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Cake day: February 28th, 2023

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  • Beefalo@midwest.socialtoReddit@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 years ago

    I haven’t used Facebook for years. It bored me after 20 minutes, I wasn’t sure what else to do there, I closed the tab, I went away. I never made a post about how I’m packing up my little hobo bags and leaving forever, you’ll all be sorry!! I just went, quietly, and never came back.

    I lie, every three months I poke my head in there, and then once I actually sold something on Marketplace, for $80, so FB is the only fucking social website that has ever made me money despite being the one I never use. One of these days I’ll get on there and try to find out my brother’s current address, but he doesn’t respond to messages anymore, either.

    LIkewise, I quit Twitter, shorty before the Elonpocalypse, because it just sucked. I didn’t like being there, and wasn’t having any fun. So I just stopped going there, quietly, telling nobody, I left. Now you have to login to even see it, and yeah, haven’t logged in there in forever. I hear they changed the name.

    That’s how it looks when you actually quit a place. You just quietly disappear one day, like a fish slipping under the waves. Who knows, maybe you’ll find a reason to come back, you know? And it would look stupid as hell if you made some big fucking scene about leaving and then had to crawl back in, WOULDN’T IT?

    Maybe you want to sell an old drumset, or ask a question, you never know. So you slip quietly out the side door, you don’t even slam it, and then you forget to show up again for months at a time, or never again. When was the last time you logged into MySpace?

    You? You look like you’re going to found a subreddit called r/ExRedditors. Move on, already. The future beckons.



  • It was always like that, is the problem.

    I never did become an app Redditor, like I never used Apollo or any of that, so I was always using whatever their production interface was on browser. For a brief time they were allowing us to create filter lists for r/All so you could attempt to browse that beast looking for interesting communities without the sea of porn and hate groups, then they took that function away pretty quickly, I guess we were using it too much.

    Eventually, the truth dribbled out that investors were breathing down their necks for user growth at any cost, since there was no profit. This is why bullshit like Coontown, fatpeoplehate, and just endless constellations of far-right hate speech communities were allowed to thrive and grow during the entirety of the 2010s. So long as they didn’t do anything that put Reddit in legal jeopardy, Admin refused to chop off large parts of their precious user metrics.

    This meant the rest of us dealing with a community where the Nazis were always in the walls, even if you were browsing subs about container gardening. Things like r/JusticeServed allowed populist hate groups to grow large and juuust barely mainstream enough that you could pretend they were something else. You were always tiptoeing around the hate groups, hoping that nobody in your container gardening sub posted something that would bring the Eye of Sauron upon you.

    So, to be clear, it didn’t become hateful, it’s been like that for years and years. The rest of the internet was far more aware of it than I think the average habitual Redditor was, as far as they were concerned Reddit was just as toxic as 4Chan, but at least 4Chan is clever and influential, sometimes.

    If you avoided r/All like the plague, and made a part-time job out of curating your experience, you could get a half-assed positive result that looked nice enough if you squint. It was true, there were some genuinely nice communities on Reddit - and they tended to be very practical in nature, like r/Excel - which didn’t attract chuds. Any subreddit which gave some fool a chance to bitch about things they didn’t like got big, fast, and ended up pinned to the top of All, where, again, anybody who wasn’t already a logged-in user would see it, festering.

    The only reason Reddit has persisted for so long is that it basically stole away the user bases that once filled all the individual forums of the internet, and came to hold them hostage. It was chill circa 2011, before the Digg migration, before they’d even rolled out subreddits, yet. It got nasty fast as the userbase grew and it started to attract average folk.

    The only thing that Lemmy has going for it is that lack of commercialization. To be very clear, the Nazis are already here. They move in fast. Stormfront was one of the first big sites on the internet, period. People avoided Mastodon for a long time because the last they heard that’s where the Nazis went when they started getting banned elsewhere. Whether it was true or not, the hate groups are already on the Fediverse.

    The difference is that for now, we can block their communities from participating in our communities, which hopefully is enough. We couldn’t do that at all on Reddit, admin just ignored thousands and thousands of reports and always had the final say on everyone’s lives. Just don’t go around thinking that hatefulness is something brand new, you must have been working hard to ignore it for a long time. That shit’s been baked into Reddit for a decade.