Mostly gaming stuff, but there was some great work on math, science, and DIY. Today even the "Reddit gold" posts are garbage by the standards of those days.
The sad thing is that even if you are using an actual keyboard and type well, you look like a weirdo on Reddit today if you type longform text. I have seen someone posting merely a couple of solid paragraphs get reactions like “LOL wall of text bro”.
The average person’s use of a phone today is also one reason why it’s not easy for PhpBB-style communities to make a comeback.
I still do this on occasion if I think what I have to type is worth reading. But usually when I do, I include a tl;dr to act as a hook/summary to get my main point across.
0. https://reddit.com/r/secretsanta/comments/nw294q/sunsetting_...
He even has a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan
> In July 2014, Eisenkop's Unidan account was banned from Reddit for using alternate (or "sockpuppet") accounts. The accounts were used to upvote his own submissions and downvote submissions made by other users that were posted around the same time and were potentially attracting attention away from his own.
In some ways Reddit is like the club. In your 20s you're meeting all these new people and the interaction feels amazing. In your 40s, you're still meeting all these new people, but you are bored of it and just want to go home to bed.
The first time I saw this happen was clear back in 1997 with an IRC system called "Talk City". It was a dot-com startup that grew out of the incredibly vibrant, close-knit chat-room community which developed on Apple's short-lived "eWorld" service, carrying forward most of its people and culture... right up until the company signed a couple of big money-making deals, one with WebTV and the other with some ISP in India, connecting their customers to Talk City's network.
It was amazing to watch, in a kind of natural-disaster way, as hordes of strangers showed up practically overnight - far too quickly to be assimilated - and the whole social fabric dissolved. A community I had spent at least an hour a day on for several years simply disappeared under the flood.
I was in the world record secret Santa and it was the funnest coolest thing ever (they sent me my world record letter even!)
Pre-subreddits, it felt very similar to HN (which they ofc have the same birthplace) and the real gold was in the comments, which made it stand out from all others and made it less about you and more about us.
When subreddits started it was totally game changing and from there on it was great.
The Condé Nast thing was weird but it didn’t really change anything, but slowly it felt like it was trying to always “grow up” but never figured out that it didn’t need to
All this nonsense going public is expected but it’s sad and another victim of late stage thunderdome capitalism.
It hasn't been there for many many years. I loved how open and free it was. Everyone really had a place there and you could read and interact with every idea, viewpoint, etc. Then as it got popular, it got corporatized, politicized, etc. Journalists attacked it to make reddit align with their version of hell. Corporations attacked it to make it more amenable to foreign markets. Political actors attacked it to further their political interests. It became an insufferable propaganda shithole. Movies, music, sports, nfl, etc subs used to be interesting places for discussion. Then it became publicity platforms for movie and music studios, sports teams, etc. News subs used to be interesting places for open discussions. Then journalists got their meat hooks into it and now they are state propaganda. Even political subs used to be diverse places for political discussion. Now they are purely political propaganda probably run by political parties.
But I guess that's the way it is with all social media. Once it gets popular, the corporate, news and state entities want control over it. Now, most major subs are just advertising platforms. Which is ironic since most of the subs ( news, movies, politics, etc ) started as a reaction against advertisements masquerading as news articles, movie reviews, sports commentary, political commentary, etc. Money/power ultimately won and reddit became what it hated.
I mean yea, you see it that way because you grew up with small reddit. But by the time journalist's were on to it, that small reddit was dead and a much larger city existed with all its dark and danger filled corners. Even by that time reddit was bleeding money fast and was looking for further investor handouts to survive.
Reddit never wanted to be small. This was always set to happen. I think you just have too thick of lenses in your rose colored glasses to see that.
Yup. And from a mod's perspective: you go from being an elder in a village, so to speak, to being a security guard at a train station.
Maybe we all need a home, but someone else's website is not it. Can't be. The whole public is not invited to a home.
Ultimately, as strictly as we allow, what goes to our eyes needs to be a view of things, not the actual thing. We'll always be disappointed otherwise.
But these communities enable you to reach out and maybe have folks stay in some "smaller net," as time and technology allow. I don't think that will ever happen automatically, ChatGPT notwithstanding.
One model could be you're floating in space on a frigate, with your own air, water, and food. Those three could stand in for identity, psyche, and values. Doesn't matter which space station or derelict dock it is, you don't give those up.
Maybe sometimes the quantity is changed a little, tweaked, and of course your ship gets upgraded or whatever. Your perspectives may change. Life doesn't stop happening.
Other than that, yeah--pilgrims headed elsewhere and time never stops.
Thank you for posting this. This captures something that I had trouble putting into words.
As someone who started using Reddit back in 2006 pre-Digg migration, this is probably one the best explanations of the immense loss I have felt in experiencing Reddit change over the past decade and a half. All the parts I enjoyed were pushed to the periphery, and while you could still find "villages" there, the bulk of the experience was "just passing through". This isn't a "get off my lawn" sentiment, it's about what value you place on the places you inhabit, whether in person or online. Whether I kept returning to Reddit out of habit or because I was still looking for that old experience almost doesn't matter, because it's not there anymore.