this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Reddit Migration
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It's truly amazing. Even people who knew that Reddit was destined to fail someday, wouldn't have predict it happening so fast.
Most people expect gradual change when many things in life are more like punctuated equilibrium.
Stable state despite gradual change in underlying conditions.
Then rapid change to new stable state.
There's also the Ernest Hemmingway quote from The Sun Also Rises:
You've now put a fear in me about my life that I wasn't ready for...
Sorry to do that, but I believe the world makes a lot more sense when viewed through the lens of punctuated equilibrium. It does not make things better, just makes the chaos more understandable.
The dot com bubble.
The housing bubble.
Basically every economic bubble all the way back to tulip mania.
The Arab Spring.
The changes in the USA post 9/11.
And most disturbing of all, the recent rapid swing of pretty much all environmental indicators into uncharted territory. Our biosphere may be heading into a phase of rapid change.
Nobody wants to change. It's hard and expensive. Until they have to because conditions have required it. Then they change as fast as possible to a new state that works in the new conditions so they can survive.
This article felt a little more relevant, recommended by wiki on the one you linked: Punctuated equilibrium in social theory
It's like Rome 😭
Like with Twitter, it's a rapid-fire series of knee-jerk reactions, like a hammer, as in - "When you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail", destined to get caught, to not fix what you were supposedly trying to fix, to generate deeper and more baffling situations in the process, to fail.