Despite mass protests by users and moderators, Reddit's unique communities look likely to survive the rebellion over the company's new business strategy.
I made this point in another thread, but I don’t think the person I was talking to understood me.
Its nice to have a lightning rod to attract the dumber parts of the internet. There’s always room for fun, but when you start getting argumentative assholes who say shit like “bruh this app is trash” when referring to a website, you know the magic is dying or dead. Reddit’s been that way for a while now. And their recent actions demonstrate that the audience they want is the ones who mindlessly scroll, the ones who barely contribute, the ones who can’t tell the difference between a website and an “app.”
Eternal September is a very real thing, and I think that there’s a significant number of us out there who don’t mind smaller, more meaningful conversations, at the expense of “popularity.” I personally welcome a return to the “weird web,” as opposed to the corporate bullshit we’ve been putting up with the last few years
+1 on remembering the smaller-scale “weird web,” and being interested in going back. It’s not possible to really go back, since some of the conditions that made a small, weird web possible (in particular, the impossibility of doing certain kinds of advertising and multimedia hosting) won’t come back. But the emotional dynamics can probably be revived.
I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that excluding undesirable people is desirable, or even necessary for the creation of satisfying communities. I remember there always being at least a few people in any forum that no one liked, and there were ways to work around that. IMO communities can repel a certain number of undesirables, even when they show up en masse. It’s corporate interests that are difficult to repel from within a small community.
I made this point in another thread, but I don’t think the person I was talking to understood me.
Its nice to have a lightning rod to attract the dumber parts of the internet. There’s always room for fun, but when you start getting argumentative assholes who say shit like “bruh this app is trash” when referring to a website, you know the magic is dying or dead. Reddit’s been that way for a while now. And their recent actions demonstrate that the audience they want is the ones who mindlessly scroll, the ones who barely contribute, the ones who can’t tell the difference between a website and an “app.”
Eternal September is a very real thing, and I think that there’s a significant number of us out there who don’t mind smaller, more meaningful conversations, at the expense of “popularity.” I personally welcome a return to the “weird web,” as opposed to the corporate bullshit we’ve been putting up with the last few years
+1 on remembering the smaller-scale “weird web,” and being interested in going back. It’s not possible to really go back, since some of the conditions that made a small, weird web possible (in particular, the impossibility of doing certain kinds of advertising and multimedia hosting) won’t come back. But the emotional dynamics can probably be revived.
I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that excluding undesirable people is desirable, or even necessary for the creation of satisfying communities. I remember there always being at least a few people in any forum that no one liked, and there were ways to work around that. IMO communities can repel a certain number of undesirables, even when they show up en masse. It’s corporate interests that are difficult to repel from within a small community.