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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • If you want to go way back, take a look at old BBSes or Usenet. The flame was commonly deployed. For many decades now people have used the internet to look at pictures of cats and also to talk trash or otherwise say horrible things. I don’t think Reddit is different in any major way, except that on subs that were decently managed, many of the worst commenters were banned and the worst comments were often down voted into oblivion. It really did depend on the subreddit.

    The fact that some people behave like assholes is not in itself anything indicative about a website working well or poorly. In real life some people behave like assholes some of the time too. Of course we have and should continue to take reasonable steps to deal with much of the badness, but we should never expect or aim for perfection on this front.


  • I remember when Google Chat added XMPP support. I already ran my own server but some of my friends we’re happy enough to use Google. And that was good for a while, but at some point Google had enough people running its own chat that it could simply shut off external XMPP traffic. That was a sad time, because we could have had a federated decentralized chat protocol that dominated the internet, much like email does for its particular purpose, and instead we got fragmented chaos.

    The same thing could happen with the fediverse in various ways. So hey, if some commercial entity wants to run their own server, that’s cool, but we need to keep reminding our friends of the dangers of relying on that commercial entity.


  • I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that because only 10% of drivers are reckless, we don’t get to regulate the other 90% along with them. Of course if we had some magical wand that would tell us who the reckless drivers are, then we could only target the dangerous folks, but often that’s impossible.

    Often the best we can do is take a look at the data and see what kind of policies would not be horribly burdensome for the general public and yet would save a lot of lives, and then we institute those.

    The other part of the problem with the 10% bad drivers argument is that bad drivers change from hour to hour, and from day to day. After all, the majority of people believe that they’re good drivers, right?





  • I think you’re wrong about people’s perceptions. I think the vast majority of the people in the world do not believe that the ultra-rich deserve to have all the money and power that in fact they currently have.

    It’s also true that trying to upset that power balance is very difficult, and many people spend more of their time worrying about things that are closer to home where they have greater control.

    The other point is that the blackout was predominantly about mods and power users showing how much of a difference they actually made. And certainly they proved their point. Administrators had to come in and boot mods. That kind of worked, but now we see other antics continuing. All of this is good for the lulz, but it also shows that the blackout was a success. Reddit can probably survive without us, but the quality will go to hell, has gone to hell, will continue to linger in hell until some years down the road the site gets unplugged.