I just got a warning and [removed by reddit] because I told a dry cut story about turkish coworkers of mine harassing women and queer people and talking about stuff like “buying wifes” from their home country as an answer to someone posting a similar story. I got warned for “promoting hate and violence against marginalized groups”. I made no generelizations, promoted no violence or hate. I actually got upset because of my coworkers doing exactly that. This is not the internet as I know it. Where you get censored because you talked about something that happened in your life.

I miss it. I came over right after Digg died, almost half a decade before 2010. Thought it was the ugliest site I had ever seen and found it super confusing.

People did largely speak their minds though, lots of controversial posts and uncensored humor, yeah it was nice, but the change in Reddit really mirrors general cultural changes too, it was more driven by Gen X and older millennials, more tech driven, and more what people would call edgy.

It was the wild west not so much because Reddit specifically was, but because that’s what broad tech bro Internet culture was. We also had relatively unmoderated Xbox Live and online gaming and other things that are hard to explain to folks now.

What we would call social media existed, Digg called it Social Bookmarking for a Digg / Reddit / Slashdot model. Myspace was just giving away to Facebook, Twitter was getting off the ground, and chat rooms, like Yahoo chatrooms and Geocities were so unhinged back then.

2005 is around the time that Yahoo started looking major ground to Google when just a few years prior it was the undisputed default search engine.

Neat to think about all this again.