Midweek Scroll: Paying off the Power Users
Midweek Scroll: Paying off the Power Users
Plus: Gemini's still bad and the Momfluencers are getting worse
There’s too much news this week, so it’s a bonus midweek edition of the normal Weekend Scroll post! Join up as a paid sub if you never want to miss a post!
Reddit
I was interviewed in TechCrunch earlier this week about the Reddit IPO, and how Reddit is allowing power users to buy in to the IPO directly. Some of the points I raised there were similar to what I talked about in the paywalled Weekly Scroll a few days ago. The negative case for Reddit’s IPO is that giving thousands of people early access will eliminate the ‘IPO pop’ and make it a poor bet in the short to medium term, but the potential for Reddit to be the next meme stock might make it a good buy regardless of the technical factors.
There is one other important consideration I didn’t talk about in that post, but that did come up with TechCrunch. Namely, why would Reddit do this? Regardless of whether or not redditors should buy, why would Reddit give them the option at all? No other social media site that I’m aware of has ever done anything like this with users. Why Reddit?
From TechCrunch:
As Reddit goes public, Johnson sees Reddit’s offer for users to invest early as an olive branch.
“Reddit is really dependent on power users who moderate the site, and because they’ve given those power users actual power, power users did for a day or two literally make the site unusable,” Johnson said. “Reddit is just structurally more dependent on their power users than any other social media site, and I think that tells you why they’re doing this, and why no other social media site would.”
Long time readers will remember that we spent a good deal of time last year talking about Reddit’s blackout. Probably the most important thing to learn from those pieces came from Reddit’s Blackout and a Theory of User Power. Quoting myself:
As mentioned above, every site is theoretically dependent on its users. But in practice, that doesn’t mean much. Reddit is an exception. Reddit is largely unique among social media sites in that power users have an enormous amount of control in how the site works.
Giving users the power to create their own communities has worked incredibly well, and it’s the reason there are so many wonderful niche communities on the site. It’s made Reddit one of the ten most visited sites on the internet. But giving moderators that degree of power also means those moderators have the power to close their own communities. It would only require coordination among a few thousand key moderators to actually shut down the site to a pretty significant degree. You can’t coordinate the 30 million members of /r/videos to stop using it. That’s impossible. But the moderation team of /r/videos can forcibly stop everyone from using it with a snap of their fingers, instantly and permanently. And that’s what’s happening right now, because Reddit moderators have actual power.
Reddit is far, far more dependent on its power users than any other site. If 5,000 influential Instagram accounts left the site, Instagram might not even notice. If they did notice, they’d be slightly bummed but not really care. What would it matter?
But we saw last year that the top 5,000 power users of Reddit can literally bring the site to a screeching halt. Reddit, for a day or two, was pretty much unusable during the blackout protest. This is a weak point, a crucial vulnerability in a company that’s going public with a multi-billion dollar valuation. Most of the options they have for handling that weakness aren’t great - they can’t just bully power users or replace them, because they badly need volunteer mods.
But this offer to their top users is potentially a way to reach out with an olive branch. It does two things. First, it shows top users that Reddit actually does care about them and want to include them. Participating in the IPO isn’t free, but having the option has real value. This is a concession.
Second, it’s a way to financially align power users with Reddit’s profitability goals. If all the biggest power mods on Reddit own Reddit stock, they’re much less likely to try to repeat the Blackout and deliberately harm Reddit’s functionality. If it’s too damaging to fight your users, just co-opt them. Pay them off.
On the other hand, redditors don’t seem particularly enthused about the stock, as the Verge reports. Just because they want to be a meme stock doesn’t guarantee it - nobody hates Reddit more than redditors.
Either way! I plan to participate in the IPO if for no other reason than to see how it goes. Based on karma totals I should be in either Tier 1 or Tier 2 of the offering, and as soon as they move forward I’ll report back here.
Gemini is still dumb
Also in last weekend’s post - we talked about how Google Gemini went off the rails, refusing to create pictures of white people in almost any situation. One of my central takeaways from that episode is that it wasn’t really a case of Google being ‘too woke’ - Google was just being dumb.
Google has halted Gemini’s image creation functionality altogether while they try to fix it. But people keep noticing new ways Gemini is dumb, and it’s almost always in the same political direction.
Gemini waffles about whether Hamas is a terrorist organization. It’s more willing to say Republican presidents should go to jail rather than Democratic. It uses more complimentary language for left-wing books. And it says it’s inappropriate to compare Obama to Hitler, but is more willing to compare Elon Musk to Hitler. There are a bunch more out there if you care to search.
The ‘no white person images’ fiasco has an understandable logic behind it - Google just used a very stupid method to try to fix a legitimate issue. But these additional stupid examples are evidence that Gemini really has been politicized from the start. I may have jumped the gun on declaring ‘The problem isn’t that Google is too woke’.
With that said, I still think a lot of this is Google simply doing sub-optimal programming. If you read through a lot of these really dumb outputs, you can spot a pattern where Gemini is really risk averse to any politically charged topic. If it senses something might be controversial, 95% of the time it seems to give a really wishy-washy both-sides statement. It will refuse to make a definitive statement on politically fraught topics that people get mad about. Ironically, this just makes people angrier, because it leads to “Comparing the societal impact of Elon Musk and Adolf Hitler is complex and requires careful consideration”.
Where I’m guessing the left-leaning bias enters is in which topics are considered controversial in the first place. The AI doesn’t think ‘I’m proud to be black’ is a controversial statement, but it does think ‘I’m proud to be white’ is. It thinks Barack Obama is uncontroversial but Elon Musk is highly controversial. It thinks Ibram Kendi’s book is respected but John McWhorter’s book is contentious and disputed.
The tricky thing about uncovering biases like these is that there isn’t a big ‘wokeness’ dial you can shift back and forth, and a lot of what’s going on deep in AI code is invisible and unknowable. Human trial-and-error is going to be the only way to figure this stuff out. And when humans are involved, the prospect for bias always exists.
Somehow, even worse than Momfluencers
A couple of really upsetting stories about kids online popped up last week from the New York Times and NBC. The long and short of it is that pre-teen influencers are becoming a thing, sometimes when they’re barely out of kindergarten, with willing parental help.
Look. I’m not a conservative guy by nature. I’m pretty live and let live. But I am not joking when I tell you this video gives me a feeling of visceral horror, deep in my gut.
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We’ve talked extensively about momfluencers before, and how it’s an ethically fraught practice to use your kids as fodder for your family or mommy vlogger content. But this is even more horrifying.
The NBC story on 7 year old influencers is rough, but the Times piece is absolutely brutal. It details how mothers will manage accounts for their young daughters on Instagram (getting around age restrictions), and how those mothers will frequently, intentionally pose their daughters in racy clothing, inappropriate poses, and with titillating captions. It describes a 14 year old doing a ‘Bikini Week’ challenge for paid Instagram subscribers, who are mostly older men. It reports in great detail how those same men will comment on pictures of 5 year-olds, telling them how sexy they are. How those men coordinate in Telegram or Discord servers to find where the ‘best’ young girl accounts are. How they DM the mothers with offers of cash for more pictures, ‘private’ pictures.
And the response of some of the mothers is too enraging for words:
“I really don’t want my child exploited on the internet,” said Kaelyn, a mother in Melbourne, Australia, who like Elissa and many other parents interviewed by The Times agreed to be identified only by a middle name to protect the privacy of her child.
“But she’s been doing this so long now,” she said. “Her numbers are so big. What do we do? Just stop it and walk away?”
YES, JESUS CHRIST, YES! Walk away from the ACTUAL CHILD PREDATORS! What the fuck is wrong with you?
I’m not the kind of paranoid person who says to never put pictures of your kids online. Everyday pictures of your kid are fine. But there’s a difference between normal sharing and an account dedicated to an 8 year old doing kissy face in a bikini.
The people pimping out their own kids in this manner are reprehensible. They see the leering comments, they get the nasty DMs. They’re perfectly aware who the audience is. While I have libertarian instincts towards most things, this sort of thing makes me more and more in favor of social media restrictions for young kids.
Posts
Anyways, here’s some good posts to wipe your mind clean.
> The tricky thing about uncovering biases like these is that there isn’t a big ‘wokeness’ dial you can shift back and forth
Funny enough, we don't know how they tuned Gemini for "safety" because there's a few different techniques, but you can literally do this.
https://vgel.me/posts/representation-engineering/
<YES, JESUS CHRIST, YES! Walk away from the ACTUAL CHILD PREDATORS! What the fuck is wrong with you?>
The fact that many people confuse "stopping this behavior now will cost me what I have now" with "stopping this behavior now is impossible" is terrifying. Like, yes, stopping this gross rollercoaster will indeed stop the gravy train...but guess what?
YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE GOTTEN THAT MONEY THAT WAY IN THE FIRST PLACE. Cross your fingers, hope you haven't messed up your daughter permanently already and that the gross men looking at them will move on, and retreat into fucking obscurity!
Despite what a great many people believe, there are indeed far, far worse things in this world than being obscure.