Makes me feel old. I was at uni when Ubuntu came out. But my story was similar to yours in the mid 90s and I got hold of a walnut creek cd with Slackware from some PC mag, a couple floppy disks and discarded hardware and I was off to the races
There was something about discovering tech through dedicated tech sites back then that felt exciting.
Now, any time I find something new it always has a polished marketed feel to it and has none of the secretive clandestine undiscovered power that old tech had.
This drives me crazy, especially because it breaks finding within a page. Eg. if you order food and you already know what you want.
Old days: Cmd + f, type what you want.
New days: first scroll to the end of the page so that all the contents are actually loaded. Cmd + f, type what you want.
Is just a list of dishes, some with small thumbnails, some without any images at all. If you can't load a page with 30 dishes fast enough, you have a serious problem (you could always lazily load the thumbnails if you want to cheat).
> That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here.
Very little, and almost none from a technical POV. What value Reddit does provide is a side effect of 17 years of investments by users, their communities, and those communities' unpaid moderators.
Yes, Reddit is free to attack the foundation of their value for short-term gain. However, the reality is that Reddit has never been easier to replace than it is right now. If even a relatively small percentage of users/communities/moderators take their toys and go elsewhere, it could trigger an irreversible decline.
There are distinct questions here: whether Reddit has the right to forcibly reopen subreddits, whether it’s justified in doing so, and whether it’s a good idea at all. The first isn’t in dispute, but the other two are open for debate.
It could all go super well and everyone forgets about this shakeup, or it could engender further animosity and chase people (particularly trend-setting power users) to some other platform. It could also ruin some communities if the wrong new mods are chosen.
I’m not sure how likely this is but it is plausible.
The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit.
The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all.
E-Mail is the last standing service that is way more open that the rest. But the raise of Whatsapp and equivalents are challenging that. One day all our communication will depend on a monopoly. We are starting to know what would have happened if AT&T have never been split.
He said that in regards to rolling his own version of Reddit. The parent comment proposes instead to repurpose the app as a client for similar but different already existing service.
There was something about discovering tech through dedicated tech sites back then that felt exciting.
Now, any time I find something new it always has a polished marketed feel to it and has none of the secretive clandestine undiscovered power that old tech had.
I guess I am getting old