honey-im-meat-grinding

Friendly reminder that consent popups that don’t have a clear “reject” option right next to the “accept” button are a violation of GDPR. You can report these to your country’s data/privacy governmental body - for example Datatilsynet in Norway/Denmark, CNIL in France. You don’t have to do it for every website that you go to, obviously, but if you do it even once you’re helping solve this problem for more users than just yourself.

Others have given you some good technical solutions - personally I use the uBlock Origin + annoyance filters enabled approach, and use Firefox on Android to get the same experience there.

I mean you’re assuming this isn’t happening more in reverse to platform disinformation: take a look at any trans related thread in a UK sub and you’ll see the most useless leap of faith transphobe comments receive 5 gold while the more scientific pro trans comments are buried far, far down the chain.

Also, equating gilding with democracy is odd - we live in a world where economic inequality is growing. Who can afford the most gold? It’s not the poor/disabled/other minorities who have important views that need to be heard - they can’t afford to give 5 gold to random reddit comments they agree with because they’re statistically earning less.

Buying gold is not democratic. There’s a reason you can’t just (directly) buy votes in elections. This is still a shitty move on Reddit’s part, but for a different reason than hurting democracy.

Basically everyone assumed Greece would handle it in a humanitarian way

That may be more the way the article presents it - Frontex infamously replaced a more humanitarian approach under the guise of “cost savings” and then over the years grew their budget beyond what was spent on border crossings before they came into the picture, and now is under increasing scrutiny over how they just watch migrants die or even push them back - the Mediterranean border crossing is said to be the deadliest in the world.

If you’re using Firefox you can click the reader view button and the article is readable again so it seems to be a soft paywall, otherwise archive.is works