u/littlemetalpixie

Reddit admins,

I would like to request that you please, for the love of all that is holy, calm down with your engagement boosting tactics that are telling everyone who makes a post to also post it to a list of machine-generated "relevant" other subs.

I moderate in a sub that discusses an extremely controversial political topic that has subs on reddit that are dedicated to the opposing side of that topic.

Crossposting from either our sub to theirs or vice versa is against the rules of both subs, because of the nature of this topic causing SEVERE trolling and brigading from both sides from people who are not interested in peaceful discourse, yet your own platform's messages are telling users they should go ahead and just break these subs' rules anyway.

You are literally making all of our "jobs" even harder by not even bothering to filter subs suggested for crossposts based on logic, rationality, or even the rules of the subs being suggested for crossposts.

More engagement, even hostility trolling and harassment (especially hostility trolling and harassment) means more ad money though amirght????

Seems the only thing that matters here any more is greed, and I'm afraid you're about to find a lot of your most difficult to moderate subs modless if you don't take things like these into consideration.

PS - good luck getting AI to do what we do since the generated lists your AI is suggesting can't even be bothered to check rules in subs before suggesting them XD

Humans are becoming more sociopathic as a species by the day.

But ask yourself if this is "just happening," or if there are architects to this design.

I'll give you a hint: it starts with big and ends with tech, and the goal is (of course) money.

Sigh I know.

I KNOW!

#But please hear me out.

We're ALL tired of hearing about this and soul-sick with this message - so much so that we would rather just ignore it - but it has never been more important to discuss this message, to pass it along, and to try with all our might to live lives that embody what I and many others are saying ABOUT it.

But first we must understand WHY humans have become more sociopathic as a species, and what in the world it has to do with big tech...

On platforms like Reddit, the platform owners make money by advertising. This is why you see ads all over every single social media platform, unless you pay them money directly (and then you still see "sponsored content" anyway so they are just double-dipping there).

In order to make money, advertisers need people to view their ads, which they then hope are persuasive enough to cause people to buy their things.

Therefore, the more people engage with social media platforms, the more ads they see. The more ads people see, the more they buy. So the more people who engage with platforms, the more money the advertisers give the platform in order to host their ads there.

It then follows that it behooves the platform owners themselves to bump up the numbers of how many people are actually using each platform, and how long they are engaging with it.

And what causes people to engage the most for the longest amount of time?

Not kittens.

Not feel-good news.

Not humanity, empathy, care, love, or support.

Rage.

Rage is what people, statistically speaking, engage for the most hours and come back the most often for. Think about it - if you see a cute picture of a cat or whatever, and you smile and move on. But if you see a rage-inducing post, you comment. You share it with your friends. You come back again and again to pointlessly argue with people.

"People."

This is where the idea of bots come into play - rage-inducing, baiting, troll bots.

Humans are pack animals. We live in societies because at our evolutional core, that is what has kept us safer. So that means we all have an evolutionary drive to "fit in," to do what others in our societies do, and by and large in both ancient and more recent history, this has kept us safer.

But then big tech came along and weaponized this evolutionary trait out of greed. People see the way these bots interact with others by shaming them, arguing with them no matter what they say, insulting them... and then real people get the idea that "if everyone else is acting this way online, it is now socially acceptable and expected for me to act this way online."

So they do.

And rage, like everything else, becomes a habit. So they take that rage out into the real world, offline, into the checkout line or traffic or their jobs or their homes and families.

They insult one another. They scream at people needlessly. They act like selfish, petulant, spoiled children. Because billions and billions and billions of bots that come so close to real human interaction, we functionally cannot tell a difference. At first, this was just on text platforms like Reddit and Twitter, but with the newer gens of AI it has now crossed over to video media as well, and the dissonance between what is a real human exhibiting natural behavior and what is a bot leading us to behave a certain way out of greed grows out of control.

Until here we are.

Make no mistake, this is yet another form of warfare, and like most wars, it was begun out of greed. And the target is our very humanity itlsef.

What we practice takes root.

We cannot fight rage with rage.

We cannot fight selfishness with selfishness.

We cannot fight greed with greed.

We cannot fight hate with hate.

#We must fight this battle for our very humanity quietly, kindly, and gently. Not with raised fists, but with open arms for our fellow humans. Not with screams and battle cries, but with empowering whispers into the ears of strangers during an embrace.

Find common ground. Love one another. Show empathy, even when it is hard. Even when the other person does not deserve it. Even when you are angry.

Otherwise, the war is lost and so are we all.