TL;DR: We should bring blogs (self-publishing) back instead of putting all our knowledge into other people’s websites.
For years, people have posted their anecdotal or technical useful information on reddit because it was the most popular centralised but community-based website. So much that, this created the “<search query> + reddit” phenomenon.
We shouldn’t have put all of our eggs in one basket: with the slow and painful downfall of the centralised network, we suddenly realised that most of our cumulative knowledge has been hosted on someone else’s website of which owners don’t give a damn about its users.
reddit is a link aggregator, it was meant to be used to discover other websites but it time, it turned into the website. This was a massive problem. Now that we’ve got the threadiverse, it makes me worry that we’ll repeat the same mistake all over again.
Normally, I would’ve posted this on my blog and link it here but for years we’ve gotten accustomed to not “self-promote”. This behaviour caused all traffic and engagement to stay in one place. There was nothing wrong with self-publishing; we left, spammers stayed.
Yes, there will always be that person with a bloated Wordpress blog with articles that sound like it was written by AI but, honestly, it’s easy to block a domain, we’ve got the tools. We can fight off the spam and find gems on the internet.
The threadiverse is a beautiful thing, but accessing information shouldn’t depend on it. Thanks for reading my blog post.
I don’t think the upvote/downvote system has merit in accuracy of information. It’s just what is popular with the hive-mind. My time with Reddit has shown me people barely click through links, let alone able to discern what is factually correct. I’ve seen Redditors upvote things that are in my domain of expertise that were just flat out wrong. Also, Reddit is federated by moderators of individual subs, so it’s not that different than what we have here.
But site reliability is certainly something Reddit has over the Fediverse. It may not be as resilient, but just like all major platforms, having a single master of information like Reddit invites enshitification.