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[–] 193 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (23 children)

i actually knew one of these powerusers in the early 2010s. he had leukemia, and i signed up to be a match to donate spinal marrow for him. i visited him in the hospital a bunch. he hasn't acknowledged me since. that was a real bummer, but, i tend to see friends where they don't exist so that might be on me.

i am a little bummed that i got permabanned just because i was so close to all of the reddit founders and early employees. i personally prevented alexis from getting arrested for trying to openly smoke weed on the street in pittsburgh when it was still the kind of thing that got you put in prison for a few years if your skin is darker than popcorn.

steve huffman in particular is a shitter and always has been. think of that kid you knew growing up who would make up that his dad worked at SEGA and that Goku was going to be in the next Sonic game — that's spez, still, to this day. he is "mr. namedropper." steve, genuinely, i do not care that you saw Beyoncé at the airport.

ETA: since people are being weird about phrasing, i signed up to be a match. his alias back then was Dacvac. i literally sat in bars and watched him mod /r/pics on an iPad. believe me or don't, i'm just some schmoe online after all.

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  • [–] 110 points 1 year ago

    believe me or don't

    It doesnt really matter either way but I'm inclined to believe you because you aren't exactly going to get kudos for being close to reddit founders on the fediverse so this is more like a confession than a brag. FWIW I enjoyed the context.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Idek what reddits target audience is anymore seems to be chronically online teen girls typically on snark/fanfic social media pages are becoming the majority, all they talk about is random drama and reality shows so they arent getting banned for saying stuff lol

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  • [+] -19 points 1 year ago (19 children)

    he had leukemia, and i signed up to donate spinal marrow for him.

    if you had actually donated bone marrow, you would know that's not how this works.

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  • [–] 61 points 1 year ago (14 children)

    i had signed up to see if I am a match, which i would have donated if i had been selected. please show me where i mentioned actually donating bone marrow.

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  • [+] -59 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    That sounds quite different. Wording matters, especially in times of bot posts and clout posts.

    Also, no one signs up to be tested for a match with a specific person, not at those odds. So your new wording still doesn't reflect how typisation (not sure about that word) is done.

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  • [–] 43 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    The fuck? Yes it does, I lost a close friend to leukemia, and a ton of us went in to see if we would match with him. I don't know where you got your info from but you %100 can do this. It works the same damn way with organ donating as well.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That sounds like it must've been rough. I'm sorry for your loss.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago

    I don't wish that shit even on people I don't like, watching him go from a big happy guy who was 3 years from retirement to a skeleton in like 4 months was devastating. Adult leukemia is such a fucked up thing. He didn't even know he had it until it was to late. Any time my wife and I, and his wife go out to our favorite Mexican restaurant, it's like a nice little reminder he is with us still joking and eating the hottest salsa they make. I really miss him, but do remember the fun years we had with him. Really sucks he's gone though.

    Get your blood tested on a regular people, it might save your life.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I am sorry but you misunderstood the process. You do not check whether you match with a specific patient, but rather typisation is done to add potential donors to a larger database, from which hopefully a donor match is already available even before, because the chances for a match are so low that you can have a couple million people checked until you find a match. This is not blood groups.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Not even close, we worked with his doc and all had HLA tests done to see if we were a match for him. They also did the larger registery match list as well, but saying we didn't is bullshit.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It seems the doc validated your feelings that you wanted to help your friend then, but also set you up for disappointment by not telling you the odds, and that you were much more likely to be a match for some complete stranger.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The hell you on about? People do that all the time.

    I’m part of a big group now that is in a pool doctors all over the US can check to see if they can find a match for people, because a friend of mine died from leukemia a long time ago. They couldn’t find a match for him, but maybe I can match with someone else someday.

    BTW, gonna shamelessly plug NMDP. They do good work.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    See you mentioned the important bit: we get checked to be in a large database pool for potential patients. Not to match with a specific friend, because as nice as that would be, it is very unlikely to ever happen.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    So? There’s no harm in trying anyways. Why are you so against a small test on the off-chance it could save a friend’s life? It’s not as if you’re being asked to submit a whole kidney for testing or something.

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [+] -21 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yes, those people who know how bone marrow type matching works, and what the odds are. Also, OC has confirmed in their response that they didn't get to the point of a donation. And found better - albeit not entirely correct - wording for the process they allegedly signed up for.

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  • [–] 121 points 1 year ago (18 children)

    Digg went sideways because of "power users," among other things.

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  • [–] 63 points 1 year ago* (8 children)

    Eh. There's more than one kind of poweruser. The "people who are too online" are very different from the "accounts that exist to leverage social media for advertisement".

    Social media thrives on the whale users who are churning out content and hungry for engagement. It goes to shit when you've got your front page clogged with Native Ads and other shameless marketing gimmicks.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Digg's powerusers were often revealed to be selling their influence.

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  • [–] 30 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Many of these accounts weren't just freelancers. They were set up by marketing agencies, often with the explicit support of the social media hosting firm.

    Like, its in the fucking business model to sell artificial engagement and promotion.

    Might not even be a bad business model per say, if the promoted material wasn't so consistently slop.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    "churning out content" aka reposting old memes

    The Internet, the fediverse included, seems like it's mostly just different buckets all containing the slop.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I think we are in a much different time than the Digg days. Reddit has much more power over their users than Digg ever did. If you leave Reddit, you are leaving all your niche communities and the boatload of user created content.

    I left as an active user, but if I want to see conversations about the latest episode of whatever show I’m watching, there is always an active discussion on Reddit. Or if I’m looking for some BIFL suggestions, I almost always end up on a Reddit thread from 2 years ago with exactly what I was looking for and 8 different opinions.

    I am hopeful that all this stuff will slowly make its way to Lemmy, but until then, Reddit is in no danger of losing its user base.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    a lot of people aren't old enough to remember that when the digg exodus happened, reddit didn't even have subreddits yet. it was just links on one page, and we built our little subculture in the comments of each thread. that's why there is such a culture of commenting before reading the article (if at all) — it used to be a big, disorganized blob of chatty nonsense, much like Fark or MetaFilter were at the time too.

    reddit is a lovely example of how tech companies from 1995 to 2020 fell into success and figured out what their product does later down the line. to quote homer simpson when asked what his tech company does, "we're a website that sells computers.... or.... a computer that sells websites, I haven't decided yet."

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    While this is true, it's funny to watch them wrestle with the exact same problems right now. Literally on the front page of new Digg right now is converstions about fragmenting the user-base with blocks/bans, and how to establish friend groups.

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  • [–] 70 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I know there's at least one admin that also moderates r/news. That's how I got permbanned a second time. They don't like it when you point out obvious bots.

    You'd think Spez's "landed gentry" would have better things to do.

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  • [–] 66 points 1 year ago

    One of my older Reddit accounts was blocked on several top subs for abusing the report button.

    One of those super mods posted a photo of someone endangering their pet on multiple subs. The content was literally against site-wide rules but also broke sub-level rules on each of the subs it was posted. I reported the photo on each sub it was posted to separately. Unbeknownst to me at the time, that super mod was a mod of every single one of those subs. So, they had the ability to ban/block me on each one for "abuse".

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  • [–] 45 points 1 year ago (9 children)
  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Which explains why the Tetrarchs are so hardcore about deleting messages about it. Digg's death brought Reddit to prominence; they don't want the inverse to happen.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    No that happened because they rolled out a completely new method of submitting posts where paid partners could have direct access to the front page.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    That rollout further cemented the superusers dominating the front page issue, who were likely already being paid to promote certain sources/topics. Half the front page was dominated by mrbabyman.

    It just made it more official.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Ha! I had forgotten about mrbabyman, thank you for that reference!

    I think we are kind of splitting hairs, myself included.

    I believe we kind of all collectively share an understanding that Reddit is controlled and users are shown what the powers behind the curtain want the users to see.

    Something about the way Digg went about announcing how the front page was literally for sale, as a good thing, seems like a very quaint memory. From a naive time when somebody at the c-level literally thought it was okay to broadcast to the entire user base that now the site is for advertisers and whatever messaging was bought & paid for.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    At one point while I was still on Reddit I learned that there was another site that indexed the users with the highest post and comment scores. I looked at the top of the list and saw accounts that were relentless repost monsters. I went ahead and blocked all of them, and my Reddit experience immediately improved, as I stopped seeing the exact same shit reposted over and over, day after day. Then the API-ocalypse came, and I walked away and never looked back.

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  • [–] 31 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    If you assume they don't have multiple accounts

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (26 children)

    I wonder how Lemmy compares.

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  • [–] 45 points 1 year ago (22 children)

    Well i just saw pugjesus move ~10 comms to piefed so…

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  • [+] 33 points 1 year ago (8 children)
  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Most communities in the fediverse, to be fair, are pretty empty compared to their reddit counterpart

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • Eh, we are a lot smaller still I think. Reddit may have had about ~40x the users that Lemmy has at this stage. But you never know, we may get some random spike down the line. When you have 1 or 2 people in a community people give up, but if you have 20-40 it may seem pretty active and stay alive and grow.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    How should moderation work, instead?

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I have always liked the balanced approach that slashdot has.

    Users are asked by automation to moderate once they demonstrate reasonable engagement statistically. Then they are assigned a number of comments or posts to rate, not just updown votes but assign qualities, such as funny or insightful. This makes reading long threads more friendly.

    Also, more reliable moderators are invited to evaluate other moderations! Accountability!

    I am not sure why the model wasn't popular elsewhere.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    We had a whole drama cycle about /c/196 trying to move. But this one didn't even get a peep :D

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  • [+] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

    I absolutely think that's part of the strength of Lemmy.

    I have no idea why the Lemmy devs copied the reddit "lords and peasants" model of moderated interactions, and I don't know if Lemmy will survive long term against the tide of corruption that Reddit is in the late stages of right now. But at least it's pretty easy to move to a different fiefdom if you want to. If, for example, your home server lemmy.world gets all enshittified and filled with obnoxious interactions, you can just up and leave and still keep nearly all of your engagement if other people are in agreement.

    You can take a look at lemmy.ml or blahaj and see what Lemmy could look like if that wasn't possible. To me, moving servers when stuff gets weird is a healthy thing.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Defederation by nature will help that. On Reddit if the admins didn’t want “RandomTopic” they could ban it or lock it and other variants. On Lemmy you always go to another instance and make it there and the admins of the original instance can pound sand. And if they go as far to defederate there are still other instances out there that federate with it.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I had a conversation with a particular Lemmy-instance admin after getting banned for having the wrong opinions, and you could feel through the screen how frustrated he was that he couldn't just mechanically prevent me from saying certain things, because of being accustomed to being in an environment where he could dictate what conversations were allowed, and everyone had to be nice to him. To the point that it was this wild out-of-pocket thing if someone could speak to him without having to "talk up" to him. It was kind of fun honestly lol.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Lots of people like that IRL. I can't stand them but for some reason people find them charming. And they are always trying to manipulate and pit people against one another for their lulz. They love spreading rumors and talking shit behind people's backs.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    Ugh. I know someone like this currently. Easier to just ignore them. Sad part is they've actively made a friend of our group just... worse. Dude is way more emotionally volatile, doesn't wanna better himself at all, and smokes weed at all hours of the day.

    I wouldn't be upset at all if the jackass was just ruining his own life (As everyone including his own mother realizes what he is eventually) but him taking my buddy down to his level is infuriating. Hell, I actually think less of my friend now for falling for that shit too.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    the problem is people.

    no technology can prevent people from suffering from the errors of human psychology.

    people want to feel powerful and control other people. they want to boost the things they like/agree with, and silence those they don't.

    some people do that by becoming internet site moderators.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    At the moment the Threadiverse has not enough users. But as soon as this is becoming a problem, it is the instance Admins job to carefully manage power user moderators. If the Admins don't do their job, the instance should be federated.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Its like a microcosm of US media in general.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    Lemmy has that same problem, maybe even worse since our user base is way smaller

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    No because almost all the accounts here are people and it is unlikely there ate many psy-ops going on here unlike Reddit.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Were you here for US election season? Because there were piles of astroturf comments pushing a don't vote narrative, with activity vaguely correlated around Moscow's time zone. And they all shut up and disappeared right after the election.

    And you could tell the difference between the psyop trolls and the genuine tankies, because the tankies are still here doing their tankie stuff.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    A short video on the subject:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjUcfSVuU1A

    Talks about ex Mods that have since either been defeated, or have just changed their names. "Cyxie", "Gallowboob", "Merari01", "Siouxsie_siousv2" and "Awkwardtheturtle".

    Reddit post talking about Cyxie's account being deleted:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/gk569a/cyxie_account_gone/

    Fuck reddit.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Holy fuck the comment section of that video.

    "CIA trannies", references to Terry Davis' "Glow in the dark n*****s", etc. Someone mentioned Ghislaine Maxwell potentially being a mod and "wonder who all these people are IRL", got replied with the singular word "Jews".

    Honorable mentions: "Nazi-communists", "left-wing echo chamber" (uh why did I keep getting shown conservative and the donald when I browsed logged-out then?)

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