Like for the past few years, browsing reddit is basically a daily routine for me. Now Reddit is dying, I feel like a part of me died. A website filled with many years of content… will soon be gone. I heard rumours that they are planning to purge the site of “undesirable” content before their IPO. I fear same thing will happen to youtube. I don’t have the resources to save all the content online, and watching sites die is painful. Reddit’s death triggered my fear for losing all those amazing youtube channels that I occasionally binge rewatch. (Does anyone else rewatch youtube videos over and over on a weekly basis? Maybe I’m just weird.
So this is what the internet is? Just a cycle of sites being born and dying, just like humans being born and dying. Omg whats the meaning of life…
Umm… sorry for the weird existential monologue. Lol
It’s a bummer, but I have a little bit of a different perspective because I’m an old techy. I first started getting into online communities in the late 80s on CompuServe. I was big into Roger Ebert’s showbiz media forum, and had friends if talk to every day there (often including Roger) but as that got expensive, I started moving to Bulletin Board Systems in the early 90s. This is before most people had dedicated Internet (it was all dial-up), and before there was much web content.
I got really into the BBS scene (even met my wife on one), and that’s where I’d talk to people. But as the web took hold of the Internet, the BBSs started dying. I ended up transitioning over to fark.com, and spent a lot of time there. But the fark admins started making changes that were annoying, and the community there started to stagnate, so I got into Reddit maybe eight years ago. We know what happened there, and just the other day I got on here.
Each of these transitions was sad for me, mostly for similar reasons. But I’ve been through it so many times now that I know it’s just a new phase and it will be fine. There are always things I miss about the last place and things I appreciate about the new.
This is all just part of what happens with online communities.
federation helps a great deal to mitigate this type of centralized power abuse. communities built up reddit, communities will build up Lemmy. honestly, Lemmy (the network) is much more important than reddit (the site)
I hear you. Opening Apollo was basically the first thing I did when waking up (don’t judge me Lol). I’ve been on reddit for over 10 years and I credit it as playing a major role in pulling me away from the far right. I’ve learned so much on it, and it really feels like the end of an era. You can’t help but get a bit emotional. Anyway I hope that lemmy can fill that gap, I’ve been really enjoying the community here, everyone is quite friendly.
If you spend enough time around here, you just might get pulled away from the center-right ;)
Reddit pulled me away from the far right as well!
Wait you’re telling me, the only reason you’re not a nazi is because of reddit? 🤔
I’ve been on the internet since pretty much the start so I’ve seen dozens of great communities come and go. Normally they reach some kind of malthusian breaking point where they collapse under their own weight, I think this is the first time where sheer greed caused the end though.
So yes, this is the cycle of the internet. Death is actually good for an ecosystem though, it means that new things can evolve, such as the fediverse.
I do feel sad for what will be lost though, and every time I load Apollo to remember this great app with all the care and attention put in to it will be gone at the end of the month.
I’ve seen many things come and go from the internet so I’m actually glad big tech is in decline. Those companies have way too much power.
