When you post on reddit, instagram etc. you're giving the company your valuable data. (And it often is valuable, you put your thoughts into it and all that). Consider if you take 15 minutes to create value content, you'd get paid $5 or sth if you were doing it commercially. Now all that value is donated to big tech companies. (that's the only reason why they have value at all.)
So what's the problem with that? The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I'm not joking. Look at these:
when i want to see content on reddit (for research) or instagram (for local community) they don't allow me to see the data that users have contributed. Reddit claims that it blocks VPNs for "security reasons", meanwhile i'm using VPNs in browser's incognito mode to not be tracked. Instagram wants you to sign in sothat they amass more users and can take leverage of the network effect even more.
I can understand restricting who can post to limit bot activity, but reading must always be possible. After all, it's our data. That's exactly what happens when you give your data to big companies to "communicate with other people": your data becomes a source of income for them, at our expense.
It's pointless anymore to try infoposting on reddit.
Take for example the soldering subreddit. The info on that sub is that you must slather everything in flux in order to solder properly. A guy posted yesterday citing 40 years of experience, saying that's not how he's done it. The comments are a mess.
Another post today, someone asks about air filtering the solder smoke. The consensus in the comments is it's not a big deal. You can literally measure the particulate matter yourself to see how bad it is. Basically an average residential room size, say 100-200 sq/ft. You'll basically hotbox yourself with smoke.
Another one that's seen less often but the false idea persists. It's that capacitors never short and burn out. I don't know how or why that false idea floats around, but I've seen it over the years. I've replaced tons of caps that spontaneously combusted. Both electrolytic and SMD caps. Sometimes they just fail and short. No other fault.
Reddit is full of bad info. It's site that relies on word of mouth and popularity contest. You do not build a knoweldge base of technical information this way. You're getting an entropic game of telephone. That's all reddit ever was and ever will be. It's flawed paradigm by default.
A paradigm that lemmy is built off. So don't you all be getting the idea that good knowledge is going to be getting sourced from here either.
As a long time maintenance technician, this made me unreasonably angry. This is something I would punch somebody for asserting.
O.o
I've been in it since the late 90's, I feel, at most, like peeing in their shoes when they're not looking.
They won't learn anyway, least you can do is make them uncomfortable for while.
It’s kind of insane that integrated wikis with citations/documentation aren’t the centerpiece of (Reddit) communities.
Instead, we got… Discord?
Early iterations of the community did try to incorporate these features.
But simply tapping the sign that reads "Go read the wiki on this solved issue" doesn't generate the kind of traffic and community participation that repeating the same copypasta every month or two does. Also, god forbid one of your mods does something like...
post something unPC in a Politics community
argue with content from a native advertiser
piss off an admin... somehow
sign in from a device in a way that triggers an automated unchallengeable ban
fail to constantly scour your community of shitposts
Plenty of the old subs have been hollowed out, transferred, or otherwise denuded of their professional contributors for some stupid reason or another. And now the site is so aggressively policed that you can't really join (much less re-join once you've been booted) to add anything useful.
This has been the OG Wikipedia's fate as well, with mods getting older and links going stale and new contributors all getting hyper-policed for fear of bots, marketing accounts, and shitposters.
Small forums full of active users are more reliable for useful information than big forums full of lurkers and attention whores. That's not unique to Reddit. Just very obvious, given the long and deplorable history of the platform.
Don't worry, they're next, they're just run by some what quiet assholes instead if fuckyou spez
Meanwhile I'm playing Oxygen Not Included, and like half the time I look something up about the game, half the results are on reddit. There's a lot of accumulated stuff on there that's still helpful.
Of course, any false or outdated info will quickly be obvious when you start up the game again. Lower stakes than soldering safety.
I was on a few narrow interest subs. I mean really narrow interest. There were folk they'd turn to for reliable historical analysis, folk they'd turn to for reliable cultural analysis, I was one of their data crunchers (I could basically find the line entries that looked wrong and the folk who had time to do more in depth forensic bullshit could dig into them) I mean on one of those narrow interest subs some people thought they were taking down a cult, I just helped shine a light on things. And learned about cults of course, can't start a good cult without knowing how the toxic ones work