June 15th will drop by, and everyone will notice what most people here already know: that Reddit is hopeless, and it's showing its middle finger to the community.
Based on that, I was thinking about releasing an infographic, telling people what's going on, and asking them to replace their Reddit content with gibberish. And I'm wondering if more people want to join this.
What do you guys think about this? Would anyone here be willing to contribute?
The infographic would list no authorship. It would be, for all intents and purposes, public domain. The only thing that you'd get in return is the warm feeling that you made internet better, by helping to kill Reddit.
The format is up to debate, but I was thinking about:
It's a picture so it's easier to share; split into sections that can be read in any order that you want (or you can ignore a few of them).
In special, I'd like help of people who write stuff well. I'm pedantic, verbose, an L3 speaker prone to "then who was phone?" grammar, and I genuinely think that plenty people could do better than I can in this aspect.
I also believe that a collective effort from a bunch of people will be probably better than just a single person doing it alone.
I'm of two minds on it. I agree with you that a reddit has become a deep well of knowledge on all sorts of topics, but it is also a flawed one. My best example is Pinterest. Pinterest has an enormous, well tagged and cataloged (by Google) images which can be difficult to find any other way. It's also register-walled for it's content, so browsing it without logging in is utter cancer, and there is no depth of information - it's just the image and no backlink or http bibliography, so it's a manual process of hoping TinEye has seen the image and has traced its lineage.
If reddit becomes fouled with garbage, or is simply filled with removed, it will become another Pinterest. A dead end for searches that we will automatically exclude when using search engines. Heck, on mobile, bringing up a reddit page from a Google search is already frustrating garbage salad of hidden threads, pleas to download the official app, and rampant, useless advertising and "similar threads" which rarely have any relationship to the thread Google says contains your information. And, of course, Reddit's own search engine is worse than asking a toddler about quantum physics.
At this point, I'm more in favor of burning it to the ground. Partly out of spite, partly because the aggregation of knowledge is poorly configured for research of almost any type. I will feel bad for the people who will not find my useful content (roughly weekly I get a thank-you reply for some obscure function or solution I've posted), but most of my thousands of comments are just dad jokes and movie quotes. And I suspect that's pretty common. Little of value will be lost. Except to Spez. And he deserves to get taken down a peg for this money grab.