I found Reddit about 6 years ago, took a little while to understand what it was about but when I finally got it, I felt like I had found the best place on the internet. Somewhere I could be my true self without being myself. Every time I logged in, I felt free. Like solo roaming the streets of a new city in a foreign country for the first time. Intellectual conversation, assistance on vague problems, sharing life experiences, advice, watching porn you didn’t know existed, and then slipping out the back door when you were done.
As many here already know, those days are gone. The freedom is gone, it feels like a communist regime and it seems that their success is their downfall. The entire personality of Reddit has changed and will never come back, it even shows in the users. The community is broken, unauthentic and the Truth has left the conversation. Freedom is dead over there. What a shame. It’s like my favorite bar burnt down.
But the thing that really gets me is that it didn’t just change, it became the exact opposite. It has become the exact reason why someone built it, in the first place.
I read that it’s attracting the most new users of all the social apps. Best performing app, which means the end is near. Soon it will just be a limb of the pretend society that we used to hide from behind the walls of Reddit. And for some reason, I just want to see it burn.
I know you didn’t likely put too much specifically pointed thought into your phrasing of ‘feels like a communist regime’, but please do realize you are describing a hypercapitalist, shareholder driven, investment seeking and profligate monetization enacting regime, governance structure, moderation style.
Reddit is now the Pepsi Ad with cops and protesters getting their Pepsis and singing kumbaiyah… and then the after credits scene is the cops finish their Pepsis and beat everyone’s heads in.
This is enshittification.
This is the relentless and ultimately brutish and stupid drive to extract as much wealth as possible out of anything, in a way that actually destroys the thing, manifest in an online message board.
Lure in the user base, lock down the market demographic, destroy competition as much as you can, and then squeeze every penny out of em when they have no alternatives.
Fuck Spez, RIP Aaron.
EDIT: Oh also, you are a lemm.ee user, your instance is shutting down at thr end of June, you may want to look at setting up another user account on another instance.
Phrasing like that reminds me of all the “this is the commu-social-marxism the libs want” and it’s just a picture of current capitalism.
I’m being nice because this person is a refugee, the fact that they are here, describing what they’ve experienced and witnessed, realizing that it is bad and another place could be better… it means they’ve got a good head on their shoulders trying to escape the hivemind.
Please don’t lose them in the pattern buffer, O’Brien =P
to this i’d like to add that when i browse there sometimes i keep seeing people saying things like “this is reddit libs are everywhere” “this is reddit even slight conservatism will make people call for a death sentence” or “this is reddit you can’t say anything non-progressive” and those are getting many upvotes, whilst anything said that’d paint you as anywhere left of centre will get you downvoted.
it seems like the conservatives have taken over and yet they still feel like they’re surrounded