Voats problem wasn’t engagement. It was literal nazis.

They tried to prop up a thin veneer of legitimacy but at some point they just stopped caring. The front page became blatant “kill all [whatever]” type posts. That’s when engagement completely collapsed.

Lemmy has some clearly in bad faith instances which are probably run by nazis. Federation seems to be doing its job of resilience.

Reddit posted their own site metrics showing much of the traffic came from a US army base. It’s a US propaganda outlet.

The goal has always been engagement prisons. Where people never leave the platform. With generated content this must seem like a final step. They don’t need to make people to interact with each other in ways that keeps both of them engaged. They don’t need to leech content from other sites while preventing people from going to the site. With generated content people will interact with themselves while engaged in completely fabricated content. It’s even more dystopian than ever.

Every generation gets to learn about their own iteration of con artists. Until they do they believe it’s something like the world has never seen before and nobody will talk them out of it.

This is a common tactic. I’ve seen people describe the same process many times before.

1. Nazi says literal Nazi shit.
2. Person gets baited into responding.
3. Person gets ban hammer. Nazi does not.
4. Nazi moves on to next target. Repeat from step 1.

They usually trot this out when they see a comment or account they want to silence. That’s how the fascists do censorship on reddit.

It’s happened to me too. Since then I’ve seen people saying the same general thing has happened to them. They must know that reddits content moderators, the “Anti-evil Operations” or whatever bullshit, is on their side. It’s the only explanation. Probably the nazis went and got jobs there. Or maybe it’s just that spez is a nazi himself. Reddit beneath the thin veneer of default subreddits has always been a very right leaning platform.

So which is this guy? A more left or right libertarian?

Libertarian in the US tends to mean more right leaning. The left social issues they support tend to be rather superficial self serving issues like decriminalization.

It wasn’t hard to foresee. We knew these kind of things could happen. The internet used to be very out spoken about it. That ethos is long gone. What’s equally disappointing is tech nerds selling out for bigger paychecks.

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The colloquial use of “AI” is basically the Hollywood concept of a conscious computer. Nobody knows about AI as it’s used in computer science industry. Nor does it matter in regular discourse. In this sense it’s not AI. It’s a disservice to lead the on laypeople to believe it’s something it’s not.

I don’t rule it out. The prior era of “reddit alternatives” in the Voat era was quickly overrun too even though they were very small. The key to the internet has always been first mover advantage. If they have enough power to manipulate the top sites, it would take very little to hedge bets on budding platforms. They risk losing their advantage if a replacement platform establishes itself without them. That’s pretty much the whole history of modern tech. To actively seek and snuff out your competitors.

They’ve been increasing the ad load the whole time. The most I’ve seen so far is 5 ads. Streaming will return to broadcast TV convention sooner than people think probably. 15 minutes of ads per hour.

It’s in its afterlife phase right now. Much of the comment sections on any given subreddit are full of newbies using colloquialisms from other platforms. e.g. Users call subreddits “groups” which I think originates from Facebook. Or users trying to “bump” posts. There’s a lot of signs that the core userbases are gone.

It’s predicated on baby boomers not having hard times. There’s no basis in reality. Not unless one were to believe baby boomers are all predominantly white upper middle class. Not to mention one must believe history was all sunshine and rainbows until their generation (millennial/zoomer/whatever) came into existence.

Do they really think people just walked right out of high school into wealth from the career factory? This is basically the privileged upper class. Which is the top percentage of their generation. Guess what? Everyone else had it hard!

So much of current day pop culture “boomer bad” stuff is based on these stupid notions. I wonder how people are going to rationalize when baby boomers are all dead and the class war still exists. I think some younger people are in for some serious cognitive dissonance ahead.

Apart from people parroting these things. Those who actually have those well off parents are admitting their own privilege. The parrots are too entranced to realize they’re worshiping their own oppressors. The upper class. They don’t know they are the cannon fodder in the cycle of hard times, revolution, and renewal.

Nothing happened. It was always like this. Geeks got unduly put on a pedestal. They got a reputation that was never earned. They’re not any different than your typical psychopath executive.

I grew up in a town where a lot of these types of guys have become multimillionaires since 2010s tech boom. One person manages some hundreds of millions of dollars AI investment portfolio. That was before the GPT explosion. I have no idea how big they are now but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s billions.

Growing up they were almost all psychopathic. Lying, cheating, backstabbing type of people. Nothing like the timid altruistic geek that pop culture proliferates. The more normal people did not go into tech. The actual timid types have had modest middle class careers in tech.

I think a quirk of reddit is that conventional finance doesn’t account for its value. Reddit in and of itself just operates a barebones site as the article says. While the site itself is ostensibly worthless. It has had incredible amount of value to those using it for commercial and political purpose. Nation state actors too even (cougheglincough). These days what organization isn’t using or trying to use reddit. Such things don’t appear in financial statements. I think they’ve been propped up with funding for so long because its a nexus of zeitgeist. There are enough organizations who it is useful to such that it’s better to keep reddit alive rather than risk having to establish their dark presence on new competitor platforms. I suspect spez knows he has everyone by the balls too.