I, like many of you came from Reddit. But what brought you to Reddit?
I've heard much about the great Digg migration but I found Reddit through different means.
Any of you hear of mfisn? It was my Reddit before Reddit. A bare bones link sharing community where a number of registered users could share links. Unregistered users could suggest links that I guess a registered user could approve? I remember sharing links to movie trailers there. I found Reddit years later after googling it and finding a Reddit post asking about it. And that's how I fell into Reddit.
I discovered mfisn through cookiethievery, a yourethemannowdog-esque page that had a rotation of repeating animations set to a short music loop. And I vaguely recall finding that through an AIM buddy's profile...? Either that or albinoblacksheep.
Any of you have a traceable lineage of Internet communities you've passed through? What were your pre-Reddit internet go-to sites? Are they still around?
Digg killed itself almost 13 years ago. Here I am now.
Exactly the same. My main on Reddit is 14 years old. I saw what was happening with Digg and moved to the next thing. I've had a good 14 years and lucked out by moving to what became the biggest site on the internet. I'm hedging my bets this time and I've created a Tildes account, Lemmy, Mastodon, and Kbin (even though all those last three are technically just the same thing presented 3 different ways), and I'm hoping I find something as much as I liked Reddit 5 years ago. But the writing was really on the wall back then, Reddit's been sliding for a while, but between the Trump presidency, pandemic, return of Nazis, mass shootings, etc.... it's been kind of hard to notice the downfall of Reddit with all the other noise going on.
So true. I'm honestly glad I got enough of a nudge to just get off reddit finally. I'm an extremely addictive type so I wasted hours upon hours. Grabbed some recommendations for basic news and I think it is time to relax on the internet for a little while.
I've given up social media, gaming, and now reddit and I haven't felt more fulfilled in years. I'm reading books right and left and going on hikes for 6-8 hours at a time. If anything, this whole ordeal had me look at how I was spending my time and who was actually benefiting. Companies and advertisers? Or me?
We have the same experience here. I noticed that Reddit really fed into my doomer personality. I’d be in the best mood and open Reddit(which I would do subconsciously) and shortly after I would begin to become anxious and irritable.
I didn’t make the connection until Reddit pissed me off royally and I moved over to Tildes. Now I just pop on a few times a day and look if there’s anything interesting. But I don’t find myself just opening the site as a compulsion.
I don’t know about you, but I really appreciate how Tildes isn’t suited to endless scrolling.
I'm still subconsciously tapping the spot I had rif for so many years. I really can't think of anything I was consciously using Reddit for so it had just become a place to waste time. I guess my main other use was to facilitate some of the games I played on steam, which might be worse than Reddit for me time-sink wise
Love this suggestion, I've implemented something similar based on multiple comments so far. Thanks for taking the time to say something.
Someone suggested to me to put a shortcut to an ebook reader on the same location where my Apollo shortcut used to be.
I’m finding out that that seems to be a great idea, whenever I’m subconsciously hitting the old position of the Apollo icon I either realise that I don’t want to read at the moment and put my phone down, or I spend ten minutes or so reading a book. I see both of those as wins compared to doomscrolling Reddit.
It meets the need for the old tapping habit, and my Libby app has got a few ebooks/audiobooks on it that are waiting on me. Excellent suggestion. I feel so efficient now!
Just did this, this very moment. I forgot I had Libby already set up. Reddit really became something unhealthy... This feels better.
Man, this thread is like reading a description of my own behavior.
I deleted all of my reddit accounts on June 12th. Before that, I doubt I'd gone a full week without looking at reddit in the past 13 years.
I gave kbin a shot, but I've decided to let the Fediverse mature for a while. Lemmy and kbin very quickly became insufferable, while Tildes, even in the couple days I've been here, feels similar to the old reddit I remember. This feels like what I've been missing. It fills the gap left by reddit without being reddit. I had no idea Tildes was a thing prior to two weeks ago. I wish I'd known much, much sooner.
I have to credit the protest for making it an easy break; troubleshooting and research were a large percentage of my reddit use. When reddit became useless in that regard, I truly had no reason to go there anymore.
Reddit for at least the past 5 years was already a cesspool. Couldn't post anything without it turning into some debate.
Same here. 13 year club on Reddit after Digg imploded due to similar mismanagement issues. Now I'm checking out tildes, lemmy, etc.
Same, except I also made an account on Squabbles - which is like a mashup of Reddit and Twitter. You can follow communities as well as individual people. "Tweet" at your followers or contribute to conversations on posts. Seems pretty cool - but still small. I've also been more active on Hacker News lately.
Yeah. Squabbles is interesting. But it doesn't feel like it's going to land as the right spot. It's hard to explain. Some of it has to do with the UI, I guess. While you can pop a post into a direct view, it's clear that's not the primary design of the page. It's a mobile-first experience. The two column view on desktop.(post -- comments) is just so odd sometimes.
Obviously things need time to grow and evolve. But the fundamental idea of mashing Twitter and reddit together means that you're kinda having a feed of short-bodied posts. I'm not sure that's what I want.
Reddit had a good desktop implementation of a text post vs. a link post with a unified comment body/flow. I'm not sure squabbles is trending towards that.
I'm also exploring Lemmy and to a dramatically lesser extent kbin. Lemmy ... Well ... Jerboa does a really poor job of presenting the "All" view rather than "Local". Again. Iteration? I'd be lying if I didn't say I was quite attracted to the federated model.
I'm looking forward to seeing what Talklittle does with Tildes and potentially Lemmy.
Answering the root question of this thread? I landed at reddit as, first, a lurker for about a year or two before signing up. At that time I was primarily rockin' on Gizmodo, Engadget, Boing boing, and a number of other blogs I liked. I perused Fark a bit. Never got into StumbleUpon or Digg, really. Kinda.thought the whole Digg exodus was odd but never really dug in on it.
It's nice to be exploring many platforms again. Maybe even landing at many for the long term.
Same, except my Reddit main turned 15 recently. What am I doing with my life?
We gettin' old. That's what we're doing :(
On one hand, we seem to have reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.
On the other hand, it's not the years; it's the mileage.
But you're right.
But the level of fucks given when something is taken away is usually much much less. Have a 16 year old Reddit account; don't care what happens to Reddit. I've now spread my browsing around to include multiple link-sharing/discussion websites.
Same, 12+ years on Reddit. For the same reasons, have migrated over here.
It honestly feels really refreshing at the moment, like the Reddit of old. Hopefully it will stay that way, I'll give it 12 years!
Also, the same
Seconded, Digg exodus made me move.
I was also part of the Digg exodus. It's sad to abandon my 14-year Reddit account but they fucked up big-time.
I'm sad too(mine was 13 years and some), but I made a tildes account 5 years ago, so I have a little bit of that feeling of having an old account.
I see people say this all the time, but I’m confused. Digg still exists, doesn’t it?
I joined Reddit 12 years ago, when I was in high school. It was recommended to me by a friend, so before Reddit, I had no alternative. I was never on Digg, so I’m not sure what it was like compared to what it is now.
Edit: After reading more of the thread, I’ve realized I had some other places I frequented before Reddit. I would browse 4chan a bit, mostly just /r9k/ (which is probably horrible for your mental health, honestly), I also used to lurk the Newgrounds forums, and then I had FunnyJunk for memes.
If anyone else here came from FunnyJunk, I’d be amazed.
Digg launched a redesign in 2012 (v4) which led to the mass exodus of users. The site still exists, but it's functionally very different to the Digg of old.
Prior to the disastrous redesign, Digg was pretty similar to old.reddit.com and was the leading link aggregator by traffic I believe. You could digg/bury (upvote/downvote) links, sort by subcategories (subreddits) - really, a visually and functionally very similar site to Reddit at the time.
They chose to move to a (perceived to be) more advertiser friendly model - you could no longer bury/downvote, curated (by third party "news sources" like Mashable, not users) content formed a good portion of the front page, and removed a bunch of other quality of life stuff like user submission history, timestamps on posts.
So apart from the name, the site today bears very little resemblance to the Digg of old.
Digg exists in the way that myspace still exists. They changed a bit
Me, too. When I first visited reddit I bounced off of it because it was pretty rough looking compared to digg. However, when digg v4 hit, I migrated to reddit, which seemed to have improved since I last visited.
Same for me.
I started out on CompuServe's forums. Then I migrated to random car forums on the internet. Then I ended up on Digg, then Reddit, now here.
I like the philosophy of this place. Hopefully this will be a long-term replacement for Reddit.
Here's to long term and less addictive! We can hope
Came here to say this.
The idea that (in theory) you could only see what you're interested in, and in an anonymous, persistent, forum-like format.
I joined reddit around 2012 and it was very much this. I actually wasn't that interested in reddit as a link aggregator(I was never around for digg either). I see the value more there now.
What drew me in was the comment section. The discussion about almost every topic, serious or not felt by far more valuable than the original post most the time. As a kid I was a big fan of message boards and this felt like an extension of that, but better because new boards would appear all the time to appeal to my specific niche interests.
Quality of comment sections did begin to dip in quality over the years though.
Comment section is what drew me into Reddit too. At first, yeah, it was goofy shit like r/AdviceAnimals and r/marijuanEnthusiasts but I found areas with genuinely interesting, insightful discussion. There was also a culture of goofiness and self-referential humor which made me feel at home.
I made an account in late 2011. I was only a few months off the 13 year mark when I deleted my account last week.
Before Reddit I was on a couple niche web forums like NorthAmericanMotoring.com … and Twitter. But as my Reddit habit grew my Twitter fell off. Twitter got shittier, Reddit got better. My usage of Reddit really took off with Alien Blue, which gave a few better experience than Reddit web or RES.
Anyway. Here I am. Also Kbin and Lemmy. Same username on all of them; I’m one of those types. Hell, you can still find my LiveJournal from circa 2000 using it. (Remember LiveJournal? I was a paid user. If you paid you could use the faster servers!)
That was more or less what attracted me to Reddit after the Digg implosion. I had very specific interests, and being able to find little communities to discuss and share related items was extremely exciting.
I used stumble upon through highschool. That lead me to 9gag which I viewed quiet often. Then a friend in college saw me on 9gag. Made fun of me. Then told me about reddit. That was 12 years ago
Stumbleupon was peak "old internet," IMO. On one hand, I wish there was an equivalent, but on the other hand, the internet has changed so much that I'm not even sure if a Stumbleupon model would even work.
Yeah I was just thinking that. The internet just isn't the same. And I'll be honest I've never met anyone who also did stumbleupon so this is great!
StumbleUpon ftw. I had at least 10s of 1000s of stumbles.
There are dozens of us.
Dozens!
I think there's a pretty decent chance it could work, there are plenty of weird web toys and art sites still out there, and there are still slightly adjacent services running - like wiby.me, which pretty much returns a mix of old sites, new sites that look like old sites, and other occasional oddities. I don't think anything would ever get as big as stumbleupon, but I'd love a more generic version of wiby.
I never really used stumbleupon so I'm not totally sure if it compares, but I came across this search engine today from another thread on tildes wiby.me
It indexes only simple html, non-commercial sites, so everything in it feels like the 'old internet'. I have been enjoying just hitting the "surprise me" button and just seeing what comes up.
I think it would work, you’d just need to block submission of links to Instagram, facebook, YouTube etc.
I’ve never looked at 9gag myself, but I do remember when it became a trend on Reddit to make fun of it. You guys had dumber trending memes, and just copied our original stuff, or so we told ourselves.
The strangest thing looking back though is that in those days, people went to Reddit to scroll through memes and rage comics, and just laugh. After awhile I started to notice I never laughed at Reddit anymore. Sure there were some funny comments deep in the niche subs, but that constant stream of jokes that you kept sharing with your friends (who promptly responded “yeah I saw it already”) had been replaced with screenshots of Twitter dunk-ons and click bait.
Oh no you are absolutely right about 9gag. It was mostly reddit memes 3 days later. Or a ton of lame rage comics. Which reddit had at the same time. But 9gag just felt like it's for children. 9gag was good when I first started. But once you see reddit there was no going back.
And I agree. The only memes that made me laugh anymore were any of the r/meirl clones. But even those got lame after a while because it was just reposted stuff. Sure you haven't seen it in a year. But it's less and less funny each year. And when you spend 12 years on a website it can get a bit tiring.
I actually moved from 9gag to Reddit. Reason was every single post all the sudden became " anybody else?" . I was pulling my hair out at those, like yes most people feel/do/experience all the things you post about. I guess it was my first circle jerk and I hated every second of it. Out of the pan into the fire haha.
I had just started using stumbleupon when I noticed the weird alien cat shortcut in a random page. The anonymity and old reddit layout really appealed to me.
Kind of like Tildes is now
Yeah I'm really loving tildes. Like others have said since it's still kinda small I like how much thought people are putting into their replies. I make sure to actually vote instead of just constantly misusing the down vote button for people I didn't agree with. This place is changing how I view my old internet habits.
Me too! I saw some article that was like "social link sharing tools" and it mentioned StumbleUpon and Digg I think, and some others. Reddit might've been there too, I can't remember. I picked StumbleUpon because it sounded way more fun. Then over time it got worse and worse quality, kept seeing the same memes, etc.
And by that point I was in college and one of my friends was on reddit all the time, plus I was getting into League of Legends and all the streamers would show the /r/leagueoflegends sub in their stream all the time. So I was like fine ok I'll switch. That was 2010 I think. It took me a bit to make an account so my account's only 11 years old now (12 in November).
Wow I completely forgot about stumble upon until reading your comment! Thanks for the mental trip down memory lane haha
Honestly? I had too. It wasn't until I started to think what brought me to 9gag. And the great memories rushed back.
This is the first time I've ever heard the theory that 4chan "got worse". I was on 4chan 20 years ago at the beginning and the only difference between 20 years ago and 10 years ago was that 20 years ago the racism, sexism, and homophobia was a joke and by 10 years ago the people posting really meant it. But as far as an outside observer, not in on the "joke" could tell, the content was the same.
Tbf, from the inside that's a pretty huge difference. Can't say I ever dabbled directly, but certainly remember reading about the shift over the years, and being somewhat cognizant that there came to be actual hateful content at some point when there wasn't really at it's origins.
Yes, from, the inside it's a big difference, and that's why I kept using 4chan for a while. But as far as people "not in on the joke" go, just people discovering it for the first time or having it pop up as a search result, 4chan looks exactly the same as it always did, and they probably don't understand the discussions about it "changing".
I am honestly very surprised the chan has made it this long.
I was also there at the beginning, when everything was just "for the lulz", and none of it really.meant anything.
Agreed, 4chan is a cesspool now. It is interesting how people can transition from satire to actually developing the opinions they were initially poking fun at. Not just in communities, but individuals as well (comedians come to mind). Related wiki page.
I think I went to Reddit because I liked the idea of being able to look at memes and greentexts without having to sacrifice my sanity by seeing insane porn and gore
A few weeks ago when everyone was discussing alternative options on reddit, I saw someone claim that 4chan really isn't that bad anymore. I was curious about the claim, so I wandered over to /b/. It took about 13 seconds to come across an entire thread of illustrated porn of infant babies. The rest was mostly threads of revenge porn of "fat slampigs" along with "let's post photos to celebrate girls who graduated highschool this year." I felt like I could practically smell a stench leaking through the screen.
Yeah, I'll pass. I don't really care if /b/ doesn't represent the whole site - it represents enough.
Reddit was like the parts about 4chan and Fark that I liked. You could get the batty random af humor and discussions about political news in one place. I also got into a bunch of the niche communities, but I always largely enjoyed just rolling with the default subs.
The one thing I didn’t like about Reddit is I rarely recognized anyone and never felt a sense of belonging. Nobody would be like, “oh hey I remember you from such and such community.” I could leave comments, but for who? Myself? It was like going to a group outing and seeing the same faces, it was like shouting in a crowded shopping mall.
Coming across a fresh post from a celeb account was always fun.. something like poem for your sprog or shitty watercolour. Or the classic bait and switch of a long emotional post that ends with falling through the announcers table, or getting beat by jumper cables.
Or getting lied to about crows and jackdaws.
The Unidan debacle was an epic meltdown. Some of those "celebs" burned bright and fast, quickly leaving as fast as they rose.
Interesting that was the exact reason I liked it when I joined around 2004. To me it created a different kind of community without faces and the belonging came from a shared “togetherness” while anonymous. I still love that.
I can definitely relate to this. I was on 4chan (specifically the /heem/ threads on /sp/ and /co/) until at some point I realised that the hateful and edgy shit was no longer for the luls and some genuinely toxic ideology was bubbling over.
So I rolled over to Reddit where I could talk about fight sports and comics without feeling like pulling my lungs out through my eyeballs. And hey, I could drop my coding questions on Reddit and not experience the... unique atmosphere, let's call it, of the Stack Exchange sites.
I was a TotalFarker, ditched TotalFark after "you'll get over it" and lingered for a bit, and eventually moved to Reddit once it presented itself to me and never returned to Fark. I've been trying to leave Reddit for years, especially after the last Reddit shakeup. I came to Tildes when it first opened, but deleted my account and returned to Reddit. I then created this account a couple years ago and have commented some, mostly lurked. The last few years of Reddit has just been mindlessly addictive /r/all scrolling and checking in with a few smaller communities I liked.
I guess what has drawn me to all these sites is that I enjoy reading comments from people discussing news and niches. It helps me understand people from different walks of life, and I think that's pretty valuable. I like to contribute, too, but Reddit hasn't been fun to contribute to in years. I try to contribute here at Tildes where I can, but I often feel like I don't have the time to sit down and write up something thoughtful. The thoughtful discussion is where Tildes shines.
I don't know the drama at Fark. What happened? I stopped visiting a while back (maybe 12 years?) but not for any particular reason. I've returned since Reddit's API issues and, while different, it's still enjoyable, maybe a little more mature in the responses.
Thank you for the history recap. All I remember was a lot more Florida Man content.
BTW, I have only been active in Reddit for the past 2 years (my account is less than 2 years old). I skimmed the Wikipedia page on Reddit yesterday and learned about the former AMA mod and that drama, which also led to site wide protests and subs going private. I would imagine, since Reddit survived that, they would believe they will survive the current protests and mod/user exodus. And that would embolden the admins to be even harsher in their treatment of mods.
There was one April fool's day when fark switched it's layout to mimic reddit. This made me go find out what reddit was, and then realize the quality of discussion was way higher. I never went back. Tildes is giving me the same vibes as early reddit.
I joined reddit ~13 years ago because it was the closest experience I could find to the BBSes I cut my teeth on as a fledgling nerdlet. Dense text, focused discussions with per-topic boards- just what I was looking for.
I do feel a sense of loss at how things are going down, but I am equally sure that the current crop of social media algorithms (which includes how reddit apparently wants to handle things, now) have been awful for us as a whole. Hopefully whatever arises next isn't quite so driven by ragebait.
I hope you're right.
But I suspect that as things get even more algorithm-driven, the echo chambers will just become worse.
I lurked Reddit a bit before, but I joined after Obama's AMA. It signaled to me that Reddit was a place where real things were "happening," and it wasn't just a niche thing.
Before discovering reddit (and before reddit was massive), I used the StumbleUpon extension to waste time on the internet. If you aren't familiar with StumbleUpon, it basically added a button to your web browser that sent you to a random webpage each time you clicked it. One day I clicked it and it took me to a reddit thread. I don't even remember what the thread was, but I ended up sticking around and it pretty much immediately replaced StumbleUpon as my time waster.
Thanks for this comment, I couldn't remember the name of StumbleUpon. I had the same experience, Reddit immediately replaced StumbleUpon for me. (also a Digg refugee)
Same here, was Digg, then Reddit, now Tildes and I'm digging it! Cheezy grin 😎
Let's see...
Never did Digg, Twitter, or even Facebook. I like my walls of text.
I used to use Digg and Technorati.
Sometime before the Digg implosion, I came across people shit-talking Reddit and gave it a look. I quickly realized the level of discussion was much better over there (much like Tildes vs Reddit for the past few years) and started frequenting both, leaning more toward Reddit. Then Digg fell apart and everyone followed.
The ensuing few years weren't the same as before the Digg migration, but still decent through 2013 or so. Then I guess the critical mass of users was already starting to move the needle well past Eternal September territory.
I've long felt that smartphones have brought the entire internet a second Eternal September wave, and I often agonize over the loss of the "internet culture" I grew up with. The web is just everyone now. (And far too many of them are ignorant, hateful iconoclasts who crowd out and dilute the people who are interested in making things, which is what the web is supposed to be about.)
I mainly used Google Reader for news, and SomethingAwful for an online community. Reddit did an efficient job replacing both, and added gracefully threaded conversations. It was a pretty good setup. But I dunno, I think 2016 & 2020 tilted Reddit (and the Internet in general) more towards outrage-based content and a more combative approach toward how we interact online.
The good news is that I can report that the SomethingAwful forums actually appear to be doing pretty well. I have a hunch that in this new era where you can't tell if the posters around you are ChatGPT bots, that forums like SA (and Tildes) are going to become increasingly special due to the increased likelihood that we're chatting with actual authentic humans.
I can't remember my first semi-regular use of reddit, probably somewhere around 2010. But before Google killed Reader (2013) I would spend hours a day poring through my carefully curated RSS feeds. I tried a few alternatives but nothing stuck, and so reddit became the place where I spent those hours. The biggest problem Reader had was the lack of prioritizing or filtering. I even used a service for particularly noisy RSS feeds that proxied the underlying RSS feed and trimmed it down based on some social signals. Reddit handled this problem very nicely through communities of shared interests, moderation, and democratic voting. I'm still not sure how they are able to surface a post in my local city's subreddit that has a few votes above content with 100's of thousands of votes on other subreddits, but they do this pretty well. A couple years ago I noticed that when I visited Reddit without being signed in it was so jarring that it was obvious I wasn't signed in: instead of in depth informative content it was all memes, shitposts, and easy to consume images. I should have taken it as a sign that the company's priorities were likely not aligning with mine going forward.
came for r/a2c, stayed for the memes. then apolloapp died.
Digg was my jam back in the day. When it imploded I migrated to Reddit. Now here I am.
If I recall correctly my first post was looking for a workout accountability partner in my area over a decade ago, after I saw someone recommending it. Prior to that I'd never used it.
After that my account sat dormant for two or three years, at which point something made me pick Reddit back up but I can't remember what. I'd check but Reddit's UI doesn't make that easy. I think when my usage really took off was when I stumbled across the third party client Narwhal, which after subscribing to a few subreddits turned Reddit into the thing to scroll through after waking up, while riding to work, and when going to bed. Over time this translated into commenting more and more frequently.
Before that, in the 2000s my time spent online was split between a handful of topic-specific forums. For maybe a year or so I was on Digg but then it crashed and burned, after which I didn't really find a replacement. I didn't so much as touch Twitter until 2015 or so.
Joel Spolsky suggested a small up and coming site called Reddit and it seemed to be nice so I stuck around. Digg imploding helped the transition and Slashdot got boring finalised my move.
My account is a part of the 15 year club.
I miss the old fogcreek forums. I hope a few of the folks from those days are here too, like you :)
Referring to Joel's texts makes me feel old every time :D
Every time someone starts talking about a complete rewrite of anything, my mind goes "Joel Spolsky just recently wrote about this"
Then I go to the link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
It. Was. Twenty. Three. Years. Ago.
I'm ancient. =)
Ugh I know exactly how you feel. I probably even read that 23 years ago and forgot. Thanks for the blast from the past and I'll sit down to (re)read it tonight
Any idea what Joel is up to these days?
Haven't heard much, he did found small companies like Stack Overflow and Trello so I'm guessing he doesn't have to work any more :P
4chan > stumbled upon > tumblr > RSS > Reddit (13 years agoish)
Reddit just seemed like the perfect mashup of what I was already using. I weirdly missed Digg completely.
Before reddit my main social site online was the forum for scratch, a kids graphical programming tool. What brought me to reddit was discovering the minecraft community there, and I made an account around 2012, and since then basically has been my home on the internet. I appreciate this place for having the smaller community vibe that there was in the forum days.
I mostly game, and in the era before Reddit, there were forums where people shared information on meta strategies to tackle them best.
While the ASCII art guides are a thing I miss in the yesteryears, the relative bustle of people congregating on Reddit, alongside other topics of note was what kept me there. Notably for the fringe Japanese games with a very small following.
On a side note, besides Reddit, the congregation of experts for subject matter on Twitter will be sorely missed as Musk seems poised to yet again make it unpalatable with the message limit changes. It truly is a decade of change, eh?
I worked at a call center, and a fella was reading Reddit between calls and while waiting for customers to do things.
Since it wasn't blocked, I also started reading Reddit. Then I got an account. Then... well. Y'know how it goes.
Been a long time, but I remember my first experience with reddit was finding /r/furry and reading through the text posts and discussion. Sort of discovering my sexuality through reading comments and finding out about the community.
May I ask how the community is dealing with this API business? Are there other places to gather or is it business as usual? Very very passing interest in the community but it occured to me that many niche ones don't have ready alternatives
Reddit is a very tiny portion of the furry fandom really, mostly only memes. The reddit API drama has been pretty inconsequential. The changes to twitter have been far far more destructive but still not the end. The most important platform for furries is Telegram which still seems stable for now. Then there are a whole bunch of furry specific platforms like furaffinity, e621(nsfw), and more recently Barq. Though most furry specific sites are stuck in a 2010s era web and have failed to keep up which is how Twitter really took over.
Oh I see, furaffinity rings a very vague memory bell, I guess that's been around for a long long time. I didn't know there was / is a big twitter group. And who knows maybe more hobbies groups are going to move back to older platforms and telegram as things keep decaying
I dipped out of Facebook about a year before the Canridge Analytica "scandal"(people have to care for it to be a scandal, right). Spent about a year off of soc. media and noticed whenever web searching a niche I was into I continually found myself on Reddit and the post quality, communities for the obscure was good. So I signed up.
I actually signed up right in the middle of the last r/place (i don't remember what year) and didn't even know how to access r/place so i gave up, but then used to "watch" reddit, didn't post anything. This API protest thing happend right when i started to make posts and comments.
I came to reddit thru a combination of hacker news and digg (before digg turned to poop), but had originally been on sites like slashdot, k5 and binrev. Frankly, I'm surprised that reddit lasted so long, since it seems like none of these sites really can last long and either become milquetoast boring or implode under the strain of trying to be profitable thru ads or starved for funds or invasion by trolls...
I worked as tech support agent for an ISP and all of my coworkers were on reddit, so I joined in 2007 to see what they were all talking about. It was really the first platform I joined as I was just a very casual internet user at the time. Been there ever since. So far, I like Tildes.
17 year club on reddit here. There was a list floating about at one point of the first 5000 users, I am one of those apparently... though I can't find the list anymore! Anyway I came to reddit in the early days, when it was genuinely a good site. I hear people calling reddit "social media" and that sort of freaks me out. To me it was a discussion forum and link aggregator. I did actually meet and interact with many people I met on reddit back then though, so who knows. I came to reddit from Usenet. Usenet was basically turning into bins and spam and reddit was similar to what I had found in the alt.whatever discussion groups. I found Usenet when I was in university and that then reddit then here and who knows where else is my trajectory.
Tildes is reminding me of reddit in the early days, back when we actually had rules and they were enforced. It's nice. I hope it lasts a while
At that time I wasn’t even browsing anything really. It was around the time they announced the Xbox One and PS4 where I saw someone using Reddit. I checked out the site to see what people were saying about the announcements. I forgot about it until I started jailbreaking my iPhone. That’s when I was hooked with the idea of having people to discuss topics I’m interested in since I lack that in my life.
Funny enough, it was Digg changing how making submissions worked. It killed the community, because it turns out people would have rather kept the power-users than sell out to professional publishers. So I’m dipping my toes into Tildes for a similar reason now I guess. Feels kind of bad though, I gave a decade to moderating on reddit.
I've always been a pretty casual and sporadic online community person. My time on reddit started about 5 or 6 yrs ago. I thought it was fun but there were also a lot of things I didn't like that got progressively worse over time. Before that, I did the social media rounds: MySpace, FB, then IG. MySpace got dumped long ago. FB and IG got dumped a few years ago. The only online community I ever really got involved in was Makeup Alley, which was around 2005ish. It started in 1999 as a place for beauty discussion and reviews. It grew into an online community with pretty healthy message board participation covering all kinds of topics, not just beauty. It's still around, I just haven't been as into the beauty industry these days like I used to be.
I had came from Digg when they shot themselves in the foot pulling similar boneheaded moves Reddit is doing now. I lurked for awhile, but finally made an account to ask for advice on something.
I made some friends on a short lived forum for teenage developers, of which I was one at the time. Of course, like most forums run by teenagers for teenagers, it died off but some of the people in it shared that Reddit was a good place for programming discussion at the time so I migrated there. This was maybe a year or so before the digg migration. Comments were there, r/reddit.com was still a thing, and I don't think user created subreddits were a thing yet.
Also I had some blog posts I wanted to promote and it seemed a good place too. They were on topic enough that they did ok, despite being the in retrospect, rather uninformed ramblings of a teen hobbyist.
I hung around on 4chan a bit circa '08-'09. I was already kinda phasing it out but when Jessi Slaughter happened in 2010 I knew I was completely done. I also messed around with StumbleUpon around this time. Anyways, I was looking for new websites to kill time with somewhere around 2010 or 2011 when a classmate showed me Reddit. Been hanging around ever since. I've had a pretty ambivalent relationship with Reddit since somewhere around 2013 or 2014. So the recent news was just the final straw and the excuse I was looking for to get me to leave. Funnily enough I never used any apps to browse, I've been rebelling against the appification of life since it started. I always just used old Reddit on a mobile browser anyways, so the changes have basically no impact on me. But I know they'll come for old Reddit eventually and I view it as a good chance to make my own tiny little statement against the enshittification of the internet and hopefully find some more productive things to do with my time.
Unlike many of you, I didn't come from digg. I was never really on digg. No, I came directly from the old Slashdot, which is why I created a reddit account "relatively" late. But eventually I realized that Slashdot had become an echo chamber (don't know if that's still the case) and that reading it was making me miserable. I'd been lurking on reddit for at least a year by then, and people were talking about it a lot - I don't know if the digg exodus was when I first found reddit or when I moved to it, but it surely must have played an indirect role in making me aware of it. I created an account and stopped using Slashdot. Never looked back.
I believe I found reddit looking for information about the brand new coronavirus. I quickly found other subreddits that interested me as well and I was hooked.
I was mostly into RSS feeds from tech sites at the time. One of them posted a link to the infamous secrets thread that, IIRC brought us the cum-box. I think I had vaguely heard of reddit before that but this time I started poking around more and got hooked. I downloaded RIF to my tablet and have checked it daily since.
Funnily enough, I began using Reddit because of Twitch Plays Pokemon. I saw the original run on 9gag, I think, and started following it through Reddit. I already knew about the site, but back then I thought it was really ugly and unintuitive (how the turntables). I learned how to navigate the site and what how these subreddits worked, all thanks to Twitch Plays Pokemon. God, all the memes surrounding the random things that happened in the game were peak comedy for me back then. Waking up and seeing all the jokes around what Australians did to the game while everyone was asleep? Funniest shit ever.
Skyrim memes lol. I've never been one to make a big deal out of making accounts. So it was basically on a whim. 11 years later... Yeah... Probably for the best...
I joined reddit in uh, okay I just checked and my cake day is 6 April '14. I had like 100 karma when I really started using it many years later. Then I posted a picture in /r/TIHI and suddenly I had 8k karma. I have retired now with 45,486 karma. (My account profile now states that If you believe in something, stand up for it. Don't let convenience and comfort get in the way. If everyone actually did that, this world would be better. I've gone dark. Ciao.)
I found r/CrossStitch just over a year ago and stuck there because I am a troll by nature, and I realized if I just chill when using social media, life is just overall better for me and everyone who encounters my postings.
Honestly, it was mostly answers to questions I was looking for on the internet. It has been rather easy for me to give it up, as I dislike a lot of social media, and I grew up being wary about anything internet-related. So it was an outlet where I could join the various subreddits that I might be interested in (and once ads started popping up, I changed my "home" Reddit page to r/CrossStitch and just left it at that).
That's why I'm super happy to have been directed to here. It basically fills the same role as Reddit, but y'all are less judgemental but have higher standards. I know this last bit wasn't part of the original question heh.
Same experience. I got into Reddit due to Hobbying. Mine is woodworking, metalworking, and any other hobbyist tooling and works. I had 70k karma before I left. Tildes just feel better.
Honestly, that's what really bothers me about giving it up. Get away from the toxic social media aspect, and there were a lot of great gems all over.
I'm really hoping that Tildes will fill that void eventually.
Hobbies. Well actually, shopping. Specifically /r/woodworking. I was looking for a solid wood nightstand but couldn’t find one reasonably priced. I kept coming across schematics for them that linked back to Reddit posts. I had literally never build anything by hand before but eventually I caved and enlisted my dad to help. I’m actually sitting in bed next to it right now typing this comment. I’ve lost the original post but this is the design: https://images.app.goo.gl/teqemhEDafcXmioJ6
I honestly came to reddit via tickld. I noticed a bunch of screenshots were from this site called reddit. Checked it out and then lurked both sites for a while until I noticed I was just seeing the same posts on reddit days before being posted on tickld. Eventually I made an account with reddit and never looked back.
My boyfriend at the time. He was into Reddit, and he showed it to me. That was 2011. The boyfriend is long gone, but I'm still on Reddit.
I was a teenager, all of my friends adopted it at around the same time in 2011. None of us liked 9gag that much and we were all somewhat technologically inclined and it's where a lot of tech people seems to be flocking to so we all adopted it. I was also a really big fan of /r/nosleep back then too, this was before every story turned into a 600 part series.
Also porn. Lots and lots of porn.
I usually make accounts on new platforms that interest me. Maybe FOMO? It was only after a few years and Reddit finally filled out with content I was involved in that I interacted.
It was all public and private fora before then, just before Reddit took the forum game over.
A testicular cancer scare and depression.
I was a part of the great Digg exodus.
Digg was great, then they changed the layout and it went to shit...
Portal of Evil. I started coming to Reddit shortly before Portal of Evil broke up and just made it my permanent home afterwards. PoE was basically a smaller, less famous Something Awful (and they would probably fucking hate that description), at least in that the main drive of the site was originally trawling the internet for weird Geocities sites to make fun of. As those kind of sites died it expanded to News and other topics. It was a pretty fun and even sometimes intelligent place in the bad old days but through infighting and attrition it kinda got stale. It has at least one child site still going that I check on once every few years when a friend of mine who still goes there tells me about some event, but I can't seem to get back into the vibe.
Oh my god PoE! I loved that place. My proudest submission was this website called "Adventures In Stalking Fabio" which was exactly what the title says.
First I was a heavy niche forum users, and still do and is surprising some reliques forums still hold to this day. Then I used Slashdot, Digg and HN before Reddit. Digg exodus happened and moved to Reddit.
I was a reddit lurker until I signed up in 2011, but before then, I mostly read a few smaller, niche-topic forums that turned into general discussion over time. I consumed many different RSS feeds when those were a thing. I also occasioned by Slashdot.
Reddit was the first full-on centralized, wide-reach site I viewed. I remembered reading about the digg migration (and I was familiar with digg) but I wasn't part of that wave.
I started (after Fidonet and usenet) with Slashdot (I still sometimes login there). I remember Digg but, after the demise, I did not migrate to reddit... I made an account but it really never clicked on me until I discovered Apollo (it seems I can't really use the standard reddit UI). Reddit in itself became my primary sources of news after the twitter debacle (now I'm without one).
Meanwhile I also used HN (and Lobster, recently) and some private Slack but I think there is a place for meaningful discussion. I'm new here (a few hours) but so far I really like it and it seems it can be the place I'm looking for.
Before reddit I was browsing a lot of forums and ranking sites. Digg, StumbleUpon, man zonder kop, wijf zonder lijf (wzl) and many more dutch ones.
I even managed communities myself.
I knew of reddit before I was a Digg user, and the content on the homepage was simply the best. The other sites became irrelevant because I already had seen the content being posted on reddit before they were “reposted” on all the other sites. The discussions on reddit were better than the “reactions” on the other sites.
The comment section on youtube/instagram/tiktok is mostly useless. On Reddit I’d go to the discussion first and content later.
Looking through the comments, I'm a little disappointed to see I'm the first to post my introduction to Reddit: GameFAQs.
GameFAQs was my introduction to message boards as a child. It was the first time I ever signed up to a website, and it genuinely blew my mind. It was around the time of Pokemon Gold/Silver. Probably between the release of Crystal and Ruby/Sapphire.
I accidentally stumbled upon the boards whilst browsing walkthroughs and found a topic a user had created about inventing your own pokemon. I spent hours going through all the old topics of the same name (GameFAQs had [has?] a 500 message limit per topic) and eventually signed up to share my own.
Over the years I really just frequented their and a few spriting (pixel art) forums. Eventually, I saw enough mentions of Reddit that I figured I had best have a look. I was immediately turned off by how it looked, but the niche communities that already existed back then really caught my attention and I have visited most days ever since.
It's funny how much the appearance initially turned me off, because GameFAQs was no beauty itself (although I look back at it fondly) and I know browser Reddit using old.reddit.com exclusively. In fact, it's the similar looks that Tildes shares with that which I first appreciated when visiting this site.
I created an account on Reddit to exchange Pokemon eggs to hatch shiny ones. That was nine years ago. It took some time for me to get used to the interface of reddit and to use for other interests of mine.
I created my original reddit account about 9 months after it was launched (my original account is 17+ years old).
Back then, there were no subreddits (iirc) and the content with similar to HN.
I kind of grew "with" reddit. As it added subreddits, I found more and more things to like.
Here's something weird that I forgot about.
Each day, from about 2007 to 2012, I would scan Reddit and save about 30 funny memes or humorous posts
In the evenings, I would show them to my two young sons.
I would have them read the memes (and comments) out loud and they found it hilarious.
What I was secretly doing was trying to help them to learn how to read.
I miss those days.
==
These days, I go to reddit for specific niche subreddits and I come to Tildes a LOT. I'm really enjoying this place.
My son sent me a link to a discussion on Reddit. I read the replies, and knew I had found my people. Snarky, sarcastic, lots of stupid puns. Yerp.
I started by browsing the Starcraft 2 and League of Legends communities, but I only made my account when I wanted to talk about Diablo 3. I've been finding it especially pertinent that the timing of me leaving reddit comes with the launch of a Diablo game, given how I ended up starting my time on the site.
I was looking for something that was not 4chan but that I could interact in a forum type environment.
To be honest, I don't really remember. I've been using reddit since I was in middle school and that was 11 or so years ago... At this point, I dont remember a life without reddit.
I still distinctly remember browsing reddit for f7u12 memes way back when.
Wanting a civil human interaction and wanting to lead something that needed to exist.
I lived on MySpace before Reddit. I met so many people and went to sooo many shows. It was awesome. I never really could get into FB because it was just too much sharing of pointless crap and drama.
I was looking for skincare. I landed on /r/SkincareAddiction and discovered /r/AsianBeauty right brfore the Korean skincare craze got underway. I never left.
My brother had a coworker show him Reddit. He thought I would be interested in it so be recommended it and I made an account! I was super into stumble upon and sites like that at the time so Reddit felt like an aggregate of cool stuff like that plus discussions.
The Star Wars Battlefield 2 lootbox controversy, when it was making the rounds on the internet. Wanted in on the action, then spent the next 5 years lurking on Reddit. Mostly because I just felt like contributing was a waste of time on there and that there other people saying the same damn thing.
On another note, is the AMA that spez did is now the most down voted? Or is it still the Battlefield one?
It's lesser known but around 2010-2011I was on The Chive (and also Berry) and people were constantly talking about Reddit in the comments, saying their content was just taken from there so I just sort of switched and never looked back - and good riddance because having a look just now, it seems it's riddled with softcore porn now 💀
I was going to say I remember the Chive, but only as a sort of fratboy, bikini picture site. I didn't even know it has any sort of social aspect.
I honestly don't remember how I found it. I believe I made my account because of the ProRevenge subreddit. For years that was basically my "home page" for reddit on desktop. In retrospect, I always did prefer the more text-based parts of reddit over the meme-y parts.
I also came over from Digg, but during the first Digg redesign (2005). I liked what I got from Reddit a lot more. StumbleUpon and Metafilter were also some of my favorite similar sites at the time.
I believe, to my memory, I was in my early teens. I kept hearing about something called "shower thoughts" off of Tumblr, traced it back to its Reddit source, and thought it was absolutely hilarious before I knew what reposts were. Eventually, the r/showerthoughts allure wore off and I explored the site, jumping from subreddit to subreddit, just to see how it was and my dopamine-addled brain, like most teenagers, kept on scrolling for the search of "quality content". Retrospectively, I'm glad I made the switch then, because if I hadn't, I'd still be on 8chan, of all places...
From its 2002 inception to its 2012 end, I was a participant at now-defuct Worth1000.com (link goes to the site's Wikipedia entry).
On the surface, 'Worth' was at first a digital image manipulation contest (I'm avoiding THE brand-name, from whom 'Worth' received a C&D letter, resulting in a relabelling of Photoshcoughing contests) website that quickly broadened to contests in other disciplines: photography, writing, illustration.
The site's operation was funded entirely (to my knowledge) by its founder, Avi 'jaxomlotus' Muchnik, but was helped to some extent by the existence of an internal credit system. Credits could be purchased via PayPal, and redeemed in many ways on-site. None of which involved cash payouts (one contest type, "Corporate contests" (logo design, and such) did offer buyer's-choice cash payouts, but those were sponsored by off-site parties who funded the cash reward; 'Worth' acted only as the intermediary).
Contests were an opportunity for participants to exercise and showcase their passion. Prizes were on-site bragging rights via a trophy system and a small amount of those cashless site credits that could be redeemed in ways that generated further site engagement. At times somone would ask about the possibility of converting Credits to a cash payout. Near-unanimously the community response was "no, what we pay-in to the community in cash is repaid -- uncountably -- in value received." (take note, r/spez)
Beyond the contests, 'Worth' had a rich community environment in the form of on-site fora, and off-site chats in IRC. On-site forum discussions were strongly moderated, IRC were less so, but in all cases, content was expected to meet a minimum standard of etiquette, and it was enforced.
When Worth1000 ended, a sort of diaspora occurred. The particiants of the various disciplines that had communed at 'Worth' found new homes to play and showcase their work.
During/after the demise of 'Worth', users were looking for a way to stay connected. A worth1000 subreddit link was mentioned. I'd heard of reddit, and had browsed there, but didn't I register an account until the 'Worth' site's communications were hopelessly collapsed.
I took a look at reddit, and explored, and ended up just scrolling,scrolling, scrolling.
A convergence of unfortunate decisions is what led me to reddit.
jaxomlotus , MeanMrMustard, arsidubu, kellenheller, hbomb, dollyllama, deralt, gunmetal, ironkite, MrIQ, et al, you are missed.
I'm a year one reddit user. Some random person in an IRC room linked it and 16 years later here we are.
When I built my first pc like 15 years ago, research brought me to r/buildapc. It's where I ended up researching everything and the community and wiki was invaluably helpful. Then I found places like r/buildapcsales and realized Reddit was a pretty cool place and stuck around for another decade and a half or so.
Edit: I just figured out that I can actually link subreddits like that. Interesting.
CGP Grey's What is reddit? was what convinced me to take a look. I think a bit before that a high school classmate tried convincing me to check it out, but I wasn't a fan of them so I instinctively blew them off.
I migrated from imgur to Reddit once I found there were more niche subreddits, particularly r/surrealmemes.
Fark (2000-2010) was getting boring so I looked around for something else.
Can't quite recall how I came across Reddit but I remember it took some time to get used to it. Once I did, the "addiction" kicked in! Haven't been back since I deleted my account in the first week of June.
I love the Tildes layout because of its simplicity!
I ended up on reddit full time when digg imploded.
I kicked around a fair amount on sites like Modern Humorist and suck.com, so I followed what was going on at plastic.com for pretty much its entire life. Then Fark was there and all was good. I first heard about Reddit when Gawker ran the Violentacrez story, although it wasn’t until 9 years ago that I created an ID and posted anything.
I never used Digg or Fark.
I resisted joining Reddit for a long time because I didn't like its culture. Then I discovered the smaller, niche boards - the ones that never appear on the front page. There were communities for all kinds of weird subjects, with more members than similar web forums outside of Reddit.
The quality of those niche commities puesuaded me to finally join.
Now I'm saddened to lose access to those communities because they often have no comparable alternative.
I participated in a few online forums in the early '00s. Joined Facebook around 2009, shitposted various memes and random thoughts for a while, but hated that it was connected to my real name.
I was aware of and spent some time on digg and reddit, then fully joined reddit during the digg exodus. I really liked moving back to a place with anonymous usernames, so I gave up Facebook fully around 2013 and spent a lot more time on Reddit.
I literal schizophrenic that claimed he was a witch convinced me to by never shutting up about how cool it and 4chan was. That would have been on the old SPUF steam forums waaay back in like 2012ish. So I guess schizophrenia brought me here?
I told my partner that if they made a post on Reddit I would create an account to upvote it. That’s how I started my account 12 years ago, but I didn’t become active on it until Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017, when I read every fan theory posted in the TP subreddit to [try to] figure out wtf was going on.
Customisable news feed and topical chat combined essentially.
Like scrolling gave me the two things I’d either want to read or comment about.
It’s basically my problem with tildes is that it is still a little niche - like the news isn’t as encompassing and the topical chat is limited. I hope that as a population increases so does the chat topics, nicher subcommunities arise and the news becomes more varied.
I ended up on reddit around the time of the great Digg migration, but I wasn't part of it. I spent far too much of my time online through my teen and young adult years and yet somehow never ended up on Digg or similar sites; I played games and visited low-brow humor sites like big-boys/break, collegehumor, etc., but I didn't engage with any sites where actual discussion took place.
I'm ashamed to admit it, but I originally found reddit in 2010 during the brief period in which I thought rage comics were absolutely hilarious.
I started out on MicroMuse which was an object oriented text only environment built by academics mostly for students, then for a while I participated in a usenet listserv about orchids until I had kids and found that I no longer had time and enrgy for my orchid hobby, for a while I was very active on dreamviews forums about lucid dreaming and dream interpretation and even became a moderator there but left over internal politics issues among moderators, then I was quite active in an aquarium forum but left that because of very heavy handed censorship by moderating team. Before I joined Reddit I was active on The Experience Project and when EP shut down I felt lost for a while. I am still active on Reddit, in fact I am one of the moderators of the subreddit EOOD which stands for Exercise Out Of Depression and our subreddit did not participate in the blackout because we felt we needed to stay available for our users who struggle with mental health issues. I joined Tildes as a backup though because I do not want to be lost like I was when the Experience Project shut down so having additional online community that is not Reddit based seemed wise.
I was both on Reddit and Digg in 2007. At first I liked Digg better because it seemed a livelier community. But then I bought a Wii and started browsing on my tv, and the Digg UI was too heavy to load (it was pre-v4 anyway). So I started visiting Reddit more and more because the interface was lighter and could be loaded by the browser… and found out it liked it more. The discussions were more in depth, the users seemed more “serious” there - even if the silliness was everywhere, it was more smart comebacks and puns than just recycled memes. I felt more… at home. And I have to say that’s why I’m here too - compared to all the alternatives, Tildes is the one that feels more like that early Reddit, and I hope it will maintain that same “spirit”.
I lurked on sensible erection/election and on fark.
And when someone sent me a dumb but somewhat funny picture thread on reddit I created an account (september 2006). My first post was of a picture of a crackhead getting fucked by another crackhead in a park...with the text "what would you do for a klondike bar?". Yeah...
For fear for what I may find, could you briefly explain what sensible erection/election is?
Sensible erection was a discussion forum that was kind of a collaborative blog. Dumb name but it had lots of good discussions. All topics related to politics was moved to a sister site called Sensible election.
One of the members created an RPG based on the forum. :)
https://archive.ph/uKLEH
Lol what a silly idea, and what fun to have a game to celebrate the ups and downs of your niche group :) they sound like a fun bunch. Are both groups still around?
I was an avid user of the forum site asylumnation. At some point somebody mentioned they came across an interesting discussion on reddit, so I checked it out. Over about 6 months my habits slowly migrated. That was 12 years ago.
I actually don’t remember but if I had to guess it would be me getting bored of iFunny in 2017 and moving over to Reddit. You also can’t delete your iFunny account so it’s still there.
Fark circa 2010 led me to reddit just ahead of the Digg exodus. I deleted my account on the first day of the blackouts; hard to believe it had been that many years. I have to say I'm feeling mentally and even physically better for having not been on the site in a few weeks.
Funny feeling myself re-learning how to actually browse different sites for different news in stead of just beer-bonging it all down one big funnel via reddit.
I came from Digg initially but before the mass migration. I just kept coming across Reddit links here and there. I think Reddit was only getting close to being a year or so in existence at that point when I joined. Spent 15 years there until ending up here which honestly I'm glad happened.
Reddit was a slow slide into shit as what used to be a friendly community became a bloated cesspool except for some of the well run niche subs.
I like that this place isn't allowing porn, shittiness, and promotes actual polite discussion. It's a welcome relief and I'm glad to be here. I joined in 2018 but it didn't seem like much was going on. Made the full switch once RIF went dark and haven't looked back.
probably 13 years ago, I came from 9gag to reddit via the fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu subreddit, which was all the rage ;-)
Lowtax hamstrung Something Awful back around 2012 and the tone changed overnight. It had been a pretty good offbeat collection of people to shoot the shit with and then suddenly all the decent mods left and we were back with the fratbro shock humor race to the bottom. Reddit was not a good substitution, but both options sucked and Reddit at least had enough people on it that you could eventually find a few posters who didn't suck.
But hey, SA has never been more Lowtax-free than it is now, so good for them.
I realized the memes and news on Facebook was old and regurgitated from other sites, and I wanted to be closer to the original source, so I tried a number of other sites all over the spectrum: 9gag( still too much regurgitation), 4chan(too much insanity), Imgur (pretty fresh and fun for memes and cute animals, but not quite enough substance for me) Reddit proved to be a well rounded community for what I needed and was looking for.
I watched some videos on YouTube of the Reddit Minecraft server being griefed. For some reason, this made me want to go to Reddit.
I was actually SUPER late to the reddit party. I had heard about it for years, but only really got into it around 2017.
I admit it literally took me a whole week to figure out how to post. I remember the frustration of having literally every single submission I made got automatically removed within 0 seconds (ah, so naive!).
After I finally got the hang of it however I enjoyed a proper golden age there. It's weird in retrospect how violent the moderation feels at the beginning, but then you slowly mould your behaviour to their rules so that it becomes second nature.
Also took me until 2019 to discover Twitter but it's changed my life ever since!
Came over about 10 years ago looking for forums to suit other interests. I have a FB account but it's really just for a) relatives b) other people who share one of my interests (we all came to FB after our mailing list stopped working). Found there is a subreddit for just about everything. I realize lemmy and kbin are very young as yet, but it's a little weird to step into a community with not nearly the number or users or activity that the reddit equivalent had. Tildes is also small, and it seems more for serious discussions than silliness.
I used to hang out on different forums. But Something Awful was my main stomping ground. They had a shakeup in the moderation and rules that I wasn't enjoying.
Around the same time, reddit had that thread about the infinite Civilization game, and a few bug AMAs, so I started hanging out there.
As embarrassing as it may be, rage comics are what originally got me into Reddit. I don't think I even used social media much before that, besides YouTube, in fact I didn't even heavily use the internet prior to when I started going to high school in the late 2000s. Prior to that I mostly lurked on various gaming related forums, and before that I stayed on various kid friendly websites, such as Nick and Cartoon Network's websites, and Neopets.
To me was that originally was a tech related news site. I actually joined reddit couple years before the mass exodus. I started disliking digg after they started discouraging commenting, by steps like (it was really long time ago, so might remember it wrong) reducing threading (I think they made it like YouTube, where it was only one level) and requiring to fetch comments on every step.
I was still visiting digg, but it was happening less and less, and once the exodus happened, there was no reason to anymore.
I wasn't on Reddit for as long as some of the people in this thread. I started in 2015 but I've hopped accounts quite a bit since (current account is just over 3 years old).
I started using Reddit when I was going through a gender crisis and was looking for resources to figure my shit out, basically. At the time I was still living in my tiny little hometown in a province that is still making the news for being absolute shit to its LGBT population, and I didn't really have anyone to turn to for this IRL until my doctor found me a psychologist that I'm still seeing today. I'm thankful I had someone to talk to IRL, and later found better resources and more people to talk to when I moved to a different area of my province near the end of 2015, because Reddit alone wasn't necessarily mentally good for me. I had to take frequent breaks when it became too much to handle, for various reasons.
What kept me on Reddit even after I cut all those subs out (except one that was still chill) was the appeal of effectively having multiple forums/discussion spaces on the same site. I thought it was really cool and I liked the variety of spaces on the site. I ended up mostly sticking around in smaller niche subs rather than the large ones. Unfortunately, my addictive personality led to me spending more time on Reddit than I would've liked, and tbh, now that it's going to shit I'm kinda glad it gives me an easier way to cut it off. I've still been looking at it occasionally, but far less now that RIF doesn't work, and if they kill RES or Old Reddit then I'm out for good.
Earlier I was going through guides on Lemmy and Kbin and other Reddit replacement sites and I started to really reconsider Reddit's place in my life and whether I really needed something to replace it. I requested a Tildes invite because it came off as having a totally different vibe - more discussion-oriented and overall just chill, without all the shit that made Reddit so easy to doomscroll. This feels more like an actual forum and less like what Reddit is/was.
I THINK it was because there used to be some sort of link between 9Gag and Reddit- one was reposting images from the other, and I don't remember which way it went. Add in that one another forum I used (and still use today, though it's become very quiet in the last five years, even if it's technically still around) said a lot of its users were going to Reddit... and well, what ultimately got me to use Reddit as a main website was its pseudo-endorsement apparently by Stephen Colbert.
I spent a lot of time reading a wide variety of blogs, back before Web 2.0 when blogs were the thing. I never created any social media accounts due to a fundemental lack of trust in how the data in my account could be used.
I happened to see Reddit described in something I was reading as a big, loose, forum for anonymous users to post and comment on a wide range of niche topics often in specific communities. The description was supposed to make Reddit seem unappealing, but it sounded just fine to me.
The anonymity did lead to some users being real assholes, but it also kept Reddit from being useful in self-promotion or monetization.
I discovered reddit in a very similar way to you: I used a link aggregator I found. I honestly can't remember how I found it! But I remember noticing that most of the posts on it came from reddit, so I lurked for a bit, and eventually joined, because I enjoyed the quality of discussion. That was over 13 years ago now.
Back then, reddit didn't have subreddits. I definitely discovered a lot of cool things on reddit, and I will miss some of the small communities there, and I hope I can recreate some of them here or on one of the lemmy instances I use at some point.
In some ways Tildes reminds me more of Metafilter than Reddit.
I joined reddit after seeing a fence that had "marry me Julia?" painted on it, and I took to Google to find the answer, which I found on reddit. I poked around on a local sub and got hooked.
I got into Reddit after a couple years of using StumbleUpon. Was recommended to Reddit instead by some computer science friends in college.
I had known about Reddit since the early days but I didn't hang out or make an account there until 8 years ago when I wanted some specific advice about a quest I was doing on Skyrim. Then I sort of got sucked in by the arguments that sub was having about the Aldmeri Dominion etc, and started participating in other stuff.
I guess the trajectory for me goes usenet > yahoo and ICQ>a niche feminist BBS > overlapping with friendster and livejournal and yahoo clubs before it got folded into groups > slashdot > a slashdot-adjacent scoop site > "fakebook" (people in nz with fake names on facebook) > reddit > tildes overlapping with the fediverse. I'm actually still in contact with some of my old BBS and lj friends on facebook but I can never bear to go on it because of all the enshittification. It was ok back when it had "hatching eggs".
Was a pretty fervent user of imgur back in the day, as it was the go-to image hosting service I used. I still have an account there, and use it to quickly upload images, but I ditched browsing their gallery years ago in favor of actually browsing reddit. I guess since that was something you could do from imgur's gallery anyway (and all of the popular posts on reddit showed up in the imgur popular gallery anyway), I started moving over there, especially when imgur's native app came out (and it sucked massive cheeks, just like reddit's native app now).
Made/joined a couple communities, firstly for clash of clans, then for some smaller communities I made with friends over Minecraft, before joining some of the larger sports subreddits, and from there my usage kinda snowballed. It was a great timesink, until they killed off the 3PA... now I only use it for tech deals and occasional sports discussion when I'm not on other SM.
I will miss a lot of the inside jokes that reddit had, but this site is kinda refreshing in that most of the discussion is well-written. At the least, it seems like it takes a little more thought to write out responses, instead of just flinging names and repeating the same jokes at each other. (Which, to be fair, have their place... but sometimes structured responses are just nice to have, ya know?)
It was in 2007 (15-16 year old account), when Digg had already started becoming stale (anyone remember mrbabyman? lol) and the level of discussion had plumbed new depths in ignorance and stupidity. The great exodus would happen around 2-3 years later.
Sounds similar to what is happening to Reddit right now. The comments are basically fights between two factions (usually left v right; every topic is shoehorned into a liberal v conservative argument), and what rules is usually inane one liners that are either jokes, plain ignorant replies or a combination of the two.
Haha my friend in highschool told me about it while we were trying to draw FFUUUU memes to pass the time. I'd just go on 4chan and when I first used reddit I remember being mad that to see an image I had to leave the page I was on or open in a new tab... Yeah I was used to just scrolling and seeing the dumb memes on the same page. I think it wasn't for another few months until I went back to try it again and... I was whoring out for karma before I knew it. The novelty accounts back then were so much cooler :\ poem_for_your_sprog if you read this ur awesome :D
YouTube! Or rather, my ambitions on YouTube. In my mid-teens I was obsessed with content creation and created a whole new channel for like the 5th time in 2015. I discovered Reddit when I saw other YouTubers discussing their “subreddits” and so I decided to make my own account so people could also see my content on there. It’s why my Reddit account contains “yt” in the username along with my channel initials lol.
I stuck around on Reddit because I had started reading manga around then and the r/manga subreddit had great discussion posts with the occasional cool art post as well. As I move away from Reddit, that subreddit is the only one I really visit nowadays. I get most of my other content through other means now.
It was ~7 years ago, so honestly I don't remember. Probably I was searching for something and then a subreddit cought my attention.
TBH NSFW stuff I think, downloaded RiF for that but then just stuck around.
I havent seen this response yet, but I swear I remember Wired.com listed the top reddit posts of the day on their website. This would've been mid to late 00s. This is how I remember first being exposed to reddit.
Anyone else recall this?
Another Digg refugee. While i instantly liked the small-sizeness of tildes having to run for the 3rd time is leaving a sour aftertaste.