No, but thanks for asking. The rabbit hole still goes far further.
Ghostarchive is apparently blocked from The Atlantic, and other archive options aren’t friendly to VPNs, so I’m afraid I can’t provide an archive link.
I see a lot of hate in here and it’s not all unfounded but man there is still something to be said for talking about hot sauce with 200,000 strangers!
I WISH reddit would end. I used to love it for the batshit insane personal stuff people wouldn’t share anywhere else. “I haven’t pooped in a month, AMA”, that kind of dumb voyeuristic crap.
It turns out that’s what everyone else loved too, and it’s profitable to have AIs write it so you can read it on YouTube for ad revenue. And y’all, it’s so stupid.
The most bizarrely specific scenarios pop up again and again, and people eat it up every time. “AITA for not giving my evil infertile sister my baby?” “My parents promised my brother and evil SIL my house without consulting me, AITA?” “My evil MIL was female aka evil, AITA?”
And then you have subreddits like BestOfRedditor updates, which you’d expect to curate these posts so the slop doesn’t come through, but in reality it’s a handful of power users obsessively following and reposting any post with “update” in the title or even just edits with the barest amount of self reflection. Posts have wild plotholes, like a 30yo being divorced for 15 years, and it’s considered “best of” as long as there’s an evil woman/autistic person/trans person, I guess.
But no, this AI shit means it will never end, because it gets numbers, and numbers matter more than anything else.
I don’t know if Reddit will end, however, it has become increasingly unusable. I just want tech news and light discussion of them, but I get so much more ‘extras’ I never signed up for.
I think we’re seeing the death of scale in social media. Ten years ago, the most heavily trafficked subreddits were where you wanted to be. Now, I’m only in niche communities that have yet to be replicated in the Fediverse. Unless you unsubscribe from anything remotely popular, Reddit has been a firehose of bullshit for several years.
Even in some niche things, it seems like people have lost their minds. I like AI and predicting future science and world developments, but honestly, there is not one subreddit where people can just calmly discuss stuff and share news about it all without being just… strange. I want to read commentary like this https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace not “You stupid moron xyz I am right, so much superior is my opinion” or “bow your heads to great technosingularity that will fix my shitty life”, “the DOOM is coming”. I want a platform where there is something worthwhile to read.
I don’t expect everyone to write essays under the news, but nobody is even trying to compose something interesting— some kind of thoughts they have— that maybe they want to share with us. It’s mostly just karma popularity contest everywhere, and that’s tiresome on the eyes.
For the most part, r/futurology is pretty tightly modded. I’m also in r/energy, which seems to be more of a self-policing affair; bullshit is immediately called out and downvoted.
But essentially, Reddit ceased being the front page of the internet years ago, and now it’s where I go after I’ve read all my RSS feeds, Beehaw, The Guardian and NPR. Looks like we might be losing that last one.
Reddit as “reservoir of humanity”… and the example is r/AITA, the most notoriously fake subreddit out there?? 🤣🤣
How disconnected from reality does one have to be to write something like that.
Reddit Answers takes anyone’s queries, trawls the site for relevant discussions and debates, and composes them into a response
Then people feel entitled to insult me for having blanked most of my comments on Reddit. “Why did you do this, [expletive]?”… Yeah, why indeed. 😒
