this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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I think that gave me an epiphany that hadn't occurred to me earlier somehow: I don't think I ever really got to experience Old Forum culture? And I kinda feel like I missed the boat?
Reddit was probably the closest I got to experiencing that kind of place. I think I knew of a couple established forums related to my interests growing up, but I learned pretty early on that I wasn't quite ready to be in that kind of place yet. Bless my heart, I found myself being annoying in all the wrong ways 🥴. I found Reddit right around the time I started to straighten that out. I think that was around a year or a few before the Ellen Pao round of intrigue? I suppose I just never found enough of an incentive to branch out from there.
I always found myself at least intrigued by the likes of Tumblr, Hacker News, or just general blogs and that kind of thing. I think the uniting thread behind them that interested me is an experience that has the potential to be a bit more longform compared to Twitter or Facebook. I'm used to people around me seeing Reddit as old school, different, and Off compared to whatever else, so I figured I was still getting a pretty respectable analog to the forum vibe I had a loose understanding of earlier.
But was I really? I recall sensing changes in the vibe pretty early on, and I wouldn't even say I was an early entry on Reddit. Things typically felt too fast for me to get my word in, and the hivemind attitude toward opinion and form was a real turnoff (not that I care to throw them around like confetti, but I'd be psyched to leave behind the rampant emoji hatred 🗿.) That's not to say I imagine forums as invulnerable to similar kinds of pitfalls, but I suspect Reddit was in a special position to make those kinds of issues more visible.
I think either way I end up with the Reddit migration, it's going to be at a slower pace and a different form than Reddit was, at least for a while. That worried me at first, but the more I think about it, maybe that's for the better. I'm starting to think I was missing out on something I didn't know I'd prefer. Maybe if I grew up just a few years earlier I would've found myself more among a smattering of forums than I ended up.
I was only on forums as a little kid myself. Trust me, I'm Very Young, I was just good with computers young. But the notifications, small scale, it gave me a little tickle that I hadn't felt since those silly days of logging onto Pokemon forums as a kid.
I've never been super active on Reddit myself. Hell, I've probably written more comments on here in the past day or two than I did over a few years on Reddit. So I can't accurately describe the culture change to you. I'm sure there's plenty of older folk who would be able to tell you though.
But it's something I haven't felt for a while, and something I had forgotten myself. Where social media is... An active choice? On Reddit, it was easy to be entirely passive. Just scroll and scroll. And really, it wasn't even making me happy. It was just engagement for the sake of being engaged. But if I'm on a smaller forum I love talking with people! Sharing these experiences. Also, yay for having forum tools again!! I missed being able to post pictures in comments.