this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Reddit Migration
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The saddest part of all this is the countless hours of work unpaid people have poured into the site, moderating, developing, and content creating only to see it end the manner it has.
I'm okay leaving it behind. I didn't contribute much over the 12 years I was there. I mostly lurked. I'm just sorry for all the people that worked hard to make the community better.
True, but the communities are built around people not the platform. We are once again learning that no platform will be around forever, older people have seen it plenty of times already.
Spot on. My journey is Usenet->various early web forums->Slashdot->Digg->Reddit, and now I'm here. Been doing this for over 25 years haha.
Since 1994 here.
Going to guess you were cruising BBS, FTP, and Telnet sites? I was just an ignorant preteen coding Qbasic garbage trying to learn programming on my Dad's PC that year. When I read back on Internet history I was a little surprised it was already so active when most people weren't even aware of it yet.
At least now I know how Dad got all them free DOS games.
I did interact with a BBS site or two, but then got caught up in the AOL wave. I used their platform, Geocities, and a few other chat sites. Once ditching AOL around 1999 I ended up on a local forum we used for electronic music, and then in 2003 made my way to a Star Wars fansite forum called BlueHarvest (I moderated there the last couple of years before the admin shut it down in 2008 or 2009). A couple friends and I then communicated via a forum we made for ourselves. Then Facebook, then Reddit...now here.
EDIT
I also had accounts with MySpace and Friendster too...Twitter for a few years around Arab Spring, but I didn't like it. Even back then The Bird was a toxic mess with rare moments of humanity. I think my avatar is still shaded green...if my account still exists.
Friendster was the OG! There was also Petster for people who were disappointed that Friendster didn't allow profiles of pets.
aol/prodigy were 'the net' to the general public by 94. i remember writing xmodem scripts to download boobie picks from single line bbs' ~89.
Shit, I used to run a WWIV 4.23 BBS back in the day. First modem was 9600 baud. Then 14.4k, 28.8k, and lastly 56k - screaming fast! Nothing like watching boobie pics loading one line at a time…
Edit: I remember signing up with Prodigy and participating in my very first AMA, with Quark and Dax from DS9. Good times.
I remember how excited I was to download the trailer for The Phantom Menace in 1999. Took almost an hour on a 56k modem. Or how it took under 10 minutes to download a 8 megabyte song off Napster on DSL.
Lol, man I remember in ‘99 having a stack of 100Mb Zip disks, using the college’s computer lab to do all my downloading on their T1 then walking my goods back to my dorm room. I’d load up a queue in the morning, then swing back by in the afternoon after classes. Such simpler times.
i just shut down a worlgroup server a few years ago... mostly up for majormud.
i with those asshats at the majorbbs restoration project would just release all the source code. they clutch those pearls like theyre valuable in some way
Man, the nostalgia is real. It was Gopher and Usenet via CIX and Compuserve for me from around '88, and eventually "proper" dial-up via Demon Internet (in the UK) in '92. 9600 baud, 14k4, 28k8, 56k and eventually dual ISDN. I still have a 28k8 modem in a drawer in my PC parts graveyard.
Lol I remember trying to get my parents to get an ISDN line installed back in ‘95 or ‘96 - the price was ridiculous. I was stuck on 56k until 2001 when I went to work for an ISP and was able to get a 1.5M SDSL line and was fucking ecstatic. Used it to run a CS1.6 server from my closet.
Edit: actually I did have a 1.5/128 ADSL line somewhere in there for a little bit.
Does anyone remember Plastic.com? I believe it used the Slashdot engine but was more focused on news and interesting internet stuff. I never see it listed when someone waxes nostalgic but I lived on that site until one day it just died.
Yeah, I used to work at a university, so I've been around since the earliest days of the web. It's kind of ironic that from the very start one of the big misgivings from academics about the web as a research tool was the ephemeral nature of its content. One of the examples given back in the 1990s was that a lot of websites that people had begun to rely on were really just some grad student's pet project, and when they moved on someone else might or might not pick up where they left off.
The scale of things has certainly changed since then, but nothing seems to have become more permanent. Just the other day I went through my list of bookmarks on a topic, and easily half of them now lead nowhere, even URLs for major news outlets and blogging platforms that are still extant.
I've seen a few Wikipedia references do exactly the same thing.
Have you tried using Wayback Machine to see if there's an archive of the sites you have bookmarked?
I've noticed that some Wikipedia references now link to a Wayback Machine archive instead of directly to the original page. That's probably the smart way to do it.
In my case none of the dead links I had bookmarked were all that important. I had actually decided to try to check them in the first place because I couldn't remember what a lot of them were.
The internet is eternally cyclical. Happens so often. Been seeing people catastrophize and I'm just like "first time?"
Yeah, but people move on too. Do you expect every single person who ever contributed to repost their content when a migration happens? Of course not. It's just not realistic. But actual info gets lost. Old game faqs vanish. Answers to niche questions poof out of existence. Yes, the world isn't over and things will move on. But actual, tangible value was lost with the death of reddit. A large portion of the internets "How To" guide just went up in flames. And a lot of that won't ever get rebuilt. Many of us who have been around long enough have also seen that dark side to these things.
It's a shame, is all. But time keeps moving and so will we.
Honestly, spez and the Reddit C-suite and board are in the process of finding out that a lot of what made their platform so good and popular was run almost entirely by community power users, enthusiasts, and developers, in addition to all the obvious utility and value that mods provided.
Why did I just notice reddit was good despite it's leadership?
To be fair, I think a lot of people, myself included, are just now realizing precisely that.
Well, things always end eventually. The important thing is that Reddit was good while it lasted.