Spyke

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If we go back to Reddit, they win

I thought from the beginning that planning a blackout for just 2 days was self defeating. All they need to do is ride it out. And they got enough disinterested users and subs still active these two days that it's not really hurting them long term. The only way it hurst them is if it's a longer strike against engagement with Reddit

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What was your best and worst experience on Reddit?

Don't really know what the "best" experience was. I can't say there was anything life changing for me. It was nice to have access to so much stuff in a very well designed app (Apollo) that let me share that content super easily with friends and family via Whatsapp or Telegram.

Worst interactions? There were many...the groupthink can be real bad. There are a lot of people who take karma very seriously. There was one sub, dedicated to a podcast, and it was clear there was a person that had six or seven alts because of the language they used and the debate style, and they would get so upset and downvote any disagreeing comment. Other subs had plenty of trolling, transphobia, shitty moderators, etc. Other subs became basically unusable because of how large they got and how many people posted "hey, look at me!" low effort content. You know, "art I did of X character" with 2,600 upvotes for what was a 10th grader type drawing done on a notebook. That kind of kills the visibility of posts with the potential for deeper or more meaningful conversation that don't get as many upvotes.

In the end I think the main issue with Reddit is that it got too big. It attracted too many people on a superficial level, too many trolls, and most subs worth visiting at this point are dedicated to niche subjects and have smallish communities.

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Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: 'It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company'

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That's why I'm deleting my account and taking my thousands of posts with me. I will create a new account to lurk in a couple of subs I like until there's enough traffic here or elsewhere. I'm almost tempted to go into some of the more active forums and start posting ChatGPT generated garbage that seems superficially meaningful or relevant to start fucking with their idea to train AIs on Reddit posts.

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So, how do we think this ends?

I'm going to do my part to help Reddit become irrelevant. There's only two or three subreddits that I care about, and I never really participate there, it's more to get memes and news from my country. I'm planning to delete my 12 year old account with thousands of posts and just lurk in those subs and steal the content once or twice a week.

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Confession. I wrote a lot of fake stories on Reddit.

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There's a lot of people that are desperate for attention and validation and the karma system becomes really addictive to them.

I had a lot of contentious exchanges with one person, supposedly a lady, that had to insert herself in every conversation in the sub, screech wildly about anything that went against her progressive ideas, even if it was inoffensive, instigate dumb debates and then accuse people of creating strawmen or sealioning, and somehow found a way to pretend to be a victim every single time. If a post mentioned the holocaust - her husband's father is a holocaust survivor. If someone mentioned sexual abuse, she was a victim of rape. If there was a mention of a kidnapping, she was kidnapped at 16. If someone discussed a murder, her best friend was brutally murdered before her eyes, etc. It got ridiculous when some medical subject came up and then apparently she's a doctor with 20 years of experience in exactly that subject and who teaches on that subject at a prestigious medical school. I have no idea how such a doctor can spend 20 hours a day on reddit and get 120k posts in a few years, but maybe that's just me. And I'm pretty sure she had several alts because her comments would be immediately upvoted and any dissenting viewpoint downvoted to oblivion. A few of the posters also had the exact same writing style and used the same arguments, which of course they justified as "great minds think alike" and "that's because you're wrong, bigot". If she was ever genuinely downvoted, she'd immediately complain.

It really sucked the life out of the sub. And there are tons of people just like her on many subs.

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Reddit Blackout Tracker

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The quality of discussion on Reddit will also suffer. They may actually gain new users from all the media attention they've been getting, but I can already tell that some of the subreddits I frequented have seen some of the best members leave and more people more obsessed with fitting in / upvotes and trolls shitposting. It doesn't take much for a niche sub with, say, 5k users of which 200 are really engaged with the sub, to change for worse once those people start coming in.

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If we go back to Reddit, they win

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I agree but I think also most of the quality posters will begin leaving as the platform becomes more shittified, beyond those of us that are quitting in protest. I have been noticing a significant decline in the quality of conversations in the last couple of years in a few of my subs, as some people obsessed with karma started inserting themselves in every possible conversation and steering the subs in the direction they wanted. Which is not Reddit's fault, but it seems to happen every time a social media platform reaches critical mass, and the karma system encouraged that. Some people almost literally live for the karma - how many times have you seen redditors complain about being downvoted? That sort of thing ends up attracting people desperate for attention.

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Windows vs Steam OS for your deck?

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Yeah, I haven't used Windows in years (not much of a PC gamer, I mostly play on consoles until I got my SD) and the more I read about Windows 11 and the bloat and telemetry the more I hated it. But I'm impressed how much they managed to shrink it into Tiny11 and might be tempted to experiment with it on a virtual machine.