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reddit: tragedy or comedy
Paolo (Profile): (2025-10-20 19:43:47 (UTC))
Every time I google some material topic, like "chatgpt doesn't have insight", I end up on "the last page on the internet", reddit.
Reddit is not a good site. It's the modern version of usenet and nntp, and it's not pleasant to use. Usenet is also not so nice to use.
My question is: is the reddit / usenet "universal discussion board" an inherently bad concept? Is it the implementation that went wrong? Or is it only the natural decay of Net News and WWW, and they were good in the beginning?
Is it good or bad to have centralized topic based text forums on the web or maybe on nomadnet? I think we all know the problem of "centralization", but that's what any forum is, even nomadForum.
The other side of this coin is the 1-man personal page, which I am also not so happy with. Maybe it's better to have something in between these extremes.
A quote from Anonymous on I2P's 10channel:
"You have a choice between small and comfy or getting big and going to shit real fast.
Remember remember Eternal September."
One could argue that the dominance of Google made Reddit's dominance possible - pushing them to the top of search results. RNS announce stream hopefully makes it harder for any one forum to dominate like Reddit has. Our September is coming, but our beginning has already been dramatically different than the internet or FIDONET.
You don't think RNS has already maxed out its popularity? I think it's time for the WWW to be replaced but .. I think nomadnet (while cool) has gemini-tier upper popularity limit (very small), but RNS can be used for some cool stuff for sure. But to have a September moment means mass appeal among college students / normal people which I'm not seeing. I don't even know what they do nowadays but it seems like discord and tiktok which is no good. that's just the 2020s version of texting and watching TV. There is no 2020s version of the web except maybe on what's left of twitter. I also don't feel any creative spark here. It's not as bad as gemini where every single capsule is the same, but what is going on here? Not much.
Reddit was a fantastic site when it first started, it was a great community where you could discuss anything, then corporate interests and extremely left-wing politics and fringe groups got into the mix and everything became a gate-kept hellhole of one point of view, the modern point of view. Anybody else who still has a normal functioning brain is cast out.
It's funny, because many people on the extreme left-wing say reddit is too right-wing. It's just too susceptible to groupthink, and rewards consensus over actual discussion.
The right have the funding to pay for bots and the dedication to work their way into moderation positions; Just look at how biased r/worldnews has been towards Israel. It's bad enough that people are moving to r/anime_titties for news.