Reddit, established in 2005, marketing itself as the "frontpage of the [Internet](internet.md)", was an extremely successful, popular and a quite nice website for sharing links, ideas and leading discussions about them, before it got absolutely destroyed by [capitalists](capitalism.md) right before they year 2020. It used to be a forum with great amount of [free speech](free_speech.md) (see e.g. [beatingWomen subreddit](https://web.archive.org/web/20110429073233/reddit.com/r/beatingwomen)) and with quite enjoyable, plain user interface; in a swift turn of events however it flipped completely over and is now among the worst, most [censored](censorship.dm) sites on the whole [web](www.md), a place [toxic](toxic.md) with [SJW](sjw.md) fumes and its site is literally unusable for the amount of [bloat](bloat.md) and [ads](marketing.md) it employs. Never visit the site if you don't have to.
Reddit users are the kind of "moderate rebels", the sort of absolutely insignificant people who think they're doing heroic acts by changing a profile picture or sharing a mildly unpopular opinion on [Facebook](facebook.md), like "I actually think [piracy](piracy.md) is not bad! Take this [corporations](corporation.md)!". [Nowadays](21st_century.md) the users are exclusively [SJWs](sjw.md), all the popular post are attempts at [virtue signaling](virtue_signaling.md) and circlejerking, you'll find annoying propaganda inserted into absolutely unrelated subreddits, e.g. in a subreddit for sharing interesting pictures the all time top post will be something like a motivational tweet by Zelenski or some other [gay](gay.md) (of course there are now annoying sponsored posts inserted in too, literally makes you wanna [kill yourself](kys.md)). Very infamous are for example reddit [atheists](atheism.md) who are very enlightened by Neil De Grass documentaries, they don't understand how a medieval peasant could believe in irrational things, conform to orthodox preaching and participate in witch hunts, but if you suggest [removing the age of consent](pedophilia.md) or opposing [feminism](feminism.md) they pick up the torches and go full angry mob yelling "Stone that heretic to death!" That's because they're just trained to react to [key words](shortcut_thinking.md), they can't do much more.
Before the infamous censorship wave circa 2019 reddit used to be quite a beautiful place to behold, truly an experience unlike anything else (maybe a bit comparable to [Usenet](usenet.md)). { I used to actually love reddit, sad it died. ~drummyfish } It's hard to sum up to someone who didn't experience reddit back then, it found a great mix of excellent ideas that just worked great together, a combination mainly of [free speech](free_speech.md) (that's completely gone now, it's almost comical to remember reddit used to be one of the "bastions of free speech" back then), nice minimalist user interface (also gone now), having many subforums for all kinds of niche communities, even the smallest you can imagine (like people who like round objects or people who try to talk without using some specific letter because they hate it etc.), sharing of [interesting](interesting.md) links and/or ideas, having a non-traditional comment system structured as a [tree](tree.md) and letting people vote on both posts and individual comments to bring up the ones they found most valuable (i.e. informative, funny, interesting etc.). Users also gathered so called "karma", a kind of points they accumulated for getting upvotes, so users had some sort of "level" -- the more karma, the more "elite" the user was (users could also gift so called *reddit gold* for excellent posts, basically giving the user a free premium account for a while); this often led to so called **karma whoring**, i.e. things like [clickbaits](clickbait.md), virtue signaling posts and basically the lame stuff you'd often see on [Facebook](facebook.md), something highly criticized for example by [4chan](4chan.md). Anyway, reddit was like an whole new Internet within the Internet, it was just a place where you could spend hours searching and discovering things you didn't even know you wanted to find -- any hobby or any detail you had a morbid curiosity about you could dig up on reddit, you could find large interviews with ambulance drivers who told fascinating stories they saw during their careers, schizophrenic people answering questions like "can you walk through the imaginary people you see?", discussions like "what's the weirdest thing that happened to you as a beekeeper", people digging out extremely weird videos on YouTube, solving mysteries in video games, even famous people like Barak Obama took part in reddit IAMA interviews and just answered all the weird questions the internet asked them. There were also porn communities and controversial communities like *r/watchpeopledie* where users just shared videos of people dying { This was my favorite, seeing people die and suffer was actually what led me to completely reject all violence later on in my life. ~drummyfish }. This was sort of the vanilla reddit experience. However, as they always do, money and [pseudoleftists](pseudoleft.md) soon swiftly killed all of this, a few greedy faggots just destroyed it all so that they could get even richer than they already were.
What was the big moment? Basically in 2019 reddit presented one the most visible, greatest examples of a **profit motivated 180 degree turn from a [free speech](free_speech.md) site to a [censorship](censorship.md) dictatorship** -- as some cock invested money to reddit, the reddit CEO just said yeah, let's make this advertisement friendly and ban all free speech on the site; there were hilarious historical moments like Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of the site, saying "we never intended reddit to be the bastion of free speech" while someone actually found a quote of him saying the exact opposite in the past :D This shitstorm resulted in one of the greatest disasters to ever have happened on the Internet. Subreddits such as *r/politicallyincorrect*, *r/Offensive_Wallpapers*, *r/watchpeopledie*, *r/necrophilia*, *r/PicsOfHorseVaginas*, *r/sjwhate*, *r/lovenotacrime*, *r/fatpeoplehate* and THOUSANDS of others were all banned (you can probably still find them in archives, but you can no longer discuss of course). Of course those who criticized this were just banned too, anyone who showed a dislike of this got a "fuck you bitch" message from a mod with a swift ban. People not familiar with reddit or Internet too much perhaps didn't notice too much, but to an Internet citizen this was comparable to something like the Pope one day waking up, admitting to [atheism](atheism.md), dressing up as [Voldemort](hitler.md) and starting to masturbate on the balcony, cumming on people while promoting nuclear war, all because someone paid him $1 to do it. Of course this was completely expected under [capitalism](capitalism.md), reddit just showed a very rapid, "we don't give a shit about users or society or anything but money" kind of step, one that must show clear as day even to any blind idiot what capitalism really is about. After this many people left reddit for good { Including me. ~drummyfish }, some migrated to alternative sites like [Voat](voat.md), but it was never what it used to be, communities were fragmented and they mostly degenerated to small groups bitching about how reddit fucked up. At least it's a great lesson learned about "free market" society.
Reddit had an extreme number of own [memes](meme.md), [historical](history.md) events, famous users, inside [jokes](jokes.md) and jargon -- it was kind of like a whole country. Especially notable are the [acronyms](acronym.md) that come from subreddit names and which reddit guys use in normal speech, like AMA (ask me anything), TIL (today I learned), TIFU (today I fucked up) or ELI5 (explain like I'm 5) etc.
Reddit is a famous rival to [4chan](4chan.md), it's basically the [pseudoleftist](pseudoleft.md) forum vs the [rightist](left_right.md) forum -- the forums trashtalk each other, raid each other, make fun of each other and so on.
