I know deep down that every digital platform shall pass. For every platform I join, I consider how I can leave with my content, and if not, what will happen to it once I leave. Things come and go, that is the nature of physical and digital things.

But what’s happening to Reddit pains me in a way I did not expect. Twitter was always my „professional“ platform, be it for journalistic purposes or for infosec OSINT. No Twitter simply means shifting to other resources. I never actively engaged with Reddit, but it was always there to know more, learn more about fellow humans on this planet, satisfy my endless curiosity for humanity and things in general, those tidbits happening around the world that make you go „oh, that’s totally different / same to my life experience, huh“. A user posting from Tanzania how they rent out their PS2s for others to play. A trans person priding themselves on their first self-made binder. Bears on trampolins, the funniest video I’ve ever watched. Hong Kong protests in 2014.

User-generated immediacy of our existence.

Yes, it’s #capitalism and costly infrastructure and walled digital gardens. Gardens, leased to users with no any other rights but stroll around and abide by the pathways laid out.

The greed of Reddit‘s CEO to monetize its data over care for its users is disgusting. Yes, the platform needs to make money in order to keep it running (#capitalism). But Reddit is what it is thanks to its users who generated all that data. Spez won’t keep people strolling his gardens by extending all middle fingers to all those who helped amassing these data riches. At least not me.

In case you don’t know what’s up, read for example this article by Ars Technica.

Image by Nightcafe/Stable Diffusion.

Last modified on 2023-06-17