This is something I’ve been wondering for awhile: if I were a mod on Reddit, and was being threatened by the admins to bend the knee, as it were, my response would likely be to remove any and all tools i had put in place to help me moderate, and say, “goodbye.”
I’m sure there’s something I’m just not understanding, but why isn’t this happening?
Because people really don’t want to lose the time and investment they’ve put into building these huge communities.
It’s like if the king just decides that your really healthy neighborhood and community, that you’re a community leader in and are constantly defending against the shittiest companies and groups dumping garbage all over and ruining and harassing the residents (and whatever the equivalent to blocking posters of illegal things is), will suddenly charge you an extreme amount of money to do your volunteer job, and the clubhouse leaders/owners and other businesses an insane amount of money just to use the land (because the king wants that land to put up billboards instead) - because he wasn’t making enough money on them before, but only because he wasn’t charging them any money. And in reality, the king wants to sell the kingdom to China for several billion dollars and just wants to show how much money can be made from the billboards instead of the businesses and community centers.
Man. Fuck u/spez. Outcast that mofo rather than the platform. I wish somebody would just coup his ass, but everybody in his sort of position just always ruins it. Always. So it’s the system, not solely him; it’s the goal of… Internet Platforms. It’s literally the same problem with government anywhere: if you have a monarchy, eventually, they’ll do shitty stuff and eventually try to ruin it.
What’s the solution?
Your question has been asked even in the Roman forum, and even for millennia before. Perhaps there is no solution - perhaps its an integral part of the human condition. But we will never stop searching.
There has to be a way for society to function healthily for all, and to disable corruption at the same time. There HAS to… Like, if we can feel when something is bad, we can eventually articulate it, and if we can eventually articulate it, we should be able to design ways to make it better. The society programming will get more and more complex until we figure it out.
I think knowing what we want is key. And to want, you have to first know. We’ve simultaneously made so much progress in the past 100 years, but also so, so little. The human condition is slow-mode.
The answer that humanity has come up with, which is, of course, imperfect, but the best we seem to be able to do is democracy.
the solution is to collectivize reddit but I do not have a good plan about how to do that.
I’m not sure I understand what that means. Can you elaborate?
(Cool thing about this place, I’ve found, is that longer format answers aren’t shunned, which makes me really happy and excited for the future)
There’s no solution in the same way that there’s no “solution” to winning rock-paper-scissors. The cycle is endless because the desire to be in control is a key part of human nature, whether that be an authoritarian “I want everyone to do what I say” or a more oligarchic “I accept that there’s others at my level, so we can cooperate so that everyone else does what we say”, and any attempt to change those systems requires an equivalent amount of force that can all too easily lead one into side-tangents of trying to keep said force focused.
As a side note, Machiavelli identified the cycle in politics in his “Discourse on Livy” - a powerful and strong-willed individual takes power (e.g. Caesar or Napoleon), his descendants wield power with less and less efficiency until in time the aristocracy seize the reins, and they get more and more corrupt and out of touch until finally the people rise up and enforce some level of democratic sway. Unfortunately, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, which is exhausting, and so over time things run down until some powerful and strong-willed individual takes power and it all starts again. It’s not purely linear - an aristocracy can be subsumed into a strong individual leadership (e.g. the popes in the 19th century grabbing power back from the cardinals) and a king can be overthrown by a democratic uprising (e.g. Louis XVI of France - though technically it did go through a brief aristocratic moment, as he re-convened the parliament to try and get around the nobility who wouldn’t fund his wars, indicating his powers had weakened). But in general we oscillate between these three modes of social organisation because of the difficulty in centralising power and in then keeping it from being corrupted (i.e. using it for selfish purposes) once it is centralised.
Crossposted to https://kbin.social/m/BestOf
