Reddit is the new Usenet

I won’t bother explaining Usenet again. That glorious time-waster of old still exists, but I haven’t been there for sixteen years or so. It’s my loss, I’m sure.

But I do waste a lot of time on Reddit. And it’s occurred to me that there are a lot of similarities there, and that’s probably one reason I enjoy it. The other reason being it’s the only place I haven’t been booted from yet.

Reddit has anonymity. Reddit has the option to create a group of interest to you, if one doesn’t exist. It has community. It has variety. It even has a very anemic version of cross-posting. Memes, trolling, flaming. I can’t see bothering to explain what Reddit is, either, but the similarities are there. It’s all in an app that works pretty well. Free, easy to download and install. In some slight ways, Reddit is a better version of Usenet. Erm, with ads.

And yet…

Reddit is the anti-Usenet.

The anonymity brings out the absolute worst in some people, in a way Usenet really didn’t. People will follow you just to downvote everything you do. They will scour your easily accessible posting and comment history to see if you’re the sort of person they should agree with, or vilify.

You can be banned from one group merely by being subscribed to another one. The hivemind is all-powerful, here.

While you can have multiple accounts, if one happens to get banned from a group, and you post there using another account, even accidentally, you risk getting everything nuked.

You can flame people to a degree, but calling someone a ‘donkey-fucking ass loafer’ is likely to incur a ban.

Trolling and sarcasm are lost on most people there. Irony is dead, and the app’s widespread prevalence leads to the worst sort of lowest common denominator posts.

In short, Reddit is a watered-down, crippled, and censored Usenet. When you say it like that, I can’t even see why I enjoy it at all.

Groups involving design, coding, and art are probably Reddit’s biggest strengths. 3D Modeling, graphic arts both analog and digital, audio creation, and programming groups are full of good information, helpful people, and stunning examples of the state of the art. Stick to these if you want to be productive. They generally welcome examples of your work, and tend to be supportive in various ways. Unless you’re an author, somehow. The writing and book groups are only good for theoretical discussions. If you dare to include a link to your own work, even inside of a blog post you publish and link there, you’re likely to have it deleted. It’s a pretty terrible form of gatekeeping I don’t understand.

General interest groups like NextFuckingLevel, MakeMeSuffer, and PublicFreakout are rather readable, and benefit from the curation of moderators. Lots of content, most of it excellent. Thankfully, there is no shortage of subreddits like these. Others fall into circle jerk areas. MenWritingWomen occasionally has some humorous material, but it now seems to uphold anything a man writes that involves women as terrible. NotLikeOtherGirls likewise delights in mocking any woman who makes a post somewhere on the Internet celebrating her individuality.

Finally, any large political group is absolute poison. Unless you tend to agree with 95% of what USA Today publishes, they should probably be avoided at all costs. The largest libertarian groups are fifty percent socialist, at this point.  Even most anarchist groups on Reddit instead espouse communism, and any dissenting opinion is dealt with harshly. PoliticalCompassMemes somehow manages to be the one group in which all sides operate more or less harmoniously without being any sort of larger echo chamber.

Meh. I don’t need more time-wasters, but thinking about all this has me seriously considering installing Forte’s Agent newsreader. I suspect what Thomas Wolfe said will hold true. You can’t go home again.