Tag: reddit

There is very few things, bordering upon zero, that would make me want to rejoin any social media account.

What joy I might ever get from them I get from just doing a little random browsing. And the way reddit is going, they will have blocked that as soon as they can figure out how to block it AND still sell the data on the side.¹

Can’t turn your users into blood for the blood gods without pretending to care about the children, or some shit.

BUT, one thing that might inspire me make at least a “DumbStuff1849” style account is the ability to auto-block everyone who has marked their profile hidden. All posts. All comments. Hell, even all the upvotes and engagement. Let me see the “non-hidden-profile-reddit” stats only.

I’m not going to post anything so they can see my profile all they want. I don’t care. Or I can make a half dozen alts. Like the old days.

I like user privacy. I largely demand user privacy. This feels like something else. At least in practice.

A lot of the weirdest stuff comes out of those accounts. People generating 100k+ karma per month and you see their post and it’s just something racist, nationalist, sexist, or…just kind of this odd milquetoast “Yeah, things are shit, what about it?!” thing that reddit does so well.

You might know what I mean, where you complain about anything or brag about anything or just feel joy or hate or anything about anything and there are strings of comments about how it doesn’t matter, it all sucks, and you know what…you are a piece of shit for having feelings on it. The default state of reddit being nowadays, it seems.

The more obvious that sort of thing is, the more likely it will be a hidden profile. 200k karma. 3 months old. Moderator of two low-quality subs that often smash through to the front page despite posting nothing that isn’t some general “aren’t things stupid now” kind of vaguepost. AND WHY? Why do the bots care? I can at least get why the [REDACTED] guys pretending to be American-hating European teens might want to stay hidden so folks don’t realize they are not from a dozen different countries at the same time.

Then you add in the those that hide their posts and to mark the profile “mature” so you have to be signed in, having 18+ posts allowed, and then just see you can’t actually see anything.

Look, I know. You have reasons to want to hide your profile. That’s fine. I’m not judging you.

You do you, boo.

To clarify, I mean the way a lot of social media sites are actively trying to stop people from being able to even browse for any length of time without having an account. For reasons. ↩︎

Today’s Conspiracy Theory: Election Years and “New Maps”

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-09-10

In Rants, The Algorithm

I’m going to not wade into the fact that you are almost definitely hearing about post-partum depression a lot because it is a mid-term election year in the United States (though you most likely are). In 2024, there was a certain track meet. 2020 I don’t even have to talk about.

Let’s just say certain patterns persist.

The less emotionally draining side of this same conspiratorial coin — though frustrations do run deep — is people trying their absolutely hardest to Both Sides™ the UN’s adoption of Equal Earth Projection maps.

Just today, this post popped up like so many others on Reddit as of late…

Obviously, I highlighted the text to bend it to my argument but the fact that the poster [whose name I kept in if you want to look some of their stuff, which does include some quite interesting map discussions besides this] felt to describe this in terms of victimhood just shows how people are baking the argument into the pretense of a statement. Begging the question or some such legal term. The mind boggles. Et cetera.

“Biggest victims…” Lord save us from Redditors. Could have just said something like “have the largest distortions in Atlantic centric versions of the maps” or whatever.

I legit feel that certain algorithmic forces are trying to poke this bear and ride the US-defaultism nature of sites like Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, etc to try and convince you that you should feel victimized by a map. Maybe I am just really unlucky. Who knows.

OP is also just wrong. Here’s what the above would look like if they had used the Pacific centered version of the map (which honestly gets more landmasses right so I don’t mind it, even as an Euro-located person, sorry Greenland/Iceland).

Heck, several places already use projections that are closer to to Equal Earth than Mercator. Go look at stuff like Winkel Tripel and Robinson Projections.

Good for all the people learning this past week that not everyone uses the same Atlantic-centered Mercator map (even if they end up preferring what they know). It is a nice moment to find out how other people do such things.

For the record, my favorite is probably something like Dymaxion or Hao’s Projection. Pole focused maps make the various landmasses much more interesting to me.

Also, we are now in the era where digital maps and the ability to have multiple projections at once makes this very, very moot. Different maps for different tasks.

Got to love it when they make it easy: Reddit’s App Push

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-05-15

In Internet, Technology

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.

The Tower of Babbling Replies

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-01

In Internet, Rants

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.