Dad, architectural designer, former SMB sysadmin and still-current home-labber, sometimes sim-racing modder, enthusiastic everything-hobbyist. he/him.
That’s the thing, though, right? I was nowhere near as prolific as you, and just going from Reddit stats I’m also in the top .1% of active users. Reddit can talk all they want about how few users are going to be affected by third party apps shutting down, but they have a particularly lopsided distribution in terms of engagement and the people they’re shutting out are all the ones on the high end of that distribution. A billion lurkers does not a community make.
the unit conversion bot was a nice QoL feature on the technical subs I tended to hang out on.
Shitty Unit Conversion Bot was good for a laugh too.
I was very excited about Diaspora right up to the point that I realized there was no way in hell that any of my real-life friends and family were going to go through the effort of setting up profiles just to talk to nerdy ol’ me. The network effect was just not their friend.
In the distant future of 2030, social networking between the scattered bands of surviving humans will be facilitated by ham operators bouncing packet radio off the few remaining satellite repeaters, and importing the responses they receive into their clan’s scavenged network via FidoNet.
Whether on Reddit or a pre-Reddit forum, I usually never bothered to add an ‘ETA:’ footer for small spelling or grammar changes, or for larger changes edited in immediately after posting (as an author I don’t exactly have the most ordered thought process…). Anytime I added information more than a few minutes after posting – for example, providing citation links or adding nuance to something that didn’t come across as clearly as I intended – I would usually provide a footer summarizing those changes for posterity. Unfortunately, reddit being reddit the discussion would usually have moved far past my post at that point.
ActivityPub has a concept of “shared inbox delivery” that could fit the bill, say, if federated instances delivered digests to each other and displayed them in a “public” tab.
A friend of mine from architecture school wound up as barista during the Great Recession and genuinely ended up loving it, to the point that he tried to buy a coffee shop from a guy who was retiring. Unfortunately for him, he couldn’t get a small business loan mid-recession (the bank told him “you have the most airtight business plan we’ve seen in a hot minute, but we’re just not making loans right now”) and he wasn’t able to make it work.
There’s no shame in wanting to work in the service industry. The challenge is in finding a way to do it without being exploited.
For anybody about to do the same, who wants to hang on to their Reddit history for whatever reason, you can request an export of your account data here:
Sure enough, it is, and my mourning for “imagine a beowulf cluster of…” memes was premature! I was more following along with @Hexorg’s statement of how he consumed news before Reddit.
/. for me. Pass the aspirin…
Thanks for doing this – do you mind if I copy/paste into the post body for posterity?