Fun fact. Jan 6 is the the biggest criminal investigation in US history by sheer number of defendants. You'd never know from the way the news covers it.

It's the camera. Younger streamers have no idea about the past but the older ones do. They know it's the camera that changes the whole proposition. Some of them have talked about this. If people think they're live on camera then everything is different when there's an audience and they believe it might be someone famous to whatever extent. Nobody wants to cause an international incident.

When random nobody put themselves in sketchy situations with nothing else but their nobody self then they are absolutely putting themselves in danger whether they perceive it to be or not. There's neither a live audience nor the illusion of "celebrity".

So which is this guy? A more left or right libertarian?

Libertarian in the US tends to mean more right leaning. The left social issues they support tend to be rather superficial self serving issues like decriminalization.

It wasn't hard to foresee. We knew these kind of things could happen. The internet used to be very out spoken about it. That ethos is long gone. What's equally disappointing is tech nerds selling out for bigger paychecks.

I don't rule it out. The prior era of "reddit alternatives" in the Voat era was quickly overrun too even though they were very small. The key to the internet has always been first mover advantage. If they have enough power to manipulate the top sites, it would take very little to hedge bets on budding platforms. They risk losing their advantage if a replacement platform establishes itself without them. That's pretty much the whole history of modern tech. To actively seek and snuff out your competitors.

They've been increasing the ad load the whole time. The most I've seen so far is 5 ads. Streaming will return to broadcast TV convention sooner than people think probably. 15 minutes of ads per hour.

Reddit was very monoculture in the beginning. The neckbeards upvoted each other because they generally agreed on the same opinions. That gets mistaken for adherence to reddiquette.

It became a rhetorical tool to prove whatever an individuals political or social adversaries are dummies because they don't use reddit properly in current year unlike some glory day that never existed.

If they really did use reddit back in the day as they claim then all of the self referential satire about reddits pseudo-intellectualism must have gone over their head. It was like the second most popular type of content. Second only to the actual circle jerking.

Nothing happened. It was always like this. Geeks got unduly put on a pedestal. They got a reputation that was never earned. They're not any different than your typical psychopath executive.

I grew up in a town where a lot of these types of guys have become multimillionaires since 2010s tech boom. One person manages some hundreds of millions of dollars AI investment portfolio. That was before the GPT explosion. I have no idea how big they are now but I wouldn't be surprised if it's billions.

Growing up they were almost all psychopathic. Lying, cheating, backstabbing type of people. Nothing like the timid altruistic geek that pop culture proliferates. The more normal people did not go into tech. The actual timid types have had modest middle class careers in tech.

I think a quirk of reddit is that conventional finance doesn't account for its value. Reddit in and of itself just operates a barebones site as the article says. While the site itself is ostensibly worthless. It has had incredible amount of value to those using it for commercial and political purpose. Nation state actors too even (cougheglincough). These days what organization isn't using or trying to use reddit. Such things don't appear in financial statements. I think they've been propped up with funding for so long because its a nexus of zeitgeist. There are enough organizations who it is useful to such that it's better to keep reddit alive rather than risk having to establish their dark presence on new competitor platforms. I suspect spez knows he has everyone by the balls too.

The American sphere of influence is palpable here. Trudeau, Poilievre, and Singh are all gen-x. The average age of politicians here is not as geriatric as American congress.

The millennials in my area are doing traditional extended family things with the kids friends from school.

There's another type of citogenesis going on with articles and internet comments. Writers look to social media to see what people are talking about / what will get engagement. Internet commenters talk about the article taking the points that strike a chord. Writers see what the users are talking about and write about that. Internet comments react. Writers see the comments and publish accordingly. Rinse. Repeat.

Some iterations later people have piles of articles to point to as proof. The articles have been repeating back their own words written by someone else with ostensible credibility because it's been published.

A major problem aside from that itself is internet comments need to boil everything down to simple one liner takes. The world isn't simple like that. People could do long form investigative journalism. And then the internet comments would boil it down to a single easily digestible take that washes away all analysis.