Whoever is the first person to see this, throw up a comment. I’m genuinely curious how long it takes. for y’all to notice. When Reddit did it to me y’all realised before I did.
But no, this time it’s real and on purpose. I nuked my reddit account and history. Yeah, it’s sad. No, I’m not happy about it – but I’m A: not one to shy away from putting my money where my mouth is and B: fundamentally unwilling to tolerate a toxic social media service, even if there’s a personal and social cost to me of withdrawing. I did keep a copy of my own data.
To be clear, there’s a lot of you on /r/leica I genuinely adore, and I’ll miss you. Drop me a message through the comments if you want to keep in touch by email – I’ll leave it up to you whether you want to reach out. But, I left Twitter when Musk took over, and despite the loss of some good friends through that – I don’t regret for one day my decision to avoid the fascist cesspool it has become. Reddit isn’t in the same place, but their owners clearly aim to take it in an unfortunate direction of it’s own, and I’ll brook no part of it.
As for the decision to nuke my data? I imagine that will be even more controversial than my decision to stop posting – yes, I deleted a lot of good memories, and probably a lot of useful information. The M8 and M9 cults will probably be relieved – but at the end of the day, the data is the valuable and profitable component of my account for Reddit. Leaving it will help funnel users from search engines onto the platform, which will help keep the company sustainable, which will encourage this kind of exploitative behaviour from others.
Simply put – the “social contract” here is that reddit gave me a service and I repaid them in data. Reddit “violated” the social contract by degrading the service they provided me. In turn, I have withdrawn my data. It’s just good business.
Now let’s bankrupt Red Hat.
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