I’ve been linking this text fairly often, but I think that it’s worth a read. People might be focusing on the blackout but that’s just the “now” - with or without blackouts, Reddit is a ticking bomb bound to eventually explode, and all the information there will be lost when it does.
And the fact that people have been relying on Reddit to look for information shows even deeper issues, not just with Reddit but the internet. Let’s see…
Google monopoly over the search market. Why would it need to make its product better, if you’re still going to use it?
Corporations always trying to prevent you from reaching the best result (because it won’t lead you to their product), and engaging on an arms race through search engine optimisation. That’s why people did that “reddit” trick.
The encroachment of the ad industry into the internet. Oh look, I found the content that I wanted… no wait it’s another ad. Move on…
Governments more often pandering to corporations than defending the best interests of their taxpayers, and the legislation on what’s allowed or disallowed on the internet suffering in result of that.
Reddit monopoly over discussions.
People sharing info in Reddit instead of through more resilient forms of digital media, as shown in the link.
Honestly I think there should be a bigger effort to preserve information from subreddits either indefinitely going dark or permanently going down. I’ve seen some go into a psuedo “archive mode”. But given the changes on the site most likely it’ll be undone, mods removed, and the subreddits restarted under new pro-reddit guidance. It’d be nice if we could have a way to “strip” subreddits/accounts of it’s information for storage. I’m not sure what the best way of going about it is, but when half of the questions you ask google are best answered by reddit it’d be nice to see this be address sooner rather than later, and google/reddit ain’t gonna be helping us anytime soon. That or we wait for other communities to grow to the size able to fill the same roll, such as lemmy. But TBH, even lemmy can have a community shut down and lose all it’s information. This is a big problem that the solution will most likely only be able to come from the open source community at large… or I’m being idealistic lol
I’ve been linking this text fairly often, but I think that it’s worth a read. People might be focusing on the blackout but that’s just the “now” - with or without blackouts, Reddit is a ticking bomb bound to eventually explode, and all the information there will be lost when it does.
And the fact that people have been relying on Reddit to look for information shows even deeper issues, not just with Reddit but the internet. Let’s see…
Honestly I think there should be a bigger effort to preserve information from subreddits either indefinitely going dark or permanently going down. I’ve seen some go into a psuedo “archive mode”. But given the changes on the site most likely it’ll be undone, mods removed, and the subreddits restarted under new pro-reddit guidance. It’d be nice if we could have a way to “strip” subreddits/accounts of it’s information for storage. I’m not sure what the best way of going about it is, but when half of the questions you ask google are best answered by reddit it’d be nice to see this be address sooner rather than later, and google/reddit ain’t gonna be helping us anytime soon. That or we wait for other communities to grow to the size able to fill the same roll, such as lemmy. But TBH, even lemmy can have a community shut down and lose all it’s information. This is a big problem that the solution will most likely only be able to come from the open source community at large… or I’m being idealistic lol