I nuked my Reddit accounts today. Deleted all comments and posts, then the accounts themselves. The tool I used showed each comment as it was deleted, and it was bittersweet.
I watched old gaming and movie discussions I barely remember appear and then get flagged as deleted. Communities I once participated in and then moved on as the years past flashed by. I remembered how I felt back then, and then watched them scroll on into oblivion.
Now I feel…I guess it’s grief. Sadness for that part that’s gone. Sadness that it’ll never be there again. Like footprints on a beach wiped away by the tide. It’s like it never happened. There is no trace.
And I feel anger. Mad that it came to this. Mad that I let a corporation have so much of my time and thoughts. Mad that they made it clear my life was nothing but a product to them.
It’s over now. Time for a new chapter.
Anyone else have strong feelings about losing a part of the past like this?
Why are they harmful? Are you saying you didn’t learn a single thing while you were there? Redditors helped me greatly. Reddit was simply the platform through which we discussed incredible ideas and life tips, and I literally found and made friendships on there that we went off Reddit for and have lasted since 2014+; I even talk to one such online friend daily, and am very focused on helping another who’s in dire straits IRL. Additionally, I learned a fair bit about CSS upfront as a mod of various small subs.
If you really think “any form of corporate social media is harmful” then I have to question how you were using it.
I can’t necessarily speak for the person you’re responding to, but I can speak to my own experience with corporate social media. Without a doubt, reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc provided things that I value: a way to connect with people and a place to learn. But when I did it on those platforms, all of those fun chats, philosophical conversations, and learning moments that I had were owned by the social media company. I got something out of it, sure, but the corporation was skimming off the top. The recent debacles that so many social media platforms have had recently is just demonstrating that they’re getting greedier and greedier. They’re trying to extract more value from our relationships and interactions. This is pretty much how every corporate-owned social media platform is destined to end, because shareholders always demand growing profits. In the end, the only resource that social media companies can draw on to drive those growing profits is us.
You’re conflating the platform owners with their users. In case that wasn’t clear, I’m criticizing the former. There are many users doing good, but the platform owners are ultimately there to monetize the users’ attention and will mess with the way people relate to each other and to the world in the process.
Also maybe chill? I never said “I didn’t learn a single thing while I was there” and I don’t get how you “have to question how I was using it” to understand what I’m getting at.
Okay, well, it wasn’t clear to me and it sounded like you were coming down on the knowledge base of all the users just as much as the corporation that created the environment. I think we have to give credit to the company for at least building the environment in the first place for us to learn how the environment itself works, as much as our own interactions with each other. Now that we have more federated content, then down they can go, but I’m saying they have had their legitimate, positive place in the history of our online social development.
I know; that’s why I asked if that was the case, to check. So I do not agree that “any form of corporate social media is harmful.” It’s more of a mixed bag. The bottom line is that I’m ultimately grateful for Reddit’s existence, or at least how it was at one point in time before it became eviler, and I think we all should be, and that’s why by extension I feel that anyone who just blanket-states it as horrible and annihilation-worthy (that’s what your statement sure sounded like) wasn’t going to nontoxic, edifying communities, a.k.a. didn’t figure out how to use it correctly.
To me, it’s like people pooping on ChatGPT. Yes, it has its limitations, and yes, it’s gotten many things blatantly wrong and forged literal lies. But if you know how to use it correctly and stay aware of its issues, it is life-changing. I’m not defending the atrocities of Reddit, either, but the whole picture is not as bleak as “any form” of it being harmful.