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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Reddit’s value has never been in the “average redditor” or the “popular subs”. The real value is in the niche tail of communities and the fact that they have such a massive amount of people that even if “only” 10% of their users were decent people, it still meant that they had enough decent people to talk with something to contribute.

    Yeah, I don’t use Reddit any longer, but it was really great that there were active subs devoted to incredibly obscure topics. If you wanted to talk about something, chances were that thousands of other people did too.














  • I agree with your points about ease of use, but even back when ISPs provided Usenet access, it was still pretty niche. Most people weren’t even aware that it existed. It was covered in the old “Internet for Dummies” sorts of books back in the 90s, but I’ve never met anyone IRL who used it, not even back when I worked at a university.



  • to the people who read all the things it’s tedious but doable, for the rest it’s “Which one is the RIGHT choice?” and just stay at the door

    Exactly. I’m a programmer and I do server administration on a small scale, but when I went to sign up for Mastodon my first reaction was, “How the hell am I supposed to know what instance I want my account to be on?” and I left. After a couple of weeks of absorbing random bits of information about how federation works I went back and completed the account creation process, but I really doubt that the average user who just wants to sign up for a service and use it is going to get past that step.