Are you by chance trapped in a submarine near the Titanic?

The worst possible fate for reddit would be if the mods became all reddit employees. You would have those mindless drones that don’t care about these protests or the legacy, and the entire conversation controlled by people that have money at stake depending on how the conversations go.

While I know it happened to an extent on the bigger subs, the control of the conversation is a huge. What made Reddit what it was is the ability to talk straight to an average person. People that have had similar experiences and have no skin in the game. If you have an issue with your 3d printer, for example, you can find someone in /r/3dprinting there who had the same issue with the same printer and find a real world way to fix it. If you google (and don’t click on the reddit link) you will find nothing but over bloated pages with no answer other than a product to buy, or a 15 minute youtube video with someone showing off all their fancy equipment and a possible answer… but they are sponsored by the company who sold the product that “fixes” it.

Or if a company runs an add campaign and it turns out they have a shit product and the conversation goes sideways, they can just remove the bad comments.

Or politics, someone posts something about a candidate and someone shows up, with receipts, with how they aren’t great. Those conversations can disappear if the person modding actually has money or a job depending on how the conversation goes when that candidate is mentioned.

Like I said, I know it already happens to an extent. But if the mods are all on the payroll they can steer the entire conversation. Facebook does it’s thing, usually with smaller audiences (People’s friends and family). Twitter someone can make a bs post but the comments are usually all gibberish. When someone sees something on Reddit, then all the top comments confirm it… people get that confirmation bias. That could be powerful, and… profitable.

The real hard pill to swallow is that Redditors, the people who created content and modded subs, for free… are no longer the END USERS. The END USERS are whoever wants to manipulate the masses. Politicians, advertisers etc.

The Redditors are now the PRODUCT.

The real tin foil hat part that is eating at me lately, I know, I am going to sound fucking nuts, but there is a huge push for the control of information lately. There was the nixing of net neutrality a few years ago and everyone’s solution was to use a VPN. They have been slowly boiling the water the frog is sitting in with that one. I can’t pay my home internet bill while I am at work connected to verizon unless I turn my VPN on. So it is happening.

Now, this RESTRICT ACT comes out of nowhere, banning VPN’s (Hmmm, that’s convenient) using communist China and TicTok as the scapegoat. While congress sits up there pretending they don’t know what a router is. The internet, a relatively new aspect of humanity, has let information spread like crazy. A politician can’t hide his shit by paying off the billionaires on the news. They just don’t have as much control of the narrative anymore. Their wars are hated, their tax cuts for the rich are obviously BS, the masses see the billionaires while they are on their phone while they sit on the toilet at their minimum wage jobs working for them through a pandemic.

The herd is pissed off. And their solution is to control the flow of information instead. And a mass majority of people just… don’t… fucking… care…

… yet

/rant

I swear I am not crazy.

I created https://lemmy.ml/c/azcardinals and promoted it on /r/azcardinals, (the only sub i am going to miss for gameday threads etc), and 99% of the comments were just talking about how stupid all these protests are and how the reddit app is fine and its the only app they ever used. Some of them didn’t even know their were 3rd party apps. 🤷‍♂️

A vast majority of users seem to not care. Like at all. Obviously if those people have only ever used the relatively new reddit app they are pretty casual and new users. I really think that is the disconnect here. /u/spez sees that reddit has exploded in the last 5 or so years and those numbers are a quick payday if he can monetize quickly. But the OG power users that created meaningful content and moderated subs are leaving (or honestly left years ago). The platform will become (more) recycled tiktoc reposts and reposted tweets with toxic, useless comment chains. And maybe it will thrive as a business with that type of traffic, but that wasteland is not somewhere I want to be.

You can subscribe and post on different instances. But, I don’t think all pertinent communities should be on one CENTRALIZED instance since that defeats the point of the Fediverse.