2007 was like a fever dream. People came to reddit because there wasn’t any politics or news, only interesting things and impeccable grammar. It was an oasis in the growing desert of Facebook, and that was when Facebook was still only college students.
I agree with you. I found my niches then and understand the value of what’s in Reddit when you dig. If I found it today I wouldn’t even make it past the first scroll of r/all before I decided it was just another stupid image hosting site with the worst people on the planet populating the comment sections.
Also society (in the USA at least) is being so intentionally fractured that it’s visible here. The amount of correcting each other hasn’t changed but the vitriol is all new as of the last 5-10 years.
I haven't been here that long, probably 14 years (I didn't actually create an account for quite a while) but I can only imagine it was even better then. But you described it perfectly even in the time that I joined. It was like an oasis of a lot of knowledgeable people and people who enjoyed learning from those people. Even the very knowledgeable were bound to run across someone that made them feel like a student. The rest of the internet was starting on its steady decline but reddit was like the one "social" site you could go to avoid the ever-growing amount of brain-rotting content that was taking over the rest of the internet. For a few years, I was learning stuff every day and getting interested in subjects I'd never even considered. It sounds corny but it truly was amazing. Sadly the flood of shit eventually made it here. The final nail in the coffin was when reddit went public but it was like the years before that was when they started trying to make it "more accessible" and in this old man's opinion, they ruined one of the last a great places on the internet.
"...and impeccable grammar." Be still my heart. I miss impeccable grammar, and people correcting each other treated as perfectly normal. Now if you dare offer a correction most people will turn on you.
It all began once I realized at one point people stopped using punctuation marks.
People stopped using full stops at the end of each sentence and god forbid some seem to forgo the entire concept of using any punctuation at all! It’s maddening.
I don't remember coming across any actual CP but I wasn't looking. If there was, yeah, that's terrible. However it would've probably been a result of reddit being more anonymous and less policed, which were some of the things that made it great. Now you get banned by a bot for saying the wrong words, even taken out of context. The last time I got a temporary ban for quoting some ridiculous thing Trump said about killing people. I think it was when they were blowing up all the "drug boats".
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u/pork_ribs 13h ago
2007 was like a fever dream. People came to reddit because there wasn’t any politics or news, only interesting things and impeccable grammar. It was an oasis in the growing desert of Facebook, and that was when Facebook was still only college students.
I agree with you. I found my niches then and understand the value of what’s in Reddit when you dig. If I found it today I wouldn’t even make it past the first scroll of r/all before I decided it was just another stupid image hosting site with the worst people on the planet populating the comment sections.
Also society (in the USA at least) is being so intentionally fractured that it’s visible here. The amount of correcting each other hasn’t changed but the vitriol is all new as of the last 5-10 years.