Technology

I avoided Reddit like the plague for the first decade - I knew that it had the potential to suck me in and I did not want that. But then during the pandemic, I kept finding myself going to it for answers, and then seeing how I could improve things, and then...

I noticed that at work I would say something "snarky", which they did too but even so it's like I was going too far. I typically did not enjoy seeing such things on Reddit, but as a mod I couldn't block most of it without banning the person themselves from the entire community, so I felt that I had to put up with it - and it changed me, but not for the better. I mean not deeply or anything, but it normalized that style, which still was not good. And now for the same reason I've blocked lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml - b/c I don't want that to come into myself. I am no fan of e.g. capitalism but "behead all landlords" seems to me a position lacking entirely in nuance or possibly even substance - like "okay Karen, why do you care what I do so much, and are ready to threaten literal violence unless I comply with your wishes?!"

Yes the mistreatment of all the app devs but especially him b/c he was so careful to document it was a big one for me too, though I glazed over that b/c in retrospect I had realized that I had already started thinking along those lines before that happened. Even so, that was the final straw that crystallized it and made me finally move off the platform. A watershed moment in history, for all of us I think. Well, to be more precise I gave up my mod position and went from checking r/popular quickly from like every few hours to only checking in on my former community once a week, then once a month, then... I can't even remember how long it's been now. For awhile I became more active in r/RedditAlternatives than I was in my niche community!:-) But there is only so many times that you can tell someone something before it becomes their choice to not listen, so I just stopped going there at all.

Anyway, the problem is not just Reddit's toxic AF culture (vision, like bullshit, tends to flow from the top to bottom direction in a company), nor even entirely the for-profit model - though each of those has their own, unique bad things that they add into the mix - and in some sense as you alluded to the issue is social media itself. Like candy, it promises good things, and like candy if taken in moderation it can be absolutely fine (especially during a pandemic when social distancing, especially in countries like the USA where "flatten the curve" was somehow taken as a challenge to encourage doing the exact opposite, to "pwn the libs" or sth I dunno), however also like candy it can leave someone unfulfilled if we always turn to the "easy doomscrolling", rather than allow our attentions to absorb longer-form content like say, a TV show, or even movie, or even a fully online & free college course like Crash Course World History.

Social media can wreck our lives! Or it can enhance them, depending on how wisely we make use of it:-).