reddit – Dickens of a Blog

Over the past month or so, Reddit has been “trying out” a push for mobile users to pick up the app:

And like…sure. Fine. Whatever. You have to love it when they make it easy to leave.

It’s helpful for Reddit to be so accommodating. Since I got that alert a couple of weeks ago, it has been very easy to not spend time just chunking through bot-driven doomscrolling where most of the good content is just reposts from years ago. The amount of books and long-form media I’ve been able to consume with the freed up time is not inconsequential.

There’s a longer rant, here, but I’ll just give a short taste.

It is absolutely criminal that “new media” has actively colluded into a universal state where websites, apps, and other services assume that the wholesale relinquishing of our personal data is a ready expectation for which we should thank them. Even apps/sites/services for which we pay money, sometimes a lot of money. Doesn’t matter. “Add more friends to make it more fun!” “Make sure your location tracking is on and we’ll give you five free gems!”

All the behavioral scientists and marketers pushing this should be outright ashamed.

AND, it should be illegal for those profiting off this new cold war to not have to give at least 80% of all user-stolen revenue back to the users. Either its worth something or it isn’t. “If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer,” bullshit has forgiven grave sins against privacy and helped pave the backbone of ecological collapse and city-sized datacenters paid for with our tax money.

Who gives a shit about Reddit’s claims that this is for the user experience? Of course it isn’t. At least not outside of addiction driven tribal-brain behavior and bright lights and stupid meme videos. The last time Reddit had a good user experience was back when it was a terrible website full of terrible people around whom you shouldn’t be. At least then it felt like a reflection of its actual target audience.

Hell, I’m not even blocking ads on the site so it’s not even about recouping lost ad revenue, at least not the direct ad revenue.

It’s so they can get more data from our phones and sell more information about their user. Because the entire economy is being entangled into datamining and AI training and selling user data to data brokerages who then sell it to dataminers, AI trainers, and law enforcement.

Up my butt, Reddit. Up. my. butt.

There are a few “Explain the Joke” subreddits on reddit and most, probably all, are trash-tier karma farming circle jerks. Just absolutely awful.

The same easy-as-shit jokes or rage-bait memes are posted over and over with people showing up in the thousands to comment. Sure, some of the replies are just bots joining in on the blatant karma manipulation. Which is fitting since it is likely mostly bots posting them. Bots and people trying to farm a few easy k karma to kickstart a reddit account so they can then sell it to bots.

In fact, you could probably automate a script to block every person who ever makes a post in one and trim a fair number of crap from your reddit experience.

Some of the replies are just going to be people who can’t help correcting others or sharing their thoughts, even when the same posts show up once a week or less. It’s weaponized tribalism versus default redditor behavior.

It is especially painful because posts from a couple/three of these subreddits frequently drift to the popular feed which dirty little no-accounts like me are forced to browse without extensive bookmarks: which might be the point. Let the shit float so people are forced to make an account just to have the tools to block them. Eh. Every day is a gift.

HOWEVER, you do occasionally get gold despite the massive attempt by gravity to pull sanity off a cliff. Like this one asking about the Tower of Babel made in [not-]LEGO [look at me violating my “never link to reddit or any social media” rule].

Pardon the proximity to a pun, but my brother in Christ, what could we possibly explain? I can get folks posting references to obscure-but-knowable things with a bit of a gate-keep to even knowing search terms. Sure.

Things like the Tower of Babel might not be universally known but when the immensely searchable words are right there….

At any rate, like all good circle jerking on reddit, the scant pretense of actual joy is people running with it and the replies are full of people posting answers [some on point] in various languages….and some people then trying to argue about the true meaning of Babel. Which is like the true meaning of Dollar Store kitten calendars. It’s aliens, my man. All aliens. All the way down.