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.