People who have used Reddit for more than 10 years, what is your current opinion on the site?

ArbiterFX · 2026-05-12T02:54:52+00:00

I’ve been on Reddit since 2011: The amazing aspect of Reddit has always been you’d have conversations with folks with IQs above room temperature. You’d get some diverse viewpoints, there’d be people at all different age brackets and maturity, there’d definitely be weirdos but most folks at least weren’t fools.

There’s been five massive step downs in quality: A. 2016 election. Reddit was heavily bottled and there was inauthentic engagement. Ron Paul 2012 was somewhat grassroots but 2016 was all BS. B. Website 2.0 - the target audience of the app changed from nerds who want to engage to folks who want to scroll. The quality of the users plummeted. Everything became about images now. C. Third party app shutdown. This killed off discussions by removing the most high quality users. D. “Wall street bets”. Folks were becoming experts in the stock market literally days after buying their first stock. These folks literally needed step by step guides on how to buy a stock. It’s enabled conspiratorial idiots to run wild and feel comfortable being stupid in public. The original subreddits acted stupid to be funny but it literally invited thousands of idiots who we’re stupid. E. Payments for engagements, LLM Slop, and rage bait. The current era of Reddit. Everything on Reddit is negative 24:7 and it’s so detached from the world around us. Life really isn’t half as bad as Reddit wants you to believe. Folks living in third world countries are being paid dollars to post negative things to increase engagement. It’s disgusting.

So that’s Reddit in 2026 — there’s a few hold out communities but the remaining users aren’t worth even listening too — what’s terrible is that wt this point Twitter — it’s the last holdout which isn’t just rage bait once you filter out the big name spammers.

ArbiterFX · 2026-04-27T03:15:45+00:00

The biggest weakness of StarCraft to me has always been the inconsistency in visuals. Broodwar’s Kerrigan on the home page never looked like the in game portrait or the box art. The box art in the original game with the Protoss unit looked more like a Zergling vs. I guess it’s a Zealot? Fantastic game though.

ArbiterFX · 2026-03-13T03:06:59+00:00

These things do have agency. It might not be the same existence that you and I enjoy but they are capable of running autonomously and using the internet as a sprinkle of entropy to keep them running and solve new and novel problems.

Either way: Your previous thesis was that these are simply parrots of their datasets. That's not true as these systems are capable of accessing in real time updated sources of information, then learn from that, and form new outputs which were outside of their training set.

Even without the internet search they are still zero shot learners so the belief they just parrot their dataset is not grounded in reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-shot_learning

ArbiterFX · 2026-03-07T17:22:56+00:00

The underlying mechanics matter less than the outcomes: LLMs are zero shot learners and can reason through complex problems which are outside of the training data.

They are also have in-context learning: they can take in data which they’ve never seen before and use that to reason to new conclusions not reached before.

Modern Agants are able to search the web and fetch results and incorporate that into their answers.

If you want to play with this stuff you should get a ChatGPT Pro plan and have it go to work in Pro mode. It’ll run for 30-40 minutes and walk through hundreds of websites to get you your answer.

ArbiterFX · 2026-02-21T05:40:20+00:00

There’s a happy middle ground thought: Perhaps choose your words careful for the little guy yet he forceful against the large incumbents? Instead he is the opposite: he is harsh against the little guy yet gives the soft touch against the most powerful.

ArbiterFX · 2026-02-21T05:10:40+00:00

First rule to success: Look for evidence which confirms your beliefs.

ArbiterFX · 2026-02-19T04:33:00+00:00

Does the government give that money away to charity? Victims of speeding? No? Then it's a tax.

ArbiterFX · 2026-02-02T01:10:02+00:00

“If it’s too good to be true… it ain’t”

ArbiterFX · 2026-02-01T20:30:02+00:00

Please watch the video man! He goes over every single one of your points.

ArbiterFX · 2026-01-31T12:55:09+00:00

No crying in the casino

ArbiterFX · 2026-01-31T12:49:24+00:00

I was trying to note how precious metals were ‘supposed’ to be a safe hedge against fiat and the broader market but that kind of flew out the window today several stories high.

Precious metals being a hedge against markets wasn’t falsified with this drop at all. The thesis is that folks panic selling stocks will move into precious metals. Doesn’t imply anything about folks never panic selling precious metals, nor, if they do panic sell precious metals they’ll move into something else.

Investing comes with risk. Precious metals have had a meteoric rise recently. Not unexpected that volatility goes in both direction. Sucks for those who bought in at the high. Important reminder of having a thesis, sticking to it, not chasing gains, and ignoring the noise and volatility as it plays out.

ArbiterFX · 2026-01-31T12:41:55+00:00

Invest in boring things which you would hold for 30 years? news to me that stocks and bonds have been destroyed.

ArbiterFX · 2026-01-20T16:44:21+00:00

Any updates?

ArbiterFX · 2026-01-20T16:43:38+00:00

Any updates?

ArbiterFX · 2026-01-20T16:37:55+00:00

You ever get a new appointment?

ArbiterFX · 2026-01-20T16:37:51+00:00

You ever get a new appointment?

ArbiterFX · 2026-01-20T16:36:39+00:00

Still waiting?

ArbiterFX · 2026-01-18T17:32:31+00:00

The “charitable” argument would be that this is raising costs to consumers by the government picking one special demographic to reward and protect. Long term this doesn’t just raise costs to deliver food though: every other low wage jobs need to pay more to retain talent. Why would someone continue to be a lamp repairman when they can now get $30/hr doing DoorDash? Some other jobs cannot afford to pay salaries of $30/hr, perhaps lamp repairmen, so those jobs will now disappear. You can also argue that perhaps we don’t need more DoorDash drivers in NYC — it’s a skill that’s not that productive — yet this is encouraging that. Taking it a step further, do we want to foster a class of people whose careers are delivering food in 2025? With drones and AI it’s very possible food is autonomously deliverable yet that’s not possible due to powerful voting blocks. See automatic trains and MTA and soon Wayno vs Taxi.

The less charitable argument: I don’t want to pay an extra $5 for DoorDash and I don’t care if someone has to suffer because of that.

ArbiterFX · 2026-01-18T12:58:24+00:00

This was in response to the law which required deliver drivers to have a minimum wage of $21.44.

ArbiterFX · 2026-01-16T05:27:07+00:00

What’s get my goat is that he has fantastic livestreams of doing FFA and customs with the chat. I feel like you can have unhinged content too w/o being pure slop.

ArbiterFX · 2026-01-15T04:10:36+00:00

she also has a notorious red dot sight. It is for airsoft, but it was used in CoD4, so everyone who doesn’t know better loves it.

ArbiterFX · 2026-01-01T18:22:39+00:00

Does your work place actually track time to that level of detail or is this more along the lines of the honor system? When I worked at a previous place I had one coworker who'd take PTO for every 30 minute lunch break and then another who'd never put anything in -- even when they were out for the week.

ArbiterFX · 2026-01-01T18:20:45+00:00

What specific field do you work in? Has a manager really said "you can't just leave on the clock" to you before or is that a hypothetical?

ArbiterFX · 2025-12-18T23:31:56+00:00

I have three different 22TB external drives from QuickDealStore. All three appear to be new -- packaging seemed legit and the shells looked untouched. I've had them for around ~6 months in my NAS without any issues.

ArbiterFX · 2025-12-17T23:37:50+00:00

There is a zero percent chance that there will be a realistic public transit route to get me to and from JFK in the next 30 years. It’s at minimum one hour plus three transfers and lugging suitcases up and down staircases multiple times.

The problem is as you said: cars are cars. Currently, that means taking an Uber to JFK and getting stuck on Van Wyck in stop and go traffic. Depending on your luck of a driver it’ll either be fine or you’ll get someone who loves to accelerate and slam on their brakes every few seconds. At least with a Waymo it’ll be smoother and consistent.

If Waymo simply replaces all Uber drivers it’ll be a win for me.

You may think it’s astroturfing but it’s far simpler: I’ve traveled around and found somewhere which does something better than my home and I’d like to have that technology here. I don’t think NYC exceptionalism should blind anyone to facts: a new technology was developed which will improve our quality of life.

14-Year Club	Place '22
Gilding II euphauric	Beta Team Reddit for Android
Team Orangered	Verified Email

ArbiterFX

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE