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by uonpopular_th 1208 days ago
The web is boring now because everyone interesting is banned by bland mediocrities. If you don't follow the current thing to the letter every major social media platform - bar twitter for the last two months - would remove you from circulation pretty much instantly. The only people who agree with everything that is popular right now are the ones incapable of thinking. Ergo a chat bot trained on old forum data seems more genuine than anyone left on Reddit.
2 comments

Yeah I miss the old days where on most sites you really needed to be a hard-core troll or do/say something illegal to get banned and removed. Now on for example Reddit if you say anything that's not acceptable in the current zeitgeist it's instant (shadow)banning.

It all became so corporate and milquetoast - all that matters are ads and so that they don't appear near "controversial" content to not to loose revenue.

It's much worse than that. The people doing the banning on reddit aren't doing it because they are paid or told to, they are doing it because they think stopping wrongthink is a public service and will feel right doing it every time.

HN isn't much better with flagging of posts. The highwater mark of this was PG's heresy post being kept off the front page for 6 hours before dang made the post unflaggable. I would have loved to see the Monday meeting where he had to explain why that was needed.

I've seen that for many of those people it's not a matter of being right or wrong but a moral battle of good vs. evil. Heretics are to be purged, not discussed with.

Being honest I think religion is kinda hard-wired into the human brain and if it isn't the mystique kind like with Jesus or Allah then it (d)evolves into this kind of agno-atheistic fanaticism where some flavor of the year "problem" appears that these people obsess with. And this is coming from a long time atheist btw.

On top of that, only the reiteration of the same trite puns or catchphrases gets upvotes, the rest drowns.

/r/homelab was interesting, now it's just pictures of people's setups

/r/garmin was interesting, now it's screenshots of people's VO2max stats

etc...

Repeat ad nauseam. Everything is bragging or showing off for fake internet points.

The nick mullen rant about the yeti cup subreddit is good for a laugh.

I don't know what is driving it but I think those posters really feel they're part of a community. The give gold, repeat the same tired jokes, and feel better. It's insane to me.

I'm going to let you in on a secret: it isn't a real community. It is Yeti astroturfing. ٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶
"every major social network" is a very recent sub continent on the internet and didnt replace most of it.

I find reddit super exciting as well, it's THE place to talk quickly with random english speakers and I wish that existed when I was a french kids pinging randos on ICQ...

Old forums aren't much better unfortunately. Going back to the places where I hung out in the 00s the inmates are running the asylum now.