Like for the past few years, browsing reddit is basically a daily routine for me. Now Reddit is dying, I feel like a part of me died. A website filled with many years of content… will soon be gone. I heard rumours that they are planning to purge the site of “undesirable” content before their IPO. I fear same thing will happen to youtube. I don’t have the resources to save all the content online, and watching sites die is painful. Reddit’s death triggered my fear for losing all those amazing youtube channels that I occasionally binge rewatch. (Does anyone else rewatch youtube videos over and over on a weekly basis? Maybe I’m just weird.
So this is what the internet is? Just a cycle of sites being born and dying, just like humans being born and dying. Omg whats the meaning of life…
Umm… sorry for the weird existential monologue. Lol
It’s a bummer, but I have a little bit of a different perspective because I’m an old techy. I first started getting into online communities in the late 80s on CompuServe. I was big into Roger Ebert’s showbiz media forum, and had friends if talk to every day there (often including Roger) but as that got expensive, I started moving to Bulletin Board Systems in the early 90s. This is before most people had dedicated Internet (it was all dial-up), and before there was much web content.
I got really into the BBS scene (even met my wife on one), and that’s where I’d talk to people. But as the web took hold of the Internet, the BBSs started dying. I ended up transitioning over to fark.com, and spent a lot of time there. But the fark admins started making changes that were annoying, and the community there started to stagnate, so I got into Reddit maybe eight years ago. We know what happened there, and just the other day I got on here.
Each of these transitions was sad for me, mostly for similar reasons. But I’ve been through it so many times now that I know it’s just a new phase and it will be fine. There are always things I miss about the last place and things I appreciate about the new.
This is all just part of what happens with online communities.
I hear you. Opening Apollo was basically the first thing I did when waking up (don’t judge me Lol). I’ve been on reddit for over 10 years and I credit it as playing a major role in pulling me away from the far right. I’ve learned so much on it, and it really feels like the end of an era. You can’t help but get a bit emotional. Anyway I hope that lemmy can fill that gap, I’ve been really enjoying the community here, everyone is quite friendly.
If you spend enough time around here, you just might get pulled away from the center-right ;)
Reddit pulled me away from the far right as well!
Wait you’re telling me, the only reason you’re not a nazi is because of reddit? 🤔
The radicalization of (particularly) adolescent white American males begins and accelerates primarily in online spaces. It tends to follow a rather predictable pattern, too.
I don’t know if you’d really call it far right or not, but at one point in my life I was:
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Pro gun
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Anti-LGBTQ
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Hated the left
I was more liberal on other things such as women’s rights and loving america to the detriment of everything else.
Nowdays I’d say I’m liberal but moving more left slowly. It started in college where I was actually exposed to other ways of life, but reddit continued that.
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I’ve seen many things come and go from the internet so I’m actually glad big tech is in decline. Those companies have way too much power.
I’ve been on the internet since pretty much the start so I’ve seen dozens of great communities come and go. Normally they reach some kind of malthusian breaking point where they collapse under their own weight, I think this is the first time where sheer greed caused the end though.
So yes, this is the cycle of the internet. Death is actually good for an ecosystem though, it means that new things can evolve, such as the fediverse.
I do feel sad for what will be lost though, and every time I load Apollo to remember this great app with all the care and attention put in to it will be gone at the end of the month.
Pretty sure MySpace sold itself to AOL and it got instantly replaced by Facebook. Tumblr and Twitter both sold out and got sucky. It’s a common trend once entrepreneurs decide they want to cash out or move on.
Same, I am going through the same exact feeling as you are. I had similar existential thoughts on how everything is temporary and fleeting, websites and life… (please don’t judge haha, I really had these thoughts)
In a way, Lemmy is exciting and I’ve got used to it very quickly. It feels like the reddit of old and is surprisingly comfy. However, reddit was a part of some of the best years of my life and helped me become what I’m today personally and professionally. There is a wealth of information on reddit and I hope that doesn’t go away.
I will really really miss using reddit, and it will hurt in the short term, but I believe it will be a good thing eventually, especially if the Fediverse replaces it (at least to some extent). Hopefully then we can avoid this happening again and end this cycle.
