This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
In the 2000s we thought user-generated content would lead to a utopian future where we got our opinions from each other rather than from big companies.
Turns out: big companies, governments and other institutions with money are perfectly capable of paying people to be "users" who are "generating content". Now we get (at least some of) our opinions from them and don't even know it.
Member-only story
Medium wants me to pay them to read a story from "Homeless Romantic" who is listed as a "Ph.D. Rocket Surgeon & Aspiring Troglodyte"?
Are they fucking high?
Are they fucking high?>
Yeah, probably
It's been a wonder that site ever got traction as something credible to get info from and not just a weird mesh of editorial, blogging, and long winded shitposts...
edit: That being said, fuck reddit.
For me, it was often a place where a lot of qualified people would essentially write blogs because hosting their own site for it would get utterly ignored by google. The last few years though I've got more utter morons than people who can write a good article, even for generic questions that they could straight up copy and paste from another site.
Tbh happy I deleted reddit
(in voice of tts laughing god)
well, who would of fucking thought?
I still have a few subreddits I passively maintain and every three days on the most popular one I'm banning some new app someone is shilling to a vulnerable group. It's absolutely disgusting and makes me so incredibly angry/jaded how much they're targeted.
say more about that. what sort of apps are being peddled?
ADHD "helper" apps, productivity apps, etc. Good UX should be for everyone and be accommodating. ADHD folks don't need something special 99/100 times.
I know lemmy is fundamentally critic of reddit, but let's not forget if lemmy ever achieves a significant weight in humanity's attention, it's not immune to such disease. The problem is systemic, not inherent of a specific platform. Any place with a lot of eyes will be susceptible to manipulation, even more so now that we have tamed artificial intelligence to write texts just about anything. We as a community need to think about countermeasures to fend this off
Reddit is run by the same cabal of mods across thousands of subreddits. Of course they're open to manipulation.
I wish Reddit hadn’t banned me. Doomscrolling was so much fun. I’d easily take a month ban and go to “Reddit Jail”. I don’t care that it’s all bots and dead internet. But, now I’m here.
