I remember several years ago r/Casual Conversation was brimming with interesting and candid discussion. As it gained more and more traction I saw it go through the same evolution that killed r/IAmA and r/askreddit. More popularity means more traffic, more traffic means more posts, more posts means stricter moderating, stricter moderating means less “casual” posts. Before long it was just another upvote machine, and that’s when I dipped out.
So having said that, how is your morning going? Did you do anything cool this weekend?
Good! I had a comfortably lazy weekend- nothing special but hey that’s the beauty of it. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what “wasting time” actually means. If I spend an entire day reading a good book or binging a show I really like, is that waste of time? I would say no. But if I spend a whole day browsing memes, I feel like shit for not doing anything constructive with my time. So what’s the real difference? The Reddit exodus has lead me to try and spend my time more productively, but the older I get, the fuzzier the line gets between recreation and productivity. If I spend an hour watching a documentary about lions, I feel like I’m expanding my horizons. But you could say that since lions have no place in my day-to-day life, learning about them is a waste of my time. Knowing a bunch of stuff about lions is effectively just as useless as knowing a bunch of one-liners from action movies. I don’t really have a point to this, its just been on my mind lately.