So, I was watching an EposVox video titled “It’s time for Reddit to die”. It might be a little hyperbolic of a title and some might say clickbaity but it’s not wrong.
After the whole API change I personally cut back my Reddit usage. I say cutback because I have still used it occasionally to find older information or even less occassionally for newer stuff when someone sent me a link. That said though my time just mindlessly browsing Reddit since the API change had dramatically decreased and I’ve, honestly, been much happier. I don’t even have the app on my phone anymore.
This more recent news of a change Reddit has made though just seems to add salt to a still open wound by them blocking the Internet Archive from archiving their site. To be fair I’m aware Reddit is a business and one that is publically traded. I know they need to make money and allowing content to be elswhere probably runs counter to that goal.
The internet has always been a place that information wouldn’t just go to die eventually. There has always been people, myself included, that had a passion for archiving things. Allowing the internet to be a vast treasure trove of human knowledge for future netizens. Things like this latest move by Reddit and the move to private Discord servers over public IRC channels makes it harder for that knowledge to continue to exist on the internet.
That is the reason I love the IndieWeb movement and hate when companies do things to restrict information from being free. I believe that it attempts to show people just what we’ve “lost” by using these big corporations for our internet services. Now, we haven’t actually lost the old internet, which is why I put lost in quotes, but it just needs to be rediscovered by a wider audience. The internet itself and all the websites and services are decentralized by design. You can use services by corporations like Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, etc or use some independently run website or forum by a dedicated fan or group of fans.
Running those independent services cost money though and it’s not as easy as a few clicks to create a subreddit or Discord server. I believe though that if you use a password manager it does make managing logins easier and even help your security online.
I’ll leave a link to a Verge article below on the Reddit change and wanted to sign off with one more thought. Check out the IndieWeb and support independent websites and forums!
Thanks for reading and see you in the next post! :D
Articles/Videos mentioned in this post (Links open in same tab):
Reddit will block the Internet Archive
P.S. Use the mobile reader in your browser if on mobile.