I’d go even further back, with hindsight. During the us elections 2016 it became basically transparent the platform was being manipulated, and it wasn’t very sophisticated at that time. It’s really only evolved since then - but there used to be real people to call out the BS.
All before we even get to the corporate fiefdom spez has decided he’d like reddit to be.
Remember in 2013 when reddit made a blog post about reddit meetup day with some statistics and they accidentally left in Eglin Air Force Base as the “most addicted city?”
Of course, can’t have the plebs knowing that the site is manipulated by the US military, so they hid the truth, but archive.org remembers.
It’s just as likely there’s no conspiracy there. It’s reasonable that Reddit was just big at that one particular place, more than other place (per capita), which can make sense given that those people actually talk to each other more than a typical city would.
I do think the US government was pretty good about not propagandizing its own people from within the government. There was a long period of time where non-partisan roles were expected to remain non-partisan. That’s part of why the Biden admin didn’t go after Trump like they should have. They didn’t even want the potential appearance of partisan government. In hindsight, yeah, that may have been foolish. They were fighting a five alarm fire with dollar store plastic squirt guns.
2016 is when russian troll farms started to realize reddit was ripe for the taking, started taking off in 2017, and by 2018, political based bans were in fact, even misconstrued posts. plus r/conspiracy was started to be taking over by conservatives. after reddit banned many “donald trump” subs they went looking for next best one to take over.
also the same time i was calling out ragebaiting around the same time articles.
At least from particular subs, those users would get banned and their comment removed within seconds. 24/7. The response times is what convinced me it wasn’t just volunteer mods handling that.
I’d go even further back, with hindsight. During the us elections 2016 it became basically transparent the platform was being manipulated, and it wasn’t very sophisticated at that time. It’s really only evolved since then - but there used to be real people to call out the BS.
All before we even get to the corporate fiefdom spez has decided he’d like reddit to be.
Remember in 2013 when reddit made a blog post about reddit meetup day with some statistics and they accidentally left in Eglin Air Force Base as the “most addicted city?”
Of course, can’t have the plebs knowing that the site is manipulated by the US military, so they hid the truth, but archive.org remembers.
It’s just as likely there’s no conspiracy there. It’s reasonable that Reddit was just big at that one particular place, more than other place (per capita), which can make sense given that those people actually talk to each other more than a typical city would.
I do think the US government was pretty good about not propagandizing its own people from within the government. There was a long period of time where non-partisan roles were expected to remain non-partisan. That’s part of why the Biden admin didn’t go after Trump like they should have. They didn’t even want the potential appearance of partisan government. In hindsight, yeah, that may have been foolish. They were fighting a five alarm fire with dollar store plastic squirt guns.
Addicted to what? Reddit?
2016 is when russian troll farms started to realize reddit was ripe for the taking, started taking off in 2017, and by 2018, political based bans were in fact, even misconstrued posts. plus r/conspiracy was started to be taking over by conservatives. after reddit banned many “donald trump” subs they went looking for next best one to take over.
also the same time i was calling out ragebaiting around the same time articles.
At least from particular subs, those users would get banned and their comment removed within seconds. 24/7. The response times is what convinced me it wasn’t just volunteer mods handling that.
recently its done by REDDIT;s AI, removing comments or post automatically , not even the mods knew it happened.
There have basically always been automods of varying capabilities and complexity. Without those no sub ever would have enough moderation capability.
This wasn’t automod.