I’d been using Reddit for 6 years; thousands of hours. All gone, in a quick(ish) running of a script. And once it’s gone, it’s gone. Link rot is gonna be so much bigger soon. And everything that represents a mark on the platform from me will be gone.

I remember spending time on basically every interest I’ve had on there. I remember the memes, the political discussions, the anticipations of football transfers, the stunning source-gathering work on the Ukraine war, the shitposts, the communities willing to help me on the most stupid of questions. The hours spent defending random pixels on a canvas modified by other communities with friends, the awestruck silence of the Snap both in movie form and Reddit form. The support for me as a person when I needed it the most and real life couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t give to me.

And in a few minutes, that’ll all be gone. It’s already going away as I type this. Almost feels like a microcosm of my own mortality. Maybe I’m being overly sentimental, but it hurts. Anyone else feel the same?

  • Ben
    5•1 year ago

    I use RSS feeds.

    For a long time I tried to avoid being roped in by the biggest dominant players. I was once on holiday for a month and found myself locked out of my Google account because of something that happened on my Youtube channel whilst I was away (4 spam uploads - I have no idea how, but even deleting them didn’t help).

    After my first few months on Reddit, the same thing happened. One subreddit for my main torrent client banned me for telling someone I think their idea was a bit stupid. Zero tolerance… so I ended up having to leave all that behind and start up a new account.

    I left Microsoft for Linux in 2013, and apart from a few evil email accounts, I have very nice (free) secure accounts too.

    I don’t use Chrome, or chromium browsers - I use Firefox.

    So really, discussing Firefox on r/Firefox on Reddit always struck me as being a rather stupid idea.

    I just hope that over the next ten years we’ll see a newer, and less centralised form of content begin to emerge…

    Can you believe that people would go to Reddit and have serious discussions about how bad Google is, about how bad Youtube is, about how evil Facebook is.

    This is just another WAKE UP call.