reddit

reddit

Today I can no longer access Old Reddit (the one with the remotely useable interface) and maybe that’s my cue it’s time to leave the platform. I did get into a huge argument last night about why you shouldn’t call female characters whores, and was downvoted. This was on a subreddit that is a haven for sexism and racism, but it stung all the same. Reddit is not for me. I’m there but I know it hates me. Sometimes I get creepy messages from strangers asking me out. It’s a weird, weird place.

My mother-in-law who I’m very close to is getting older and she doesn’t understand technology. She keeps getting pop-ups on her phone like this one, which I posted to reddit in a rage last year after finding it on a game I downloaded from Swagbucks. (Swagbucks itself is very good, but the free games they offer are soul-suckers.)


You and me know that that ad is a disgusting scam, but someone who lived the vast majority of their life without technology does not. If Luigi Mangione had gotten around to shooting the person who made that scam, I would break into prison just to shake his hand. Anyway, a year on and my mother-in-law is constantly worried about her phone because of scams like that one. That’s what she was worrying about today. I feel so bad for her and so unimaginably fucking angry that she has to deal with that. And I will never forget the response I got when I posted that screenshot to Reddit. It was this, upvoted seven times:


Caring for relatives is difficult. It ate up my childhood, and now as an adult I see even worse things, like Alzheimer’s. I see the disabled people of the world being prey to the monsters that scam them over their phones, and cunts like that just want to cape for the companies profiting off human misery. Burn in hell, “ps4rulez.”

…….Anyway, yeah, probably best to avoid Reddit for a bit. I wish I could take my mother-in-law out somewhere nice.

Reddit

I note that today Reddit has changed its little logo, presumably in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.


They also released this:


-which is here

-and it just rings so hollow. Why? Because Trump fan club the_donald, among other forums, are hosted on Reddit! And Reddit shows no sign of wanting to get rid of them. Even forums which I gather are meant to be “non-political” can end up full of hate speech, and oh sure you can vote them down, but…

… Well, the responsibility to get rid of this stuff lies with Reddit. And they’re not doing that at all. So until they do things like changing the logo are just pure nonsense.