Then they changed the subreddit rules and only accept "Notable" people for IAMAs and r/casualiama was born. In the 10 years I've been at Reddit it has changed a lot, including some "niche" communities that I was at, as Reddit becomes more popular all it's subreddits degrade into Meme collections.
If you want to find older posts you have to use a search engine.
Reddit might have cleaned their act up a bit but it still a gross wild west.
On an unrelated note, isn't spivak a gender?
This is just a passing trend though, 10 years ago everyone on the internet was libertarian. Which is how you knew the internet wasn't real. Nobody's actually a libertarian in real life.
I'm going to assume what you mean is that nobody lives entirely by Libertarian ideals. While that may be true, it's true of every other political category as well, so I guess nobody is anything under that logic.
On the internet there's that political compass site that tells people they're libertarians, but it was made by libertarians so I think it's a recruiting tool.
But it's also true that people don't practice it in real life. Drug legalization, yes, that's going somewhere if slowly, but the right wing libertarians still tend to be NIMBY in local politics.
They haven't, like, done anything though. Not many politicians elected, no drugs legalized, noone freed from prison, state control over people generally not reduced. I have heard of a few attempts to start libertarian cities that failed because you can't get a Walmart when your taxes are too low to construct a sewer line.
Reddit is where you go if you begrudgingly vote Democrat but think that liberals and progressives have gone too far.
I do wonder what the political landscape is going to look like in the next decade if/when Republicans realize that there's huge huge swaths of young and young-ish people they could easily convert if they just dropped all the gods & guns & murica branding and gave up on social issues.
Practically nothing makes it to the front page organically these days. It's all orchestrated.
I also miss when the youth of the time weren't so in favor of heavy-handed censorship. The current zeitgeist puts the CCP to shame.
Admittedly, I think I see those more on obviously humor subreddits (r/jokes) or smaller subreddits. I'm actually happy that places like r/science delete comments that are simply effortless jokes.
Unfortunately, it seems like the only options out there are either:
1) Reddit clones, that attract people who are angry about the worst subreddits getting banned at one point or another. Pretty much nothing but non-witty hate speech, and meta discussion about how much Reddit sucks.
2) Random phpBB bulletin boards, that are too small to have the critical mass of early Reddit. Of course, today's Reddit is WAY too big, and suffers from the "Eternal September" problem. A smaller, lesser-known alternative would be great. But it has to be large ENOUGH, or else it's not much different from a private Slack or Discord.
Today I'm out looking for alternatives again, which brings me to HN. There's something magical about early reddit, but I don't think it's unique, I think it existed on usenet and bulleting boards and other stuff before my time, I think it will exist again, but if it exists right now, it's a carefully guarded secret that I haven't stumbled upon yet.
I hope a new one emerges.
These days just about any popular thread that I wander into, I see wide swaths of "deleted" comments. I'm sure they were deleted for many good and valid reasons.
IMHO, reddit's aggressive moderation suppresses spontaneous comments and is off putting to lurkers. The wittiest comments are likely spontaneous. And lurkers are not likely to engage in a discussion if they feel it may be off topic.
So we miss out on spontaneous humor and the random insights of brilliant people.
All of this makes reddit a sadder experience.