Archive Your Reddit Data While You Still Can
I’ve been a fairly active Redditor for more than 11 years. Until now, it’s been the website with the best mix of community, popularity, developer ecosystem, and web-search-ability. The non-monetary value Reddit as a knowledge store is literally priceless; it’s a modern-day Library of Alexandria.
By now, you probably know my thoughts on social media. (Fuck social media.) But Reddit was always the exception. When I hear “social media,” I think “toxic stew of projection and posturing designed to make you feel bad about yourself in the service of serving you advertisements,” and by that definition, Reddit isn’t social media.
I’ve made friends on Reddit. Real-life friends. Pen pals. Some people I’ve met in person, others I haven’t. Fellow writers and amateur programmers, fellow HomeKit-ers and hikers and GaiaGPS power users and Stoics and people who live in old homes and lovers of the American West. For many years, on a night when I couldn’t sleep, I’d hop on r/depression and talk to people on the edge of suicide, hoping my past experiences might help them in some way. I’d come to Reddit for good vibes or a little schadenfreude. For help with dinner or a laugh. I met other people with my very, very specific interests. Antinatalists. Techno-grumps. Privacy nerds. Plant daddies. Nature lovers. Righteous tenants and geologists and people just as fascinated by the world in which we live.
Reddit was the promise of the internet in one place. A group of people, each passionate about something, talking and supporting and, yes, sometimes fighting with each other. It’s been a good place. The best of human nature.
Everything changes and nothing is free. Not in this culture, anyway. I know this. But it’s still painful when the pursuit of profit comes for a community you love so dearly. We’ll see how these API changes play out, but I’m not hopeful.
Enshittification comes for us all.
(Update: my blogging idol with a very good point over on Daring Fireball.)