The problem with Reddit in a fucking nutshell. 10.7K upvotes, 611 comments. Removed because the content is "tired". It's live footage from the Nepal disaster as it happens.

I had over 20 accounts: all of them banned.

I'm at least grateful I can access them.

I already answered this comment but it's later now and I thought about it and I wanted to say:

I knew this comment was coming as I posted this.

And you are absolutely god damned motherfucking bitch ass right.

What are we doing there?

What are we even doing here?

Is this going to just be the new model Reddit?

Or will we create something new, something true, something unique, something... Interactive and communicative, and collaborative, and creative. Like, you know, the early days of Reddit.

We were all pretty well educated, we were smart, and we were actually kind, and we were all friends.

You know what truly sets friendship apart from... What makes it unique?

It's the fact that you have known each other and talked to each other and gone through things together daily, like in school. Why are our oldest friends consistently the people we went to school with? Sure some of it is you shared the experience of growing up, but, you got that experience because you all showed up day after day, year after year, did shit together constantly, talked, fought, solved problems together- for better and for worse.

There is a classic social psychological experiment- you get a bunch of kids in the forest and make them solve mental and physical tasks as a group, but you divide them in red and blue team. As soon as you divide a group, automatically the human brain starts belittling the outgroup and praising the ingroup. As long as there is competition.

So they are out there for a week, Survivor style tasks, and red vs blue grows into true animosity.

That is how you create conflict- divide people into separate groups (red/blue, black/white, A/B, doesn't matter at all which is shocking, literally any (formal or implied) distinction between an otherwise more or less homogenous group of individuals, will cause conflict.

This is the Robber's Cave experiment. At the end of which, when they all hate each other completely and... Scarily... They are set to solve a task that can only be solved by cooperation between both teams.

Once you do that one time or two or three, they very very quickly become one group with one task and start working as one, and become friends.

That is VERY FUCKING WORTHY FOOD FOR THOUGHT.

What if... We based our societal system, or this very communication system in case, on cooperation rather than division, judgment (up vs down arrows), gatekeeping (do you belong vs are you an enemy), grouping into content directories that imply or presume or subsume any type of division (/r/BarcelonaFC vs /r/RealMadrid, /r/leftwingmemes vs /r/rightwingmemes, or /r/A vs /r/B), so what if...

What if we instead built the system around cooperation and a... I wouldn't necessarily say Laissez Faire attitude, but foster a communal spirit of cooperation and mutual understanding... Our communication systems, and primarily our economic one that has taken over all agency of democracy and replaced it with a zero sum antagonistic free-for-all game of maximization- what if we could invent, create, write, and build a system based around cooperation.

Is this a lofty ideal? Is this the musings of a drunk teenager? If so, are the teenagers right? Because I remember being one, and I was right, and I was saying this same shit three decades ago and I'm still convinced it's true, and it rings true, and I believe it's true, and even if it's not true, I think it is the better alternative for human interaction.

Humanity has become... Schizophrenic. Paranoid, delusional, aggressive, neurotic, frantic, fanatic. We need a reality check. The problem is that other humans ARE our reality check.

We need to establish ground rules for communication.

"Read the sidebar, it's a very coherent set of ground rules for communication right there"

Very clever- nobody reads the rules, nobody cares, we're not here to read notices, we're here to communicate, to talk, to exchange ideas, to make friends. Isn't that what we always do? Unless we have either something to prove or something to hide or something to sell or something to demand. Perhaps we should establish a form of communication which precludes all of those- like a philosophy of language and communication.

"LOLOLO read Derrida, Foucalt, Wittgenstein, et al"

I did, and I think that words are a bunch of bullshit, and that we can use them to influence the whole scope of conversation, if we but allow ourselves to work from a foundation of constructive collaboration, rather than semantic arbitration.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my LemTalk if you read this far I'm impressed and also question your sanity.

I know. I know. I know.

I know.

But the utility!

Then again...

I know.

I have to log in to access reddit on a tablet.

The polls are essentially disabled.

Almost all moderators can't think of bans that last less than permanent.

Complaining about bans? Lol, you have nowhere to complain! Where's you're god now? Then all the athiests clapd.

Be me