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One of the great internet disappointments for me, Reddit. It was so good in its day. Perverted in parts, poisonous, like a loaded gun ready to go off--though even loaded guns are harmless if you know how to handle them. But also brilliant, funny, expansive, daring, poetic, a real scope into the lives of others, worse and better, and of course of our own familiars far off.
Now it's like an IV where you push for more stupidity and lies, push the button, push, until it euthanizes you.
There are still rare flashes of the old (dot) Reddit. Floating among the river of bravery posts on /bestof recently was this post where an industrial press mechanic answers a question about the shapes on the lids of tin cans.
It feels like that sort of thing used to happen frequently on Reddit. A small insight into some overlooked aspect of modern culture brought to the fore and given a human voice. Of course given the medium much of that was tech adjacent, like a '90s games dev popping up to explain how they exploited the hardware in a console to pull off a novel graphics effect, but also these more unexpected interactions that only happened because Reddit's userbase was so big and broad.
It's a shame that AMAs which began with people like that mechanic (or a pathologically upvote addicted biologist) inadvertently hijacking a thread to spontaneously answer people's questions on a slow work day were formalised and turned into cynical PR appearances for attention starved celebrities.
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Hilariously accurate. Used to be useful at least for keeping a thumb to the pulse of 'the internet,' but they went and alienated the actual fun parts of the internet so now its just a thumb on the slowly fading pulse of the particular brand of 2010's atheist/SJW leftist brigade who still think that their ironclad hold on the site makes them relevant.
The button pushing also helps euthanize the rest of the patients too.
"When does the Narwhal Bacon" indeed.
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Indeed, it's technical brillance compared to its contemporaries in the early and mid 2010s was so great, that even now 10 years later (an eternity in internet time) spinoff/dissident platforms like this one haven't found a better format. And when such a great tool was left to a representative slice of the western population (or at least, of the technophile western population), it really felt magical.
To ruin it, all it took was the admins coming down a couple of times on the same side of culture wars tussles (and it's not a matter of being the right or wrong side, just coming down on the same side a few times in a row is gonna do it), and the left noticing (as it often does) before the right the large amount of narrative-shaping power that was being left on the counter in the form of modship over ostensibly neutral subs.
It was inevitable. The years where it worked were great, but it was not a stable arrangement.
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