[ekianjo]

> Reddit has for years coached people to 'remember the human' and backs it up with various rules and bans. They want people to treat each other well.

Are you saying that Reddit is a good example? Because that would be a laughable point to make

[22289d]

A good example of what? A platform not seeking to maximize outrage?

Yes. They banned the Donald Trump subreddit. That one subreddit produced more outrage than probably everything else in the history of Reddit combined. And they banned it. A company seeking to maximize outrage would not do that.

[sanitycheck]

You don't want your customers OD'ing, you want them to keep coming back.

Just because there's a limit to the outrage tolerated, it doesn't mean that outrage isn't part of the plan.

[22289d]

You're supporting my argument. You're saying it's not in their best interests to maximize outrage.

That's where the goalposts are and that's where they are going to stay: whether or not they seek to maximize outrage.

[AlecSchueler]

You're just looking at it as "maximise peak outrage" when the other people are talking about "maximise outrage over time."

[22289d]

I was responding to someone else who said it. They did say '...whose business model depends on...outrage'.

So ya, that interpretation is the logical one. If your business model depends on something, you would be optimizing for maximizing it over time.

[JieJie]

A business depending on a dependable local water source can still be destroyed by a flood.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

It may be better to say that they want to maximize effective outrage. Or put another way to 'optimize' outrage. They are really good at it.

[jowea]

I think the "maximize outage" is a good simplification 80% of the time, but the "goal chain" goes from there to maximum advertising revenue, and that requires happy advertisers. And in the case of reddit I'm not sure how much revenue comes from gold and how much that was harmed by people saying "don't give money to this site hosting hate-speech".

[plagiarist]

A company seeking to maximize profit from outrage would keep it up until they engage in behavior that threatens ad revenue, like if they were talking about murdering police officers or something.

[22289d]

Here are the goalposts: 'seek to maximize outrage'

Please do not add any extra words to that, thus shifting the goalposts. Here you have added the word 'profit'. I never said anything about profit.

[plagiarist]

You're proving everyone's point that outrage drives attention: one can get a lot of engagement from deliberate misunderstanding. No, those were not the goalposts to anyone but the most pedantic of pedants.

[22289d]

Someone argued they maximize outraged.

I argued that they do not.

I don't think it's pedantic at all to say the goalposts are whether or not they maximize outrage.

I totally understand that the word's 'Reddit' and 'Twitter' and 'Trump' are going to trigger people into wanting to talk more broadly about those topics. There are lots of other places they can go and do that. I had a very specific and narrowly defined argument.