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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 th

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.
neurostimulant 3y ago
The end of an era. I doubt a young person can emulate your growth by regularly using reddit now because how many meme and low effort inside jokes ones have to wade through before finding genuinely great and useful contents.

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.

neurostimulant 3y ago

The end of an era. I doubt a young person can emulate your growth by regularly using reddit now because how many meme and low effort inside jokes ones have to wade through before finding genuinely great and useful contents.