Lennvor

That is absolutely hilarious. Yeah Reddit, I totally buy that you want internet communities to not depend on platforms like Reddit. This would be totally monetizeable for you, not that you care about monetization and not that monetization has proven to work at cross-purposes with making good internet websites/communities. And once you mentioned blockchain, well that’s when I recognized the subliminal cues suggesting a well-thought-out proposal that positively impacts the world.

EDIT: Ugh just saw that again, they just linked an old post, this one apparently from 2021. I don’t think it changes things much insofar as they’re presumably planning to replace awards with something and this proposal presumably describes it. But I already didn’t see them successfully implementing the thing as written, and knowing now that it’s from 2021 it just makes me more certain that whatever they roll out is unlikely to be exactly what’s described here.

I’d say knowing this was written two years ago makes the text less hilariously on-the-nose but that depends on whether they’d write something different today doesn’t it, I’m not sure they wouldn’t.

This question is so generic I can’t help but feel there is a more specific idea behind it. Can you talk about what made you want to ask this, what kind of answers you’re expecting?

The thing is that, technically, “human fluorishing” (understood as the evolutionary tendency of our specie to thrive & expand) is not something that can be maintained indefinitelly.

I meant “human flourishing” as a shorthand for the list of things I listed, as in “things that tend to make individual humans feel fulfilled” not the expansion and thriving of humans as a species. I don’t think the latter is always seen as utopian; for example if I were to list utopias like The Culture, The Federation in Star Trek, Le Guin’s short stories, the Abbey of Thélème… Some of those do feature human expansion although even there it’s not uncomplicated (The Federation not only explores but also colonizes uninhabited worlds and I think it’s fair to see “the expansion of the human species” as part of its utopian vision; I think the same is true of The Culture but the books also challenge the idea), others straight-up reject it like many of Le Guin’s utopias, and I think ancient versions of the genre like the Abbey of Thélème don’t think that much about it at all. However all of those utopias portray humans as having or being able to achieve a variety of “personal fulfillment” goals such as those I listed; those are what I meant. I do think our evolutionary tendency to thrive & expand may be worth valuing for its own sake, contra Le Guin, but that’s a different conversation.

Having said that I don’t think the “rat utopia” experiments say that much about human flourishing. For one thing those “utopias” didn’t meet all of the rats’ needs - they had unlimited food and safety from outside threats but they didn’t have unlimited space or the kind of stimulation they evolved to thrive and maintain their social structures in. I guess it’s good nuance to understand that “flourishing” doesn’t reduce to “unlimited food and safety from predators” but that organisms have other needs too (notably space), but I think it’s something most people realize already. Note that stories that do feature “the evolutionary tendency of our species to thrive & expand” as utopian tend to have the opposite of a “rat utopia”, with space colonization/exploration making space unlimited but with challenging conditions.

I’m also not convinced such behavioral sinks apply to humans, or at least apply to them as completely as they did to those rats. Some unique features we have that seem relevant here include our level of sociality, playfulness and adaptability. Humans are much more social than our closest relatives (& maybe all mammals) so overpopulation doesn’t have the same impacts on us as others. We also (literally) play a lot more than any other species, in the sense of engaging in behaviors for the sake of random goals instead of the more straightforward ones that usually motivate us - in that category I’d list not only what we understand as play and games, but also things like art, science, sports, random hobbies, etc. We don’t only individually play, but as cultures we devote time and resources to goals “for their own sake” instead of concrete survival/expansion. I’d guess such random behavior serves as a natural outlet in cases where conditions are “too favorable”, one that we probably literally evolved to engage in (evolutionarily speaking play has the purpose of learning new things, and you do it when conditions are favorable enough that you don’t need to focus on survival), meaning it’s likely to feel satisfying to some extent at least. Finally, Alison Gopnik says adaptability is a hallmark of humans as a species and I think that claim holds up - human societies have proven able to adapt to a huge variety of environments, both physical and social. Our own societies are extremely different from the kind we evolved with and have tons of issues, but they still basically function, with a huge proportion of humans in them leading lives that range from satisfactory to fulfilling, in a way that wouldn’t be true of a comparable number of chimpanzees. So I have doubts that we’d completely collapse as a species because of something so generic as conditions being “too favorable”. Humans and human societies can be broken, no doubt about that, but that usually involves extreme scenarios. Unfavorable ones, at that.

It might be worth noting at this point that a lot of us, particularly of the “posting randomly on the internet” variety, do functionally live in “rat utopias” with unlimited food, no predators but limited space and tons of people around. And I think most would attest that while it’s not the key to perfect happiness, it also hasn’t devolved into the horrifying hellscape the rats experienced.

This isn’t to say I think human utopia is possible/coherent/compatible with our nature. I just don’t think the rat experiment is a very good example for that argument.

This kind of “why do we seek out happiness/pleasure but stories of artificial happiness/pleasure utopias always read like dystopias” question baffled me a lot until it occurred to me recently - happiness and pleasure are evolved systems that evolved for a reason. It feels absurd to treat them like a goal because they’re not a goal, they’re a measure. It’s a bit like you’re heating something and looking at the thermometer to check it’s heating right, and someone says “hey why don’t we paint the thermometer to have the value you want, that’s much simpler and you’ll reach your goal fine” and the answer is yes, but no. Yes, the thermometer will have the value you were aiming for and it may have looked like that was your goal but actually no, your goal won’t be achieved because the real goal was never the thermometer it was heating the thing.

In our case, happiness, pleasure and so on evolved to drive us towards certain states and behaviors that it was evolutionarily beneficial for our ancestors to be in. Being physically comfortable, safe and healthy, being well-regarded by peers, achieving personal and collective goals, having friends and family who love you/have your back and you them, acting in line with what one feels is best, etc etc etc.

I think that has two consequences: 1) it’s entirely possible that perfect happiness/pleasure isn’t something we can ever attain, or that it’s even a coherent state, via real OR artificial means. Because happiness/pleasure evolved under constraints that didn’t include the requirement that such a state be attainable or even coherent. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it definitely means there is no guarantee that it is. Certainly our current experience with happy-making drugs suggests it’s much harder than you’d think. And 2) it puts into question the assumption that this state is “good”. These dystopias always seem so sterile, like what’s the point of all those people being happy, why have this system go to all that trouble to make it happen? Well, why should we care about anything, right, it’s all value judgements. And there are obvious reasons humans would value happiness. But there are also obvious reasons we’d value safety, comfort, loving friends and family, having children, achieving personal and collective goals, social status, discovering new things, leaving a legacy, etc etc. The “artificially happy people” dystopia assumes that we value happiness above all those other things but that’s an illusion borne from the fact happiness is a unified system driving us to all those things. A bit like thinking money is the most important thing because everybody is trying to get some, when in reality the money is just the unified vehicle for various things we really want - products and services, security, status, etc.

So insofar as all of those different goals are things we care about because we evolved to, it seems both more parsimonious and more robust to focus on goals that happiness/pleasure evolved as instruments to achieve rather than trying to hack the thermometer.

Arguably that’s the difference between actual utopias and “we’re all happy, that’s good right?” dystopias. Actual utopias explore the conditions for human flourishing, and either portray happiness as obviously following from that or straight-up don’t focus on happiness at all. Happy dystopias are dystopias precisely because the conditions they show are so antithetical to human flourishing that no reader would buy the characters are happy without the in-Universe happiness drugs or brainwashing or whatever.

Is it, though?

My kid was conceived via IVF. I literally have a picture of him as a 5-day-old blastocyst. (ok I can’t help being pedantic and pointing out that I think it would be more accurate to consider the embryonic disk as the true “here is me when I was little” precursor as the zygote/blastocyst develops not just into the baby but into the whole amniotic sac. But whatever).

That first comment has thrown me for a loop. The replies accuse if of being ChatGPT, and it extremely looks like ChatGPT, but I think it might be a human imitating ChatGPT? Bang-on imitation if so.

It really reminds me of this paper that was discussed on the Many Minds podcast awhile ago, about a new hypothesis on the evolution of music. Basically this person argued that music evolved as a credible signal for group cohesion - working together is a critical adaptive skill for humans (I recently finished Michael Tomasello’s book “The Evolution of Agency” which I think drives that point home even harder), and singing and doing music requires coordination. And putting on a good performance requires really good coordination. So the idea is that it evolved as a signal of “you don’t want to fuck with us, look at how much of a well-oiled machine we are”.

It’s just one hypothesis among others of course but it’s compelling enough to me that it’s wormed itself into my brain as being obviously true.

Anyway, I kind of want to find that author and link them to r/place and just go like “whaddaya think, is there a paper in this”. There are quite a few ways internet communities flex and compete in terms of “we’re more numerous and better organized than other communities” but I’m not sure there are others that are as performative as r/places. And I don’t think it was intended that way, was it? Like, today’s r/place says “alone you can do something, together you can do more” but when they originally did it had they expected explicit subreddit coordination to be such a big part of it? Or were they expecting something much more random and individual-driven?

I don’t think there currently are but I haven’t searched either. I will say there were two separate “how about we do this” on kbin.social/m/redditMigration (where I first posted this comment), and given most replies seems to agree on shunning r/place I’d guess that nobody has started anything at this time. This comment isn’t me volunteering to do it either, I wouldn’t even know how to start, I just decided I disagreed with people’s arguments and wanted to throw my thoughts out there. I might participate if something did get coordinated though; I don’t have the app but when I was checking out r/place on my browser I seemed to hit a page where it looked like I could participate. Dunno if they changed things or if I misunderstood.

Anyway ISTM lemmy.world/c/reddit (is this where this is?) and kbin.social/m/redditMigration would be the logical places for such coordination if it were to happen. They’re the places I’ve seen people talk about it.

There are definitely diminishing returns to increasing the discoverability of something (if we hate the word “advertise”) once enough people know about it. What are your reasons for thinking we are now at this point of diminishing returns and not still in the expansion phase?

Like, if it were actually the case that everybody who had an interest in being on Lemmy or kbin knew about Lemmy and kbin and understood exactly how much it was in their interest to be there… The only conclusion I can come to is that Lemmy and kbin kind of suck, given the activity in the subs I’m interested in. Or are inherently niche products that intrinsically interest few people compared to a platform like Reddit. I can definitely see an argument that this is true of Mastodon given the graveyard of “here is my new home away from Twitter” accounts that haven’t posted since 2022 (I don’t think Mastodon sucks but I can definitely buy that it has features that made it an unsatisfactory replacement for Twitter for most people in 2022), but whether that argument is correct or not I don’t think you can make the same one for kbin or Lemmy at this point in time.

Anybody who gives the slightest fuck about finding an alternative is already aware of kbin/Lemmy.

That’s just empirically not true and it’s not how people and internet communities work. But I guess a more important question is, are you saying this because you believe it to be true or because you are happy with the size Kbin and Lemmy currently are and would prefer not to have a mass migration from Reddit that would change the vibes ? Because that’s absolutely a valid concern. If that’s not where you’re coming from and you really do just think that sentence is true, at what point in time would you say we reached the point where everyone who needs to be aware of kbin/Lemmy became aware of kbin/Lemmy?

By trying to “advertise”, you’re only opening up the platform to brigading.

You WISH kbin or Lemmy were big and well-known enough to be worth brigading. Or maybe you don’t, which would be valid as I said above and is a different conversation. And it’s possible that by “brigading” you mean “an influx of newbies who ruin the vibe”, in which case I agree that this is a possible effect of what I suggest. In fact it’s the desired effect. However if this does in fact result in a mass of people going onto the platform with the intention of ruining conversations who would not have gone on it instead, that would suck but I’m not sure it couldn’t also be leveraged as a streisand effect. Kind of like how for a nobody like Rocky Balboa just being in the ring with Apollo Creed was a win.

Oh, and on top of that, you’re giving Reddit additional traffic, which is exactly what they want right now. Just leave it alone!!

Yes, giving Reddit additional traffic sucks and is what they want. If there were a way of participating in r/places without doing so I’d recommend that as a no-brainer. However it doesn’t just give Reddit additional traffic and “what Reddit wants” isn’t necessarily what’s actually best for Reddit. I made an argument for why I think it would also cause a certain amount of migration from Reddit and we can get more into it once I better understand whether that’s something you want to avoid or not. The question then becomes what the net effect will be, and I don’t think that’s easy for anyone to know, including Reddit. But numbers-wise, given the number of people in these threads compared to the audience of r/places and the percentage of that audience who would be nudged towards checking out/contributing more to kbin or lemmy from seeing them on r/places, I really feel the net effect is more likely to be on our side.

Hi, I seem to be reposting this comment everywhere there is discussion of r/place on Kbin and now Lemmy. I just haven’t really seen those points being made so I thought they were worth highlighting. Sorry for the spam, this is the last one I promise. I need to go to work.

After giving it some thought, I think you should indeed do that. For Lemmy AND Kbin and more.
tl;dr: Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don’t know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms

The major objection is that going to r/place gives Reddit the engagement and numbers they want for the IPO, and I think that’s a compelling point but I don’t think it’s as obvious as the people making that point seem to think. The idea of “don’t go on Reddit to protest Reddit, that’s just helping Reddit” has some “But you live in a society, curious” vibes to it; I think the question of whether to protest vs abstain and how to best protest is always going to depend on the details of what you’re protesting or abstaining from.

In this case I think Kbin and Lemmy users should put their names on the r/place board according to the following reasoning:

• The argument that you shouldn’t go on r/places is essentially saying that the best protest against Reddit is people leaving Reddit, which I agree with

• Like all protests however it’s not that impactful if it’s a few isolated people doing it, you need to find a way to have users do it en masse. Coordination is key.

• Same thing for going on Kbin and Lemmy and others - these platforms become good if they have enough users to sustain vibrant communities, they rely on network effects.

• r/place as an event is a showcase of a community’s coordination. It both requires a community to be large and well-communicated and it gives a very practical, visible way of advertising that coordination to both rivals and random observers (there’s a paper out there proposing that this is why music evolved btw, hmmm that’s pretty cool)

• what ultimately made me decide to post this is going on the thread for r/place’s first day. Look at the conversations, this is exactly what they’re doing: discussing the communities participating, commenting on what they draw and explicitly talking about what it means for those communities’ size and coordination

• These comments also included people asking “why fuck u/spez ?” and “the only reason I’m still on Reddit is that there aren’t any alternatives”

• This means there is a pool of normie users who aren’t aware of the protest, but are following r/places, and the “fuck u/spez” movement is effective in bringing their attention to it

• By the same token there are tons of users who aren’t aware of existing potential Reddit alternatives (one of those comments got “Lemmy” as a recommendation in replies and said “interesting I’ll check it out” - they legit hadn’t heard about it).

In conclusion:
Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don’t know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms.

Now in practice I don’t know that these platforms actually have the size and coordination to showcase that on r/places and that’s fine, clearly a huge percentage of people here believe that boycotting Reddit entirely is more effective or more convenient. But if the question is “which hurts Reddit more, promoting Lemmy/Kbin on r/places or avoiding r/places”, I’ve come to believe the answer is the first.

EDIT: oh right another objection I saw was “but the admins will just erase it”, and there again look at the comments on r/place. Clear streisand effect on the guillotine, if there’s stuff for lemmy/kbin/squabble that’s visible enough and admins erase it it still works fine from a comms perspective.

Maybe that’s the answer to OP’s “is [bribes] actually a thing here”