It also makes it nearly impossible for independent researchers to uncover bot networks and AstroTurfing, just in time for fully automated AI propaganda.

The very first prompt this AGI is given will be “secure as much wealth as possible without breaking any laws that might see us punished”.

That’s not what the CEO of the company thought.

They don’t care about ill will, they care about money. They made nothing from third party apps and millions from gutting the API and selling it to AI companies.

It also allows people to use much higher quality products. She’s pulling a power tool out in the picture and goddamn, there’s some garbage tools out there, even from quality brands. Renting a $1000 tool sounds better than buying a $100 tool and encouraging the race to the bottom.

Unfortunately, that nightmare is absolutely on its way. The moment companies work out how to secure their initial prompts, they’ll start selling product placement. As the technology continues to become more accessible, it will be used for astroturfing and manipulating financial markets.

A decade from now, social media is just going to be an endless flood of secret AI sales reps trying to convince other secret AI sales reps to buy their shit products, vote for their shit candidates or follow their shit investment advice.

It catches the deeply stupid, but not the ones blessed with 3 braincells. Even the ones struggling by on 2 will learn from those mistakes.

“What if instead of convincing gullible people to buy healing crystals, magic water and psychic services, we used those techniques to make them hate minorities?”.

I’d say having these groups coordinate in a platform where government officials are able to gain easy access is better than banning them and forcing them to move to more secure methods of communication

It’s not, because extremism spreads like herpes. Making these platforms more accessible to government officials also makes them more accessible to vulnerable, stupid people – and there’s 1000 of them for every 1 fed who wants to stop a terrorist attack.

Also, the people at the core of these groups are absolutely aware of secure communication. The Facebook page might say “Rally for Freedom, 2A welcome” but behind that curtain, human dogshit are brainstorming things like “how can we get counter protesters killed”.

As dumb as most of the far-right is, very few are stupid enough to plan crimes and conspiracies on Facebook.

They could have stopped adding features years ago.

Employee wages are often the largest expense for a business and they’re always trying to have fewer employees, squeezed harder for more work and less pay.

It really undermines their whole “oh they’re just unskilled labor and drones, they don’t deserve a living wage” rhetoric. If Amazon didn’t need warehouse workers and delivery drivers, they wouldn’t have them. They could be working for $1 a day and they’d still be fired the instant that role was no longer needed.

They get away with it because they just need somebody doing the work and there’s no shortage of desperate, exploited people. Unions and collective bargining definitely help but ultimately the government needs to advocate for workers and simply say things like “If you use slaves at any step in your supply chain, you and everyone you report to is going to jail and your assets will be stripped to cover the pay you owe them”.

It’s such a low fucking bar. Almost every law we have boils down to “don’t be a piece of shit” but we don’t make them for rich people or use them to cover foreign workers.

The “incentive” is just greed. Customers could be paying a million dollars a month and there will still be some greedy, slimey executive pushing “if we sold their data too we could make a million and one dollars off them each month”.

Plenty of them didn’t, so reddit replaced them with scabs.

He actually sold out early in a much more obvious, objective way.

Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast on October 31, 2006, for a reported $10 million to $20 million. Huffman remained with Reddit until 2009, when he left his role as acting CEO.

That’s a tiny fraction of his current compensation. He then spent a while backpacking around and started a mediocre company that’s since closed down.

He is neither a shrewd businessman, coding god, nor visionary genius. He’s just some guy that was in the right place at the right time.

The same is true of practically every executive pocketing grotesque compensation, with the only difference being “the right place at the right time” is more often “in a rich woman’s womb” or “at an extremely expensive school”.

He isn’t being paid $200 million a year for his talent. He’s being paid $200 million a year because instead of paying staff better wages, or not enshittifying the site, or paying moderators and content creators, he simply pocketed that money for himself.

It’s what this neoliberal utopia always is. Executives stealing workers wealth and claiming they earned it for stealing so much wealth.

The best thing about his deeply fuckheaded comments is that it’s a perfect example of the sick way the ultra wealthy operate, presented in a way reddit users can absolutely understand.

The act of building early reddit was a group effort. I have no idea how much Spez contributed to the concept, but he did code it – a task that realistically millions of people also would have been able to do.

But a platform without users is nothing. It was the users creating content that truly built reddit and the unpaid moderators who stopped it collapsing under the weight of spam and extremism.

While that was happening, spez shit the bed over and over again. He sold out too early. He openly advocated platforming extremists. He got called out for the bigotry he tolerated in his company. He alienated his most important users so he could sell their content to AI companies.

And now here we are. He makes an absurd amount of money, despite being shit at his job, despite being a clearly bad person and despite his accomplishments being ordinary. Meanwhile, the people he needs, who are critical to his business, are paid nothing.

This is the same setup as Amazon, Walmart, Uber and a million other businesses, distilled down to its very essence.

So now anyone who says things is going to be held accountable for crazy people being crazy

Nope, that’s just you being melodramatic. The judge has acknowledged there is grounds for the case to be argued so it won’t he dismissed. That’s all. They haven’t been found guilty of anything. They’re not being lined up and shot.

What would you prefer we did to determine if a company is culpable? Just ask you because you read a headline?

You mean the “responsible gun owners” who don’t properly secure their weapons from a child?

Yeah, this reeks of generic neoliberal sabotage to me. They do the same thing with unions and political parties. If anything is a potential threat to profits, it’s infiltrated and undermined.

There’s simply no way that a team focused on employee rights does something like this. Everybody working there would definitely be aware that companies routinely try to identify and punish people for their posts. That alone would end any non-malicious plans for using real names.

Does that mean they fixed the problem or did they simply make it impossible for people outside of reddit to see the extent of it?

People are welcome to try for themselves, which is how I originally learned they do fuck all. They didn’t even clear the lowest bar of “20 upvotes from 20 accounts, on the same IP with no other activity, just switching with RES”.

Maybe that’s changed in the decade since, but the search results for “buy reddit upvotes” don’t bode well.