Bit of an autistic rant here.
It occurred to me a few months ago that I can't remember the last time on Reddit that I got a response to something I posted that wasn't just outright vitriolic. I can't even remember the last time I got a response that wasn't snarky, wrong or just bait; never mind the last time someone on Reddit shared something new or insightful with me. When you use the "Google trick" of putting Reddit at the end of your search, most of the top comments now are just deleted from when people fucked off from the site. The Reddit feed is also now no better than any social media feed and algo that's out there... it dawned on my that the quality of communication I was getting on Reddit mirrored Facebook comment levels of retardation. It helped a lot when I posted on a small forum and the response actually got me to laugh, can't remember the last time that happened on any social media site. Reddit's usually just a queue of people waiting to qoute and reference Office Space, Star Wars, Rick & Morty, Tropic Thunder, Dune, Star Trek, The Simpsons, Family Guy, King of The Hill, Marvel Movies, Idiocracy, Metal Gear, Monty Python, Whitest Kids You Know, Chapelle Show, ..., ...
This summer I posted a picture of something I made that only took a few hours. I got FLOODED with requests for me to sell people copies. Like people creating new accounts after I blocked them to literally say "pls pls pls". I was just sharing something cool I made with the relevant community. Without doxxing myself, it was a very simple design that was just in demand I guess. When I said I wasn't going to sell copies people were saying "well you can at least share the templates you used...'. I literally just used GIS, not that I was going to tell them that. They couldn't even be bothered to help themselves. A few bots posted in the comments almost immediately of copies of my design for sale on eshops; granted the dimensions and resolution were off.
I used to genuinely be helpful and sort the guitar sub by new and answer newbies' questions. It was pretty thankless, but it's cool because I know how 16 year old kinds can be. But it's fascinating to see yourself to get down voted to oblivion and get yelled at by them for not following their groupthink when it comes to recommending gear. And then you realize some of these people aren't actually kids at all. I'm not a professional musician or producer, but I literally have more experience playing, performing, and building gear than years they've even been alive. I also used to help out in specific hardware and software threads, I can't remember the last time someone said thanks, but I get a bunch of people bitching that my code doesn't work and requests for technical support. One of my posts about editing the registry in Windows must have gotten picked up by Google, because I had to turn off notifications with all the people asking for help for things like not knowing how to run CMD as an administrator. I ended up editing the comment so that if you run it, it instead deletes services that are needed to boot into Windows on next startup.
Anyways, I write all of this because it also occurred to me last night that most people really have no place complaining about enshitification of the internet. Most if not all of the websites and "communities" they use are already complete shit. I saw a few users on Reddit rap nostalgic on the old internet, and it's like, the internet is still awesome. There are plenty of sites, communities, and content out there that rocks, you're just afraid to go there unless there's a subreddit or Instagram page for it. It's literally never been easier to make a website or do something weird or creative on the internet. These are just the same people that move to a city, and then after five years say it's not fun anymore and the city changed because they got boring and refuse to accept that they suck, and not you know, the whole goddamn dynamic world around them. I'm finding that as I fall back on more smaller dedicated communities, my time online is a lot more engaging and interesting.
Also, one time I did Redddit secret santa and my secret santa was a grown man in his 30s that wore XXL shirts and lived with his parents in the suburbs. His job was delivering pizzas but he drove a brand new red Ford Mustang.
