I haven't really used Reddit in about 2 years, since reddit banned 3rd party apps. I used "Reddit Is Fun" for years, and hated the walled-garden Reddit was starting to create. I created a Lemmy account instead, which has since scratched the itch but I am considering deleting as well, as I mentioned in my blogpost about reclaiming my attention span.
Since then, I have gone to the website a couple dozen times for the sake of its best feature: honest, crowd-sourced reviews of products and services. I have noted something quite disheartening and almost infuriating some of those times: Reddit communities have become living advertisement and astro-turfing cesspools.
Now before anyone accuses me of exaggerated let me caveat one thing: I am not referring to your favorite little <50k-sub subreddit. However, I am fairly confident that all the front-page subs and any sub dedicated to a product has a team of unpaid social media interns filling the comment sections with nothing but positivity about the product and either shooting down or outright mod-removing criticism.
Beyond the obvious, provable presence of social media managers and 'official accounts', Reddit forum structure and culture has made it really easy to fall into the "criticism of what I like is criticism of me" mentality. I wrote about the phenomenon at length my essay on 'haters' but it bears repeating that redditors have become so attached to the things they consume that they cannot separate criticism of the product or service from criticism of their own thought process or ability to reason.
As people began attaching their identities to the products they bought or the media they were fans of, any critique of someone/something you stanned was no longer just someone else's analysis or opinion, it was an attack on you... Set aside the fact that someone calling your favorite show 'mid' was accusing you of poor taste - which your aristocratic sensibilities should be appalled by! - that person was now calling a part of you 'mid'.
This makes them not only combative when criticism does pop up, but it also transforms them into the best promoters for the products they like.
Reddit has always been a great platform for promotion; I remember a time when Barack Obama's "Ask Me Anything" was the top post of all time on the site. The sheer mass of users is Reddit's most valuable asset and, as it heads towards IPO, its largest product as well.
I tend to belabor the point on this blog, so in an attempt to not do that, here are some examples of what I've observed lately with some short context.
- r/Kindle user top commenter dismisses concerns about Kindle being a locked-down ecosystem:
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People who complain about the ecosystem are people that fail to understand what a kindle is for and don't want to accept the realities of the digital rights. I also get a feeling that there are several people that like to come here just to trash on kindles in general, a lot of them are Kobo users whom I guess are bored from using their Kobos and come here to trash kindles.
- Found this thread when I was doing research on whether the Kindle Paperwhite SE is worth the extra money over the regular Paperwhite
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- r/Privacy explicit rule against 'FUD' and regularly receives comments/posts from the official Proton team
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Please don’t fuel conspiracy thinking here. Don’t try to spread FUD, especially against reliable privacy-enhancing software. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Show credible sources and learn how to spot fake news.
- Conspiratorial thinking is bad, but 'Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt' is a term typically used by communities like r/Crypto to silence legitimate concerns over issues with a product. It's just a bit eyebrow-raising that a Privacy community would want people to just go along with software they've deemed 'reliable' instead of allowing people to bring up concerns.
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- r/NYC users praise the benefits of the Whole Foods Credit card, even going as far as to say Whole Foods is cheaper than most grocery stores
- This one is just weird... comments read like bots or copy-pasted adverts but accounts have long comment history.
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I just use my prime card and buy through Amazon and get it delivered tbh - same 5% and I don’t have to carry heavy groceries. It’s $100 a year for unlimited free deliveries over $35 —- pays for itself in convenience easily.
Unfortunately I don't believe the 'Federated Internet' can change the overall I-am-what-I-consume culture, but maybe it can reduce the amount of corporate advertisements masquerading as discussion.
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kagumail.uselessly535@passinbox.com
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