As someone who's blind I never looked at Reddit because it was not particularly easy to use with a screen reader. Now's a heck of a time to discover there are accessible ways of accessing it for the next two months.
For instance https://old.reddit.com/r/hackernews/.json
wget https://old.reddit.com/r/hackernews/.json -O hn.json
jq -c '.data.children[] | {title: .data.title, domain: .data.domain, url: .data.url, upvotes: .data.ups }' hn.json
{"title":"Service Rents Email Addresses for Account Signups","domain":"krebsonsecurity.com","url":"https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/06/service-rents-email-addresses-for-account-signups/","upvotes":8}
{"title":"Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted","domain":"arstechnica.com","url":"https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/dell-in-hot-water-for-making-shoppers-think-overpriced-monitors-were-discounted/","upvotes":12}I feel overall though, the tone of discussions and echo chamber sentiment just feels different now. Especially on say, r/all.
I usually only browsed occasionally in anon mode when seeking a respite from "reality", and overall it seemed to go from lighthearted discussions and a lot of really cool, "check this out"-style posts to a sea of outrage baiting, word for word reposts, and outright flamewars. Eventually that seeped in to a number of subreddits in my meticulously tailored logged-in experience.
I was so disappointed by the erosion of something that once filled me with immense joy and from which I have gleaned a wealth of valuable information, I just wrote off the entire thing.
I'm not even sure if it's manufactured in my own mind. A while after I found reddit went through some things that have substantially reformed my general outlook; I am a lot softer now. I'm probably just too sensitive but in my experience, most people there just don't treat each other well.
I can certainly understand how those in a community like r/blind would be predisposed to kindness.
I'm not sure if there's any factual basis in my reasoning, but I feel in general groups facing greater than average adversity tend to value treating others well.
On the other hand, those in more advantageous positions seem to lean in to entitlement, and are disproportionately enraged when they feel taken advantage of... It's funny/sad how that happens.
Meanwhile, take the new generation. Some of them might go on old.reddit.com, some of them might only get exposed to the new version of reddit, some of them might not go there at all. As a whole, I'd say a higher percent of online discussion users in newer generations are on a platform like a walled garden, than a self hosted forum or niche subreddit today. This affects their expections and what they understand the internet to be going forward. It affects what sorts of websites or services are able to exist going forward as well. Our concept of the internet will likely die out along with our generation.
It reminds me of trying to find value in YouTube comments around 2008 and realizing there's some kind of community-wide attitude problem completely destroying any chance of it. It's not a discussion forum, it's one of those rooms where people pay $20 to smash stuff up with a sledgehammer and yell.
I have no control group reference for this, only my decades of early adopter existence, but this does also happen to align with the USA’s change of discourse IRL as well.
I wonder how much of this apparent effect is from attitudes changing in the population at large, versus how much is simply from a larger percentage of the population just getting online.
If the latter, am I assuming that the early adopters also happened to be more chill? Is that likely?
> It reminds me of trying to find value in YouTube comments around 2008 and realizing there's some kind of community-wide attitude problem completely destroying any chance of it.
This was my experience as well, even 5 to 7 years ago. It seemed to me like YouTube comments were 99% a-hole trolls back then.
These days, that’s not my experience. Either (or both) I got better at finding cool channel communities, or the platform’s comment section somehow actually improved. My guess is both.
I wonder how much of this is because many, many users had their YouTube account identity automatically converted to their Google account identity, which would be much more likely to include their real name and a profile picture.
Congratulations! You’re one of today’s lucky million! You discovered a feature that’s useful instead of anti-user just in time for a tech company to shut it down in the name of ~~user~~ shareholder experience!