HandsHurtLoL

I would have been willing to pay reddit $3 directly if it meant avoiding ads entirely before all of this blew up.

I recently have been coming out in professional contexts in my workplace and have never been the person who wears a lot of pride merch. I've worn ally symbols often, but not as a central point.

I recently attended my first Pride event and I got a free wristband that I've been wearing every day since. I was thinking I would put it away after June, but this made me tear up. I think this should be something I sincerely incorporate into my self presentation so that others who need the safety know they can count on me for it.

I think prospects of going public via IPO were tanked when a tech giant like Google is publicly venturing opinions about the platform.

I am hoping that the new users are coming here with the intent to learn how this community works, before we try to remake the community we just left.

I counter this part of your post by throwing in there that for me and my time on reddit, the worst parts of the broader experience were the fact that communities of neo-nazis (r/conservative, r/conspiracy), Donald Trump cultists (r/the Donald), incels (numerous subreddits including r/incels and r/theredpill), and pedophiles (r/just18 among other porn based subreddits that were quarantined and banned several years ago) were allowed their own communities on the platform for as long as they were. This gave these horrible ideas time to draw attention and build a userbase that then degraded the quality of reddit across multiple other communities.

If kbin or lemmyworld immediately start banning or defederating these instances or communities/magazines, then to me that is how this larger community works and it is inherently not former redditors migrating here to shape the Fediverse in the image of reddit.

I think though that the trade off to not getting paid is that you run your sub however you want. The mod teams set community standards, but rarely are expected you do so democratically. Not all mod teams ruled with an iron fist, but some did. That's the perk when your labor is free.

In my 11+ years of experience, the few times mods made things democratic in subs (prior to reddit going dark this month) were when a new feature of the community cropped up that was divisive but popular, the mod team actually agreed or liked that be feature of the community but didn't want to be viewed as embracing something that was drawing ire from a vocal portion of the community, so the mods opened it to a vote to avoid the controversy of overtly picking sides and let the trolls and brigades overrun a voting system to codify the new feature into the community. This gave mods enough cover and plausible deniability about their hands being tied and the people have spoken, so who are we to ban all neo-Nazi memes? or whatever the divisive topic was.

What do you gain by going to bat so hard for someone who doesn't even know you exist? To be so loyal that you're required to go into mental contortions to explain away the facts presented to you so that you can find the most generous rendition of what's going on?

I'm surprised you're referencing Geocities and MySpace because your post really smacks of young-person naivete.

You're severely overlooking overhead costs and multiple revenue streams for reddit in terms of profitability. Yes, it costs money to employ people, but servers and data costs money too. I remember when reddit was NOT its own photo and video hosting site, and everything that was posted as OC was hosted on imgur, flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, and other content hosting websites that were prepared to scale. Instead of defending why Spez has to find more money, why is cutting costs for probably reddit's biggest expense not on the table? Seems to me that reddit took on all the cost and liability of content hosting without there being any asset to the website for doing so.

Additionally, there are multiple revenue streams for reddit. Yes, ad revenue is one thing, but also reddit coins were another stream. I can't even remember the layout of the reddit webpage right now because it's been so long since I've logged in on a laptop, but does anyone else remember the years in which every day, the front page had a progress bar of how much of the daily cost for reddit had been met through the purchase of reddit coins?? Why didn't reddit just become a subscription model? I would have gladly paid $3/month to keep the lights on. Multiply $3 by the massively addictive nature of reddit and its multiple million userbase, and reddit could have set the Guinness book world record for social media profitability.

2X would get brigaded and trolled by douchebags from r/The Donald before that sub was quarantined and then closed (which was about the time 2X became a default sub), but before it became a default sub, it was a large but mostly niche interest. It was on the radar for incels and ne'erdowells, but those were relatively small fires for the mod team to put out case-by-case through temp and permanent bans. But once 2X became default - and reddit cares was created - this is when I saw even non-antagonizing men feel welcome to join the discussions and throw their weight around to always say "not all men" in response to whatever the OP was. It was largely counterproductive. The mod team at the time protested the incluaion of 2X on the default subs list when that feature was announced.

Heaven forbid TwoXChromosomes not be a default subreddit. I remember when not every OP was badgered so badly in the comments that she had to go back and ETA "not all men" to the post text. Or how women with scathing and accurate insights about the patriarchy didn't have to always have reddit cares reports filed on their accounts!

Apparently Musk hasn't considered the number of cisgendered allies to the trans* community who are willing to describe themselves as cis/cisgendered.

Bastion of free speech McGee.

I don't have more context to add to this since I'm not from Europe, but the author is associated with a centre-right political think tank in Europe, so read this piece with that critical piece of information.

Although this flew well below the radar for me in incendiary language (though very colorful language was present), it was light on very specific details. Example: clear claim being made that small farms are being shuttered, but no detail provided on how the CAP limits being reduced are causing that. These are simply two facts strung together closely enough to imply a correlation. But like, name one such farm that is being shut down for going over the lowered CAP limits.

Do what you need to do for your mental health, but not paying attention to the bad faith actors is how they have gotten away with so much for so long to the point it is now so brazen.