As I participate in the boycott today and going forward, the biggest thing I’ve found I’m going to miss is the availability of discussion on topics. Obviously Reddit was never a bastion of truth and fact, but being able to find a discussion on a topic I was researching was always nice. For example today I was looking around for a fightstick / looking to see if one would be worth it for my use case, and Reddit was always the first result. What is everyone else unexpectedly missing from Reddit today?

  • Phillipjfry@fedia.io
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    1 year ago

    Realizing that almost every single weird thought or idea I’ve ever had was had by so many other people was kind of reassuring. That and the super informed people who were experts on literally anything you could ask(most of the time).
    And the inside jokes and reddit celebs like shittymorph and shittywatercolour.

    • sarsaparilyptus@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      That and the super informed people who were experts on literally anything you could ask(most of the time)

      I’m going to let you in on a secret: what was actually happening most of the time was that random pontificating dicks would authoritatively make shit up on topics they read about once. It became easier to tell if you spent time with subjects you knew a lot about. It reminded me of this, where Michael Crichton was talking about his friend Murray Gell-Mann and a trend they had both noticed in newspapers:

      Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.