Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area
This General Chat area started off as a place for people to talk about things that are off topic, however it has quickly evolved into a community and has become an integral part of the GAW experience for many of us.
Based on its evolving needs and plenty of user feedback, we are trying to bring some order and institute some rules. Please make sure you read these rules and participate in the spirit of this community.
Rules for General Chat
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Be respectful to each other. This is of utmost importance, and comments may be removed if deemed not respectful.
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Avoid long drawn out arguments. This should be a place to relax, not to waste your time needlessly.
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Personal anecdotes, puzzles, cute pics/clips - everything welcome
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Please do not spam at the top level. If you have a lot to post each day, try and post them all together in one top level comment
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Try keep things light. If you are bringing in deep stuff, try not to go overboard.
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Things that are clearly on-topic for this board should be posted as a separate post and not here (except if you are new and still getting the feel of this place)
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If you find people violating these rules, deport them rather than start a argument here.
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Feel free to give feedback as these rules are expected to keep evoloving
In short, imagine this thread to be a local community hall where we all gather and chat daily. Please be respectful to others in the same way
Really good question. Haven't seen any definitive answers yet.
Wondering if it was a temporary service hiccup, or if it's something more insidious like reddit pricing API access out of bounds of any 3rd party's budget.
On that note: shower thought.
Reddit recently removed their Award System where users could flair a post with a variety of graphical "medals" to show support for the topic / post.
Why would they do such a thing? It's a completely digital asset, non-negligible passive income. There was a whole cultural "thing" where people would drop a couple of dollars to flex and interact with the forum. Total casino style addictive nonsense. Free money.
Well, something I'd noticed on /r/conspiracy specifically, and really any right-leaning post site wide, is the sophistication of downvote bots to control the narrative. In /r/conspiracy ALL posts are immediately downvoted until they display "0" votes, which is apparently the bottom threshold the system shows. Very few organically overcome this and eventually display positive votes - and that's on inarguably one of the largest subs on Reddit. Stuff in normies subs just gets CRUSHED.
But you could always tell which "unpopular" posts had the support of the community by the Awards people paid to place on them. When you saw a controversial post sitting at zero votes with a bunch of expensive Awards attached, it undermined the narrative.
The removal of the awards system definitely strikes me as being in preparation for 2024 and NCSWIC. No more underground Code Talk. Same way almost all news outlets dropped their comment sections coincidentally before COVID. Same way Amazon bought IMDB and unceremoniously deleted the single largest collection of message threads outside of Usenet (which Google just happened to buy and bury as well as they could) 2 years before COVID. Can't have normies discussing the plots to all this wildly suspicious media.
Millions of free dollars just dropped on Reddit, I suspect solely to control this tiny bit of nonverbal communication. They're afraid.
NCSWIC
omg, another one of you conspiracytards coming up with another conspiracy theory, that even involves reddit. it all makes sense and I believe you are on to something. great reply, thanks.