Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

Re:Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed by nonchalantsui on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @03:32PM (#42954686)

This is just the consequence of the API protests. Despite people claiming it had no lasting impact, admins coming in and making sweeping changes to mod teams replacing them with loyalists, alongside ramping up centralized feeds to serve more ads onto meant content quality took a nosedive. This is obvious in most subs if you actually look at who is submitting the threads (something the app and All/Popular pages hides in several views), most of these subs are dominated by a handful of accounts. It's a cycle too, because often they'll continue spamming subs in order to get on All/Popular, or make up weird stories to do so, effectively karma farming taken very seriously, with mods encouraging it because of the aforementioned loyalists.

It's all just driveby anger and reposts. Maybe some smaller subs with good communities here and there, but that often requires a mod team putting in substantial hours and remaining under the radar from All/Popular in any shape.

Forgot to mention, Reddit also started paying these accounts for posting. So a literal financial incentive to ragebait. It' called the "Contributor Program".

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Re:Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed by eloisius on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @09:37PM (#42958339)

RDDT was a good buy, but the site is absolutely going to be destroyed. That’s what’s valuable. I’m not selling until Reddit is Facebook-tier garbage.

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Re:Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed by safety1st on Thursday February 06, 2025 @05:58AM (#42961168)

It's wild how bad it has gotten since the election. It's important to remember that free speech does not protect directly inciting violence and it does not protect advocating for the murder of anyone, even a politician. These are generally illegal

So what Reddit has morphed into, is an illegal content factory - there has already been a comment or two about it from the government and the Trump admin is not one that is likely to sit on my sidelines over this.

Whatever your politics may be, I'm just saying this is going to burn Reddit bad.

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Re:Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed by michaelt on Thursday February 06, 2025 @01:26PM (#42965045)

> It's important to remember that free speech does not protect directly inciting violence and it does not protect advocating for the murder of anyone, even a politician. These are generally illegal

Under US first amendment rights, it's actually sometimes legal.

For example, "Watts v. United States" established that if an anti-draft speaker tells a crowd "If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ" that's political hyperbole.

So if a crowd were to set up a guillotine outside congress and chant "hang mike pence" it's not necessarily illegal.

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Re:Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed by noah_buddy on Thursday February 06, 2025 @01:29PM (#42965085)

The only thing not covered by the concept (and law) of freedom of speech with regard to violence are direct, clear incitements to immediately commit violence. E.g. egging someone on to go lynch another person right now is not legal.

Saying “I think this person should be killed” is legally free speech.

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Re:Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed by solumunus on Sunday February 09, 2025 @11:47PM (#42997038)

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but respect of law and norms is being thrown out of the window. That was the old USA and the paradigm is wildly shifting.

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Re:Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed by NeutralCrane on Thursday February 06, 2025 @08:51AM (#42962269)

This behavior has been going on long before the API protests.

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