"[Reddit] has quietly started beta-testing Reddit Answers, what it calls an 'AI-powered conversational interface'..."

"... basically an AI chatbot. On a new search screen accessible from the homepage, Reddit Answers takes anyone’s queries, trawls the site for relevant discussions and debates, and composes them into a response. In other words, a site that sells itself as a home for 'authentic human connection' is now giving humans the option to interact with an algorithm instead.... Consider, for example, requesting tips for traveling with a baby on an airplane. Reddit Answers generates a list of ideas—perhaps 'Pack Essentials' or 'Board Early'—decontextualized from the parents who gathered this wisdom, the horrifying and hilarious anecdotes in their original posts, and the heartwarming support and tips in additional responses.... [S]hould the feature really take off and Redditors stop engaging with one another, the chatbot will be drained of biological intelligence, and soul as well. It’s the same with any AI tool seeking to synthesize, summarize, and boil portions of the web to their essence: Eventually, the pot will burn dry."

Writes Matteo Wong, in "Is This How Reddit Ends? The site has become a reservoir of humanity on the web. Now it, too, is turning to AI" (The Atlantic).

Show Redditors finding a happy place to escape from Trump.

 

Link. Who would have thought, back when GWB was the hated devil, that he would one day provide solace to those who were agonizing over a far more hateful devil?

I like this picture someone put up. Do you see who it is? At first, I thought: LBJ??!? But he's too short:

"Along with three quarters of a million other people, I’m a member of r/AmIOverreacting, a forum on Reddit devoted to the problem of potentially freaking out too much...."

"If anything, r/AmIOverreacting is a kind of reactivity buffer zone—a place where reactions can be mediated, and so slowed down. In that sense, it’s part of a larger, society-wide effort.... Mindfulness is another way of managing one’s reactivity. Broadly speaking, mindful minds seek to replace the question “Am I overreacting?” with the neutral observation that, yes, a reaction is happening. In the pre-baby mindfulness workshop I attended, our instructor told us to imagine our emotions as locomotives. 'You can watch the train leave the station without getting on board,' she said. She encouraged us to react to our reactions with nonjudgmental attention...."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Are You Overreacting? How to survive when provocations are a natural—and inescapable—part of life" (The New Yorker).

"Each time we argue my girlfriend will go away and discuss the argument with chat gpt, even doing so in the same room sometimes."

"Whenever she does this she’ll then come back with a well constructed argument breaking down everything i said or did during our argument. I’ve explained to her that i don’t like her doing so as it can feel like i’m being ambushed with thoughts and opinions from a robot. It’s nearly impossible for a human being to remember every small detail and break it down bit by bit but AI has no issue doing so. Whenever i’ve voiced my upset i’ve been told that 'chat gpt says you’re insecure' or 'chat gpt says you don’t have the emotional bandwidth to understand what i’m saying.' My big issue is it’s her formulating the prompts so if she explains that i’m in the wrong, it’s going to agree without me having a chance to explain things. Am i the asshole for asking her to stop using chat gpt in this context?"

From "My girlfriend uses Chat GPT every time we have a disagreement. AITAH for saying she needs to stop?" (r/AITAH). Via "Couples are using AI to fight — and win — arguments: 'ChatGPT says you’re insecure'" (NY Post).

I think it's sad that they live in such a way that she can "go away" and still be "in the same room sometimes." Just agree to use the AI together, alternating who puts in the next prompt or using your own device in parallel fashion. Have fun with it, and if you can't, you're not doing anything right. 

"I have seen claims on social media saying that semen retention can boost your testosterone levels, cure erectile dysfunction, make you more manly..."

"... make you stronger, cure depression, make you more successful, clear your skin.... And there is no medical evidence that it does any of those things."

Says Ashley Winter, "a urologist who has been publicly critical of nofap ideas," quoted in "Masturbation abstinence is popular online. Doctors and therapists are worried" (NPR).

The experts are worried — worried about respect for their authority. But whether there is "medical evidence" or not, individuals will experiment with their own body and mind and observe the results and make their own choices.

"Reddit is in deep decline."

Link.

I changed the way I presented that "Reddit is in deep decline" comment. The "deep decline" referred to commenters who thought the front-page poster — on a subreddit devoted to Bob Dylan — was asserting that "Blood on the Tracks" is underrated. The front-page poster had to come in and say "How did your comment get 20x more upvotes than my post😂 Did nobody read the full post? Hilarious but also frightening that the fanbase of a Nobel laureate for literature does not know how to read."

"From the distant historical perspective of a 90s or 2000s forum moderator or avid user, the Reddit of today might sound like a pretty depressing destination..."

"... a link aggregator that replaced and flattened the web’s independent communities into a single template owned by one company. But place it next to the other places people started spending most of their time online in the 2010s and it looks like a civic institution in comparison. It may not be ideal, but Reddit is a place where people build spaces with shared norms to talk about stuff they want to talk about. It’s not the feed. The experience of feed-based social networks is primarily about the individual. In addition to endless streams of content, they provide their users with personal feedback and validation, or opportunities for notoriety or fame, in exchange for their contribution and engagement. Their most devoted users, whose presence helps keep others around, are driven to cultivate brands — to see their followers as customers — in all but explicit marketplaces for attention. Reddit’s most devoted users, however, are up to something a bit different...." 

From "Reddit and the End of Online ‘Community’ A standoff between the site and some of its most devoted users exposes an existential dilemma" (Intelligencer).

15% of Maryland's license plates display the URL of a Philippines gambling site (instead of a War of 1812 site).

WaPo reports. 

These plates have been around since 2010 (and obviously the bicentennial of the war was in 2012), but we're just noticing now, as somebody at Reddit is calling attention to the typo.

Here's a screenshot of what you might see if you go to the URL on the license plate:

"Weirdest thing you had to ban and why?"/"A puppet show where the puppets were made out of weed."

From "I’m a content moderator for a very famous short video social media"/"Ask Me Anything" (Reddit).

We're just not existing at the same speed as the birds.

Let's just slow down that birdsong so we can really hear what's going on:

 

Amazing bird singing
by u/sabbah in nextfuckinglevel

Via Metafilter, where somebody says, "Reddit is a terrible place to learn things, because any comments with real info gets lost in thousands of silly puns and cultural references. But the video comes from this Instagram account with many more videos of the birb."

So Metafilter is the place where they just have to say "birb" for "bird" and they get snooty about Reddit, and,  I guess, Instagram is the best choice for finding the originator of the material.

And TikTok is where you go to find a guy who comically portrays Redditors as the ones who are snooty.

It's a propaganda postcard, but what is it propaganda for?

I found that at the subreddit Propaganda Posters.

"Is this the end of it? And if so, why couldn’t the Biden administration foresee it being blocked so easily by the courts?"

"Why did they not have stronger legal cards to play with instead of having 43 million filers on a legal and emotional tightrope?"

A Reddit discussion of the current state of the student loan forgiveness program.

Why did Biden get 43 million hopes up?  You can hear the poignancy in the question... or do you think that's phony? Everyone knows the answer to why it was done despite the lack of "stronger legal cards." It's just a question of how outraged they will feel and who they will blame. At least some people will curse the courts — those damned conservatives  — and some will forgive Biden for toying with their feelings because it was worth it, given the modest Democratic Party success in the 2022 elections. You could also say the more obvious it was all along that the program would not hold up in court the less sense it made to invest serious expectations that you'd be getting that $10,000/$20,000 some day.

"MPD: Witnesses report motorcyclists going 140+ mph in downtown Madison."

A local headline prompts disbelief on Reddit. 

ADDED: Stand back, nonbelievers, there is footage of the incident:

"[I]f the garden variety American liberal as represented by New York Times readers is almost universally against this, who is pushing it and why do they have so much power?"

Someone writes in a Reddit discussion of the NYT article "More Trans Teens Are Choosing ‘Top Surgery,'" which I blogged yesterday, here.

I've read a lot of the NYT comments myself, and I agree with the Redditor that "It's amazing how many of the reader comments on this article are basically horrified by all this...."

Other Redditors try to answer the question "why do they have so much power?"

One says: "Because the Garden Variety American Liberal As Represented By New York Times Readers will fold like a cheap suitcase when publicly called a bigot or even told that they are kinda sorta maybe sounding like a conservative, even if holding private misgivings."

Another says: "Political dynamics in the US is that the GOP is a moderate party beholden to extremist voters and the Dems are an extremist party beholden to moderate voters. It's a very odd dynamic."

Another question about these people with "so much power" is whether they will lose power if the NYT publishes articles like "More Trans Teens Are Choosing" that collect comments from "its garden variety American liberal" readers that clearly point in a different direction. 

ADDED: Is it "fold like a cheap suitcase"? I thought it was "fold like a cheap suit" — though I can't think why a cheap suit would fold any more readily than an expensive one. Fortunately I found a Grammarphobia post on the topic: What is the "X" in the phrase "fold like a cheap X"?

"In the late 1800s, archeologists in the Sumerian city of Nippur (modern-day Iraq) uncovered a 4,000-year-old tablet with what appeared to be the world's oldest documented bar joke."

"Roughly translated, the joke reads: 'A dog walks into a bar and says, "I cannot see a thing. I’ll open this one."' The meaning of the joke — if it even is a joke — has been lost. But after a Reddit thread revived the debate, the public-radio podcast Endless Thread (which usually does stories focused on Reddit) decided to look into it, and they produced a two-part series. Part I is about the joke, and Part II goes into the origins of humor...."

A post at r/history.

The top comment over there is another ancient-times bar joke: "A Roman walks into a bar, holds up 2 fingers and says '5 Beers Please,'" which is responded to with another Roman joke: "Listen, barkeep, if I'd wanted to order two or more, I would have ordered two or more!! Now bring me my martinus!"

"oil painting of an elephant playing a guitar smoking a cigar in a low lit bar."

I'm just checking out the r/dalle2 after seeing it mentioned in the New York Magazine article, "Will DALL-E the AI Artist Take My Job? I was unnerved by how well DALL-E 2 mimics a human photo editor. So I put my AI competition to the test." 

I like the elephant paintings, but part of what I'm liking is badness, and I feel liberated from knowing there's no delusional artist behind it... though I am a longtime fan of the subreddit r/delusionalartists.

But, of course, I want the human artist to win. I think! The author of the NY Magazine article, Megan Paetzhold, does win in this competition that she controlled against the AI in its current form:

"There can only be one conclusion: You also want us to be slowly killed."

UPDATE: My post consisted of an embedded Reddit post that is now removed. It showed Zelensky, speaking in Ukrainian, and had subtitles that may or may not have been accurate. I don't know why Reddit removed the post. 

AND: You can still see the Reddit post here, along with a note that it was removed by moderators. And: "Moderators remove posts from feeds for a variety of reasons, including keeping communities safe, civil, and true to their purpose."

The subreddit, r/nextfuckinglevel, is "A subreddit for gifs and videos that are next fucking level!" My guess is that they don't want that subreddit to be updates about Ukraine.

"I literally have no friends. I wanted to go out today and i wanted to text someone if they’re down to do something fun. BUT then i realized i have no one to ask."

Says someone in the subreddit r/offmychest. 

There are 374 comments there right now, and nearly every one is "same" or a variation on "same." Some of the "same"s add that they have a spouse who is their best friend, but other than that, absolutely no friends. 

There's also the variation that sounds like a line from the Police song "Message in a Bottle": Seems I'm not alone at being alone.

Reddit Recap 2021.

"There was a time I loved riding the Hudson River Bikeway, but the metal bollards dotting the path made me phobic."

"If you’re wondering when this dark terror took root, I can tell you exactly: The moment I slammed my bike into a metal barrier, shattering my wrist in five places. Some time after that — and after a collision with a cement Jersey barrier — I reluctantly gave up the Hudson River Bikeway. My once-relaxing path had become an obstacle course.... The great thing about New York, of course, is that there is no phobia for which you cannot find a therapist. My first was an instructor called Lance (really), who built me a set of Styrofoam bollards. I had absolutely no fear of hitting Styrofoam. Unfortunately, after the first lesson, Lance became unavailable.... An online search turned up someone promising, but her fee, for a 90-minute lesson, was a stupefying $475. I quickly moved on to Andrée Sanders, who bills herself as the Bike Whisperer.... She’s never had a client with a fear as specific as mine.... Her fee is $200..."

From "I Was Afraid of the Bike Path. So I Hired a Bike Coach. A nasty crash instilled a phobia of bollards. I called the Bike Whisperer" by Joyce Wadler (NYT).

Then a "food delivery guy" yells the piece of advice that I think most cyclists know: