To say nothing of the fact that the cultural zeitgeist has changed from kids distrusting "the man" to kids openly bragging about sponsorships and "influencers" whoring themselves out for likes and free product. Content that was accessible, linkable, archivable, and searchable now lives in millions of miniature jails. And then we get something like the Reddit apocalypse that just happened and now the internet is missing vast swathes of vitally important information, because one stupid fucking CEO wanted to take his company public.

So yes, kids these days.

I personally don't place nearly as much value on diversity of clients to access centralized services as you. Isn't that exactly what led to that "Reddit apocalypse"? An illusion of openness with a giant corporate SPOF, just like all the other ones? Chosen by the kids of 10-15 years ago? If not for the transitory nature of Reddit becoming popular as the surge of the mobile migration catching people off guard, you probably never get the same appearance of openness in the first place - but as long as the content was centrally hosted, it was the same closed-garden story. Same with all the old no-longer-viewable picture tweets that relied on one or another flash-in-the-pan image hosting service... Reddit, Twitter, all of them were never anything but walled gardens, and people in the fading non-walled-gardens in the last 2010s certainly called that out.

Nor is thinking everyone else is a sellout anything new. Certainly not newer than the 90s. The target of that message was the huge number of people who always did buy the pop products in the first place. Nobody would care about raging against the machine if the machine wasn't dominant. And isn't it telling that all those generations still ended up going with The Man or becoming The Man? Maybe it isn't an effective approach.

I'm OK with the patchwork of image hosts fading out because they are archivable. I can still right-click to save what interests me, and the image is hosted at a URL anyone could punch in or scrape. Except more recently, where we all apparently hate bots and we've let our bandwidth providers become highwaymen for a resource that is supposed to be free.

I'm not saying this stuff needs to be immortal, it just needs to be distributed, archiveable, linkable, and accessible from the client of your choice. Reddit suppresses scraping and nobody seems to have anything cached in an accessible way, at least judging by Google results.

> And isn't it telling that all those generations still ended up going with The Man or becoming The Man? Maybe it isn't an effective approach.

Where there is an effective ecosystem that avoids "The Man" I think you will still find those people. They are not highlighted or lifted up by the masses. Instead most folks will make the contemptible choice of sucking off the corporate cock in exchange for a relatively easy and mindless, monotonous, consumptive, pathetic little life. I know this because I did it too. But I am much happier having weaned myself from its bosom.

Yeah, it's not just "kids of today", is it? Almost all of us have chosen convenience over distributed, decentralized, robust, linkable, exportable platforms at some point.

All the way back to the days of those corporate media and commercial advertising sites inside of AOL bringing more new users to the web than plain Usenet.

I just don't think it's despicable at all. Running a discord channel instead of hosting a web forum? A lot easier to spin something up quickly with multimedia capabilities for a community without technical knowledge. It could all go away tomorrow, or slowly get shittified... and people will move on to something else again.

People having to ask questions anew that have already been answered in the past? In-depth knowledge of yesterday's culture fading away? To me, that isn't a high price to pay. I talk to people on HN (walled garden), some others on forums (a mix of corporate walled garden or independent ones), some others on Discord (walled garden), it's all good enough IMO. Certainly not a moral failing for anyone. Saying something like "contemptible choice of sucking off the corporate cock in exchange for a relatively easy and mindless, monotonous, consumptive, pathetic little life" doesn't make me think you're any happier for avoiding it... those are not the words of the content.

Yet the original Reddit, Usenet, was right there as open as decentralized as can be and they flocked to the walled gardens anyway. Kids those days.

Which resulted in most pages being a horrific travesty in terms of readability.

knowledge. Kids in the myspace days were relatively safe. The dark patterns of Facebook weren't public until well after it became the social media website.

If reddit/discord kids choose not to heed this knowledge, this is on them. They should be better at googling and consuming news than the Myspace kids were. I'll hold them to a higher standard.

>or "kids those days" using AOL 25-30 years ago?

in the early AOL days there wasn't even an easy way to receive online transactions. People who had AoL had it delievered to them on a disc, bought or given to them physically. There could be viruses, and the 90's internet was truly the wild west, but this was well before the mantra of "the Internet never forgets" was really something to worry about.

>it's been moving from one walled garden to another for basically 20 years now.

I don't have issues with the concept of a walled garden. But I'm not a fan of putting all my eggs into one basket. Even if we have a truly benevolent ruler, they may one day pass away and transfer power to a tyrant. Always have a backup plan.

That's my issue, it seems the internet is closing off more and more and converging into a few critical points of operations. Seemingly forgetting the idea that every empire falls. I don't care if Reddit devolves into a glorified eternal commercial, I care that no one is prepared to properly move to something else, anything else.