this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
10 points (100.0% liked)

tech

9 readers
1 users here now

A place for general news and discussions about technology and tech companies.

When sharing news articles or other media, please provide a descriptive, non-clickbait title.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Gradually over the last decade, Reddit went from merely embarrassing but occasionally amusing, to actively harmful, to—mainly by accident—essential. As the platform that swallowed niche message boards, it became home to numerous small communities of surprisingly helpful enthusiasts, and grew into a repository of arcane knowledge about, and instantly available first-hand expertise on, a staggering number of topics, from the demographically predictable to the somewhat more surprising. And now that is all set to come to an ignominious, self-inflicted end.

The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.

We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it.

Found via Twitter: https://twitter.com/DefectorMedia/status/1668017737895911425

top 2 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

It feels so sad to see this evolution take place. Many of us saw the birth, rise, and decline of online discourse happen so fast

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I've been wondering about this. If the federation becomes more user friendly, eventually we may see it become the backbone for social media platforms. What happens then? Will instances be searchable with things like google? I keep hearing how it's similar to email, but obviously you can't look up someone's else's email inbox.