To be fair, people stopped after starting a witch hunt for the Boston bombers and identifying the completely wrong people. It may very well be the case that they over corrected, but there is at least a good reason for the change overall. (also corporate interests I suppose, fuck them though)
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I'm not sure one has much to do with the other. I completely agree that the Boston bombing investigation was a witch hunt, no argument here. But witch hunts target individuals, and individuals are entitled to a certain degree of privacy which one would hope would protect them from an uninformed mob.
But airing your employers' dirty laundry is whistle-blowing. It should be protected, especially if the industry secret is anti-consumer, dangerous, or illegal. And importantly, a corporation isn't an individual, so they shouldn't benefit from protections for individuals.
It's tempting to think that we don't see the Name and Shame posts actually naming and shaming because of Reddit's interests with advertisers. But I think it's also just as likely that users don't want to be identified leaking secrets - likely due to the litigious nature of their employers.
Reddit also gets a lot of blame for shit that actually came out of 4chan in that case. Though reddit definitely amplified it.
I just got a warning and [removed by reddit] because I told a dry cut story about turkish coworkers of mine harassing women and queer people and talking about stuff like "buying wifes" from their home country as an answer to someone posting a similar story. I got warned for "promoting hate and violence against marginalized groups". I made no generelizations, promoted no violence or hate. I actually got upset because of my coworkers doing exactly that. This is not the internet as I know it. Where you get censored because you talked about something that happened in your life.
As a Turkish person, ooph. Sorry you had to deal with that.
We've got some nice coming from Turkey, but also a bunch of shit heels. These days the latter outnumber the former, sadly.
These days the latter outnumber the former, sadly.
It feels like that lately no matter where you happen to live.
Every country has some shit people. It's inevitable. Just gotta hope us good ones make it better.
It's been like that ever since China/Tencent invested. I noticed soon after that investment there was a huge degradation in freedom of speech on the platform.
It was a Wild West but I'm not sure the Lemmy community would have liked it much - there was a lot of content in the "offensive to everyone" category and people generally didn't mind as long as it was contained in its own subreddits. That doesn't seem to be the attitude of "kids these days".
Not to mention that one time they made a woman a CEO just to ban the fat people hate sub because it was making the whole site look bad and then fired her to pin the decision on her just being a bitch feminist
Bruh the Ellen Pao hate was fucking insane. People like to pretend that Reddit got worse post-Trump or gamergate, but lbr the deplorable behaviour was always there, it just wasn't "political" yet.
The big Lemmy instances are constantly inundated with posts to defederate from unscrupulous instances, which to me seems like a stronger version of siloing off content than what early reddit was like.
remember when space dicks would get front page. or imgoingtohellforthis
I've been on reddit since the fall of digg. It was a wild time that's for sure.
I remember when they had reddit meetups. I stupidly brought my toddler thinking it was going to be family friendly. The places they hosted were peoples workplaces. One guy rented a limo. Beer was given away for free. Some women walked around shirtless and one creep was taking videos. Feeling unsafe, I left. Then I got a email about how the hosts were looking for the creep because he may have committed a crime, and was asking for money to pay for the broken office equipment.
Wild time.
Same. It was a really fun unique place for a long time.
Yeah, I remember... But I also remember nearly a decade of shills and astroturfing. Fuck Reddit.
nearly a decade
It was the god damn 2016 election, wasn't it? That's the period when I noticed the rapid decline.
For me, it became undeniable after the gamestop fiasco. I used to sub to wallstreetbets way back before all that. It was one of the last genuinely funny places on the internet. I'm lucky, i got in on those shares at £45 and sold at roughly somewhere round about £420.69.
After the day the price shot up to that, the place was just flooded with bots trying to get anyone to spend their money in any place but gamestop. You even had some mugs trying to short silver which, for anyone not in the know, you'd need about all the money in the world to do that.
But yeah, now, everything going on there is going to be ultra analysed by every fund in the world. Oh, they also fired all the admins and replaced them just before the flood gates opened.
I think its then that people saw the potential for flooding reddit with bots and shills.
In Japan, we have to be careful because a company could sue for reputational damage (even if the claims are 100% true and provable). Same for some other examples like posting a pic of someone with his mistress or basically anything with their face.
I remember when it was a teeming swamp of T_D memers. Afaik it is again.
Reddit wouldn't censor those names. People are self censoring on the big subreddits
There is currently a tiny bit of uproar over at r/irelandshittydrivers. A user took a photo of a work van that blocked two disabled spots. He sent the photo via Whatsapp to the company, which responded in a batshit crazy manner (for some reason, escalated it to praising Osama for 9/11). Naturally, the user posted the photo and the conversation to Reddit. Within a few hours, the company contacted Reddit and had the post removed. If a company with perhaps three customers per week can do it, what do you think large companies can do? Censoring user posts would be only the tip of the iceberg.
Reddit wasn't mainstream then. Comments could go unnoticed for months.
Even in 2010 the front page was a shitshow. The smaller communities are generally their own thing but i'd say reddit often did more harm than good.
I got permabanned instantly from r/mildlyinfuriating because an idiot mod read the word "criminal" as "black person" and assumed I am racist.
That shit hole can die in a fire. Mirror their content over here(it isn't theirs) and let them bleed out.
PUBLIC SHAMING WORKS ON BULLIES
I don't think lemmy could withstand the onslaught of popularity that came with giving out "reddit hugs" to domains, and with lack of moderation the toxicity levels could easily soar. so just be careful what we wish for or the communities will become the things we hate.
I miss it. I came over right after Digg died, almost half a decade before 2010. Thought it was the ugliest site I had ever seen and found it super confusing.
People did largely speak their minds though, lots of controversial posts and uncensored humor, yeah it was nice, but the change in Reddit really mirrors general cultural changes too, it was more driven by Gen X and older millennials, more tech driven, and more what people would call edgy.
It was the wild west not so much because Reddit specifically was, but because that's what broad tech bro Internet culture was. We also had relatively unmoderated Xbox Live and online gaming and other things that are hard to explain to folks now.
What we would call social media existed, Digg called it Social Bookmarking for a Digg / Reddit / Slashdot model. Myspace was just giving away to Facebook, Twitter was getting off the ground, and chat rooms, like Yahoo chatrooms and Geocities were so unhinged back then.
2005 is around the time that Yahoo started looking major ground to Google when just a few years prior it was the undisputed default search engine.
Neat to think about all this again.
I was on here and called out a billionaire that fucked over me and my company because they didn't want to pay what they owed. I named, I shamed, and assholes on here defended the billionaire.
I came to Lemmy to get away from Reddit, not to reminisce about how good it used to be.
Then block the community literally called c/reddit and move on with your life.