this is an interesting question i’ve had banging around in my mind since well before Reddit’s implosion (and Discord’s enshittification), but which seems really worth asking now.
you can’t blame Reddit and Discord or their imitators entirely for these going out of style, but they’ve sure put the dagger in a lot of remaining ones, and i kind of wonder if they’re just in an irreversible and terminal decline a la USENET. i can only name two or three i even consider checking anymore, and i’m not sure how sustainable any of those are long-term.
TLDR, yes and the current popularity of Reddit may be because it is actually hiding how it is not really that much of a community of people but rather a bad simulation.
My PhD was in this area of how older-style internet forums operate and touched on why they continue to hang around. Yes they absolutely (with caveats lol) have a future, but the mass appeal of the reddit style is surprising. I didn’t delve into that in my work but do have an educated guess that could be explored further (hint by someone else) to explain that.
Forums require a lot of engagement and memory on the part of the people who use them. Think about how context is needed to understand any text - like how easy it is to misunderstand just what the hell the USA founders really meant in the Constitution because their world-view is mostly gone. Pick any other old document if that’s a little too contentious for you.
Well, forums are the same. They require a community of people who interact with one another so that meaning can be created and maintained. Like you said, you have to read and read and read and then comment and get picked on for getting some minor lingo wrong or for breaking some taboo. Eventually, if you stick to it, you’ll become a part of the “machine”. Quite literally, you will be hosting the knowledge and processes that make the forum work, just in your head and not on the server. There are some decent higher-level theories that can help give a conceptual framework for this sort of thing. Post-materialism is helpful, so is technological posthumanism. A shortcut to all this is to think of the transhumanist movement in the 1990s. They thought they would upload their consciousness to the net. Well, in a twist of fate, the net has been downloaded into our minds instead. Basically, all those apps and stuff don’t make sense unless you have some cultural wetware installed in your noggin and some ability to communicate with others in order to keep it constantly updated.
That’s a lot of work and most people don’t do it. Instead, they’ll grab the simple and readily-accessible stuff. Memes, catch-phrases, “in-jokes” that aren’t really “in” anymore. Basically, most of Reddit can be considered a simulacrum - a piss-poor representation of community that requires little effort to participate within. Notably though, at the same time Reddit is full of the kinds of complex and effort-laden communities that I mentioned before. It is just that they are hidden in plain sight. Anyway, gotta go, it’s bedtime.
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This really connects with how I’ve been feeling switching from reddit to beehaw the last couple of days.
I used to be very active on a game-related forum and knew most of the regulars there pretty well (esp. the other teenagers/young adults). It was a nice time.
However, now that I’ve gotten used to reddit over the past ~6 years, I’ve realised the standard level of engagement with others and the amount of attention I feel like spending on a comment or post is so much lower than it used to be back in my forum days.
I won’t lie - it’s been hard to find the mental capacity to write a full and engaging comment sometimes. I find myself having some thoughts on a subject and then giving up before I start writing because I’m just not used to writing that much anymore.
It’s not a bad thing though! I’m glad to be spending more time on honest and engaging replies :)
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I might have interacted with certain users multiple times and I honestly wouldn’t have a clue. It’s too large to be cohesive like that.
Sorry for the late reply. Yes, I think that’s exactly right. Not my field but we are limited in the number of deep relationships we can have like you said. Of course, there are examples at both extremes; some can annoyingly have a near-multitude of deep friendships and others only one. Regardless, you are spot on, each deep relationship takes up a finite amount of time and eventually we run out of that time.
The shallower relationships that we have via memes are sometimes called “parasocial relationships”. It is usually a term reserved for one-way relationships, celebrities and their fans for example. Fans know an awful lot about their favourite celebrity and devote considerable time to the relationship. The celebrity will likely not even know that the fan exists. Still, people (the fan) can gain important benefits and I really don’t want to imply that these are somehow “bad” relationships, just that they are very different from what we normally think of as friendship.
Parasocial can extend to these sorts of meme-based simulations of a relationship you are talking about. I’m not up with this sort of literature but usually there are people who think these things can be useful shortcuts to “lubricate” interactions within large populations (where you literally cannot have deep relationships with everyone). Others might be a little crusty and say that they are not “real” relationships. Memes can also be ways of signifying being a member of a special “in” group and sociologists would pursue the idea of differentiation here - we are dividing ourselves into groups because it helps to avoid the endless complexity of individuals. This sort of research goes on a lot and is really interesting. My personal view is that it is all psychologically and socially important as a way of binding strangers together. The problem is that it often excludes and then may (not always, just may) lead to conflict between groups. So yeah, getting to know people deeply is a heck of a lot of work, just like what you and I are doing now. It’s likely far easier if I had posted a “that’s what she said” comment and you clicked the upvote button or maybe responded with a “boom!” comment. Which one is better? I don’t know, it’s up to your preference, mood, level of exhaustion after a long day, etc etc. :-) Hope that you are feeling rested.
Interesting write up, thanks for sharing !
That’s really interesting, thanks for sharing!