Dedicated to, and inspire by, the beautiful minds of the many, many genuine people I’ve met here, and the hope for many more to come.
Part 1.
A real revolution is never simple, and the path to every real revolution is universally met with panic and confusion from all sides, just as it did in this instance: fear, derision, doubt, apathy, all of the above, all at once, for those who remained at reddit, the fear of the unknown, despair. After all, reddit was supposed to be the end-all-be-all of Internet forums, where all of the Internet’s good talkings can come together into one singular place, the sweet, succulent gems upon its many branches, ripe for the picking for the unwashed masses. So, as redditors stand in open revolt against their administration, reddit’s decayed snag crumbling down to cinders and ashes as it burns bright against the coming darkness of the night, I’ve seen many of us who made it over on this side ask: “Why won’t they simply leave, and finally be free of it all?”
After a few days of being away from that accursed trash fire, the answer to this question (unlike a real revolution) turned out to be quite simple: The fear of the unknown, despair.
Part 2.
Once upon a time, there was Facebook, where you talked with your friends and your-not-quite-friends and your family and that random asshole you’ve added for reasons that you forgot but it would be too awkward to unfriend now. Back then, it was all vacation photos and party pics and status updates and family drama; it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t anything remotely close to good "content", but it was real, it was sincere, and it was cool. Then came the link sharing, and the algorithmic feeds, and the Farmville and Mafia Wars boost requests, and we were shocked and hurt that the people whom we thought loved and cared for us actually wanted nothing more than to yell at us and sell us things and get more points on some kind of boring clicking game, furiously refreshing the page every 15 minutes, on the dot, to watch a number go up. And so, we left in pain, lost and confused, until we found a place, a refuge in the shades, it’s raw, and confusing, and crashes a lot, but a place where nobody cared who you once were, where you are free to be anyone, even yourself, especially yourself. And then, we looked at cat pictures and asked each other about the sxiest sx we’ve ever s*xed and ran around airports shouting when the narwhal bacons and argued about whatever colors that dress is, and all is good again.
And then we’ve reddit all.
Reddit! The beast, the roots that binds, that was and will forever remain a scar upon our spirits; while we can cut off the reddit without, we cannot cut out the reddit within, its creeping tendrils tangled and gnarled across our true selves. Being a “redditor” was not only an identity, but an insidious mindset, that at first slithered, then wrapped around, then finally beaten into, our very selves, then shaped and formed us until we’ve accepted its madness as routine, that somehow, somehow, our cumulative value on the Web is not in the human connections we’ve made, but is instead something worthless, to be grounded up and rendered down into a number, POINTS, and we reduced ourselves back down to yelling and selling things and getting more points on some kind of boring clicking game, furiously refreshing the page every 15 minutes, on the dot, to watch a number go up, so we hate us, as we hate them.
Worthless. Internet. Points.
Karma. An appropriate name, what goes around comes around.
More than a decade ago, redditors laughed, jeered, and mocked “15 Million Merits” on “Black Mirror”, at the absurdity, the beat-you-over-the-top-of-the-head directness of the message, without even a single shred of irony, as we each sat on our respective stationary bikes to churn out “content”, selling our real selves daily to the highest bidder on the subreddits, all for the good of “our” reddit. And so starved for human interaction we’ve became that over and over we came to grovel and fawn over the first buffoon that shows up, the peddlers of fear and outrage, grotesque mockeries of kindness and honesty clad in gold leaves and man-skin, whispering into our ears that “things are going to be different this time,” and when it turns out nothing changed and everything is wrong and everybody knows that everything is wrong and the advertisers get antsy that everybody knows that everything is wrong and their precious content cattle are not being milked for “content” quickly enough anymore, the Red Names shows up from behind the curtains (to wild applause usually, I might add) to shuffles some other Red Names around, and promises that “things are going to be different this time,” then everybody clapped, some of us grumbled under our breathes “nothing is ever going to change,” as we all sat right back down on our stationary bikes, and the daily grind for “content” begins once more.
There once was a screenshot of a 4chan post floating around the Internet that described reddit as a failed democracy, where the loudest, dumbest voice always wins. But it should be clear as day now that its entire premise was wrong: There was never an “our” reddit; beneath the facade of “democracy” reddit was, is, and always will be, a feudal system, where the Red Names (oh so kindly) provided the land and feed and troughs to milk us away as content cattle for their precious, precious advertisers. We are always meant to package and sell ourselves for the good of “our” reddit, and for that, they’ve made us loud, and they’ve made us dumb, and they’ve made us hate, so we must stay: After all, all of our friends are stuck here with us, where else can we go? Redditors do not belong outside reddit, and redditors will never escape reddit.
We’ve been worked so frail and weak for who knows how long that when some of us finally made up our mind to take a break and touch some grass and smell the flowers and see the sunlight again its brilliance burned and blinded us, as we stood there, stunned, like the way we used to, before we became redditors all those years ago, lost and confused, unsure of what to do, or where to go.
Many of us did try to take the next shaky step towards freedom, to finally be rid of reddit once and for all, but we just ended up setting up the stationary bikes and smearing the reddit within to these new places, and polluted them, and choked them, and killed them, and held a parade with them, and took selfies with them, and reposted them on reddit, and buried them, and came back with more venom and vitriol and more reddit than ever before, ultimately learning nothing. Because, as it turns out, building a better reddit for redditors was never going to work, it doesn’t matter if you add JPEGs or crypto or as-an-AI-language-models or blockchains or cartoon dress up dolls, because reddit has already buried its twisted roots deep within our very selves, so that even now, people are showing up on this side, full of the same venom and vitriol, ready to set up those same stationary bikes again.
“Things are going to be different this time,” they said.
Let me repost an old reddit favorite: Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is?
I will now tell you. To be a redditor is insanity.
To be a redditor is to be an arrogant know-it-all, engaging in pointless “debates” not to find understanding, but to “win”, to make a farce of everyone and everything for any, all, or no reason, and then turns upon itself as the circlejerk ensues, and then the counter-jerks, and then the counter-counter-jerks, ad infinitum.
To be a redditor is a snake eating its own tail.
To be a redditor is to be the first person to giddily racing to post the latest tragedy or comedy or whatever song and dance it is that day, just to watch your Merits go up for your daily dopamine rush, screaming at the top of your lungs: “LOOK AT MY POINTS! I MATTER!”
To be a redditor is to be the first one to reply “this” or some other nonsensical in-joke, or build heartless, mindless machines to automate “this”, in hopes of getting a trickling down of leftover Merit/JPEGs from the kind strangers.
To be a redditor is the annoying pun chains. No, you did nazi that coming, we’ve reddit, we’ve reddit many, many times.
To be a redditor is to assume the worst in everyone without cause, out of sheer indifference or laziness or both, and lock yourself inside your echo chamber, away from the world, where you won’t be hurt, or hurt others, ever again.
To be a redditor is to have your PR person copypaste canned responses to fake questions asked by even faker accounts, written by a team of writers or even heartless, mindless machines, a script which had gone through multiple writes, focus groups, rewrites, and focus groups, for the sole purpose of promoting my latest movie, “Barbie”, opening only in theaters July 21st.
And above all else, to be a redditor is to be a cynic. To be a redditor is the nihilistic self-loathing for what-could-have-beens. To be a redditor is to despair, despair over the way that things are is the best that it’s ever going to be, despair over that nothing will ever change, the fear of the unknown, despair, for all of eternity.
Despair is the enemy of progress.
[Continued in comments.]