PippinVanderspiegel

I’m really sorry to hear that they did this to you. I went through something similar, but only as a poster.

There was a really famous Usenet poster called Humdog who, back in 1994, wrote a brilliant essay called Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace. It talks of how cyberspace, instead of doing away with hierarchy and creating equality, actually commodifies its users and transfers power to large corporations.

cyberspace is a mostly a silent place. in its silence it shows itself to be an expression of the mass. one might question the idea of silence in a place where millions of user-ids parade around like angels of light, looking to see whom they might, so to speak, consume. the silence is nonetheless present and it is most present, paradoxically at the moment that the user-id speaks. when the user-id posts to a board, it does so while dwelling within an illusion that no one is present. language in cyberspace is a frozen landscape.

i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management.

You can read it all here:
https://archive.org/details/pandoras-vox-on-community-in-cyberspace-by-humdog-1994
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Hermosillo

It really does show that none of this is new. It’s what the internet really always has been.

I first joined Reddit in 2007 when it was a genuinely friendly and informative place. The first big change came with the Digg exodus which brought mainstream meme culture. I think at that point, Conde Nast starting putting serious pressure onto management for Reddit to become more of a social network. This then led to the broken UI changes which, as you say, brought the wider bell-curve of humanity with it.

The problem is that Reddit simply didn’t have the security controls/moderation in place for that type of activity. By 2016, Reddit was being widely manipulated by outside sources – Large corporations were hiring troll-farms to shill their products; Nation-state actors were doing the same; political activists were trolling/abusing Reddit’s systems in any way they could – doxxing, death threats, extreme trolling…

And the friendliness and trust were gone forever. And instead of having discussions, it’s now just everyone shouting over each other.

Now the management just want to cash out and using Reddit is now like writing a college essay while sitting in a McDonalds basmement eating a stale three-hour old Big Mac.