The weird thing is rebellious shock-jock type folks like this would have rebelled against conservatives a generation ago, but these days “the system” is perceived as the left. Something to keep in mind when trying to make sense of the world.

People here trying to make this about masking bad business decisions etc don’t live in Oakland. I live here, it’s really bad right now.

I was joking with a friend that a lot of Oakland feels like a bad 80s dystopia film…like you know those scenes with hobos warming themselves around a burning oil drum, stripped and burned out cars everywhere, piles of trash, drug addicts and prostitutes wandering around, etc? That’s literally real life in a large part of east Oakland. Like I’ve swear to god seen a half dozen girls at one intersection twerking in the middle of the street on the yellow lines, and one block over is a 5 block long encampment (16th and international/ 12th st).

Like this shit is on Google street view! It’s not hard to find. Follow this road all the way down to Fruitvale ave, it’s like a solid mile of a 3rd world refugee camp.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/YTVNJW36gbYTJuY67?g_st=ic

+1

Tbh I felt Reddit was getting less interesting and more of a habit, Apollo was the last straw. Lemmy is small and a much less active, but more random. Prob good to reduce the mindless scrolling.

Sure, and an earache can be nothing or a symptom of a brain tumor. That’s the problem with a bunch of people self diagnosing based on WebMD or memes.

Show this comic to 100 people and almost all will think they’re in the blue zone.

This is like those ADHD memes which just list every one of life’s inconveniences or challenges as some kind of “symptom.”

Everyone has these feelings, it’s not a curse, it’s just life.

I think we all underestimate how much smaller the internet was back then. Flickr, the premier photo sharing site back in the day, was acquired by yahoo for $25MM. Kevin rose of digg was famously on the cover of business week touting a $60MM valuation. In todays big business tech era those are small numbers even factoring for inflation.

Basically back then users were counted in millions and if the let’s say 5-10K power users and a 100k randos moved on that could kill a service. Today Reddit is too big to fail. It would take tens of millions of users in a mass exodus to make a dent.

Look at Twitter right now, which is about the fastest case of enshittification of the modern era. The weird trolls filled the power vacuum that proper power users left and it’s still plugging along. If something like this eventually happens to Reddit it’ll be more like Facebook, a very slow decline but even in its shell state boasting hundreds of millions of users.

I’ve never modded but have been on Reddit 15yrs 11mo as of the Apollo shutdown. At this point I’m in the 16yr club. It’s wild how badly they are acting toward mods.

Frankly I’m not a mod lover or hater, with the exception of AskHistory. It was so clear how the mods there truly made the community. Haters will say they had a heavy hand, but it kept the quality remarkably high.

I’m middle age so I’ve seen a full decade of forum shitposting and flamwars before Reddit even existed. The fact that Reddit can’t see the value of the community that build “their platform” is beyond tonedeaf, it’s just straight up arrogant.

I’m sure Reddit will stay far bigger than lemmy for a long time, but that’s fine. Maybe better. The old forums were microscopic by modern social media standards but in hindsight the conversations with active users were more real and not just some random username that might as well have been anon.

My take on this is not that this is the default early adopter demographic (bereal, TikTok, etc…cmon old dudes don’t act like we are “leading the charge”). But, there’s a good chunk of older tech oriented folks that see a glimmer of hope in the fediverse bringing back some bits of the “old web” imo.

While most of the people like me don’t love meta or Twitter it was kinda good enough, but Reddit was kind of a last straw. I was there when all these companies were born and at the time we were all teen and 20-something early adopters (believe it or not even Facebook used to be cool!) and we’ve watched them all slowly degrade. Very young folks prob don’t care as they don’t really use any of these services, but us old nerds want to avoid the pitfalls of the Web 2.0 era.

Web3 and the crypto-decentralization efforts were really ham fisted…I think most experienced techies saw through all the BS and recognized how wildly inefficient it all was, not to mention outright scammy in many cases. Fediverse is unproven but I think it has potential, and I think many of us older techies feel that way.

This is the way. Though despite all that I started to keep my Reddit browsing a secret as the average person considers a “redditor” a pretty negative thing to be.

Tbh kinda glad in that sense that the API fiasco revealed the true colors of the company and gave me a very clear reason to leave. It hadn’t felt “good” in a long time and now I know why.