As someone who was on reddit for about as long, I miss that. But I wonder if it's really reddit I miss, or the naive web we had back then, that allowed people to get excited? Back when everything was not engineered specifically to grab the most attention, I felt more like we were actually communicating. Nowadays we're just collectively filtering noise it seems.
I miss the long posts that explain a thoughtful, technical, essay on a subject. I vaguely remember from the ~2010s internet reading some very informative posts on bulletin boards and reddit.
Mostly gaming stuff, but there was some great work on math, science, and DIY. Today even the "Reddit gold" posts are garbage by the standards of those days.
Once phones became the default device for browsing and commenting on Reddit, comments began to grow shorter. (Some people might claim they can type on their phone just as comfortably as on a keyboard, but this clearly isn’t the case society-wide.)
The sad thing is that even if you are using an actual keyboard and type well, you look like a weirdo on Reddit today if you type longform text. I have seen someone posting merely a couple of solid paragraphs get reactions like “LOL wall of text bro”.
The average person’s use of a phone today is also one reason why it’s not easy for PhpBB-style communities to make a comeback.
> The sad thing is that even if you are using an actual keyboard and type well, you look like a weirdo on Reddit today if you type longform text.
I still do this on occasion if I think what I have to type is worth reading. But usually when I do, I include a tl;dr to act as a hook/summary to get my main point across.
I remember a lot of similar thoughts and remarks at the time about the Internet ca. 2000, so I feel like maybe people are just getting older. When people dig up old Something Awful posts from 2002 they aren't as funny or engaging as I remember but I was a kid when I first saw them so they isn't surprising.
I remember taking part in an early Reddit gift exchange. People were gifting members in need computer monitors and and pizza. There was the jackdraw facts biologist guy. The website definitely felt smaller back then. It was toxic, but still cozy.
> In July 2014, Eisenkop's Unidan account was banned from Reddit for using alternate (or "sockpuppet") accounts. The accounts were used to upvote his own submissions and downvote submissions made by other users that were posted around the same time and were potentially attracting attention away from his own.
A community that can support a secret Santa and not have it devolve into a shitfit of scamming and backbiting is still a village. Once it’s bigger than that, it starts to fall apart.
In some ways Reddit is like the club. In your 20s you're meeting all these new people and the interaction feels amazing. In your 40s, you're still meeting all these new people, but you are bored of it and just want to go home to bed.
I realize your probably leaning towards "naive web", but I think it might actually be reddit you miss, or at least the club that you identified as reddit. I say this because I felt the same 10 years before that about watching the decline of usenet. Or irc. Or metafilter. Or niche sites that I can't even recall the names of. It's not just "kids these days" ruining a more innocent time, but the feeling of being in a community with a shared ethos that's eroding as the community's values change.
