snarfback

I feel bad for this laughter…

I recall getting my first email address through school in 1993 or so.

I remember having minimal presence on the Internet until perhaps 1997 - when I worked in a highly technical environment and internet communities were still very nascent. People had to search out how to find meaningful communities online. If non-technical people had access to anything like internet communities, it was usually some angelfire cookie cutter site.

Then friendster, myspace, fark, somethingwful,diig, facebook, reddit and many others rapidly expanded the options. People without the knowledge or inclination got into spaces that started with nerds nerding out.

I see this recent split as something like a natural evolution of the people who would’ve originally been on fark when the user numbers were sub 50,000 and fb- was new, or who were skeptical of facebook because it was only for college kids, or who originally started reddit seeking the spaces they’ve always sought. Maybe non technical people will eventually take up these spaces - but those people have NEVER cared about the intracacies of their online privacy…or where their data is stored…or their cell phone data…or any of that. They cheered on The Patriot Act and they don’t care about net neutrality.

This is nothing particularly new.

Unlike the Great Library at Alexandria, the information contained in many reddit threads is actually available in other places and can be recreated - often by the same person if necessary and relevant.

I understand people not wanting to have that information deleted, but I think the analogy is a bit heavy. For many, it’s a balancing act where the fundamental disagreement with reddit’s cultural evolution outweighs the desire to participate in the knowledge repository.

I think many people were comfortable with their ideas belonging to the communities that spawned on reddit, and they viewed reddit’s ownership as a necessary technicality for the platform to exist. Once reddit clarified that they intended to act on that ownership, many people no longer wanted to participate.

I think they have that right.

More importantly, who owns our thoughts in this space?

I moved to Germany and those sumbitches insisted on being German!!!

I suppose each to their own, but I wasn’t an intensely committed redditor outside a few select communities, and that mostly recently. I mostly lurked and used the site to aggregate news and gather a rough idea of the major zeitgeist reactions. I may continue to do that occasionally - like I occasionally do with facebook these days.

I can’t see myself really wanting to comment on the selected forums I was participating on - and have found myself reading posts, thinking of a response, and consciously choosing not to post because I just don’t want to generate content for reddit any longer, even in my limited capacity.

I think one of the most valuable things about this situation is that it lays bare the relationship between users/mods and admins/employees/owners of reddit. I think most users and mods lived in willful delusion that they kind of owned their own data and communities, and admins/employees/owners just sort of maintained infrastructure and me money from ads and unspecified backend data stuff…

It’s now forced that ownership question into the open in stark terms: users and mods don’t own their data or thir communities and their sweat equity, as it were, is not valued by the admin/employee/owner group when it really comes down to it.

That’s something I miss about my old bulletin board home; I could never imagine the admin team strong arming users over shit like this. It’s antithetical to the very ethos of the place - hell, I still send them $5 / month for old times sake to keep the servers up.

Reddit sold out years ago and it’s really just now hitting the fan.