I found Reddit about 6 years ago, took a little while to understand what it was about but when I finally got it, I felt like I had found the best place on the internet. Somewhere I could be my true self without being myself. Every time I logged in, I felt free. Like solo roaming the streets of a new city in a foreign country for the first time. Intellectual conversation, assistance on vague problems, sharing life experiences, advice, watching porn you didn’t know existed, and then slipping out the back door when you were done.
As many here already know, those days are gone. The freedom is gone, it feels like a communist regime and it seems that their success is their downfall. The entire personality of Reddit has changed and will never come back, it even shows in the users. The community is broken, unauthentic and the Truth has left the conversation. Freedom is dead over there. What a shame. It’s like my favorite bar burnt down.
But the thing that really gets me is that it didn’t just change, it became the exact opposite. It has become the exact reason why someone built it, in the first place.
I read that it’s attracting the most new users of all the social apps. Best performing app, which means the end is near. Soon it will just be a limb of the pretend society that we used to hide from behind the walls of Reddit. And for some reason, I just want to see it burn.
I was there from day one.
When Spez implemented user registration, I was like the 5th sign up and I ended up mailing him his own source code because he had his server misconfigured to report verbose errors.
All this to say, the site has always sucked. From day one it has sucked. It has never not sucked.
Edit
I feel like Reddit in general is remembered far more fondly than it ever has a right to.
For those that believe Reddit was some bastion of intellectual discourse, it never was! The very first or second conversation I was involved in (remember it didn’t even have users or comments at one point) immediately devolved into people calling each other robots and morons.
It just immediately cast my mind back to the BBS days where there was some cool techy people but lots of people that were just… there… And bored… And stupid.
I didn’t never really changed from that formula. Reddit grew somewhat in tandem with overall NA society’s ability to just get on the Internet. And it was always just a slice of society, never really any special qualifications or commonalities generally speaking. It’s very naive and myopic to think that it was a Tech community. It’s every dingbat you’ve ever met in your life and all the cool people as well in a giant heap. Please don’t kid yourself.
Politics immediately took over the site. And as most people know, the dialogue surrounding American politics is most dignified by taking place within a monkey house at the zoo.
Politics was immediately quarantined into its own special sub thingy.
Spez being the absolute moron that he was, implemented communities instead of tags which is what the fking site actually needed. It was very obvious he had bananas in his ears at that point, and he did not want to give selective content control to the users. He didn’t even want to implement communities, he was that against it.
They refused to show at the outset that giving users the ability to categorize content mattered. They wanted it to be a fire hose of content right from day one.
Later, they did an amazing public relations job of faking community and faking community spirit, while they had secretly embedded social media managers from outside agencies plugging most of the content onto the front page.
I can’t remember the first time Reddit lost its virginity or perhaps had its heart broken, maybe first coming of age… when we collectively rooted out that one of the biggest community builders and participants was actually a plant! I might be wrong but somewhere in the back of my mind I remember the username Sahadra(?).
It was a bad sign when they started purging subreddits in '17 of certain questionable topics.
I don’t know dude, they’ve been boiling the frog, so to speak, on us users since day one.
It’s been such a gradual contortion from what it started to what it’s become. But it’s finally come to what Spez wanted it to be in the first place. Aaron would want no part of this piece of shit.