I have been on reddit for just about 12 years now. Something I’ve noticed over time is just how hateful the place has become. A complete outrage machine. Every single sub became filled with it. I’ve filtered so many subreddits over the last few years, it’s insane. I don’t know enough about this place to be sure, but I do hope it doesn’t become the same type of echo chamber of anger.
I blame the 24 hour news cycle and end of the Fairness Doctrine. It has allowed editorializing and “spinning” of news stories as opposed to being factual and objective.
People give the fairness doctrine far too much credit, it only applied to your local over the air news channels. Not cable, and it wouldn’t have applied to the internet.
This is correct. The idea is that bandwidth is public property and as such holding a license to use part of it entails public obligations. This is why radio stations are required to repeat their identification a certain number of times per hour, for example.
Cable networks are privately owned and therefore were never subject to the same kinds of regulation.
I’m not sure that’s true. You have to remember that when the fairness doctrine was still in force everyone got all of their information from broadcast. Even when cable first came on scene and got popular in the late '70s and early '80s, it was simply to improve how well you got your broadcast stations, and maybe give you a chance to have a few additional channels. The idea of basic cable took years before it took off.
It’s very true. Cable networks are private property whereas broadcast bandwidth is public property. That’s the difference. It creates two very disparate regulatory environments.
It’s very true. Cable networks are private property whereas broadcast bandwidth is public property. That’s the difference. It creates two very disparate regulatory environments.
Indeed, but during the time of the fairness doctrine cable was primarily used to watch broadcast networks, but without signal degradation. In other words, most of what people consumed on cable for the first 10-15 years of cable’s existence were broadcast network content. The doctrine could’ve been expanded to cover basic cable networks and 24/7 news instead of scrapped.
It’s very true. Cable networks are private property whereas broadcast bandwidth is public property. That’s the difference. It creates two very disparate regulatory environments.
It’s very true. Cable networks are private property whereas broadcast bandwidth is public property. That’s the difference. It creates two very disparate regulatory environments.
The Fairness Doctrine only ever existed due to the way the broadcast airwaves were divvied up. It had no bearing on cable’s CNN, etc.
Not sure about the Fairness Doctrine’s role, but it saddens me that people don’t seem to be nearly as aware of the damaging effects of the news cycle anymore. People seem even less aware that getting your news online, or through social media, doesn’t protect you from it either.
If you’ll excuse the ramble: Years ago when the Tea Party (arguably one of the first big far-right movements in the open) started gaining traction in the US, they held a rally in DC. People were apalled, but to my knowledge there weren’t issues where anti-Tea Party counter protesters were attacking Tea Party members with bike locks
or concrete mix in milkshake cups in an attempt to injure Tea Party members. (During the time of antifa and Trump supporter protests/rallies there was shit going around online about how to mix quick dry cement mix with fast food milkshakes to make a slurry that would cause severe chemical burns on people. Not sure if that was real or not.)EDIT: I’ve been informed the concrete milkshake thing wasn’t real.What did happen was that Comedy Central, who (we know now) had already been planning on holding a joke rally in DC to build hype for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s shows even befoe the Tea Party mess, started pushing online into the groups suggesting a separate counter rally.
The Rally to restore sanity (or to keep fear alive, as Colbert was advertising it satirically) started gaining a ton of traction online. At the least, it was an opportunity for fans of Stewart and Colbert’s shows to come out and have a laugh. At best it was a way to show that the Tea Party didn’t have power and was just a bunch of hot air.
I went to the Comedy Central rally. They made it a fum time with guests like Mythbusters, music, and speeches from Colbert (in character) and Stewart. What impacted me the most was the sheer amount of people. If you have a chance check out the bird’s eye photos of the two rallies. The rally to restore sanity easily outnumbered the Tea Party four times over. Thousands upon thousands of people there with joke picket signs, having a fun time.
Stewart’s closing speech has stuck with me, even now over a decade later. It pains me that it seems that even John Stewart himself seems to have forgotten it, or re-evaluated his stance.
I’ll share some the parts I find particularly important:
Time and time again I see people with good intentions effectively saying that “making concessions for those hideous reprehensibles is tacitly supporting them” by allowing a group to have a space to speak, hell sometimes by even allowing a group to exist.
Yes, yes, the tolerance of intolerance paradox and all that. That’s valid and important. My point is that far too often I see people jump the gun.
Go ahead and deplatform people calling for your death. Don’t deplatform them because they don’t think your lifestyle choices aren’t valid/okay, and they are discussing that in a separate space from you.
Make an attempt to ignore them, live and let live, or an honest attempt at discourse in good faith as if you are dealing with other human beings.
Again, not if they are actively calling for the end of your life, but far too often I see people stretch that with “they support ideas that align with people who would deny me my existence” as if there’s some sort of idealogical purity standard we all need to adhere to lest we let the wrong opinions in and taint ourselves by the vaguest of “idealogical association”.
Should we be concerned that the majority of painters are nazis because Hitler liked to paint? Of course fucking not.
Most people are not purely the opinions they espouse online. Often there’s deep layers of nuance left unsaid, personal lived experiences causing them to draw different conclusions from what you think.
The world falls apart if everyone out in real life caused things to come to a screeching halt to shout someone down and call for deplatforming or shunning every time they encountered an opinion they found reprehensible.
I’m guess just tired of the extremism absolutely fucking everywhere. From people with offensice opinions and especially from well meaning people who are motivated by their feelings of righteousness to try and protect themselves and others. People insisting that if you don’t literally use every single opportunity you have to speak out against the wrong of the day, then you are actively supporting that wrong.
Just got a general day to day mood of “Sir, this is a Wendy’s”
Rally to restore sanity was a blast. The whole reddit team (myself included, at the time) were there, and Raldi wrote a neat little QR code network feature, where you could scan other redditor’s QR codes, and after it was done we released a graph showing the network effects, who met whom at the rally, or the minor rallies across the country.
That was back when reddit was actually fun. I can’t imagine, nor would I attend, any modern rally event with the purpose of meeting redditors
That must have been an interesting time to be part of the team there! Reddit was an amazing site back in the day, and it’s a tragedy that so much good and interesting “internet firsts” that it did/enabled are being lost now with the crap.
There’s no obligation, but the lemmy/kbin github projects might get some use out of your knowledge. They’re a bit overwhelmed right now and everyone has differing ideas of how to do stuff like deal with bots, brigading, etc.
Unfortunately I missed out on the QR code thing, but I did manage to snag one of the last shirts! Colbert’s (I think it was Colbert’s letter on the back) writing team really went overboard on weaving memes into his “letter”, but that was totally in line with online culture of the time.
Uh, no. It wasn’t, so it would be better to not repeat it as if it was credible.
Thanks for keeping me honest! I’ll edit it. Unfortunately comment edits don’t seem to sync across different instances consistently yet. I should probably be more careful before posting a comment for now.
Sure, not to try to slight you, just the “concrete milkshake” thing was something spread by Andy Ngo to try to pretend he was a victim and that “Antifa” was a wild anarchic hate group out to harm people.
Oh? I don’t know about the “fairness doctorine”.
You owe it to yourself to read the wiki article at least. It died under Reagan.
Ya about the time it became out dated and irrelevant. Doesn’t apply to the internet or cable TV.
He should have extended it as opposed to ending it. But that’s kind of the problem with him and his administration. All of the deregulation of his time is what led to today’s bullshit. He will go down as the worst president in recent history in my books.
The internet itself is far more to blame than either of the factors you cite. Why? Because it destroyed journalism’s traditional revenue model and in so doing murdered local news. Only the biggest legacy news organizations can still make ends meet through a subscription base, so the result is that everyone else is left churning out bullshit clickbait articles in a competition for views.
“Information wants to be free,” was the mantra of the early internet, and that’s nice as far as it goes, but good journalism is expensive and when we gut the revenue stream of an entire industry, we shouldn’t be surprised that what’s left kind of sucks.