Technology

A piece of shit now

I've heard it was a popular discussion place people would go to. Even called the front page of the internet because it was the first and best source for compiled news and information. Its CEO had some quotes that showed how important free flow of information was.

"I don't think we should silence people just because their viewpoints are something we disagree with. There is value in the conversation, and we as a society need to confront these issues. This is an incredibly complex topic, and I'm sure our thinking will continue to evolve."

"We are not the thought police. It's not the role of a private company to decide what people can and cannot say."

He was also forward thinking in designing an open forum, controlled by individuals.

"Our approach to governance is that communities can set appropriate standards around language for themselves. Many communities have rules around speech that are more restrictive than our own, and we fully support those rules."

Wait, that sounds more like the Fediverse.

The Internet is for Porn! 🎶

I can't remember the exact quote but someone once said "if all porn was removed from the internet tomorrow, by the next day there would be one website left called bringbacktheporn.com

The stoners on Reddit got screwed - many of the weed subs got the banhammer, and the rest got NSFW'd because spez wants Reddit as G-rated as Disney for the IPO.

All companies that go to IPO purge their porn content beforehand unless they are dedicated pornography businesses, and even those have a massive shakeup of what content is and is not allowed (pornhub and onlyfans being examples). It's not because they're "puritanical". When a company IPOs it opens itself up to share purchases but what most people miss is that it also opens itself up to shortselling, this is essentially a shares "downvote" where the person shorting a company can make money if the company's value goes down.

Negative press causes a company's value to go down. And the people that own the press are the financial industry, they use and weaponise their media contacts and friends to achieve financial outcomes very successfully.

So when a company IPOs one of the things it does is seek to remove all possible things on a service that can be weaponised as negative press against the company in order for people to profit off of shortselling the drop in value this causes in the market.

The situation is that Reddit and Imgur have a sizeable amount of likely illegal pornographic content on their servers.

Their options are:

• To ban all the porn. Which it looks like they are trying to do. On paper this is the best option for investors, as it protects the investment. However in the real world this can piss off the userbase and tank the website by losing a sizeable amount of users (see Tumblr).

• To continue without any changes. This is also guarantees the investment tanking, all it takes is one Anderson Cooper style jailbait investigation into Reddit to destroy the investment. I guarantee that there is a significant amount of underage content uploaded to it, certainly enough to stir up a shitstorm in the media.

• To implement proper age verification for pornographic content, like pornhub and onlyfans did. But in the investment world it is unpopular to be seen as a person that invests in pornography, the investors don't want it to be public knowledge that they are investing in a porn website in some way and Reddit implementing proper verification processes will make it clear that Reddit is a pornography business. Thus also devaluing the investment.

The VC money dried up

They are losing access to nearly limitless free money

Digg-ing

That's a lot of effort for the sweet sweet nsfw content!

May I present you PornLemmy?

So the workaround would be to make an NSFW sub, then make it private after a couple days?

Oh, that's interesting. I was hoping a scraper would emerge. Stealth's scraper (currently) doesn't seem to actually display content that is marked nsfw. Maybe they haven't yet figured out how to detect/accept the confirm 18+ barrier on old.reddit.com.