Finally, I can fulfill my destiny of taking over r/television and banning anyone who says anything positive about a show with a laugh track. It should never have been allowed to begin with.

More seriously, the other day someone spent significant time and effort trying to convince me that the new version of The Wonder Years featuring a black family was anti-white propaganda by The Jews. If he's a reddit user I'm sure he'd love to mod a sub with such a large community.

I feel like the crazies ranting about "white erasure" are making it harder to criticize these race-reboots on the grounds they should be criticized for: laziness. Mediocre products where the selling point is, "we swapped races, give us points," remain mediocre and are unbelievably lazy compared to what we should see... which is new and interesting things with diversity baked in.

Unfortunately the hysterical racists are so loud and pervasive that this is yet another issue we see broken down in a Manichean battle to cover for a total lack of new ideas.

I just let it be "lazy" as you say as the rest of tons of other stuff is lazy and don't bother to think to much about it. I'd rather focus on stuff I actually like.

That's a good default, I think people who spend all of their time obsessing about what they hate are really missing out.

It's extremely hard to take any middle of the road position now. Extremists on either side just won't allow it.

It's like calling a song lazy because it uses the same chords as another song. Gender/race-bent remakes are still entirely original works with new scripts and new shots. Even if they were to keep the script the same and make a shot-for-shot remake with new actors and a new crew, that's still 99% new work that's being done. I'd watch a shot-for-shot remake of something like Star Wars with a gender-swapped cast, that sounds like a lot of fun.

Ideas are worth very little, it's the execution that matters.

I'll go on the record of being in favor of species-swapping Ewoks and Gungans, with Rancors and Gamorreans respectively.

Its lazy on the plane of 'what kind of show should we hire some one else to make'.

Good shout on bringing it up though

> Gender/race-bent remakes are still entirely original works with new scripts and new shots.

That's not what the word "original" means.

Sequels, adaptations, remakes, reboots, etc. are not "entirely original" because they're using existing stories or characters.

Whether you like those works or not, it's flat out _false_ to call them "entirely original".

Rather than arguing with him about racism I tried explaining the commercial logic behind the decision, pointing out that advertisers would like to reach black consumers and if the original show was popular with a black audience then recycling the successful formula was a safer commercial decision than trying to build a new brand, but he kept going on about his heritage being stolen. I guess this means all the Fred Savage statues will have to come down.

I don't watch television much except for a little bit of news and local weather, but it seems to me there's always about the same number of family-centered sitcoms and dramas set in the present, about one's parents generation (nostalgia aimed at 30 something starting a family) and grandparents or older ancestors (mythmaking, culture reproduction). Sitcoms are like the McRib of television; they generally don't age well but since they come and go as the cast ages out it's easy to get teary-eyed at how great they used to be.

I admire your attempt to reason with the unreasonable!

A lot of people end up as neo-nazis or similar because they're anxiety-ridden losers who take refuge in cosmic narratives. Aggressive and violent ones need punching, but lot of them are confused and need a way to vent to a non-judgmental person. Moralistic approaches tend not to be very effective ime - horse, water etc..

I agree with you, but I've never had the patience to make that work in practice.

Ohhh, it's a new version of The Wonder Years... I had never seen the original show, but I was vaguely aware of it, and it was playing in the gym the other day and I saw the main characters being black and I felt like I was deep in the Mandela Effect or something.

same, but for r/music for praising songs that have fade out endings

And CDs where the track actually starts five seconds into the previous track and it’s never been fixed in any digital version ever.

blame Bob Ludwig for that

Add drum mixes panned from the audience perspective instead of drummer perspective and you’ve got my vote.

I always mix audience perspective because I usually stand in front of the drum kit when I see bands live. Do most people stand behind them? Am I doing something wrong?

I'm assuming OP is themselves a drummer.

yes, you are doing it wrong. drummer is not drumming from the audience perspective

Duly noted. Next time I mic up a speaker cab I'll stick the microphone where the guitarist's head is instead of on the speaker grill.

I think a rational argument for it is that stereo panning of drumkit elements are not something you can hear from the audience, and maybe even from the stage. Can anybody even remember having the "audience" stereo experience in real life? You'd have to be standing right in front of the drumkit.

Whereas drummers actually experience this panning configuration in real life, and when you're placing the mics in the mix, that's the set of ears you're trying to mimic, really because there isn't any _other_ set of ears to opine. And it's an important one because it provides the lion's share of the stereo image.

Speaking as a drummer and sometimes producer, the only people likely to have strong opinions about this are drummers. All of my drummer friends agree: audience mixes make some albums unlistenable on headphones. Nobody else will notice either way, so mix drummer perspective on the off chance that the drummers listening will appreciate it.

Live albums get a pass, of course. And yes, lefty drummers exist. If a lefty drummer wants their kit panned the way they hear it, that is of course fine.

How do you know the drummer isn't left-handed?

I support you in your quest.

I’m gonna ban everyone who complains about Ted Lasso.

Barbecue sauce.

The worst part about Ted Lasso was that there wasn't more Ted Lasso in it!

(please don't ban me)

Your account has been suspended for 24 hours.

I need someone to make an AI-show filter for removing laugh tracks.

It doesn’t work.

The pauses are built into the script. It’s worse, it’s far worse. It highlights that the scripts are usually pretty bad.

Classic example of a completely unfunny basic show https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jKS3MGriZcs

As uncomfortable as some of the timings are without the tracks, it still feels a lot more bearable.

If the timings could be adjusted I feel shows might actually be better off.

They already have tools to cut down based on silence. So, remove the laugh track to enable this silence, then cut based on the silence. If there was a filter for ffmpeg, you could just chain them together in a single command.

Agreed. As weird as that was, I prefer it to the original.

that show is hilarious without the laugh track

just not in the way the creators intended

But what about Seinfeld??

> 2. Unpopular political/religious factions seeking to surreptitiously "move the needle"

How would that be different from the status quo?

This was my thought exactly.

The front page politics of even my local subreddit are completely divorced from the concerns of my neighbors and other millenials I know.

Comeon man. Sure, there's a lot of evidence that Ghislaine Maxwell was one of the elite super-mods and gently pushed acceptance of pedophilia, but it's all circumstantial at best

I think it’s a complete mistake to think Maxwell who definitely was a Reddit powermod gave a single shit about pedophillia or the girls she trafficked.

It was a blackmail operation. I am certain it was a means to an end.

Same as being a Reddit power mod. It’s about control.

Despite the fact I think I have an answer, let me say this is a good and important question.

In the status quo, Reddit, the mods, and the subreddit users have all coevolved with each other.

https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution

They may not be entirely happy with each other, but they've developed with each other slowly over time, developed callouses, and generally worked out how to live with each other. Even if a mod here leaves and a mod there joins, the incremental changes to the community can be absorbed.

A complete replacement of the mod structure of a subreddit, especially a lot of subreddits at a time, will cause more chaos than you may initially expect. In ecosystem terms, imagine simply yanking out an entire species and trying to replace it by engineering fiat. Yes, eventually the ecosystem will resettle into some new equilibrium... but there is no guarantee that that equilibrium will be similarly healthy, biodiverse, etc. There's no guarantee it will even be an ecosystem at all; the Sahara Desert is basically an ecosystem that was so disrupted that it just straight-up collapsed. It is theoretically possible for it to end up healthier, but, well, look out in the real world at what ecosystem modification tends to produce and I think you'll be on the right track.

Replacing all the co-evolved mods with brand new ones is going to be intrinsically more disruptive than you may think. Moreover, the selection mechanism for the new mods is also likely to be highly disruptive; however they do it they're not going to be taking some mythical random sample, there's going to be some sort of systematic correlation between them all that will further tend to result in the communities experiencing rapid and non-trivial change. Plus, new mods will have no habits, no tools developed, no support structure from other existing mods, etc.

Continuing the biological metaphor, this is all coming at a time when Reddit is inflaming the entire community. Speaking for myself, I'm not particularly passionate about the API issue, I've just been following the community lead on it for the subreddit I'm a mod in, but I am definitely taking note of the loud notes of contempt coming out of Reddit in this drama. If this is the level of contempt they have for us all in vetted public statements, how much more contempt we must all be held in inside the organization when they can speak freely with each other. Consciously and otherwise, people are picking up on this, and things that a user might otherwise have pushed through will become reasons to leave for inflamed users.

The sum total of all of this is that while Reddit has the _technical_ ability to remove and add mod status as they see fit, the community dynamics are more complicated than someone simply modeling the community as "the given set of people" may understand. They are living organisms of their own, if not ecosystems of their own, and the level of disruption will be greater than you expect. Moreover, if you are not looking at the situation properly, the disruption will initially be smaller than you expect. The first day the invasive species is introduced into the ecosystem, nothing appears to be wrong. The first week after Reddit just boots all the mods and installs their own may seem like nothing much has gone wrong. The initial sound and fury will die down. But the sound and the fury isn't the damage; that's just the inflammation. The damage will only be seen in the weeks and months afterwards.

One of the most challenging things about managing communities is that for the most part, in my considered opinion, mass exodus is not the beginning of the trouble. It is the end. If you judge the quality of your community management simply by the membership numbers, you won't be getting any alarms until well after it is too late. By raw numbers I doubt in 2-4 weeks that Reddit will appear to be in any trouble. But the processes set into motion by such a drastic action will play out nevertheless.

Well, Apollo and Boost will stop working...

There's been no "make the cut". There's been first-come-first-served, followed by obtaining the favor of the first-come.

This is what I don’t understand about the claims that any next generation of mods would be incapable of doing the job.

I think it will be exactly like the current status quo. You see subreddit and mod drama happening all the time.

So many people want to moderate a local subreddit for Seattle that we have at least three different ones. The mod teams for each all have strong (and different) political views. But the threat of their community splitting keeps the mods acting fairly reasonable when in the public eye, because each seems to desperately want to be the Seattle subreddit.

> So many people want to moderate a local subreddit for Seattle that we have at least three different ones. The mod teams for each all have strong (and different) political views. But the threat of their community splitting keeps the mods acting fairly reasonable when in the public eye, because each seems to desperately want to be the Seattle subreddit.

Yeah, this is something I’ve seen multiple times on Reddit. Mods on larger subs start putting into place capricious rules, and told the users that if they don’t like it, start their own subs. Then if someone does this and the sub actually start gaining traction, the original sub gets nervous and suddenly starts relenting because they don’t actually want users to go elsewhere, they just want to exert as much control as they can before they trigger an actual exodus.

It shows the importance of competition if we want users to be treated fairly. Unfortunately, there’s strong network effects working against it (both inside Reddit, and among the web in general), and mods have made things worse by working to shut down rivals.

Either way, though, the supply of mods greatly outstrips the demand.

> The mod teams for each all have strong (and different) political views.

Do you mean three segments between pretty left and extreme left? Because I am kind of skeptical there is a conservative mod on the Seattle sub. I saw how much of CHOP and the murders there were covered up.

Inquiring minds (and a future resident) need to know -- which Seattle subreddit is the best? Or at least, what are the flavors?

r/Seattle and r/SeaWA are both to the left; r/SeattleWA is further right.

The Seattle subreddit is pretty calm. That community expresses a lot of stereotypical 'I vote democrat' values.

The SeattleWA subreddit is pretty angry. That community expresses a lot of stereotypical 'I vote republican values'.

I prefer the Seattle reddit but don't much like either. The Seattle subreddit can have too much holier than thou sniping for points for my taste. Its the kind of place where if you expressed some doubt about this 'defund the police' thing you've heard about you might get some thoughtful responses and you might also get a breathless history lesson that accuses you of supporting chattel slavery. The SeattleWA subreddit is too full of violence for me - many posts are about violent crime, conversations about street people frequently have people fantasizing about using violence to resolve the issue. Its the kind of place where a post asking what post-covid seattle is like mostly has people expressing contempt for masking policies in the abstract and deriding people they have seen wearing a mask, a few folk addressing the question, and one person who has been around long enough to compare it to the recession in the 80's (which I thought was neat enough to mention).

I don't know of a third, but those two are different enough that I think even a casual inspection of both will give you an idea of which you might prefer.

Those both sound pretty boring.

Curious in general, has Seattle as a greater entity mostly split into red & blue lines?

Last time I was there, I remember there were more independent (and interesting) anti-WTO/globalization and anarchist contingents.

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