I nuked my Reddit accounts today. Deleted all comments and posts, then the accounts themselves. The tool I used showed each comment as it was deleted, and it was bittersweet.
I watched old gaming and movie discussions I barely remember appear and then get flagged as deleted. Communities I once participated in and then moved on as the years past flashed by. I remembered how I felt back then, and then watched them scroll on into oblivion.
Now I feel…I guess it’s grief. Sadness for that part that’s gone. Sadness that it’ll never be there again. Like footprints on a beach wiped away by the tide. It’s like it never happened. There is no trace.
And I feel anger. Mad that it came to this. Mad that I let a corporation have so much of my time and thoughts. Mad that they made it clear my life was nothing but a product to them.
It’s over now. Time for a new chapter.
Anyone else have strong feelings about losing a part of the past like this?
Why are they harmful? Are you saying you didn’t learn a single thing while you were there? Redditors helped me greatly. Reddit was simply the platform through which we discussed incredible ideas and life tips, and I literally found and made friendships on there that we went off Reddit for and have lasted since 2014+; I even talk to one such online friend daily, and am very focused on helping another who’s in dire straits IRL. Additionally, I learned a fair bit about CSS upfront as a mod of various small subs.
If you really think “any form of corporate social media is harmful” then I have to question how you were using it.
I can’t necessarily speak for the person you’re responding to, but I can speak to my own experience with corporate social media. Without a doubt, reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc provided things that I value: a way to connect with people and a place to learn. But when I did it on those platforms, all of those fun chats, philosophical conversations, and learning moments that I had were owned by the social media company. I got something out of it, sure, but the corporation was skimming off the top. The recent debacles that so many social media platforms have had recently is just demonstrating that they’re getting greedier and greedier. They’re trying to extract more value from our relationships and interactions. This is pretty much how every corporate-owned social media platform is destined to end, because shareholders always demand growing profits. In the end, the only resource that social media companies can draw on to drive those growing profits is us.