i actually knew one of these powerusers in the early 2010s. he had leukemia, and i signed up to be a match to donate spinal marrow for him. i visited him in the hospital a bunch. he hasn’t acknowledged me since. that was a real bummer, but, i tend to see friends where they don’t exist so that might be on me.
i am a little bummed that i got permabanned just because i was so close to all of the reddit founders and early employees. i personally prevented alexis from getting arrested for trying to openly smoke weed on the street in pittsburgh when it was still the kind of thing that got you put in prison for a few years if your skin is darker than popcorn.
steve huffman in particular is a shitter and always has been. think of that kid you knew growing up who would make up that his dad worked at SEGA and that Goku was going to be in the next Sonic game — that’s spez, still, to this day. he is “mr. namedropper.” steve, genuinely, i do not care that you saw Beyoncé at the airport.
ETA: since people are being weird about phrasing, i signed up to be a match. his alias back then was Dacvac. i literally sat in bars and watched him mod /r/pics on an iPad. believe me or don’t, i’m just some schmoe online after all.
believe me or don’t
It doesnt really matter either way but I’m inclined to believe you because you aren’t exactly going to get kudos for being close to reddit founders on the fediverse so this is more like a confession than a brag. FWIW I enjoyed the context.
I know there’s at least one admin that also moderates r/news. That’s how I got permbanned a second time. They don’t like it when you point out obvious bots.
You’d think Spez’s “landed gentry” would have better things to do.
So thats why Ibwas perma banned too
One of my older Reddit accounts was blocked on several top subs for abusing the report button.
One of those super mods posted a photo of someone endangering their pet on multiple subs. The content was literally against site-wide rules but also broke sub-level rules on each of the subs it was posted. I reported the photo on each sub it was posted to separately. Unbeknownst to me at the time, that super mod was a mod of every single one of those subs. So, they had the ability to ban/block me on each one for “abuse”.
It’s kinda sad really that reddit mods get a power trip from banning people when reddit accounts are disposable unless you care about karma for some reason. I got banned site wide and from various subs multiple times and it would only take a few minutes to be up and running again with a new account. I even had a script to transfer over my subscriptions. Never got done for ban evasion either, despite having a static IP address. It got to the point where I’d create a new account at least once a month even if I wasn’t banned just to have a clean slate.
This is how Digg fell.
Digg went sideways because of “power users,” among other things.
I think we are in a much different time than the Digg days. Reddit has much more power over their users than Digg ever did. If you leave Reddit, you are leaving all your niche communities and the boatload of user created content.
I left as an active user, but if I want to see conversations about the latest episode of whatever show I’m watching, there is always an active discussion on Reddit. Or if I’m looking for some BIFL suggestions, I almost always end up on a Reddit thread from 2 years ago with exactly what I was looking for and 8 different opinions.
I am hopeful that all this stuff will slowly make its way to Lemmy, but until then, Reddit is in no danger of losing its user base.
Eh. There’s more than one kind of poweruser. The “people who are too online” are very different from the “accounts that exist to leverage social media for advertisement”.
Social media thrives on the whale users who are churning out content and hungry for engagement. It goes to shit when you’ve got your front page clogged with Native Ads and other shameless marketing gimmicks.
“churning out content” aka reposting old memes
The Internet, the fediverse included, seems like it’s mostly just different buckets all containing the slop.
Want to know what’s fucked? People on Reddit are openly advocating for Concentration Camps and the Mods have ID gated subs like alcoholics anonymous but if I bring up things like the leader of a sitting political party not only saying we should fund the Taliban with tax payers money but presenting it as a flagship policy for this party, I get my comment removed and my account shadow banned.
That’s where we are on Reddit right now.
Their Contributor Quality Score is basically the social media equivalent of a Social Credit Score. Not like karma, it’s a whole other system that demands you produce content for them or get shadow banned. It’s bonkers.
I mean it wouldn’t be the FIRST time an inexplicably beloved and dementia ridden Republican has funded the Taliban.
I was referring to the UK. IIRC Farage is very much a monarchist.
