Like for the past few years, browsing reddit is basically a daily routine for me. Now Reddit is dying, I feel like a part of me died. A website filled with many years of content… will soon be gone. I heard rumours that they are planning to purge the site of “undesirable” content before their IPO. I fear same thing will happen to youtube. I don’t have the resources to save all the content online, and watching sites die is painful. Reddit’s death triggered my fear for losing all those amazing youtube channels that I occasionally binge rewatch. (Does anyone else rewatch youtube videos over and over on a weekly basis? Maybe I’m just weird.
So this is what the internet is? Just a cycle of sites being born and dying, just like humans being born and dying. Omg whats the meaning of life…
Umm… sorry for the weird existential monologue. Lol
It’s a bummer, but I have a little bit of a different perspective because I’m an old techy. I first started getting into online communities in the late 80s on CompuServe. I was big into Roger Ebert’s showbiz media forum, and had friends if talk to every day there (often including Roger) but as that got expensive, I started moving to Bulletin Board Systems in the early 90s. This is before most people had dedicated Internet (it was all dial-up), and before there was much web content.
I got really into the BBS scene (even met my wife on one), and that’s where I’d talk to people. But as the web took hold of the Internet, the BBSs started dying. I ended up transitioning over to fark.com, and spent a lot of time there. But the fark admins started making changes that were annoying, and the community there started to stagnate, so I got into Reddit maybe eight years ago. We know what happened there, and just the other day I got on here.
Each of these transitions was sad for me, mostly for similar reasons. But I’ve been through it so many times now that I know it’s just a new phase and it will be fine. There are always things I miss about the last place and things I appreciate about the new.
This is all just part of what happens with online communities.
I hear you. Opening Apollo was basically the first thing I did when waking up (don’t judge me Lol). I’ve been on reddit for over 10 years and I credit it as playing a major role in pulling me away from the far right. I’ve learned so much on it, and it really feels like the end of an era. You can’t help but get a bit emotional. Anyway I hope that lemmy can fill that gap, I’ve been really enjoying the community here, everyone is quite friendly.
If you spend enough time around here, you just might get pulled away from the center-right ;)
Lol I already had my “enlightened centrism” phase on my way to the left
Hahaha glad to hear it my friend
I’ve seen many things come and go from the internet so I’m actually glad big tech is in decline. Those companies have way too much power.
Some of us have been through this sort of thing before. At the end of the day, it’s a normal and predictable result of using a corporate/walled garden website. The great news is that there is a shift for many toward alternatives in the fediverse. Not to say that content loss is never going to be an issue again, but since everything is open-ended, it should be a bit more resilient to various “business decisions” that can cause it to be lost.
I hope it motivates many to become web archivists. If anybody is able to financially invest in digital storage, I encourage them to join up at !datahoarder@lemmy.ml and keep copies of all the good stuff you find, including YouTube channels!
I think that when it comes to video content, that is generally the most difficult to store and distribute. Peertube exists and the fediverse equivalent for free as in freedom and beer content, however creators who want to monetize their content are also finding paths that they are in control of which is also great. By that I mean services like Nebula and CuriosityHub. Paywalls aren’t so bad if everyone behind it is putting out premium level content (although I do have some bones to pick with those services in their existing state).
Reddit pulled me away from the far right as well!
Wait you’re telling me, the only reason you’re not a nazi is because of reddit? 🤔
The radicalization of (particularly) adolescent white American males begins and accelerates primarily in online spaces. It tends to follow a rather predictable pattern, too.
I don’t know if you’d really call it far right or not, but at one point in my life I was:
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Pro gun
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Anti-LGBTQ
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Hated the left
I was more liberal on other things such as women’s rights and loving america to the detriment of everything else.
Nowdays I’d say I’m liberal but moving more left slowly. It started in college where I was actually exposed to other ways of life, but reddit continued that.
I had a similar experience. Reddit both led me into a hate community (TiA) and helped pull me out of it later. It’s also the place that helped me realize I’m non-binary.
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I’m a bit sad (mostly for the reasons you already described), but it’s also new and exiting. Interestingly, I’m having more fun here than I’ve had on Reddit in years. Not only was it cool to set up my own instance, I also notice I’m contributing far more then I ever did on Reddit. Maybe it’s because the communities are a bit smaller, so there’s a better chance of someone actually reading your comment.
