thechadwick

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Alwayswas.astronaut.meme

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I remember the "narwhal bacons at midnight" phase of reddit when the great digg migration took place. It took years for the geocities from the 90s vibe of reddit to turn into the community it became. Content posts were so few and far between, at first, that I wasn't sure the site would last. Over time the 3rd party apps and general openness of the original dev team made it worth using but slowly, the bigger the site became, the bots and meta comments (and truly awful mods) kind of took over the main subs. The niche subs weren't valuable enough for it to be worth that kind of manipulation, so they were great (at many still are to a large extent).

It's a sad reality that I've watched evolve having been online for the rise of the web. the enshittification of commons seems to be the trend in every network as far as I can tell. That's the problem with network effects i guess.. You need people to have a network, but people are greedy. The more people in the network, the more tempting it is to try and exploit, which makes it lousy for the network. Too far, and the value of he network sinks and the people leave (digg, tumblr, slashdot, etc.). I wonder though, if Aaron Swartz had been around, if he would have been able to keep reddit more aligned with the original vision? Tragic we'll never know.

*edit: an even better deep dive, I hadn't read until lately, the takes the history of enshittification back to the roots - https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

 

In the Rubber Coils: Scene—The Congo “Free” State. In this 1906 cartoon from the satiric magazine Punch, a Congo native is entrapped in a snake whose head is a portrait of King Leopold of Belgium. Published as Parliament was debating its response to the revelations of [Joseph] Conrad’s friend Roger Casement concerning conditions in the Congo, the cartoon emphasizes Leopold’s commercial stranglehold on his private colony, whose principal export was rubber.

Excerpt from Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling - Heart of darkness, “The man who would be king” and other works on empire edited by David Damrosch. ISBN 0-321-36467-8

Interesting read and good reminder that imperial colonization was the subject of debate even in it's prime—at the turn of the century.