On 4 March, the denominator of Trump orbits the Ministry for Veterans Affairs Note to the leadership of the management. The agency, as they say, would “aggressively move” to improve efficiency, with the “initial goal” of the reduction of labor at 2019.
The following morning someone published copy From this “Reduction in Force” note to the Reddit Group called VeteransfaiirsOnline community of 19,000 members. The copy was difficult to observe, sequences of photographs taken by the memorandum on the screen, but the report was clear enough: approximately 80,000 jobs would be reduced.
Questions and comments were poured, some confused, others frantic. 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 it the end of medical research VA? How would it affect waiting times for medical meetings?
No one had solid answers, just reported speculation. There was a living and well -being of veterans at stake, so the vibration was grim. But there was still room for dark humor.
“We have to pay for Greenland somehow,” one person joked.
Reddit, a social media website on bare bones organized around more than 100,000 specialized communities called Subredits, long provided people with unpredictable shared interests whether Bitcoin, Flying or Keanu Reeves’ photo is amazing.
It is unlike other social media platforms. Instagram and Tiktok offer videos and influencers; 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 perhaps “The best platform on a junior site“Given that other social media sites fell on AI slopes and continuous requests” Like and Sign “, Reddit has become one of 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 workers previously published an occasional story about a zoom meeting, the disaster or question of the health plan became an overcrowded forum for concerns, anxiety and formations of intraagential observation. On one subreddit, FnesowsGovernment employees give updates to the release, the new $ 1 limit to government credit cards and “what you have achieved last week”. Drew the tide millions of visitors Since January, according to internal statistics shared by the creator of Subreddit.
“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 saying The manager told 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 for Veterans Affairs did not respond to the request for comment.)
Not using your real name makes it easier to share information or vent frustration 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 former VA employee who lives on Mount Pleasant, Tenn, is one of the more than 60,000 Reddit moderators. These volunteers do a huge amount of work moderation that other social media giants close. 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 interesting information and has remained basically. 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 cases their own jokes and culture,” said Galen Weld, a doctoral student at the University of Washington, who conducted Reddit research, and also completed consultation for the company.
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 rules In 2015, the company founded against harassment and inappropriate behavior.
Reddit, which was published last year, is now one of the most visited websites on the Internet, according to the latest financial submission of more than 100 million daily users and $ 1.3 billion. It may seem chaotic for the first visitor sent by a search engine. His homepage is a random collection of intelligence articles, funny photos and unknown short -circuits like AIO (‘Will overpay?“
Each of these subredites, be it Repair, romantasy or Maps Dungeons and DragonsIt is unique and each has different rules that its moderators have 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 their decisions. Enjoy Schadenfreude? Try Leopardatemyface. This community shares anecdotes about Trump’s voters who immediately suffered from their political decisions, but forbade 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 by 2024, Mr. Carson and his co -founder founded a ban on guerrilla political conversation after the commentators began to warm up too much.
“People showed the fingers and calls of names and were abrasive and offensive,” Mr. Carson said. “We are.” tries to create a community that receives people. ”
Mr. Carson, which was diagnosed with post -traumatic stress disorder after fighting, receives the benefits of disability from VA, which also teaches part -time 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 of a balloon for six or more hours, he said.
“I pulled Reddit every free minute on the phone,” Mr. Carson said. “If I am in a car with my wife, I 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 moderate Subreddit.”
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 does not know, recently hired two new moderators: one veteran and the other clinical pharmacist employed VA
Recently, Mr. Carson enrolled in Reddit and checked his moderation front, which 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 contains a link, it will click through to make sure the information is relevant. “Then you have to explore the web to say OK, is this site reliable?” said. If the site has extreme guerrilla tendencies 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 Urbana-Champaign, who studied Reddit. “They also make it easier to find good things.”
Mr. Carson always starts with the content labeled, either by the community user or by an automated filter tool. The tool, an autoderator, is looking for an inappropriate language, the users of problems that have been marked with other moderators and words that violate the Subreddit rule “no policy”, including “Musk”, “Trump”, “Doge” and “Orange”.
Mr. Carson himself has strong political feelings. The expression has been in trouble in the past. According to the administrative judge, he lost his job as an examiner in VA in 2017 due to a post on Facebook, which he wrote with the hashtag #assassinatetrump.
At that time he was angry with the government. Va has brought 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 they were threatening the contributions. They contained obscenence and ominous hypothetics and were a tenor of the post that would now be quickly removed from their subreddit.
After being released, Mr. Carson moved back to Tennessee and continued to moderate Subreddit, grateful for being able to share his expertise. He came to think about helping veterans with their benefits as more than work. It was his purpose.
“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 prefers to address these people to offer help.
This morning, the autoderator described the comment: He claimed that the spyware was installed on all computers in which the Ministry of Government Efficiency, groups led by Elon Musk, reduced federal bureaucracy. Mr. Carson removed the comment.
“We allow interviews that focus on facts and provide evidence,” he said. “But even then it must be relevant to VA.” Spyware comment, he said, was “assumption”.
“You’re not alone”
When federal workers received the e -mail last month they told them to mention five things that the previous week did, someone published a veteranskéhohooire survey for colleagues VA: “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 mainly 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 repaid with robots and the content generated by AI distinguishes a website.
But that could change. Last year, Reddit has signed license agreements with Google and Openi, allowing the content of the site to be used to practice 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 go to Reddit,” Dr. Gilbert.
The facilitation of the human connection and creating networks is why Mr. Carson spends so much time to cut 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 ever.”.”
The sound was produced by Adrienne Hurst.
