It ain’t politics; it’s a particularly aggressive form of argumentation that holds no boundaries. Even the most hateful subreddit enforces standards (no doxxing, no brigading, etc) because if they don’t, they know the Reddit admins will shut them down or force them private (invite-only).
The subject matter of the sub doesn’t matter, the toxicity is in the methods.
I feel a subreddit is a good solution when you need to have a discussion with over 1,000 people. That’s an arbitrary number, but it’s the point at which personal relationships break down and it becomes a “flat” discussion.
I don’t think Reddit is a very good way to push say, an HR policy to a bunch of branch offices. There are better tools for that job (including Facebook’s corporate offerings).
I know someone who is a mod for a couple major subs and he absolutely does paid placements (he has his own bot network for everything, but being a mod his shill posts don’t get deleted).
Mods don’t necessarily use their mod power itself for profit, but knowing how the sub works and what users like is very powerful. So is ignoring obvious upvote botnets because they belong to you or another mod.
I would go so far as to say that while the moderators of most major subs may have started as volunteers, they are almost certainly on someone’s payroll now as “social influencers”.
This includes the political subreddits (actually especially the political subreddits). It’s legitimate user posts and discussions filtered by whoever has the coin to rent access to those moderators.
What if you use Reddit the way I do when posting anonymously: I post on throwaway accounts and delete the accounts every few weeks. The account names aren’t saved in the posts, and the posts aren’t linked in any visible way.
I’m sure Reddit has code in the back end to track people, but afaik thanks to Reddit’s general lack of ads, there just aren’t a ton of DMPs, so there aren’t a lot of data points to correlate with.
Reddit has been more interventionist with content, which means they need more people to manage the community. I would guess they have all the developers they need...
Reddit works because it’s anonymous, information-dense and relatively ad-free. Change any one of those three and the user base will abandon you.
It’s been Reddit’s dilemma since the beginning: you can’t monetize a toxic user base that has total freedom. Sure you can try to drive away the toxic users, but it turns out that those toxic users are also pretty influential in non-toxic aspects.
I’m still skeptical of Reddit’s ability to turn a profit. But as a community platform it’s the best out there IMO.
I really wish it worked that way; but agriculture still has a number of scarce resources (namely land and water) that will require the adoption of productivity-increasing tools to boost the productivity of a given plot of land or to increase efficiency of water use.
Also to clarify, Stuxnet was the trojan (widely attributed to the CIA and Mossad) designed to introduce subtle errors into the uranium centrifuges that Iran was using to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons development.
It was really ingenious in a lot of ways: it targeted a specific industrial controller card. Even then, all it did was use the controller card to introduce a subtle voltage fluctuation in the power supply in 1/10 of the centrifuges that rapidly burned out the motors.
Basically, it introduced subtle errors into the system that the Iranians spent about a year trying to resolve. It also spread itself through some ingenious mechanisms to avoid air gaps -- in this case it is suspected they infiltrated a supplier for the centrifuges in China via spear phishing and got it on a USB drive from the supplier to cross the air gap (the way it embeds and hides itself in USB microcode is pretty cool).
The whole story reads like a spy novel; except it actually happened. It's one of my favorite examples of how a nation-state can use cyberterrorism to sabotage an enemy from the shadows -- and this action saved lives, because the alternative was an Israeli air strike on the compound. IMO this is a great example of ethical super-spy hacking.
Yeah; that's what you get with nation-state resources. How long does it really take to reverse-engineer a target like HDD firmware? Give a good hacker a month and they could probably figure it out for one HDD -- now realize the government can hire, train and supply hundreds of people like this.
Sure, it costs billions. But to a nation-state, billions are easy to find.
This is why modern security tools and practices are really only going to be capable of keeping out criminal organizations and mass-hacks. If a nation-state decides to target you, there is really no way you can defend against it. Often they are able to undermine the trust mechanisms in place through sheer resource asymmetry (they have the compute resources to brute-force SSL key collisions -- they did this with Stuxnet to fake a Microsoft signing cert to push the payload via a MITMed Windows Update).
There are even reports of three-letter-agencies intercepting routers during shipment, desolderig chips from the board, and replacing them with "bugged" chips containing back doors in hardware; then packaging it all up and getting it delivered on-time.
You just can't fight that kind of power; even as a company as large as Google or Apple. Nation states will always be able to probe and exploit the edge cases in your security model. In general, you can't make anything totally secure, but you can try to make it cost enough to break into that it will deter anyone who can't justify the cost.
This is great -- I never knew about this paper but it reinforces a lot of things I learned. Namely, if you want to know how a company really works, ignore the org charts and map the systems architecture (a corollary to the author's thesis).
That it still holds true almost 50 years later is pretty amazing.
But they're with a group of like-minded people whose rules reinforce many of their other NIMBY tendencies (i.e. no homeless shelters, adult bookstores, garish homes.) They agree with most of the rules, but because they want more control they tend to complain loudly about the ones they don't like.
So this is a good usage model, but I'm not sure people want to carry yet another tablet just for gaming. The only way I can see this thing taking off is if it can fall back into an Android tablet mode for web browsing, e-mail, etc. But as a portable gaming console, it seems pretty boss. I'm curious what the hardware specs are and how they differ from other tablets on the market.
Because if it can't do everything else my current tablet can, I'm gonna have to carry a tablet AND this thing. Done right, Nintendo can make this thing the first real challenger to the iPad for mass-market adoption. But they've gotta treat it as a first-party Android device and get updates out ASAP and not muck with the interface too much. I'm willing to bet they could work out a rev-share agreement with Google on the Google Play store and Google Play Apps (and keeping their own Nintendo licensing scheme).
But let's not kid ourselves here: Nintendo is a Japanese company and it operates like one. That means they'll try to own the entire value chain and miss out on any network effects, while simultaneously moving themselves from a market with a 5-10 year refresh cycle to one with a 2-3 year refresh cycle. While it means they could sell more tablets to repeat customers, it also means that they have less time to be patient for success (as happened with the Wii and WiiU) since it also increases customer churn. Network effects and platform lock-in are a lot more important when the refresh cycle is shorter, because there are more opportunities for your customers to jump off the train.
I wish Nintendo luck, and I think that this is a good usage model. But I'm not convinced it's compelling enough to displace the tablets that people are already carrying around with them unless it can also duplicate the capability of those devices.
The subject matter of the sub doesn’t matter, the toxicity is in the methods.