Reddit isn’t so much killing itself as rather being killed for money.

This is why I hate capitalism. It ruins everything, including the planet and the future.

Pity we can’t have a social media site that’s a public service!

I mourn what it was, yes.

There was a recent comment I read about how it’s become this incredible resource for the most obscure tech issues and they were reluctant to delete their posts and accounts because they’d receive random messages of thanks years after a tech resource post was made.

And it’s true. Reddit has become an invaluable resource for these kinds of things. Not only that, but it’s one of the few places that exists on the web where cohesive and coherent discussions even exist. It was always the community and discussion that made reddit great and they want to turn it into yet another swipebait infested serotonin sponge. I sincerely hope lemmy can take its place, but there are going to be some major growing pains if we get big influx of “redfugees.”

It almost makes me think that when something becomes such an enormous and invaluable public resource, there should be a legal compulsion to archive it before doing anything that will compromise its accessibility.___

I don’t mourn Reddit, but I am sad that it’s another example of the commoditization and corporatization of the modern internet.

Hopefully federated networks, P2P protocols, and FOSS software/frameworks are able to provide a robust and healthy web going forward into the future. The era of the free general internet is over, has probably been for a long time honestly. Now if massive companies want to stay afloat in that space, they will need to make huge profits. Everything as you are seeing nowadays, is being monetized and centralized.

Maybe this truly is late stage Capitalism and the collapse of it all is on the horizon, idk. But as long as I have an internet connection and things I am interested in doing on there, I will be trying to resist the corpos.

Long live the free and open internet!

(PS, power to the users, and I can and do contribute to the products and services I use from these wonderful people in our communities <3)

I’ve mourned more for the shells of the eggs that I broke today. That was a tasty omelette.

I’m genuinely happy that Reddit is dying. Yes, it’ll lead to some information loss and that’s bad, but we’ve been stuck in that abusive platform for too long. Now at least saner alternatives will get some room to grow.

I am beginning to mourn what reddit was. Not what it is or what it is going to turn into.

In a way, I mourned for reddit a long time ago. I stumbled (literally, stumbleUpon’d) reddit way back before the great Digg migration, when it was still mostly a haven for techies. The site went through a great many changes. Some good, some bad, some just… different.

At some point it got a little much. I’ve known for a number of years that I was growing increasingly alienated from it. Part of it was the Nazis and Reddit’s inability or unwillingness to deal with any of the hate and bots. Part of it was the pervasive meme / low effort image culture. Those things were always there, but there was a time it’d get you the stink eye and an annoyed upvote.

Besides Hackernews (which has always been full of a certain Silicon Valley type), there wasn’t really too many places to go. I’ve just been kinda waiting in the funeral parlor, hoping a ride to something else would come while I mostly browse the niche subreddits.

It’s my hope that this incident starts the seeds of old forum culture as expressed through multiple lemmys. That’s a pretty ambitious hope, but still. It’s well past the time for the big social media networks to break up.

Honestly, yeah. Reddit has been part of my daily routine for 12 years now. Sure, a lot of the content is junk food for the brain, and reddit has changed a lot during that time, but I’ve also learned a lot of cool things and had a lot of interesting conversations there. Lemmy looks promising, but it’s still very nascent. The userbase is small, it’s missing a lot of the niche communities that you can find on reddit, and the tech is glitchy. Overall it feels a lot more like tinier than reddit (which duh, of course it does).

Reddit is also a bad habit that I’ve wanted to reduce for a while now, so maybe this is the shove I needed.

I am absolutely going to miss RIF. That app provided such a clean filtered experience to the content I was interested in on Reddit for years.

I’m mourning the communities i found, but not reddit itself. Spez has been a turd forever. I saw him at a tech inclusion conf like 6-7 years ago and they knew then he was such a shit they didn’t even allow questions from the audience. He said nothing useful and basically said “we keep the donald because both sides” and not so subtly that they keep everyone for add views.

He sucks ass and is only concerned about IPO and will likely just change the r/all to whatever is left and declare the IPO a victory as users bleed away.

Hoping to find more of my old communities around lemmy with hopefully less bigots.

I have pre-grieved

I think, at a fundamental level the Reddit I am mourning isn’t Reddit as it exists now, but perhaps how I imagine it did ten or so years ago, the so called “Early Days”. We’re all here now because Reddit at is now is unsustainable and actively hostile against it’s users. The contradiction between the need for monetization of the userbase and the userbases disgust at being monetized. This isn’t a recent occurrence but sometimes we need to get a bit of a kick to realize how bad its been, in retrospect.

I do know, as many fellow tech people do, whenever I have to look into a problem I haven’t encountered before, appending “Reddit” to the search often leads me closer to an answer. I will miss that, as it had become so well indexed. Lemmy isn’t there yet in terms of being indexed.

I honestly doubt I will entirely stop using it, but I will likely entirely stop using it on mobile, and continue to use adblock on old.reddit. Some of the communities there are fairly irreplacable for me for now, especially hobby communities with their wikis and tutorials and years of answered questions you can search for.

It will most likely stop being my main time waster website on the net, though, and for that I’m not sad.

I feel like reddit dying could be a positive thing for me. For years now I have felt the negative influence that its toxic environment - fueled by impersonal, discordant interactions - had on me. Not to mention the complete destruction of my ability to concentrate caused by the micro dopamine hit targeting of social media UX. I’m hoping that moving to a smaller platform will help with some of that pervasive anger I feel as a result of constant reddit usage.

I think what I’m most sad about is losing easily searchable information. Finding an obsscure thread about some weird question I had is great. Maybe that will be preserved somehow. Idk. That and the more unhinged reddit posts and copypastas throughout history.

Yeah for sure. I was on reddit for 13 years, there were users I recognised by name, people I was friendly with, people I’d have intense debates with, many, many, many subreddits I loved.

But nothing lasts forever, and this place seems nice so here’s to new beginnings 🍻