This article looks at Reddit as a “comment economy.” Beneath the rhetoric of community and information sharing, the platform’s economic incentives favor conformity, reaction, endless engagement, and compulsive commenting over independent thought, meaningful discourse, and the exchange of knowledge.
Reddit’s revenue ultimately depends upon the creation of, extended attention to and the scrolling through of massive amounts of comments. This produces advertising opportunities, data value, repeat visits and valuable user engagement metrics.
Fuck Spez.
Can we talk about the unnecessary death of the Oxford comma?
Fuck all headlines that don’t use it.
Yet these actions also favor users who behave in the manner most useful to the platform’s economic model while making participation difficult for those whose primary goals are sharing articles and information, having thoughtful and civil discussions and presenting original content.
Has Reddit sacrificed an opportunity for meaningful civic discourse in its pursuit of extracting maximum value from its users’ unpaid labor?
Yes. Next question?
Can I just randomly throw in that new reddit’s UI just plain sucks? Holy hell it’s bad. (I’m still looking at a few very niche subs.)
Good, fuck reddit.
Ya Reddit can fuck right off, it’s nothing like it was and now hardly worth using. Going to go down the tech drain like Digg did.
Digg is back now 🤣
So is MapQuest, oddly enough.
“Aggressive bans”, please. Half the site is the most obnoxious people you’ve ever met and the other half are bots. Normal people on reddit represent a statistically insignificant percent of users. I would love it if they could be aggressive with bans.
I’d rather a site filled with weirdos than one with even 40% normies
They ban aggressively based on who is in power at the time. When Biden was they banned even the tiniest discussion of vaccines in a not glowing positive light. With Trump they now treat Nazism as a legitimate political viewpoint and thus the whole punch a Nazi thing that used to be accepted as part of general culture became bannable as political violence and terrorism. Which I guess technically is true but it clashes with past American propaganda so it’s hard to unlearn.
‘Aggressive bans’ should be ‘random mod is just being a petty cunt’
I’d prefer a petty cunt with a backbone over a limp weenie unwilling to take a stand against dogwhisles and slop
obnoxious people
The mods are obnoxious. And let’s face it, you have to be in order to want to be a mod for free.
I agree but probably for different reasons than you. I think reddit mods in general let too much slide and that’s why the site has filled with slop.
