this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

At least they don't post unhinged nazi propaganda

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 hours ago

i have information that may lead to the arrest of ~~hillary clinton~~ federal workers

[–] [email protected] 40 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (3 children)

Even if they do post at work, so the fuck what? Do they not have downtime? Are they not allowed to spend said downtime as they please?

This is propaganda. “See how lazy these workers are? They USE THE INTERNET AT WORK!” Posted by a billionaire that tweets 900 times a day.

It’s totally okay when he goes on websites to post memes but when you do it you’re a lazy piece of shit because worker scum should be giving 100% efficiency. No breaks, no cellphone usage, no chairs, fuck you wage slave

Plus as others have said this is almost certainly edited and misleading:

First off what did weekends and holidays dwarf this? Are they purposely excluding them to make this seem worse?

Secondly what the fuck is that y axis scale? 30,000 posts per day? Bullshit. Reddit has no api access to make this easy to figure out (so how did they get this data??) The front page of r/fednews doesn’t have a metric that would go that high aside from upvotes, maybe. They do get some posts with 1-3k comments but most have like 20. Upvotes make more way more sense

That’s where we get to the point of purposefully misleading. I haven’t used reddit for years but when I did I was on a community for psychotherapists. It’s one of the things I miss about reddit actually because to post there you had to subscribe and message the mods with proof of your licensure or enrollment in a program and then were flaired appropriately. This helped immensely with “armchair psychologists” invading our professional space, which is a genuine problem elsewhere

I mention that because it does not appear fednews has any similar policy, meaning anyone with an account can post, comment, upvote, etc. The overwhelming majority of this data is likely not federal employees given Reddits prominence in online discourse and the current focus on federal government employees

At a minimum they realized this is data that can be easily used to mislead, at worst they pumped the numbers with bots to push their narrative

Similar to the RFK anti vax “data” that was easily dissected bullshit yesterday. The gop has been good at misleading data for years (so have dems but the gop are far more shameless) but now they have big tech on their side. This is absolutely terrifying because tech giants are going to be much better at making this subtle and outright manipulation so that the data appears valid (see the potential for botting above if the scale is upvote based)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

I hate this idea that your outside life stops when you get to work. So fucking what if I want to text my mum good morning, or text my mate about meeting for a pint later, or whatever. Yeah, you get mandated breaks, but we aren’t machines.

Also mad curious as to what his sources are, can people easily get Reddit data for posting and commenting across the world?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

What kind of privileged yuppie fuck are you that you have all this time to post at work?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

it's "activity" so I'm guessing it's literally any action including upvotes and comments. So likely this is just a chart mirroring reddit's american userbase activity, excluding weekends and holidays.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

Yeesh.

But herein lies the problem. They post a sentence and a misleading graph, people eat that shit up. They have an audience of millions and media outlets will amplify it to more, maybe tens of millions even. Easy to digest

I can tear it apart, others can too. Easy, but wordy. I am very bad at doing this succinctly (my post history is clear evidence of this ha). I am sure someone else can do a much better job of doing this concisely BUT:

It almost inherently won’t be concise enough to be as digestible as theirs. It will be a paragraph, a few sentences. There will be more to it.

It will be inherently harder to understand. There will be more steps involved in processing the information. You have to understand what they presented, understand the flaw, and then evaluate whether the flaw is valid

The person posting a reaction is almost certainly not going to have the initial reach of musk amplified by the tech bro and gop propaganda sphere

Per above it is inherently reactionary. Their info has settled in people’s minds as valid and legitimate before yours can even come into play.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

So posting goes up after the work day finishes on the east coast where most federal agencies are located, and goes down while the US is sleeping?

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

Half of Reddit posters aren’t even American. Can he split the USA traffic from non-USA traffic?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 hours ago

Yes! and "74% of posts are on working days"!!

  1. There are more working days, so there are more posts per day on weekends
  2. It's wholely unsurprising that federal news would happen on days when the federal government is doing stuff
[–] [email protected] 11 points 13 hours ago

intellectually honest people would compare it to the graphs of other subreddits

[–] [email protected] 82 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Elon musk has discovered people do things while awake. Excellent work from him there.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Tbf Elon’s probably generalising his own lived experience of snorting prescription goey and spamming twitter all night

[–] [email protected] 7 points 15 hours ago

TIL new drug slang.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 17 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 27 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Weekends and government holidays were deliberately excluded from the dataset. (because they would be devastating to their narrative) They also did some rounding fuckery, which I'm going to attempt to undo by just showing fractions.

The 73¼% of posts made on workdays is proportionally very close to the same as the roughly 71½% of days in the year that are workdays. 1¾% more posts are made on workdays than would be proportional.

It describes the standard government hours for a working working day as being between 7:30 am and 8 pm Eastern time. (7:30a-5p shifts) This 11.5 hour period makes up about 76⅔% of the average waking day and only contains about 66⅔% of posts, meaning 10% more posts are disproportionately being made outside of the workday timeframe. Not sure how commute time would affect this.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

There's a pretty big leap between "Most posting happens during work hours" and "Many federal civil service workers spend most of their workdays complaining about their jobs on Reddit." It's not like it matters if people are shit posting at work all day anyways but their data doesn't even back up what they are saying.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

yes this is the correct argument let me word it better

r/fedreddit has federal workers posting during work hours. we do not know what % of federal workers this constitutes. the musk argument is equal to saying "a Canadian has lung cancer therefore Canada is an extremely polluted country"

[–] [email protected] 36 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Besides the fact Elon just discovered people have internet at work, how is posting illegal?

Jesus, can he just fucking disappear already?! I thought he was going to Mars or some shit.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

He wants to fire everyone for going on reddit and implying head eunuch regent-in-waiting Melon isn’t running the government perfectly

[–] [email protected] 7 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

pretending he himself doesnt spend his entire day on twitter

[–] [email protected] 53 points 18 hours ago

Melon is the last person who should complain about anyone posting when they're supposed to be working.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 16 hours ago

From the motherfucker who’s LITERALLY got his head so far up Twitter’s ass a court forced him to buy it after he ran his mouth

[–] [email protected] 12 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

"weekends and government holidays have been excluded from this dataset"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 12 hours ago

if i remove all the data i dont like i end up with data i do like

[–] [email protected] 36 points 18 hours ago

This is rich coming from my-hero

God he's dumb

[–] [email protected] 20 points 17 hours ago

Wrong I post on the clock at my stupid email job for a private corporation.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 15 hours ago

I like how the claims aren't supported by the data in the slightest. What leads someone to believe workers are wasting "most of their workdays"?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I'M NOT A BIG FAN OF THE GOVERNMENT vegeta-stare

[–] [email protected] 7 points 16 hours ago

very-normal Thirty on thirty

[–] [email protected] 12 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

From the guy who apparently has time to become a top path of exile player and has hundreds of tweets a day

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

I looked it up. He has a boosted poe account lmao. Not surprising a billionaire is p2w

[–] [email protected] 21 points 18 hours ago

I know it is like they are all acting like they are the CEO of three corporations while a shadow government overlord.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

If you work for the municipal government are you a "Muni"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 15 hours ago

If you work for the Department of the Interior are you an Innie?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 16 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago

NGL. melon-musk Posts sometimes make me get Trump reply-guy Eric Clapton. Like if there was even a chance of him seeing my post and putting a ding in his self esteem, it might be satisfying. Even if totally unproductive.