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I remember signing up for Reddit as a college freshman. I was a digg user and joined Reddit in the aftermath of that fiasco. I sometimes laugh looking over my p

• doublepg23 3y ago
  I can trace my earliest account to middle school. You can imagine the cringe on there...
  • SantalBlush 3y ago
    If every Reddit user was tagged with their age, it would be an eye-opening experience. "Why is this 16-year-old talking about divorce lawyers on r/relationship_advice?"
    • anthomtb 3y ago
      A 16 year old with recently divorced parents probably has some reasonable insight there.
      • SantalBlush 3y ago
        I think that is absolutely not true.
    • bentcorner 3y ago
      > "Why is this 16-year-old talking about divorce lawyers on r/relationship_advice?" The opposite has occurred and it wasn't very pretty to look at.
      • fakedang 3y ago
        Huh? Divorce lawyers talking on r/teenagers about relationship advice?
        • ikt 3y ago
          https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/djdmd9/we_banned_all_of_rteenagers_and_it_turns_out/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/djdmd9/we_banned_all... /r/drama banned people who posted in /r/teenagers and brought to surface a whole bundle of pedos
          • fakedang 3y ago
            Talk about dark patterns. Reddit has disabled scrolling down on mobile devices. Well that ends my reddit usage.
            • johnnyanmac 3y ago
              Yeah, reddit has been mobile hostile for a few years now. Hope this forcing more users to the site reveals that. Granted, I don't think anything will change, but complacency is the moment reddit truly dies.
• bears-n-beets 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I also joined reddit as a college freshman (2012). I don't even remember how I discovered reddit - I want to say maybe via StumbleUpon? My trajectory is pretty similar to yours. It's pretty surreal to have a community I actively participated in for my entire adult life essentially go dark in an instant. Of course the website still exists, but it certainly won't be the same.
• koprulusector 3y ago
  You summed it up nicely. I followed a lot of tech stuff, and sci-fi, etc, stuff it’s hard to find on traditional social media. Following a tech Instagram will never be like seeing Netflix’s engineers posting to r/Kubernetes for an outage in the middle of the night. And even if I wanted to keep using Reddit, a lot of brain drain has already happened, so it’s so much less useful already, and it really feels like one of my favorite tools is suddenly obsolete.
• appleflaxen 3y ago
  Consider r/redditseppuku
• Waterluvian 3y ago
  If we’re having a wake… I remember when I accidentally became a moderator of /r/science because they asked for variety of domain expertise and I’m a geographer and c’mon… nobody’s a geographer. It was a fun experience. Then became an educational one. Then frustrating. Then thankless. Then I stopped. I’m happy for the lessons. I’m sad it died years ago.
  • goalieca 3y ago
    I had totally forgotten that you had a flair showing your expertise. I did some computer vision stuff for a while. You wouldn’t recognize r/science of the early days though. Reddit is a completely different site.
    • Auracle 3y ago
      r/science is now r/poorStudiesThatJustifyMyBeliefs
      • Gareth321 3y ago
        You aren’t kidding. Add r/Psychology to that list. It’s all bad social science studies now. “Study Proves Republicans are Dumb”
        • vGPU 3y ago
          I’m fairly certain that rephrased versions of “Study Proves Trump Voters have low IQ” are posted there just about weekly, and the rest is just psychedelic research. It’s one of the laws of the internet: as the size of a community grows, the quality approaches a stadium full of drunk sweaty sports fans.
          • r3vo 3y ago
            One of the reasons I hope hacker news stays relatively obscure. Fingers crossed
• slg 3y ago
  Well said. Although one aspect that makes this both sadder and stranger is that we all watched Twitter do the same thing just a few months ago with awful results. Sure, the sites will still live for a long time, but the versions that existed as of last year are forever gone.
  • tinus_hn 3y ago
    Don’t worry too much. It’s a cycle, new sites will appear to fill the gap and they will go through approximately the same evolution.
• tnecniv 3y ago
  I joined Reddit almost 15 years ago, shortly before I became a freshman in high school. I mainly joined it to chat on r/programming back when that was one of the top subreddits. I was just starting out as a programmer and it was instrumental on teaching me the subject. It also taught me about life in general as a relatively sheltered introvert. Fast forward 15 years, I now have a PhD largely due to the path that community helped set me on. You could follow a very similar journey of maturity for me through my Reddit history (and that’s the main reason I haven’t flushed my posts, even if I was an idiot at 14 that was my personal journey). The Reddit I joined changed a lot — we had characters like Bozarking and there was a strong libertarian element in contrast to today’s left leanings. I remember the Digg exodus changing Reddit fundamentally but not necessarily for the worse. The big subs declined by the niche ones blossomed and taught me much about my hobbies. While I don’t expect to fully leave (Google will lead me there or I might have a question where I am not sure what other site has a pertinent community to ask), my use will decline 99% or more. I have long been aware a lot of Reddit has sucked but there was still a lot of value to be had. It’s also been apparent for years that Reddit, the company, has zero clue what users actually want (hint: it’s not 3 separate chat implementations, nfts, and profile pictures), however this open hostility towards the users and mods who volunteer their time (mods have had their problems but generally they are good, after all, you only notice the bad mods). I won’t miss most of the absent scrolling I do on Reddit, but it also has been a bit like my childhood friend passing away. I am not sure what my online future will look like, but it will be strange without Reddit being there.
  • EdwardDiego 3y ago
    > r/programming back when that was one of the top subreddits. It was also a default one, IIRC, and when I joined had far more activity than /r/funny. Pretty sure a lot of people were very upset when it stopped being a default. I was teaching myself to code when I first encountered Reddit, and I followed the language hype on proggit as if it were gospel - I learned Common Lisp because proggit was giddy that Reddit was written in it at the time, and I subsequently learned about macros, and functional programming, and that Erik Naggum wants you to get off his damn lawn and stop asking dumb questions in comp.lang.lisp, then it was the Ruby hype, then Erlang, then Haskell etc. All very interesting stuff to delve into, but yeah, I thought I'd never get a job programming if I was struggling with Haskell's type system, look at all the regular workaday coders on Reddit who're loving it! (I know, I know.) That said, I really benefited from the Erlang hype period, the ideas in Erlang/OTP were very interesting indeed, even if I didn't quite understand what a finite state machine was, and what it was useful for, when trying to grok gen_fsm. But the actor model, the deliberate choice to treat failure as normal and build accordingly, that stuck with me all these years. Hell, I even ended up printing off Joe Armstrong's thesis to read on the bus to work. Reddit was a great replacement for forums, especially for technical topics, IMO. But their "reopen the sub or else landed gentry" approach directly hurts tech communities, because the mods of a technical sub are often domain experts in the technology it's focused on, and a lot will disengage and move on. At least, I know two of my fellow mods in a small technical sub have disengaged dramatically because of Reddit's approach, and they will be a massive loss to the sub. But then, small tech subreddits aren't exactly a massive money-making market niche, so yeah. It is sad though.
• TechBro8615 3y ago
  I'm going to press X to doubt. Reddit is infuriatingly sticky. Every time I land on a post from 10+ years ago (like this one [0] for example), I go to the author's profile page. Almost inevitably, they've written a comment within the last week. This is a remarkable property for a social website to have, and it's not one that I see exhibited in other places, like StackOverflow or ancient vBulletin forums. I'd like to think that this is finally Reddit's "Digg moment," but I am just not convinced. The boycott was over in 48 hours and everything is back to normal, but people are just complaining more. Heck, the commenter I linked to from 11 years ago also commented two hours ago, unsurprisingly, complaining about the API changes. As offensive as Steve Huffman has been throughout this saga, he doesn't seem to be wrong. Reddit could shoot a third party app on Fifth Avenue and people would still use it... [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rx9u9/til_grigori_perelman_best_known_for_resolving_the/c49gpjj/ https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rx9u9/til_gr...
  • tnecniv 3y ago
    Eh I think this will fundamentally change the site, almost like the inverse of the Digg exodus. A lot of us old school users are angry and done. The newer users that haven’t experienced a different social cycle of Reddit are the one are the ones upset that the mods are revolting. Over the last month, the quality of the front page has significantly dropped, and the remaining subs were heavily biased towards the ones that most recently rose to prominence (and have the most repeated / bland takes in the comments). I’m not going to claim that Reddit was a bastion of intellectualism back in the day, but the mean effort put into comments on the main subs has deteriorated over time and today might very well mark a discontinuity in that
  • mdu02 3y ago
    I have (had) a 9 year old Reddit account, that I unironically grew up with. I created it when I was 12 (sue me COPPA) to comment on a Cookie Clicker subreddit. I remember my cakeday, May 28, 2014. It really was a lifestyle app. The account had comments on all the games I played as a teenager, fitness and university subreddits, random hobbies I picked up for a few months, basically every single one of my interests for the past decade. I had a NSFW burner that received frequent use. I have to say, you're pretty accurate about how I was basically active and commenting once or more a week for the majority of my conscious life. I started using the RiF app on a god awful 2010 phone when I created my account, and have used Sync since probably 2016. I blanked then wiped all of my comments and then deleted my account two weeks ago. To be truthful, Reddit had a much different feel already, but nothing can stay constant for that long. It was already frustrating me that (my perceived) quality of discussion on the site has steadily become dumber and any mainstream news or political sub is astroturfed to hell (presumably by the Russians). I started seeing the emoji or "lol who cares" in response to perfectly normal comments. The East Palestine derailment frenzy was what made me realize that the website is definitely attacked by coordinated actors. I spent the last few months on the site browsing /r/neoliberal not because I necessarily agreed with the tenets of the ideology, but because it was one of the few reasonable political subs left, and /r/CredibleDefence for broadly pro-West but reasonable takes on the war. I slowly realized that I was reading empty content. Much of my time on the site was seeing a clearly stupid, if not false comment, and realizing that the effort I would put in debunking or arguing was going to reach two or three eyeballs. Essentially, much of Reddit is the one eyed preaching to the blind. I frequently typed up long comments (much like this one) for an hour or so, and returned to maybe 4-5 upvotes, since the post had already peaked in popularity. I had a few long posts in /r/summonerschool , a League of Legends advice subreddit that were probably 10x the detail of any other comment advice and took me an hour to watch their gameplay and give specific comments. In short, I felt I was trying to suck shit water from an Olympic sized pool through a lifestraw and hoping it would clean it up. The 3rd party app ban was a huge fucking slap to my face. Call me arrogant, but I believe I contributed more than my fair share to the running of Reddit by creating high quality discourse on the website. And in return? I get slapped with a shit UI and advertisements up my ass through the official app. And spez's response showed a complete lack of any attention to the website, to any concerns to the community that is most of the value proposition of their site. Their claims to be looking for profit now are transparent as fuck when you remember all their failed, clearly unmonetizable crap they've put dev hours and low interest money on in the past few years (NFTs, the other crypto crap, whatever RPAN was supposed to be). Coast by on institutional inertia while you piss away money, let the website decline in quality, and then aggressively try to monetize from the most loyal users (the decade long user who uses a third party app)? No thanks. So yeah, I blew up my account. To be honest, I am having some withdrawal symptoms and am trying hard not to relapse, but I see it as the only moral route to proceed. The internet is broadly really quite bad. Twitter is tolerable but has similar ethical issues and quality depends very much on topic. I am getting into Substack, but that is ultimately a newsletter publisher and not a discussion forum. Any non-reddit result on Google is unusable. Maybe the internet will agree on a replacement. Maybe it keeps on spiralling down the enshittification drain. For now, HackerNews occupies the space on my phone's home screen that Reddit used to. I hope the future isn't as crap as I anticipate. Rant over.
• time0ut 3y ago
  I remember seeing reddit on my coworker’s screen in 2010. The front page of the internet? Isn’t that slashdot… Oh but its for everything? Interesting!
• anjel 3y ago
  Newsgroups > Yahoo Clubs > Yahoo Groups > Digg > Reddit > the next great "online community" good enough that you come to rely on it, which of course means enturdification is right around the corner, sure as turds.
  • blitzar 3y ago
    Newsgroups > Yahoo Clubs > Yahoo Groups > Digg > Reddit I recognise that journey!
  • kcrwfrd_ 3y ago
    Slashdot > Digg > Reddit > Hacker News
  • project2501 3y ago
    similar journey, but on two parallel paths for tech/science discussions: slashdot > HN for entertainment: rss > reddit > ? (help)
• rjbwork 3y ago
  I joined my senior year of HS. My original account is 17 years old this year. I'll probably just continue to use old.reddit.com for a few niche time wasters on desktop, but the decline in quality is already apparent. It's a damn fucking shame.
  • cyanwave 3y ago
    Narwhal has found a way to make it work, will be 2-7 a month. The pitchforks are up but I love Reddit as a community so I’m happy we have something.
• tim333 3y ago
  As a Reddit user I'm a bit puzzled by these death or Reddit posts. I use Reddit by going to reddit.com with the old settings and it works just the same. Does the death of some third party app really matter? It would be like saying HN is gone because some 3rd party app on it that I've never heard of is gone. Honestly a bit puzzled.
  • SSLy 3y ago
    For some people access on their phones is important. Old reddit www is bad for that, New reddit is much worse. And Apollo was an extremely well thought out app, there's certain niceness in interacting with such products during your lazy moments.
    • vGPU 3y ago
      Reddit was great for aimless scrolling, and its most recent incarnation was as close you could get to TikTok while still having text posts. Which meant that it got used the most while in the bathroom or while stuck somewhere - both phone uses. I refuse to use the official app, and the new site crashes safari in the iOS beta, so Reddit is now dead to me. I’ve dropped by a couple of times but since the changes and blackout all of the good subs I follow are empty/dead. They lost me as a user.
  • linker3000 3y ago
    The third party apps supported two important functions that the official Reddit app sucks at: 1) Reading assistance for people with sight impairment. Reddit has granted a pass for some apps on this basis though. 2) Moderation and Modmail. For people on the move, or, for example, where you're in front of a business PC or laptop all day, with Web restrictions or personal use policies. The mobile apps were extremely useful for moderation. I did use the Boost app, but have moved to the official Reddit one for mod work; it's buggy and prone to erroring when trying to complete an action so you have to keep repeating things to make them 'stick'. This is why the mods are up in arms because it's hard work at the best of times.
    • alex3305 3y ago
• egometry 3y ago
  My only note: state the year (and month if possible) in the first paragraph of a story like this. It helps for readers now, and archaeologists later!
• basq 3y ago
  Joined reddit the second half of my freshman year of university in early 2008, after hearing about it from an XKCD comic on 4chan. It was during the democrat primaries (Hillary vs Obama) and between that and the science articles I was hooked. It was not the only website of its kind, but it was the fastest for news updates and also had some content on other sites like it didn't (such as slashdot, which had the tech and science stuff but not much else). I would repost stuff to FB and managed to garner a decent amount of clout that way. It went along like that for some years but eventually reddit 'hit mainstream' and the content I reposted didn't get the same traction. At that time I remember thinking reddit wasn't "underground" anymore. I recall that thought occurring in 2012. But that still didn't stop me from using it, except for a couple breaks it was my primary source of info and discussion and debate for many years, even to this day. However I'm at a point though where I feel like I need to divorce myself from social media entirely (perhaps even HN). The 'debates' / discussions / etc feel as though they have run their course for me. It's like groundhog day where I feel like I've had the same interactions 1000 times over to the extent where I don't feel like it's worth the effort. But at the same time living without social media makes my world feel much smaller. I only talk to a handful of people, my friend group has dwindled significantly, and adding new folks has become really difficult, even with sparse usage. I feel like I was so dependent on social media for so long to keep in touch with people that, now living without it, I have practically no social connections. This has been exacerbated by my decision to live a sober life, free of any and all mind altering substances. Going out to a bar or music night loses most of its appeal without alcohol involved. Likewise for gaming without smoking. Between all this and no social media, my life has become really... Well, boring I guess. spend my days reading books, and going to the gym. It's more boring than it sounds. No social media also means no gigs and that's a bummer, may have to start looking for steady employment. Anyway to stay on topic, I don't know what a world looks like without these things that have taken up so much of my life in the last 15+ years. I'm just trying to take it one day at a time. I want to develop other hobbies but thus far the motivation I previously leveraged from caffeinated beverages has dried up as well. So I guess I can just wait and see, and try to remain optimistic.
• xnx 3y ago
  I'm surprised that TikTok, YouTube, and Meta (via Facebook? Instagram? something new?) aren't trying harder to welcome exiles from Reddit and Twitter.
  • trogdor 3y ago
    To most people outside of this bubble, nothing about Reddit has recently changed. At all. Reports of Reddit’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
• ryaneager 3y ago
  By chance are you into sim racing? It’s just that your first paragraph is exactly my Reddit story, so maybe we have similar hobbies… haha.