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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Shower Thoughts
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The issue I have with your stance is dependent very much of the nature of the service we are talking about.
It's not "just an internet service" in a vacuum. It's a huge base of influence, powerful enough to affect election results, public policy and a platform for ideas which can have life and death level importance for some people.
I wouldn't talk about principles and trust if the service in question was something like an app to manage your personal finances, watch tv shows on or anything like that. We're talking about a company with enough influence to affect millions of lives, which can in turn be affected only by millions of lives taking a stance towards it.
I don't know how else to explain this. Some things are, by their nature, aren't supposed to be personal choices. One can have an opinion, and one can have personal reasons to do as they please, but I think one should at least have some awareness of what the thing they're forming opinions on influences ultimately.
You may say "what difference could my personal choice as a single person make", and that's valid, but if that was true in every case, marketing and outreach wouldn't have any effect on life, crowdfunding wouldn't be a thing, people on youtube wouldn't literally beg for likes and subscribes, of which everyone can have one per video and per channel respectively.
I see, I think that's a valid point to make. For myself though, I don't really see or use Reddit in that manner since I always considered it to be a content and link aggregator. It has a collection of communities that I subscribe to see links/images/videos, and that's it. So in that sense I don't personally view it more than, as you say, an app to to manage your personal finances and watch TV shows.
Of course that's not to say that it's not capable of the things you've mentioned, it's absolutely able to influence the opinions of those that participate in the platform. And by extension it's reasonable to expect that the management of the platform needs to be trustable - which is being put to question with their recent actions.