Lemmy is turning into a left-wing echo chamber. The mods have declared that right-leaning opinions are not welcome and are defederating from any right-leaning instances. If you declare that half the population is not welcome, you’re really limiting your reach. It’s also going to be a pain to have two logins, one for lemmy.world and one for the free speech instances.
No. It just leads to people gaming the system. I also think that counting upvotes but not downvotes is also a good idea, when ranking which posts show first. Too many people use downvote for “I disagree”, which means a true idea with less than 50% popularity gets buried.
A site like Reddit could be run on a skeleton crew of 20-50 people. That’s what Elon Musk is trying to do somewhat with Twitter, slashing unnecessary employees.
Look at it from the viewpoint of an executive. “I managed a 5 person team.” makes you sound like a loser. “I managed a 100 person division” makes you sound like a Big Important Person, even if 95 of those jobs were unnecessary.
Also look at it from the viewpoint of investors. If an investor puts $200M into Reddit, they want Reddit to be spending $100M-$200M on growth. No investor would put $200M into reddit if reddit was going to just run a barebones operation spending $20M per year and then coasting for 10 years off the investment money.
Here’s one way to realize why Reddit should not be taken seriously: Suppose that the head moderator position for r/politics was put up for open auction. How much would it sell for? It would be purchased by someone who was interested in controlling what information people see.
Subreddits are moderated on a first-come first-serve basis. If you were the first one to squat a name 10 years ago, you get to be the head moderator, even if someone else might do a better job. This is the “landed gentry” comment Reddit’s CEO was referring to.
There are more potentially interesting websites than I have time to spend. I’m taking the same attitude to Reddit that I take for StackOverflow and Wikipedia. I’ll read their content, especially if it comes up in search, but I’m not wading through the cesspool to try and contribute anything.
Maybe the problem is that your definition of fascism is “anyone who disagrees with me”?