this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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While I hope Lemmy/Kbin takes off (heck, I'd love early internet forums to come back in style) and kicks off a second internet renaissance, the imminent collapse of Reddit legit is giving me anxiety. Hope y'all don't mind if I vent a bit.
Firstly, there are a lot of "niche" communities on Reddit, mostly dedicated to individual games and the like. The kind of thing where fanart, announcements and discussions happen. In the short term, I don't see them surviving the collapse. And if they do, they'll probably move to a not-great platform like Discord or whatever Facebook comes out with.
Secondly, with SEO optimized AI generated garbage topping search results, Reddit has become an important reference when looking for reviews and opinions on things. As well as that, it has become somewhat of an archive of internet culture in a way. With subreddits moving to black out permanently and a push for users shredding their own data, there's a very real chance that all of this content will be lost forever.
Archival efforts are underway by many archival teams.
However you're right, a lot of things will be lost forever. A lot of old viral reddit posts from 10+ years ago, that kind of thing will probably not make it out of this.
That being said, screw reddit and screw spez. They're the ones doing this. The site will be un-moderateable anyway once 3rd party mod tools are banned, so it's going to be barely usable anyway through their broken app.
In a broader sense this is just the way of the internet. Platforms rise to prominence, then slowly dwindle into irrelevance. It has happened many times before reddit and will happen many times again in the future. The amount of media lost in this exchange is monumental. So much of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is lost forever. It's the transient nature of these kinds of spaces that makes them this way. For instance, archive team maintains a wiki index of all social media platforms that have ever gone down. You can see how much has already gone and you never even knew it was there to begin with.
... but that probably didn't help with your anxiety ๐ things will be okay. Communities will survive so long as people remain interested enough in them to continue gathering and talking and sharing together. Have faith in the communities you care about, and if you'd like to try you can always help organize a transition to a new platform :)
Great post and I agree. Just roll with the inevitable cycle, keep contributing and just enjoy what is there for what it is in its time.
I personally exported the comments that I deleted, so they aren't lost. I might put them online, for archive sake