Reddit Was Fun

So... I have some harsh feelings about Reddit. It's bittersweet. A reflection of humanity with both good and bad and corruption of power and so forth. Like many I spent a lot of time on there. Learned a lot; challenged my views; and threw my voice out into the void for whatever it's worth. 10 years and a lot of server time given from gildings handed out and received. Oh well.

Whether Reddit persists is contingent namely on 2 things:

1) Will they revert some of the biggest grievances?

I find this to be highly unlikely. When Spez is quoting Elon Musk as doing good work at Twitter, you know that's a bad sign. Spez was not the genius behind Reddit — Aaron Swartz was. Spez just wants to cash out and leave Reddit behind. They need to find a way to make an inherently unprofitable concept profitable — and so of course the users suffer. It's little different to what happened to Digg, and what happened to Facebook when it navigated away from its original UI that was so elegant and simple. So I'm happy Reddit's devaluation is continuing.

2) Is there a substitute to seize on this moment?

When Digg collapsed under similar circumstances, Reddit was already there. Of course Lemmy is here; Tildes is in progress; and now Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia is spinning up Truth Cafe (WT Social 2.0). All three have significant hurdles to overcome that don't quite match Reddit 1:1... So we'll see.

My estimation is that Reddit will "survive," but with diminished value, reputation, and significantly-lower average monthly users no differently than how Digg has "survived." My view is to not fix what isn't broke — and to disrupt applications like Push Shift / RiF / Apollo and so forth that are cornerstones to Reddit's success, along with a variety of other administrative choices — is shooting themselves in the foot. It's the end of Reddit for me even as a lurker since I can't use RiF anymore, and I'm excited for something new to take its place.

I'll leave a Medium article I wrote going into detail further for those interested, along with a terrible experience with both Admin and Moderator incompetency and inconsistency.