Hillmarsh

Yes. Truthfully for the last 2-3 years I have been dismayed with the direction social media in general were going, not only Reddit. Here were the 3 major issues I had: 1- lower quality of content & the volume of bad content drowning out the good, 2- the corruption of the companies themselves, and 3- the toxic social environment with nasty behavior becoming the norm. I think that fragmenting the web into smaller and more distributed communities, with a slower pace, will probably be a good thing at this point in time.

PS I’m happy to admit the web has always had a dark side, but it had gotten noticeably much worse in recent years.

I’ll say. The kings of proprietary code grifting, but they sure want YOU to share all your code on GH, which they own (so that corporations can rip and run with it).

FB is a desert compared with the old days, and Twitter will get there as well. Maybe the “AI revolution” can replace all the organic human content with fake people, but that’s about their only chance long term. If you can even call such a thing a “win”.

Thanks. Never heard of that one but it made my goddanged day!

You ain’t kiddin’ man, I went there and I couldn’t believe the amount of chiseling you all have to put up with. And I’m American!

Platforms get arrogant and eventually overstep the bounds. It already happened since a long time with FB and Twitter, and now it’s Reddit’s turn. You can only take your user base for granted for so long. The problem is that economic conditions are changing rapidly right now and all these Silicon Valley firms are trying to find new ways to make money in a much more hostile climate. This has led them to some desperate moves that are alienating their users. I think it will be a slow war of attrition from here on, just like what happened to most of the other platforms that made this same mistake over time.

Splintering communities suffer from major attrition events that lower their value. We already have a model for where Twitter and Reddit are going – FB. Compared with 10 years ago it is a graveyard. If it weren’t for their ownership of IG, it would be far worse for them. It is now a site for older people and for an awful lot of fake accounts. Twitter and Reddit are headed this same direction, but it’s probably a 2-3 year timeline before it is really obvious. More generally, the model of centralized social media has already peaked. I am not disputing that they will still have large user bases but there will be a slow grinding down.

Proprietary software has basically just turned into a giant grift and it makes me not want to use any of it anymore.

Yeah, they should have the resources to hire pretty much the best devs, it’s not like they are a startup or in some kind of backwater situation. They’re an old company with a big name and a lot of money.

I have been using Linux Mint in recent years, however the most recent version is quite buggy. It has regressed to 2014 levels of usability and I’m thinking about switching. The last LTS version worked great, best ever in fact. Not sure what explains the difference.