As Facebook has devolved into a cesspool of hatred, disinformation, misinformation, corporate control, and nonsensical AI-generated reels, there is one social media site that more or less remains true to the promise of the early internet as a democratizing source of open information, now sadly swallowed whole by other interests.
I barely knew what Reddit was until a couple of years ago. It even looks like a holdover from earlier times, crude and kind of klugey. In short, it’s quintessentially human.
Yes, you can still find all the cesspool elements of other social media sites there, but it’s segregated into subreddits (communities, so to speak), so you have to go looking for it.
A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about deleting my Facebook account, but I have yet to figure out what I’m going to do about the years of content. I have no idea what exists elsewhere nor have I decided if it matters.
In the meantime, I’m just not looking at it much and rarely post anything or respond to other people’s posts (as tempting as it is sometimes to want to futilely wade into the idiocy).
Mostly, I now use it for my interest groups (bass players, Newfoundland dog owners etc.) and chatting on messenger with people I don’t have on other, better, chat platforms.
I find myself more and more turning to Reddit for community and entertainment.
There’s even a great podcast called Smosh Reads Reddit Stories in which the host, Shayne Topp, reads stories people have posted to the site, then he and his two guests dissect them and the comments.
Sadly, though, just as I am discovering this possible alternative to other social platforms, it is also starting to show signs of being consumed by AI in two ways.
The first is systemic. Like Facebook, Google and everybody else, Reddit has introduced Reddit Answers, basically an AI chatbot. These bots are basically replacing search functions and promise to be more robust, but, of course, they suffer from being indiscriminate in the answers they produce.
The other, perhaps bigger, problem is users generating their stories and answers using AI platforms such as ChatGPT. It’s getting more and more difficult to tell if you’re actually interacting with people or whether anything you read or see is real.
Social media has always been kind of an artificial stand-in for real human interaction, but even it is becoming more artificial every day.
It’s discouraging, but perhaps the most human thing of all is tearing down promising developments.
