Anyone else who used to be on Reddit in the early 2010s remember how it used to be a Wild West?

To be fair, people stopped after starting a witch hunt for the Boston bombers and identifying the completely wrong people. It may very well be the case that they over corrected, but there is at least a good reason for the change overall. (also corporate interests I suppose, fuck them though)

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.

It was a Wild West but I'm not sure the Lemmy community would have liked it much - there was a lot of content in the "offensive to everyone" category and people generally didn't mind as long as it was contained in its own subreddits. That doesn't seem to be the attitude of "kids these days".

I've been on reddit since the fall of digg. It was a wild time that's for sure.

Well, I missed Reddit until the mid 2000 teens, but I remember when the entire internet around 2000 was The Wild West. And I miss it, very much.

Yeah, I remember... But I also remember nearly a decade of shills and astroturfing. Fuck Reddit.

I remember when it was a teeming swamp of T_D memers. Afaik it is again.

In Japan, we have to be careful because a company could sue for reputational damage (even if the claims are 100% true and provable). Same for some other examples like posting a pic of someone with his mistress or basically anything with their face.

Reddit wouldn't censor those names. People are self censoring on the big subreddits

Reddit wasn't mainstream then. Comments could go unnoticed for months.

Even in 2010 the front page was a shitshow. The smaller communities are generally their own thing but i'd say reddit often did more harm than good.

PUBLIC SHAMING WORKS ON BULLIES

I got permabanned instantly from r/mildlyinfuriating because an idiot mod read the word "criminal" as "black person" and assumed I am racist.

That shit hole can die in a fire. Mirror their content over here(it isn't theirs) and let them bleed out.

I don't think lemmy could withstand the onslaught of popularity that came with giving out "reddit hugs" to domains, and with lack of moderation the toxicity levels could easily soar. so just be careful what we wish for or the communities will become the things we hate.

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.

I was on here and called out a billionaire that fucked over me and my company because they didn't want to pay what they owed. I named, I shamed, and assholes on here defended the billionaire.

I came to Lemmy to get away from Reddit, not to reminisce about how good it used to be.

Can we do that here? It'd be cool

People severely overestimate the lawlessness of the west. Only reason anyone even has that picture of it is because westerners realized it was an easy way to cheat folks who have never been west of the Mississippi out of their money in exchange for wild tales and performances about the cRaZy life of Arizona

Yeah just like in the Wild West, we used to all die of dysentery.

I think that I started using Reddit around 2014~5 or so. For me the cultural shift shows two things:

1. Any online community financed by adbux will eventually prioritise advertisers over its own participants.
2. Unless you have tools ensuring transparency of the process, people with power over the others' speech will misuse it to defend their individual interests, instead of the community's.

"couple/several"

Relevant XKCD

It was like that

Yeah, then the litany of litigiousness took hold and the world has never been the same