I do not personally use Reddit. I do not like Reddit. I include Reddit in my Privacy Redirect toggle settings for those occasions when I follow a link from a search engine, but that is the extent of it. Hacker News has been flooded with posts about the dispute between corporate Reddit and the moderator community over Reddit’s API changes killing off almost all of the third-party clients. I eventually added a filter in my Handy Reading settings to block Hacker News headlines mentioning Reddit from my hnrss feed. To the extent I have an opinion on the matter, I think that it is unfortunate that Reddit is destroying third party clients but that it is unsurprising and the incident highlights the danger of relying on a third party which views you as a product for community-building purposes. That was until I came across this a certain story in the June 18, 2023 Daily News Stuff on Ambient Irony: Three of the biggest Reddit communities reopened in the funniest way possible (The Verge). The use of the word funniest in a headline bothers me. But I digress. What was so funny?

Three huge subreddits, r/pics, r/gifs, and r/aww, now only allow posts about comedian and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver. The subreddits have reopened after participating in the ongoing protests toward Reddit, and after each community polled users, the new rules are now in place.

The Verge

This is certainly precious. It is not, however, funny. Pixy Misa of Ambient Irony offered a take:

A timely reminder that while Reddit may be run by vapid radical left narcissists, so are most of the communities built on the platform.

Pixy Misa

When I read the Oliver-meme story, I thought of a quote I used recently in a Leaflet about Chat GPT threatening the livelihood of contract cheating writers. There is a certain quote attributed to Mr. Henry Kissinger about the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s:

It’s a pity they can’t both lose.

Henry Kissinger (maybe)

The real losers in this struggle are the people who shared (and share) interesting articles on Reddit and the moderators who lack excessive self-regard. While I have little interest in Reddit, I am interested in ways of sharing writing and information which focus on the individual writer. That is a subject I will write more about in the coming weeks and months.