Half-Life is also my favorite. But incompetent? He graduated from MIT!

Seriously, what the fuck is this guy on? Do I want individual forums with independent communities and separate identities in each of them? You’re goddamn right I do!

Yeah, that’s bullshit. Early Reddit is probably best described as “libertarian” - not to be confused with the embarrassing Republican malapropism of the same name. Much of the community was not explicitly political, but they definitely held what would be called “liberal” beliefs by conservatives. /r/atheism used to be a default sub. Political issues of the time such as gay marriage, OWS, and universal health care all enjoyed popular support among the site’s community. The demographics of the site skewed young, educated, and technically inclined - /r/programming also used to be a default sub - so the whole site had a sort of “California liberal” vibe.

You can always tell a conservative who found Reddit during the /r/KotakuInAction/ and /r/the_donald era, because their memory of the site doesn’t go back any further than those shit-shows.

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I had a DOS version on a 3.5" floppy disk. I loved the MIDI music.

Does Diablo 3 count? It got panned at launch and I do understand why. The story was predictable and dumb. Making the whole game revolve around a damn auction house made it unsatisfying. But man, the game itself played so well - I loved smashing my way through a dungeon as fast as I could wiping whole screens at a time. And they did do “loot 2.0” with the expansion, which killed the auction house and made the gear you picked up actually worthwhile sometimes.

Diablo 4 feels kinda meh to me by comparison.

I played Guild Wars starting from the beta and loved it. I was super excited for the sequel - even bought the collector’s edition - but didn’t end up playing it that much.

A new version of the Lemmy server software was released recently, version 0.18. It appears that the Jerboa app is now expecting servers to be on that new version. It looks like you’re connecting to the lemmy.world server, which has not upgraded yet. They are waiting for a feature that won’t be ready until 0.18.1

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot you can do to fix this yourself - it’s up to the people administrating lemmy.world to upgrade their server when they’re ready.

IMO, Jerboa should not have locked out old versions so quickly.

I think reddit realized that having prominent subs posting photos of 14 year old girls wasn’t something they wanted to be in their public image at all

It’s basically a non-starter; all “free speech absolutist” websites are. I think Moot said that 4chan didn’t make any money because they were radioactive to advertisers. Voat died because they couldn’t attract advertisers. The remaining right-wing social media sites are all running at a loss as far as anyone can determine.

I don’t feel like reddit became hostile to conservatives as much as conservatives who were hostile showed up

Maybe a bad choice of words on my part. I 100% agree that conservatives basically invaded the site during the leadup to the 2016 election and proceeded to harass the existing user base until the admins were forced to step in. Even then the admins did the minimum they possibly could and slow-walked everything. Conservatives got every opportunity to course-correct and basically refused.

A lot of Reddit is hostile to conservatives now and they definitely earned that ire.

I’m not sure if /r/conservative even existed before ~2015.

That sub was created Jan 25, 2008. Interestingly enough, it seems /r/christianity was created at the same time. I don’t remember anyone being aware of either sub - much less caring about them - prior to /r/the_donald. Reddit was pretty fine with conservative subs before they started showing up in everybody’s gaming and knitting subs calling everybody cucks and baby murderers.

Personally I feel like a lot of it was organized astroturf, not even necessarily from inside the US.

Everything about the genesis of /r/the_donald feels like organized to me. That shit came out of nowhere. If I had to guess, it’s something similar to Steve Bannon’s strategy to target gamers and the gamergate fiasco.

When they first started joining Reddit, I thought of them as FaceBookers fleeing their parents and grandparents

The real first wave were Digg refugees, but there’s some truth to that. Millennials made heavy use of Facebook but largely abandoned the platform when their parents showed up. The only people I know who are still using Facebook are my boomer-aged parents and their friends.

I remember it mostly the way you do. It certainly wasn’t conservative in any sense of the word. Socially, /r/atheism was a default sub, most of the user base was LGBT friendly, and pornography was allowed. Economically, universal healthcare and the OWS protests were supported.

There was a libertarian-minded free-speech-absolutist streak, which is why things like /r/jailbait and /r/watchpeopledie were allowed. Some people like to blame the elimination of that type of stuff on “intolerant leftists” but in my estimation the real culprit there was the media catching wind and advertisers not wanting to advertise on sites with that sort of content.

In my opinion, Reddit became far more hostile to conservatives when /r/the_donald took off. That may be more a sign of the times than anything particular about Reddit; political engagement in general was rising during that time. But also most users didn’t really appreciate the way that sub manipulated Reddit’s algorithms, or being called “cuck” in their hobby subs.