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.
Truthfully? Mixed feelings.
I’ve mainly been a lurker on Reddit on account of the Reddit userbase being…well, rude sometimes. I disliked using it as a user ever since this time I asked a question and had to reply to like, 5 different comments apologizing for the way I phrased things. I wasn’t even being offensive. It was a innocent request for books! I just apparently had to specify “mainstream” instead of phrasing it as “likely to be found at a library”.
However, I won’t lie when I say it has valuable resources that people put a lot of effort into. For example, I really appreciated /r/EOOD and /r/Fantasy. One is a small community dedicated to exercising more to help with depression, and many people are nice there. The other is a community dedicated to fantasy books, and the resources there are immense. Loved it.
I think losing out on rather niche communities is going to be my biggest loss from reddit. I’ve been on reddit since about 2011 or so and the quality and worthwhileness of the site has ebbed and flowed since then, but smaller, sub-10k communities still hold onto the last vestiges of that old-school reddit/internet mindset, and I will miss that a lot. At the end of the day, though, I’m hopeful that Beehaw (and other similar sites/instances) will be able to fill the various voids that we’ll all miss - and honestly, we get to be the ones to cultivate that, and I think that’s very exciting.
I truly feel this. I literally asked a simple question about getting crayon off my wall, and was brigaded by people being hateful toward my children and myself. Who cares yall… its just some crayon.