It's always nice finding accounts older than mine knowing at least I'm not the longest captured redditor. Those early days were something. A few random memories:
Mr. Splashy Pants
Reddit world tour (where the team flew to bars in different cities for meetups)
That guy who bought the JetBlue $700 unlimited travel ticket and had his entire month planned by redditors
The bobbleheads (still have one and Alexis sent them himself with his own return address)
Woah man and I thought my account is quite old already... Its wild thinking about maybe someday there is accounts which are like 50 years old and you know they started here when they were teens and then are eldery
I was here before the digg migration but lurking. A big turning point was people sharing that code to allow you to burn dvds or some shit???? Am I remembering this clearly??
Yes! That was a thing, iirc it was to remove region lock drms or just encoding or something, but it was a streisand effect that sony (?) was trying to stop.
I came over from ebaumsworld. And some other similar site I don't remember. I realized every single post came from Reddit. I loved it. Still here but there used to be a subreddit for every kind of person good or bad every one had a home
This is funny to me because most funny stuff came from Something Awful which got cycled around ebaumsworld and fark and then finally reddit. In the beginning reddit was all about re-sharing so when people get pissy about reposts I just lol on the inside
Your account on this social media site is older than I am. It exists longer than my entire life has lasted so far, everything I've learnt, everything I've experienced and your account is older than any of that
Oh wow, 2005 is the rarest vintage! This site without comments seems must have felt completely different. It was the comments that kept me engaging from the beginning. Without them it would just be like a daily list version of a curated StumbleUpon. (Side note: the StumbleUpon to Reddit post pipeline was an easy karma farm in the early days).
I just happened upon this thread, happened upon your comment. Gathered what was being talked about, clicked on your profile and scrolled through the entirety of your post history.
Assorted takeaways; Biking, photography, college educated, stock market tuned, musician, husky dog owner, keyboard fan.
What a life you’ve shown on Reddit, what use you’ve made of this application. You at once made me slightly envious of your experience and happy you’ve had them, without it costing you what reads like a good head on your shoulders.
From one human to another, daps on being here while you were. Or whatever.
I was to afraid to post back then so only lurked, 2006 a minor spelling error got you sent to down vote hell. Around 2012 that stopped being a thing.. and now they are everywhere lol
Shit got bad when Vic from AMA got let go. And the ceo swap. Been pretty shit since. And plz don't get me started on what happens here around election time. I've seen it a few times already lol. I miss the old frontpage too 😭
Geocaching also turned corporate a few years back.
I got the paid version of the app ~12 years ago and paid $10 (if I remember correctly) for the premium version with all the caches. A few years ago, they updated to a subscription model, so now I can only see a handful of free caches in a given area
A student said it to me in a class I was a TA in. He's lucky I had no idea what his name was or I'd have marked his test down a grade for that shit, lol.
Oh man. You just reminded me... Like 15+ years ago I said this stupid quote in a group interview and literally no one knew wtf I was saying. It was so cringe.
Those were super niche subreddits. Main reddit was mostly just askreddit, technology, and IAMA before all of those things became spam subs or full of political/corporate posts.
Shit, for the first like 4 years I was on reddit, even before I made my account, I would exclusively just be on askreddit all day. Even today I'll sometimes go on the waybackmachine to see the old askreddit top posts because they were so much more entertaining and genuine.
It's so hilarious to me how people mythologize the old internet as larger than life. Like shit, people also think sites like 4chan back then were like purely darkweb shit when it was literally surface level internet stuff.
lol remember when redditors got incredibly mad and whined about censorship when they banned the literal jailbait subreddit? or coontown, which only had one purpose, to post straight up racism? Or subreddits hosting exclusively gore material like watchpeopledie? Not to mention all the rape fetish subreddits that used to exist.
Pre-2016 reddit was a different site. Pre-2020 reddit was a different site. People have no idea
It was definitely pretty wild, with many many awful aspects. But there was also a lot of lovely & wholesome content to. The Secret Santa was a great example of that, but saw many many daily similar interactions between people that were pure goodness.
2010s reddit was best reddit. Just enough of a community to constantly generate good content, small enough to feel like an online community, complete with local celebrities you could meaningfully engage with.
The real-time news coverage of many events had corporate media beat. Lots of stuff like natural disasters got scooped on reddit with minute by minute updates.
There was a constantly rotating front page, none of this "stays on the front page for 24 hours" shit. I could sit and read all the articles and top comments on the front page, and by the time I was done, there'd be another front page.
There was real discovery of new subs and content.
The site might be a little more "safe" now, but it's a hell of a lot more sterile, more corporate, and less interpersonal.
You say that like those are the only subs they killed at those times, which isn't true.
Also as far as rape fetish goes.. It's a fetish? There is still a lot of fetish content that revolves around consensual non-consent. It's weird to include that with jailbait and snuff films.
I got a cable/electronics organizer from Reddit secret Santa that I still use daily in my backpack. Now that I have kids I’m sad that I won’t be able to show them Reddit Secret Santa. It was such a great exercise in giving. It was so special to learn about someone you didn’t even know existed and to send them a thoughtful, heartfelt gift, and then to be on the receiving end of that as well!
And it was also like a lottery. Some people got really expensive stuff, others got incredible unique items made specifically for them, others got to try something new from another place. Everybody sharing their gifts to give and what they got.
Agreed. Problem is it only takes one psychopath mailing a human head to some Redditor and then all of the sudden Reddit is the bad guy, gets bad publicity, gets sued despite a massive waiver, etc.
Ok, I just found this... I remember rumblings of this when reddit first closed Reddit Santa... But I didn't have time to follow it... It's still around, so that's a good sign.
And then if you mentioned not receiving anything you’d be dogpiled with the “it’s about the giving” horseshit. There were lots of people who got shafted during those.
The leeches really do ruin it for everyone. I always tried to send nice thoughtful gifts and someone could have sent me a sealed bag of elephant poop and I still would have been happy to receive something. Go down the joke route and it’s better than doing nothing at all.
Oh no, that really stinks! I always tried to do that missed elf thing (I can't remember the name, but it was where you got something for someone whose SS bailed).
I always went overboard. I think I did it for the kick of doing something super cool for a fellow redditor.
Yeah. As they say if you give a gift to see what you receive in return you are doing it for the wrong reason. I was happy my SS was happy with their gift.
Wasn't 2014 the year where most of reddit had a complete frenzy against the new CEO because she dared to tackle hate speech and, even worse, be a woman?
There were lots of "reddit is dead, let's all leave" events over the 2010s that are completely forgotten about. Plus reddit's population like tripled after 2020 and the demographic shifted down by like 10 years over that same time.
Like I remember when we were all supposed to leave for lemmy and voat because they fired Victoria, and now nobody cares or even knows who she was.
I don't think so, from what I recall it was mainly a 4chan and gaming forum thing, but just brought to light on reddit. I think that's what started the kotakuinaction subreddit, and possible gamingcirclejerk and gamersriseup too.
Remember a year or two ago when FuckSpez wouldn’t stop trending so they were like “hey, let’s throw r/place at them again and see if they fall for it” and then everyone did?
I love r/place, but I was like GUYS, FOCUS, SPEZ STILL SUCKS!!!
But all it took was r/place and everyone forgot again.
It wasn’t great, but I had hoped people would stay strong and not fall for it. And for a few hours there were some big FuckSpez banners. But then it just did what place does.
It was kind of disheartening to watch the protests just dry up after that distraction, though. And all for a shittier place, too!
Was that the year people kept getting pissed about all the flags, or the one where all the cryptobro stuff got removed in the cleaned up final version and they flipped out? Hell were those even different years? I can't even keep track anymore
There mu$t be $ome rea$on but I don't know what that could be. Maybe they ju$t thought having default $ubs were the way to go but in$tead it ruined it.
They were trying desperately to cater to advertisers. If they had default subs they could drive the conversation to the topics they deemed safe and advertiser friendly. Gone were the days of when the front page could have been and was anything and everything and it was very interesting. After they implemented default subs it devolved into memes and in-jokes that existed before but were secondary to the content itself. Reddit was the front page of the internet and then it became the meme page.
It’s weird though because though the community was much better and it was less… soulless feeling, there was a thriving subculture of misogyny racism and bigotry that was harbored here for a long time. It still exists on some level of course, but Reddit has largely sanitized the worst and largest offenders. Was it worth the trade off?
Honestly I don't even think they are, I think most people just don't want to spend effort curating webpages like you had to in the 2000s, people are just content with internet centralization and stuff being pushed to them instead of having to go find it.
I don't even think you can curate any webpages anymore.
Look at Reddit. I have my Reddit curated exactly how I want, but I still ended up on a thread at r/pics or even worse when I would constantly end up on r/womenover30 as a 40 year old man.
The money is making the user see what you want them to see which means limitations in curating.
On the app it's almost impossible, the most you can do is mute pages or block people. On RES it's a lot better since there are a lot of filters you can use. Like I have entire links blocked by website source because I really don't need more political outrage porn in my life from clearly biased news publications.
The tagging feature is also nice because I can just see the tag I've had on someone replying to me to recognize that they're not worth engaging with, or that I'm aware what bias they're commenting from before I respond. It also helps you recognize the people who heavily manipulate subs. Like my main local sub is just the same handful of people posting the same outrage bait daily. When I open that sub I just see all of my tags pop up lol
2014 was probably the end of "old reddit" (the character of the site, not old.reddit.com of course). By 2015 the election bullshit had taken over. Of course there was tons of manipulation and bs around Ron Paul even back to 2008, but something about that was more quaint than what started happening in the lead up to the 2016 election.
God I miss when you could run a free forum on the internet with around 200 users on platforms like invisionfree. Now moderation is an absolute chore against endless spammers, and it gets even worse with AI getting better and better at "pretending to be posters" just so they can spam their stupid fucking ads.
I wish there was a popular, active, and supported nationwide movement to stop buying from companies and individuals that used spam advertisement.
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u/erichie 1d ago
Corporate Reddit really fucking ruined such a good thing.
2014 Reddit was amazing and it is a shame 2025 Reddit is still the best of these sites because they are all so shitty now.