snarfback

I feel bad for this laughter…

Unlike the Great Library at Alexandria, the information contained in many reddit threads is actually available in other places and can be recreated - often by the same person if necessary and relevant.

I understand people not wanting to have that information deleted, but I think the analogy is a bit heavy. For many, it’s a balancing act where the fundamental disagreement with reddit’s cultural evolution outweighs the desire to participate in the knowledge repository.

I think many people were comfortable with their ideas belonging to the communities that spawned on reddit, and they viewed reddit’s ownership as a necessary technicality for the platform to exist. Once reddit clarified that they intended to act on that ownership, many people no longer wanted to participate.

I think they have that right.

More importantly, who owns our thoughts in this space?

I suppose each to their own, but I wasn’t an intensely committed redditor outside a few select communities, and that mostly recently. I mostly lurked and used the site to aggregate news and gather a rough idea of the major zeitgeist reactions. I may continue to do that occasionally - like I occasionally do with facebook these days.

I can’t see myself really wanting to comment on the selected forums I was participating on - and have found myself reading posts, thinking of a response, and consciously choosing not to post because I just don’t want to generate content for reddit any longer, even in my limited capacity.

I think one of the most valuable things about this situation is that it lays bare the relationship between users/mods and admins/employees/owners of reddit. I think most users and mods lived in willful delusion that they kind of owned their own data and communities, and admins/employees/owners just sort of maintained infrastructure and made money from ads and unspecified backend data stuff…

It’s now forced that ownership question into the open in stark terms: users and mods don’t own their data or their communities and their sweat equity, as it were, is not valued by the admin/employee/owner group when it really comes down to it.

That’s something I miss about my old bulletin board home; I could never imagine the admin team strong arming users over shit like this. It’s antithetical to the very ethos of the place - hell, I still send them $5 / month for old times sake to keep the servers up.

Reddit sold out years ago and it’s really just now hitting the fan.

I think this is partially resulting from the bias of people here, who more than likely care about the community involvement aspect of online forums/platforms. If the forum I used to live on 15 years ago was still well trafficked, I likely wouldn’t be exploring these spaces the same way.

The reality is that reddit today ISN’T what it was 10 years ago when it killed a lot of forums. It is now a platform, like facebook, that has mass appeal and is going to therefore operate to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Maybe a lot of “redditors” support the strikes, but I’d believe that a majority of people who use reddit don’t.

People want their feeds. They want their dopamine. They want their predictable comments and hot gossip. That’s what people are in larger groups. That’s who reddit is now designed to appeal to.

I think about this kbin/fedithing as a chance to reboot online conversation in an environment that is different than what reddit has become, but I don’t expect reddit to change in any way other than to continue to become boring and ad-data driven.