On March 4, Trump was appointed at the Ministry of Veterans, sent a note to the leadership of the leadership. The agency said WoW “moved aggressively” to improve efficiency, with the initial goal “to reduce work at 2019.
The following morning someone sent a copy of this “Reduction in Force” note to the Reddit Group called Veteranfaffairs, the online community of 19,000 members. The copy was difficult to follow, a sequence of photographs taken from the memorandum on the screen, but the message was clear enough: about 80,000 jobs.
Questions and comments were poured, some confused, others free. The agency had half a million employees in hospitals, clinics, calls and regional benefits that served veterans across the country. Who would be released? Was this end of medical research VA? How would it affect waiting times for medical meetings?
No one had solid answers, just inform speculation. We are at stake on the living and well -being of veterans, so the vibration was sober. But there was still room for dark humor.
“We have to pay for Greenland somehow,” one person joked.
Reddit, a website on social media with bare branches organized around more than 100,000 specialized communities called Subredits, has long provided people with unpredictable shared interests, whether bitcoins, fly flying or Keanu Reeves’ photographs is amazing.
These are social media platforms. Instagram and Tiktok offered videos and influences; Reddit is a textual and aggressively unsuitable for building stellar power. Facebook and LinkedIn require real names; Anonymity rules on Reddit, minimizes ego and consequences.
Atlantic recently considered Reddit as a possible “best platform on a juicy site”. Given that other social media sites fell on AI slopes and continuous requests “like and subscribe”, Reddit was in the last places on the Internet with authentic human information, community and advice.
It has been a rescue rope for government workers in recent months. With the rapid reduction of the federal bureaucracy of Trump’s administration with Subredits, where government staff previously published a preparatory story about the zoom of meeting with disaster or the question of the health plan, became crowded forums for concerns, anxiety and units of intra -agent observation. At one subreddit, Fdaws, the employed government handed over the release update, the new $ 1 limit to government credit cards and “what you have achieved in the past weekends”. According to internal statistics shared by the creator of Subreddit, the influx of millions of visitors has attracted since January.
“These individual subrediti allow people to find niches that work really well for them,” said Sarah Gilbert, a research worker at a Cornell University, who focuses on the online community. “This is happening to Fnews, where people use this space to join and talk to other people who experience similar trauma.”
Fnews participant recently wrote a post that said that the manager told the employees to stop “escape” information about Reddit. “Do not stop, people deserve to know,” added the author, who, like almost all Reddit users, employed a pseudonym online designer.
(The Ministry of Veterans Affairs did not respond to the request of how.)
Not using your real name makes it easier to share information or frustration of wind without further threat to career prospects. But anonymity can also breed misinformation, incorrect behavior and vitriol.
This is where people like David Carson come. Mr. Carson, 53, an army veteran and a train employee Vas Wo lives in Mount Pleasant, Tenn., Is one of the more than 60,000 Reddit moderators. These volunteers do a huge work with the moderation of content closed by other social media giants. The work of unpaid moderators, such as Mr. Carson, allowed Reddit to shine at this point in political storm.
“Reddit is a community operated by people like me, focused on people like me.”,,“Mr. Carson said.
The front page of the Internet
Reddit is 20 years old, which is ancient in Internet years. It started as a place to share interests and it was that it was. Anyone can create a subredit and become its first moderator. Anyone can visit or join him unless private.
“Every Reddit community has its own theme, its own rules, its own moderators and in many boxes their own jokes and culture,” said Galen Weld, a doctoral student at the University of Washington, who has a Reddit conductive survey, as well as done.
What people want to share may sometimes be disgusting. In the past, Reddit has gained acquaintance for communities dedicated to revenge porn, videos about people’s deaths and other toxic content. This site, however, twisted its worst impulses (and the most alive moderators) by dissolving the subredites, which consisted of violating the rules that the company introduced in 2015 against harassment and inappropriate behavior.
Reddit, which was published last year, is now one of the most visits to the Internet with more than 100 million active users a day and $ 1.3 billion, according to the last financial submission of the company. It may seem chaotic for the first visitor, smells there in the search engine. His homepage is a random collection of intelligence articles, funny photos and unknown short -circuits such as AIO (“am I exaggerated?”). However, the individual subredits may feel intimate and weighing.
Each of these subredites, where the repair of houses, romantasy or dungeons and dragon maps is unique, and each has different rules on which its moderators decided. Do you want to talk to people who have decided that life is better without children? Join Childfree. Parents are welcome, but only if they regret to decide. Enjoy Schadenfreude? Try LeopardstateMyface. This community shares anecdotes about the voters of Trump, who immediately suffered from their political decisions, but forbids stories about real animal attacks.
New Rule: No Policy
There are two paramount rules on the veteransfafrair Subredit: Stay on the topic and be respectful. This means no personal attacks and no policy.
When the creator of the Subreddites tapped Mr. Carson to take over the channel ten years ago, a policy was allowed. But in the presidential election of 2024, Mr. Carson and his co -foundation institute a ban on a guerrilla political interview after the commentators began to warm up too much.
“People speculated the fingers and calls of names and were harsh and offensive,” Mr. Carson said. “We are Trying to create a community that receives people. ”
Mr. Carson, which was diagnosed with post -traumatic stress disorder after the fight, receives the benefits of GO’s disability, which also teaches part -time in English literature at a community university outside Nashville. He likes to see the reaction of his students when he appears on the first day of motorcycle bark and “goat wheels that come to my belly”.
Its schedule is flexible, allowing him to reduce the veteranffair subreddite. For many years it has been an hour or two a day. But in recent months, the daily commitment has been packed for six or more hours, he said.
“I pulled Reddit every minute replacement on the phone,” Mr. Carson said. “If I am in a car with my wife, sit in the passenger seat and moderate Subreddit. After my wife is going to sleep, I sit down and watch TV, and while watching TV, I am a slight subredit.”
The constant time spent on his phone was “irritating”, his wife Stacey, who is also a veteran, “until I realized exactly what he was doing.”
To help with an increase in activity, Mr. Carson and his co -founder whose real name Mr.. Carson des Not New, Recently House two new moderators: one veteran and the other clinical pharmacist employed VA
We have a recent day morning, Mr. Carson enrolled in Reddit and checked Hi Moderator Tail, who had a list of more than 1,000 posts and comments. Each of them began to read and removed all unrelated to the veterans.
It’s time consuming. Some people write “dissertation”, said Mr. Carson, and if the post contained a link, it will click through the information to be relevant. “Then you go to explore the site to say OK, is this reliable website?” Said. If it has extreme tilt or unclear origin, it will remove the post.
“The work of the moderator is not just about preventing abuse or removing bad behavior,” said Eshwar Chandrasekharan, professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urban-Champaign, who studied Reddit. “They also make it easier to find good things.”
Mr. Carson always starts with a content marked for reviews, either by a community user or an automated filtering tool. The tool, Samuprodcer, is looking for inappropriate language, users of problems that have been marked with other moderators and words that violates the Subreddit rule “without politics”, included “Musk”, “Trump”, “Doge” and “Orange”.
Mr. Carson himself has strong political feelings. The statement has been put into the past in the past. According to the decision of the administrative judge, he lost his job as a claim for VA in 2017, because the Facebook post, which he wrote with the hashtag #assassinatetrump.
At that time he was angry with the government. Vas transferred him from Tennessee to Colorado and lived for two years from his wife and children for two years. Writing about his frustration with the agency on the social media was katartic, he said. But his colleagues found that the contributions were threatened. They contained obscenence and ominous hypothetics and were a tenor of the post that would quickly remove from their subredites.
After being released, Mr. Carson moved back to Tennessee and continued to moderate Subreddit, grateful that he could still share historical knowledge. He came to think about helping veterans with their benefits as more than work. They were his purposes.
“We are trying to create a safe, useful and respectful community,” Mr. Carson said. He always seeks mention of suicidal thoughts – which he has also experienced – and preferred to address these people to offer help.
This morning Self -Bicus indicated as: claimed that spyware was installed on all computers glued to the Ministry of Government’s efficiency, a group led by Elon Muskek reduced federal bureaucracy. Mr. Carson removed the comment.
“We allow interviews that focus on facts and provide evidence,” he said. “But even then it was still on the way to VA.” Spyware, as he said, “assumption”.
“You’re not alone”
When federal workers received e -mail last month, saying that they list five things they did to the previous weekend, someone published a survey on the veteransko -boors Subreddit for colleagues: “Did you answer the e -mail?”
Most respondents said it was not.
This kind of information is “useful and instructive”, said Bruce, employee of VA in Salt Lake City, who checked Subredit every day.
Bruce, who asked not to use his full name to protect his employment, said that his regional authority had little official communication and that Reddit helped fill in the information vacuum.
“It just gives you an idea of what other people in VA are going through, that you are not alone,” said Bruce, who has so far thought of Reddit Main as a place to deal with sports news.
People can publish on Reddit “and get this really fast individualized feedback from a real person,” Gilbert, research worker in Cornell. On the Internet flooded with robots and content generated by artificial intelligence that has distinguished this site.
But that could change. Last year, Reddit signed license offers with Google and Openi, allowing the website content to train artificial intelligence such as Chatgpt. Authentic Human writings from Reddit will help AI to sound more human, said Dr. Gilbert, which makes Reddit and its moderators to throw robots in the future.
“Maybe you don’t get the same kind of human, high -quality information that people are going to find,” Dr. Gilbert.
The facilitation of human connection and creating networks is why MR. Carson spends so much time cutting the conversational hedges of his Reddit domain.
“People will find us when they need us,” Mr. Carson said. “Right now people need us more than Forese.”.»
Sound produced Adrienne Hurst.