Asif Youssuff

Leaving Reddit and Salvaging My Posts

It has been a while since the unsuccessful Reddit protests, whereupon I argued that Reddit ought to pay posters, lest they leave. Reddit crushed the protests, and unsurprisingly, they aren’t paying posters for enriching the corpus of posts and comments that helped Reddit cash in to the tune of $203M in LLM training license fees.

I first joined Reddit on Jan 21, 2006, but it was after I created an “alt” to discuss politics in 2015 that I supercharged my involvment on the site. While I soon found myself discussing less about politics (by dint of taking part in volunteer activities away from social media), I became increasingly involved in r/firefox – sharing thoughts and discussions, but mostly helping people with issues. Eventually, I was offered a moderator position (this is not at all glamorous - posters derisively [and accurately] call moderators “jannies”: internet janitors), where I set about fostering a culture of service.

I’ve made the decision to (mostly) part ways with Reddit. But as I take a step back from the platform, I realized that there’s a lot of material I’ve posted that I don’t want to disappear into the void.

So, here’s what I’m doing: I’m taking the best of my posts and comments from Reddit and bringing them over to my blog. This isn’t just a one-time thing, either. As I dig through my Reddit history, I’m going to be updating this post with more gems I find along the way. I’ll also be sharing them on Mastodon in case anyone else finds them useful or interesting. It’s a way to preserve what I’ve contributed and, hopefully, share something useful with you.

If you’ve ever stumbled upon one of my posts, keep an eye on this blog! I’ll be posting updates and diving into some of the tech discussions I had over there.

Stay tuned for more, and feel free to drop your thoughts or comments on Mastodon!

The Salvaged Posts

2017

2018

2019

2020

2022


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This project is maintained by yoasif