Remember when Spez said it was “It’s time we grow up and behave like an adult company”? Apparently, that means paying himself $193 million and single-handedly tanking Reddit’s profitability right b…::undefined

  • Radical DogEnglish
    19•9 months ago

    The myth of Aaron Swartz continues…

    He was a big proponent of free speech absolutism. He’d have been more than happy with the jailbait subs, watchpeopledie, fatpeoplehate etc. I really don’t think he deserves a free pass just because Reddit wasn’t enshittifying while he was around, as it was in a growth phase. It had other problems which needed resolution.

    • @frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
      36•9 months ago

      I can see where he picked up that attitude. It was common in the hacker types of the late 90s/early 2000s regardless of where their politics lay otherwise. Around the time he died, many of them were starting to see the monster that was created out of that, but it wasn’t really obvious until the 2016 election.

      • @Serinus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2•9 months ago

        And the idea was that we should be better than that. We’re more educated now than people have been since at least the Roman times, and probably ever.

        We’re supposed to be able to handle free speech absolutism and simply bust through all the bullshit and logical fallacies. We’re supposed to have the tools to find the truth, and therefore be resistant to propaganda.

        Even after all this, I don’t think it’s our education that is lacking. It’s our lack of community that makes us vulnerable. It’s easier than ever to pick and choose who your limited “community” is, outside of family. And there’s a reason family is taking the brunt of the pressure now.

        The boomer adage of never talking about religion or politics has killed us. People used to fight and die over politics, and now we can’t even talk about politics with close family. Better to avoid the subject and just let dad go out and vote for the guy idolizing mein kampf.

        It’s especially a failure of our churches. One of the few places we still have a third place, a community, and most have failed to lead their people to truly Christian values. How can the way Republicans treat immigrants reconcile with Christianity? Their stance on guns while children are being murdered regularly enough that we can’t name all the schools anymore? Go ahead and rattle off the easy four before clicking the spoiler. I’ll wait. ::: spoiler spoiler Columbine, Newtown, Sandy Hook, Uvalde ::: Sorry, Parkland, I forgot you. And sorry for all the others I can’t name.

        The idea that any and all information should be free isn’t new. The idea that we should have the wisdom to discern the truth and handle the chaff hadn’t been tested so hard in a long time.

    • @Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
      13•9 months ago

      https://web.archive.org/web/20031229025933/http:/bits.are.notabug.com/

      Share Child Pornography

      In the US, it is illegal to possess or distribute child pornography, apparently because doing so will encourage people to sexually abuse children.

      This is absurd logic. Child pornography is not necessarily abuse. Even if it was, preventing the distribution or posession of the evidence won’t make the abuse go away. We don’t arrest everyone with videotapes of murders, or make it illegal for TV stations to show people being killed.

    • BlanketsWithSmallpoxEnglish
      4•9 months ago

      WPD has it’s place and there was nowhere on the internet that was nearly as sanitized as it was on reddit compared to other gore sites.

      That morbid curiosity in my twenties helped me through a lot.

      • Radical DogEnglish
        4•9 months ago

        I guess it’s the one I care least about that I listed. Substitute in the overtly racist subreddits, if you wish, as they surely didn’t deserve a platform.

    • @db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2•9 months ago

      You have to admit that comparatively he was the least rotten apple in that basket though.