Reddit’s disrespectful design


An overview of Reddits seemingly counter-productive changes.

Source: Reddit’s disrespectful design

The author says, “I’ve stopped using Reddit mostly because I no longer wanted to support a site that has aggressively started to employ disrespectful design patterns.” Excuse me, but “started?” They’ve been going down this road for years. I’ve stopped using Reddit entirely, and have the site blocked on my network, so that I can’t inadvertently give them traffic by clicking through a search result, as they have obviously paid through the nose for placement these days! Just about everything I search on has at lease one Reddit link in the first page of results. For awhile, I would click through to the page, wait for the site to load it’s 100 MB of scripts, dismiss the popups, expand the answers, and see what Google had supposedly found, but I gradually realized there is never a good answer on the site. Technical discussions are not what people are doing on the site.

500 comments on the HackerNews discussion about this post, and these are the only comments about porn:

This exchange is utter nonsense. Reddit is filled with porn. Thousands and thousands of subs are dedicated to it. If you have an account, and allow NSFW content — and take note that most of the viral posts on the site are marked NSFW, encouraging you to do so, even if you don’t necessarily want to look at porn — all it takes is one search on the site, and you can instantly infer how much of it there is. Yes, a lot of it is come-ons for someone’s paid site, but there is a virtually limitless supply of free, high-quality porn to accommodate everyone’s tastes.

No one wants to admit this. I will. I’ve had a look around. It’s bewildering how much of it there is, and how specific it can be. I’ve brought it up many times in various HN discussions, and no one even wants to acknowledge it. The exchange above is a perfect example of just ducking the issue entirely. In fact, the exact inverse of what’s stated here is true: Reddit is a porn site, with some user-interest topics (like gaming, audiophile headsets, or mechanical keyboards) to keep you engaged between wanks. One of these days, I expect PornHub to take a note, and start forums on their site about whatever people want to talk about. Who knows? Maybe they already do. I’ve not “researched” that site.

Why Porn Stars Like Me Are Terrified of VP Kamala Harris

I respect Harris for seeing gays and women of color through a compassionate lens. After four years of Vice President Mike Pence, it’ll be nice to see someone make the executive branch empathetic again. Still, I doubt Harris’s executive empathy will extend to exotic dancers, porn stars, strippers, prostitutes, or erotic masseuses: The vice president-elect brings a lifetime of animosity toward sex workers to Number One Observatory Circle.

Harris’s hatred goes back to her days as San Francisco District Attorney. In 2008, Harris opposed a San Francisco ballot initiative to legalize prostitution. “I think it’s completely ridiculous, just in case there’s any ambiguity about my position,” Harris told The New York Times. She proclaimed the law would roll “a welcome mat out for pimps” and push vulnerable women into the arms of drugs and guns.

Source: Why Porn Stars Like Me Are Terrified of VP Kamala Harris

So, let me get this straight. Kamala Harris gets to be as politically hard on sex work as you can be, but she still gets credit for being “compassionate” towards marginalized demographic sectors, while Pence — according to my Googling — has not done or even said anything politically, one way or another, about sex work, but he’s still considered un-“empathetic.” Got it.

When it comes to sex work, Harris always has a but. Harris has expressed one too many buts about my chosen profession. We need all Americans to raise a but to her objection to sex work. If not, Americans might soon have nothing to jack off to.

Right. Whatever Kamala Harris is doing or not doing in regards to the legality of sex work, I’m very confident that it will make exactly ZERO impact on the amount of stuff “to jack off to” available to Americans. What an eyeroll-worthy statement! As long as Reddit exists, Americans have nothing to fear. The site used to be a great collection of forums for nerdy interests. Now the site is being run as an experiment in using social media to manipulate national discourse, modded by psychopaths, and driven by crazy people at the fringe of every topic discussed, all as a precariously-thin veneer over the world’s largest, free hub of every type of pornography that can be categorized (and probably some that can’t). Yes, I’m bitter about this, and I take every opportunity I can to bag on Reddit now.

Don’t even try to tell me that you can’t monetize yourself having sex on the endless numbers of paid pornography sites, and don’t even get me started about OnlyFans and it’s copycats. Not to mention that you can post endless come-ons for your site(s) with snippets of hard-core pornography on Twitter. With all of this going on, it’s a little difficult for me to understand how people who want to pimp themselves out online can complain about not being able to get paid. If anything, if you aren’t getting paid for performing sex acts online, it’s because so many people are trying that you are probably just getting lost in a sea of slighty-better-than-average-looking people trying to do the same.

You can tell me that actual, physical sex workers — i.e, prostitutes — face unfair legal problems with making a living. I’ll buy that, and I can say that I support people making money however they want, but don’t try to tell me that pornography is in peril, in any way, shape, or form, from any politician, or that you face difficulties in selling yourself performing sex acts online. With so much porn popping up in the mainstream sites that have become “the internet,” that just doesn’t compute.