Its audience isn’t the world.
You don’t say, remarked the head of Nicholas Cage.
Reddit is just another website exploiting poor human behavior for clicks.
Also reddit is trying to trick their user base into paying each other to work for reddit with reddit gold.
I don’t like that. I don’t like to see capital that tries to set labor up to recreate the capital/labor division within labor itself. Monetizing 4chan-lite seems amoral.
I find Reddit to be quite interesting. There’s something for everyone. You can find kindred spirits, no matter what you’re nerdy about. It’s funny, it’s entertaining, it’s mean, it’s tragic, it’s horrible, it’s great!
Yeah, but Reddit.
I think more focused, “curated” (sorry!) outlets like Medium or DeviantART serve the purpose the author is talking about better than a blaring wall of noise and shit you need to sift through to find occasional gold flakes.
Any other favorite aggregators/distillers of user-generated creative content? (sorry AGAIN i dont know whats wrong with me today)
There’s really not. There are ideas that can get 51% of the community to agree with them. A 49% opinion on a polarizing topic is quite literally disappeared by the ranking algo. It’s a platform where mob rule, groupthink and silencing are built into its very structure and held up as virtues.
Quiet moments of individual creation – that messy, incomplete, and internal process – have no place there if they challenge the 51% opinion. Hyper engaged single-issue-voters work to send pushback into oblivion. Counter-narratives are disappeared before they are even finish speaking. Compare that to the systemic biases of Tumblr, which rewards uniqueness. Not accidental that you’ll find far more LGTBQ, brown and kink stuff there.
I’ve started unsubscribing from any subreddit where misogyny regularly wins the top comments; it’s not that there isn’t also value there, but that it was draining me to see it daily. The big defaults forums are all gone. Professional topics are gone (software). I’m down to a few unpopular art forums and pictures of bikes. It’s a slower, more livable place. It’s also somewhat boring. I read books more than I did.
I can see reddit as a place for artists to carefully shape entertainments to the needs of young men. I’m not shocked that Hollywood finds this valuable.
I know that I’m old and comfy in my filter bubble when there are websites that I can go weeks without thinking about.
But I still miss memepool.
Digital sharecropping?
Ah, Reddit. Home of such wholesome subreddits as r/jailbait, r/creepshots, r/beatingwomen r/thefappening etc. I know they eventually shut them down, but only as a result of the bad press, rather than the harm they were causing.
No. All terrible and wrong.
Long time reader, first time poster…
I think reddit serves an useful purpose, as do other sites and forum like communication software which is strongly based on reader voting. It hits at those ideas of improvement by peer review and democracy.
I dislike it however, because a lot of the best things said are unpopular. It kind of forces people to write in a way that will appeal to everyone, which can definitely corrupt the material.
I also believe it fosters group think, largely because of these factors.
There are, of course, positives to this system, or kind of system, and I do agree it has its’ place.
For my own artistic focused writing, I would never put it on that sort of forum. A lot of times I am writing to try and find or express hard truths, so some of my best stuff very well could be condemned by such a method… and I could start to taint my work, instead of doing it for the art and the journey, I believe I would start doing it to appeal to people.
eg, people condemn one thing I write, praise another… the later could actually be crap, while the former might be my best stuff ever.
Not to condemn popular art, I am usually a very big fan. But to get it popular with a wide range of readers you do have to severely water it down.
It’s interesting that a pro-Reddit article is posted just as Reddit is embroiled in a huge controversy over censorship and corruption.
Many ex-redditors are jumping ship (remember the 4chan exodus to 8chan anyone?). I for one have a big bag of popcorn ready.
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