I’ve never been sentimental about a social media site but it’s sad for me to see reddit so clearly killing itself. Pushshift is already banned and Apollo is soon to follow. Reddit will either pivot fully to a mainstream audience or die out. It’s just sad for me to see it doing it to itself.
In a way, I mourned for reddit a long time ago. I stumbled (literally, stumbleUpon’d) reddit way back before the great Digg migration, when it was still mostly a haven for techies. The site went through a great many changes. Some good, some bad, some just… different.
At some point it got a little much. I’ve known for a number of years that I was growing increasingly alienated from it. Part of it was the Nazis and Reddit’s inability or unwillingness to deal with any of the hate and bots. Part of it was the pervasive meme / low effort image culture. Those things were always there, but there was a time it’d get you the stink eye and an annoyed upvote.
Besides Hackernews (which has always been full of a certain Silicon Valley type), there wasn’t really too many places to go. I’ve just been kinda waiting in the funeral parlor, hoping a ride to something else would come while I mostly browse the niche subreddits.
It’s my hope that this incident starts the seeds of old forum culture as expressed through multiple lemmys. That’s a pretty ambitious hope, but still. It’s well past the time for the big social media networks to break up.