Earlier on Lemmy’s life, there was someone here telling people of how many fake reddit stories they had written to places like Am I The Asshole using numerous alts.
And how they were convinced of doing it because they were an editor, and they were used to seeing so much badly written anecdotes with no respect for narrative or proper focus on details of importance… Until Reddit hapenned and flipped that. It was a source of far too many interesting and well edited stories and something was off. They were certain that the average person with a story to tell was far less educated in English, far less capable of shorthanding detail, than what Reddit had to offer on average, and the answer was that people were just using it as a creative writing exercise platform. So, they used it that way too, since they wanted to bea fiction writer.
That’s an interesting theory they had, but I’m not sure their evidence necessarily followed.
The upvote/downvote mechanism and the Reddit alogithm mean that the stuff that you’re most likely to see is not necessarily “the average person with a story to tell”. Because if they’re a bad writer, people are more likely to downvote it. It’s a sort of sampling bias.
The mildly infuriating part is how obviously fake it is
Earlier on Lemmy’s life, there was someone here telling people of how many fake reddit stories they had written to places like Am I The Asshole using numerous alts.
And how they were convinced of doing it because they were an editor, and they were used to seeing so much badly written anecdotes with no respect for narrative or proper focus on details of importance… Until Reddit hapenned and flipped that. It was a source of far too many interesting and well edited stories and something was off. They were certain that the average person with a story to tell was far less educated in English, far less capable of shorthanding detail, than what Reddit had to offer on average, and the answer was that people were just using it as a creative writing exercise platform. So, they used it that way too, since they wanted to bea fiction writer.
That’s an interesting theory they had, but I’m not sure their evidence necessarily followed.
The upvote/downvote mechanism and the Reddit alogithm mean that the stuff that you’re most likely to see is not necessarily “the average person with a story to tell”. Because if they’re a bad writer, people are more likely to downvote it. It’s a sort of sampling bias.