere (see Eternal September), it got tiresome real quick.

It's possible to "moderate" Usenet in a fashion, but NNT protocol was never really designed for it. There were a few moderated newsgroups, but I believe the system of moderation just consisted of every new post being routed to some volunteer's desk who had to sign off on it. You can't really global ban users or IPs, just filter email addresses/usenet server accounts, so "bans" are for all intents and purposes nonexistent. It's easy to pretend you're a user you aren't, too. Even by circa 1995 sockpuppeting and constant trolling was rampant. It was like trying to use 4chan/random to have actual discussions.

So initially moderated Web discussion forums gained popularity as an alternative just to weed out endless shitposts, but I think over time people grew to like their safe spaces. And then once the ability to upvote or downvote came on the scene, and users could actually influence who got heard and who didn't directly, well, the nail was in the coffin for antiques like Usenet.

NNTP scales just fine, AFAIK way better than any web-based discussion framework, and there are plenty of newsreaders that are dead simple to operate, including the ones included in many email clients like Thunderbird. But most newsgroups are ghost towns and probably always will be.

I think one could make the argument that Reddit is so popular simply because there are a half-billion office workers in the world who want to fuck off on social media all afternoon and would fall apart if any content that might vaguely be thought to be "inappropriate" showed up on their screens without a huge "NSFW" warning.

[Rhyme or Reason]

All very good points XP. I remember hearing that the creators of reddit basically faked it till they made it. When there were no active users on the site they all made accounts and faked discussion to drive traffic until users started showing up.

The main topic of discussion in the early years was tech shit and coding, this was circa 05-08 which if you recall was the time just before the "nerd empowerment" thing caught on. Once being a nerd became "cool" everyone congregated to sites like reddit (previously digg) because it was a way for people like that to feel like they were "in the know". It was also towards the end of the Bush years and it was cool to be a liberal then who snarked at how out of date conservatism was.

I've always thought that the nerd empowerment culture was nothing but a strike back at what they perceive to be their oppressors. "Jocks, dudebros, douche bags" ect. We have seen this come to pass with the rise of the privilege narrative. SJW's are in many ways, the revenge of the nerds.

Being beta males they cave into what women want which always boils down to authoritarian totalitarian rule. This is why the site went from being about tech talk to all of a sudden being about left wing politics, feminism, privilege, and all manner of poisonous, self hating ideologies.

Virtue signaling also started with reddit. Before anyone was superimposing rainbow colors on their FB profile pics, people were racing for the approval of others on reddit by showing how liberal, guilty, and self hating they can be. The upvote system compounded this.

Online snark is also thanks to reddit. Sure,people were dicks online before, but snark brought it to a whole new level and was used as a way to bully and undermine opposing views. All while never having to actually make an argument. Just in the way it's users have no doubt been subject to in the past. It gives the nerd the opportunity to use the same tactics that were used on him growing up (using the power of the group to "other" those who they don't like) they learned this and used it without mercy on anyone they disagree with.

None of this is a coincidence. XP is right in that the userbase wanted censorship.. Wanted safe space. Wanted a place they could virtue signal and accrue social capital in the form of upvotes whilst having to do nothing in real life to achieve said social capital.

But more accurately, the user base wanted censorship under the guise of free speech. I believe reddit managed to put forth the face of being a "fair an open platform" while in reality being ruled with an iron fist.

Reddit was able to represent itself in a myriad of schizophrenic ways:

"There's so much misogyny on reddit" --in reality reddit is full of white knights and simps

"There's so much racism on reddit" --- in reality reddit is full of white cucks who self flagellate and won't miss an opportunity to signal how non racist they are

"Reddit opposes censorship" ---- While the admins censor ruthlessly

"Reddit opposes harassment" --- while only selectively enforcing this rule and protecting harassers who are supporting the narrative

Not to mention all the gay LGBT crap they have been shoving down it's users throats for the better part of a decade.


It's my belief that this dualistic position reddit holds is at the core of it's appeal to it's users. In other words, it personifies the millenial mindset, which at is core is a feminine one that simultaneously signals that it isn't XYZ, while being exactly that.

[Aurini]

(10-29-2016 04:55 PM)Red_Pillage Wrote:  

The main topic of discussion in the early years was tech shit and coding, this was circa 05-08 which if you recall was the time just before the "nerd empowerment" thing caught on. Once being a nerd became "cool" everyone congregated to sites like reddit (previously digg) because it was a way for people like that to feel like they were "in the know". It was also towards the end of the Bush years and it was cool to be a liberal then who snarked at how out of date conservatism was.

This helped clarify something for me: that I watched 'nerd culture' get taken over by something even worse than nerds - Betas of mediocre intelligence, aka nebs. Let me paint a picture of what my life was like back in '01.

The internet was fairly unknown. Pop culture back then was terrible rap music and girls covering themselves in glitter. My two best friends back then were the sorts of guys I could discuss nerdy topic with, while still acting like men.

One was a 6'4" Italian. He and I would go to the bar to argue philosophy and pick up women, and every Friday we'd play Dungeons and Dragons. The other was a skinny martial artist from South America, who did nothing but study new ways to hurt people, play strategy games, and fuck his girlfriend (now wife).

We all had a blast, and were part of the pre-Net-2.0 Internet culture, as well. We ignored the mainstream garbage culture, not because we were intimated by jocks, but because it was lame. Then, as the Internet got more popular, the nebs took the whole thing over.

Reddit, Digg, and now Twitter - these are just outlets for the nebs to pretend to be intelligent, confident, counter-cultural operators. For instance, this XKCD comic back in the day:



That's the sort of thing we might have done - because who gives a damn? Capes look cool, after all. At least, they look cool - until one of the nebs puts one on:



What a massive faggot.