cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53085066
This article looks at Reddit as a “comment economy.” Beneath the rhetoric of community and information sharing, the platform’s economic incentives favor conformity, reaction, endless engagement, and compulsive commenting over independent thought, meaningful discourse, and the exchange of knowledge.
Reddit’s revenue ultimately depends upon the creation of, extended attention to and the scrolling through of massive amounts of comments. This produces advertising opportunities, data value, repeat visits and valuable user engagement metrics.
“One account had approximately 200,000 comment karma and only a few hundred post karma. This is the person Reddit wants to keep. This type of guy (the most aggressive users still seem to be guys) will not get his account banned.”
Bullshit, they banned my account and it was a higher comment karma number than this. The bans made no sense. On top of that they are using pixel (or something similar) so I made a new account it was insta-banned. I said “fuck it” and havent been back even as an offline user.
Although Reddit possesses many of the structural features of a public sphere, its economic incentives increasingly reward bias, outrage, conformity and superficial engagement instead of the kind of informed discussion and critical reflection that could lead to beneficial social change.
Unfortunately not enough people realized this three years ago, and most still don’t.
the article can just condense it to propaganda ragebaiting.
I was part of that ban sweep. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
thier revenue depends google and open AI SCRAPING the comment seciton and posts. as of recently thier bot traffic/scraping drop so much that reddit is trying to force lurkers to login now, so they do everything disincentivize any lurking at all. All this lurking was cause by thier original ban/purges too.