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r/ZeroWaste mod talks about ongoing "plague of bots" spamming comments at an extremely high rate
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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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This is something I’ve been wondering for awhile: if I were a mod on Reddit, and was being threatened by the admins to bend the knee, as it were, my response would likely be to remove any and all tools i had put in place to help me moderate, and say, “goodbye.”
I’m sure there’s something I’m just not understanding, but why isn’t this happening?
Because people really don't want to lose the time and investment they've put into building these huge communities.
It's like if the king just decides that your really healthy neighborhood and community, that you're a community leader in and are constantly defending against the shittiest companies and groups dumping garbage all over and ruining and harassing the residents (and whatever the equivalent to blocking posters of illegal things is), will suddenly charge you an extreme amount of money to do your volunteer job, and the clubhouse leaders/owners and other businesses an insane amount of money just to use the land (because the king wants that land to put up billboards instead) - because he wasn't making enough money on them before, but only because he wasn't charging them any money. And in reality, the king wants to sell the kingdom to China for several billion dollars and just wants to show how much money can be made from the billboards instead of the businesses and community centers.
Man. Fuck u/spez. Outcast that mofo rather than the platform. I wish somebody would just coup his ass, but everybody in his sort of position just always ruins it. Always. So it's the system, not solely him; it's the goal of... Internet Platforms. It's literally the same problem with government anywhere: if you have a monarchy, eventually, they'll do shitty stuff and eventually try to ruin it.
What's the solution?
Your question has been asked even in the Roman forum, and even for millennia before. Perhaps there is no solution - perhaps its an integral part of the human condition. But we will never stop searching.
There has to be a way for society to function healthily for all, and to disable corruption at the same time. There HAS to.. Like, if we can feel when something is bad, we can eventually articulate it, and if we can eventually articulate it, we should be able to design ways to make it better. The society programming will get more and more complex until we figure it out.
I think knowing what we want is key. And to want, you have to first know. We've simultaneously made so much progress in the past 100 years, but also so, so little. The human condition is slow-mode.
have you watch cgp Grey's video called rules for rulers? I think therein lies a lot of answers. the TL;DW version is that rulers need to keep their other top ministers happy lest they revolt. they have no such strong incentive to cater to the common people. I suspect while keeping the ministers happy they engage in either illegal or not entirely legal actions at least once in a while. indeed to rise as a ruler you probably can't be too moral either.
so of course they don't want to take away their tools that help them stay in power. I think the solution lies in what we accept from leaders in terms of amoral conduct. and there's the conundrum. this needs to be a society wide thing where the vast majority recognize blamrnshifting, gaslighting, moving the goalposts and so on. and don't accept to be manipulated and lied to that way. most people simply don't care. and most people also use these exact same manipulation tools in their life as well. which in turn means they don't want that taken away either.
that's essentially exactly what we see play out in reddit too. most people can't be bothered to act on spez's selfishness. and the mods who by rights should be bothered cling to hard to their own little fiefdoms of absolute power.
Benevolent AI leader.
The issue is that power and money corrupt.
The man in power won't be giving it up voluntarily. So you join the revolution, and follow a charismatic leader into a civil war. You win and in the end you find out, you have been backing Napoleon and now he's the one chopping off heads.
Napoleon wasnt all that bad of a choice to back though. His decisions did a lot of lasting good.
Having backed Robespierre though must have made a lot of people feel really silly about themselves.
Napoléon certainly got a lot more people killed than Robespierre.
He was a military genius but the battle he fought still had a lot of blood from French and other. Millions of dead for nothing but some little man glory.
Only 30 000 died because of the terror
It's not knowing what we want, we all know what we WANT, it's knowing what we NEED. We WANT to have more than anybody else (More money, more power, more ... things)... But it's not what we NEED. We need food, water, air, a safe place to sleep, love.
But we instead spend a bunch of time, resources and energy on things we don't really need, and convince everyone else that THINGS define our worth, that we can only be good if others are worse off. We promote greed and hatred. We APPLAUD that shit and then try to emulate it. It's not what we need though.
The answer that humanity has come up with, which is, of course, imperfect, but the best we seem to be able to do is democracy.
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
Which only works with an educated and informed base of voters. Which is probably why the people who corrupt all forms of government spend so much effort in making sure we remain ignorant and misinformed.
There's no solution in the same way that there's no "solution" to winning rock-paper-scissors. The cycle is endless because the desire to be in control is a key part of human nature, whether that be an authoritarian "I want everyone to do what I say" or a more oligarchic "I accept that there's others at my level, so we can cooperate so that everyone else does what we say", and any attempt to change those systems requires an equivalent amount of force that can all too easily lead one into side-tangents of trying to keep said force focused.
As a side note, Machiavelli identified the cycle in politics in his "Discourse on Livy" - a powerful and strong-willed individual takes power (e.g. Caesar or Napoleon), his descendants wield power with less and less efficiency until in time the aristocracy seize the reins, and they get more and more corrupt and out of touch until finally the people rise up and enforce some level of democratic sway. Unfortunately, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, which is exhausting, and so over time things run down until some powerful and strong-willed individual takes power and it all starts again. It's not purely linear - an aristocracy can be subsumed into a strong individual leadership (e.g. the popes in the 19th century grabbing power back from the cardinals) and a king can be overthrown by a democratic uprising (e.g. Louis XVI of France - though technically it did go through a brief aristocratic moment, as he re-convened the parliament to try and get around the nobility who wouldn't fund his wars, indicating his powers had weakened). But in general we oscillate between these three modes of social organisation because of the difficulty in centralising power and in then keeping it from being corrupted (i.e. using it for selfish purposes) once it is centralised.
Crossposted to https://kbin.social/m/BestOf
the solution is to collectivize reddit but I do not have a good plan about how to do that.
I'm not sure I understand what that means. Can you elaborate?
(Cool thing about this place, I've found, is that longer format answers aren't shunned, which makes me really happy and excited for the future)
I believe they're referring to collective ownership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_ownership
I suppose if every Reddit user bought stock at the IPO... Yeah... Not practical.
Welp, that's why we're here making our own social media with blackjack and hookers!
it would be kind of like that except that
spez et al wouldn't be able to choose to keep a controlling number of shares. all the shares would be offloaded. he could have 1 share just like any other user.
laws that govern publicly traded businesses would not apply. it would be a coop or other model. details would depend on jurisdiction(s) but many do have separate legal structures for such entities. In the US, REI and in Canada, MEC are buyer coops which are fairly well known. There are also housing coops and other structures for inspo.
shares could only be owned by people who had a specific kind of interest in the project, such as being individual users, mods etc. furthermore, individuals would be limited in number of shares (e.g. 1 share each)
This is not a fully formed proposal. :) but in terms of thinking about how the world could be I think a worthwhile train of thought.
a person who was interested in this kind of thing could do a websearch for "the cooperative movement" for historical context. not to be overly rosy about it, the movement basically failed to accomplish its goals at the end of the day. however, it did make a lot of good interventions while it was existing. for example the famed (if crumbling) canadian health are system is a result of cooperative farmers' movement. furthermore, coops which continue to exist under capitalism experience a lot of tensions and can become corrupted.
also lookup: Mondragon in spain
TL;DR: The sunk cost fallacy. It's the tendency for people to carry on doing something even when abandoning it would be better for us. Because we have invested our time, energy, or other resources, we feel "it would have all been for nothing" if we quit now.