brownpaperbag

Why are you posting about the Titan sub in a thread about a Reddit community of transcribers that will be closing?

Mr. Huffman is stretching in a variety of directions here. Reddit is not a feudal government, or a city in any sense; neither is it ultimately “democratic,” as he frequently suggests. It’s an advertising and subscription-supported web service that also depends on free content and unpaid labor from its users. It is, substantially, in the same business as Meta, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok — giving people something to use mostly for free in exchange for their monetizable time and attention.

I really appreciated this callout in the article.

Thanks for sharing that!

While that quote has been attributed to Twain (and several others) over the years, there is nothing to suggest that Twain used this particular phrasing nor was he the originator of it. That credit goes to George H Derby, under the pseudonym John Phoenix, back in 1855.

The trifecta of “kings, editors and people with tapeworm” has been widely attributed to Mark Twain, but like so many witticisms credited to him, there’s no record he ever said it. It’s also unlikely that Henry David Thoreau ever made the remark once ascribed to him: “We is used by royalty, editors, pregnant women and people who eat worms.”

Worms, or more specifically tapeworms, figure prominently in we-­related humor. The earliest known joke to combine parasites and pronouns comes from George Horatio Derby, a humorist from California who assumed the pen name John Phoenix. “I do not think I have a tapeworm,” he wrote in 1855, “therefore I have no claim whatever to call myself ‘we,’ and I shall by no means fall into that editorial absurdity.”

New York Times, Ben Zimmer, 2010-10-01

I’m not sure where it ranked at the time but I remember when one of the subs hit 100k (this was circa 2014) and by the time I left we were close to 500k. When I checked before the blackout they were sitting at 1.9m.

You’re absolutely right about an alt not doing much, if you ever had time for that. Modding definitely affected my Reddit experience, even after stepping down, and combined with how it changed over the last several years, my participation went way down, maybe a handful of comments a month at best, and I lurked and upvoted/downvoted for the most part. I’m slowly shaking off those cobwebs in this exciting new space!

My time as a Reddit mod left me with no desire to do it elsewhere and I’d modded other forums prior to Reddit. I stepped down about 5 years ago and while I won’t say I’ll never do it again, I’m exhausted just recalling my experience and that’s enough to put me off.

There are communities I’d love to have and see here on kbin but the mere thought of the time and effort has me taking a hard pass.

This is, by far, the best article on the subject I’ve read to date. I really appreciated this paragraph being included:

This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon.