Reddit

Years ago we heard that Facebook was a silo. What was meant by this term is that FaceBook would pull content into its social network and behave like a portal, without allowing people to leave. It encouraged people to see the World Wide Web as Facebook and nothing else. For a while it worked.

Zynga and The Death of Conversation

When FB was young, and vibrant it was a network of friends having a chat, until Zynga came along. When Zynga came along it went from being a conversational website to a gaming site. It became a waste of time in the eyes of many. It went from being a way of connecting with uni friends and colleagues to being a source of time wasting. As if that wasn’t enough FB was used to manufacture consent for the Far Right groups. It helped Brexit, it helped Drumpf. It even helped genocide and experimented with making people depressed. It never apologised. It bought Whatsapp and Instagram so I stopped using both apps.

I know of Reddit and I have an account that I use every so often. I have never felt the need for a site like Digg or Reddit, because I don’t feel the need to look at what people are sharing and reading, and promoting or demoting. For a long time it felt like a website that had users, but had not updated it’s UI for years. 

The Issue

The problem with Reddit, Digg, lemmy, kbin and other alternatives is that they’re large enough for everything to be shared within seconds, and you get trolled if you share something that someone else has already seen. That trolling discourages me from doing anything more than lurking.