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There’s More To The Reddit Meltdown Than Meets The Eye
A cross-functional, objective analysis of the Reddit scandal…
Anyone who still thinks the web is still what it was ten or twenty years ago, needs a reality-check. It’s not. Far from it. Having had the opportunity to grow up with the World Wide Web, I got to see it go from cradle to… whatever this is. That doesn’t make me special, of course, my entire generation has witnessed the same to some extent or another. We’ve seen the early static HTML pages go from tables, to using CSS, responsive design, Web 2.0, the rise of web apps, AMP apps, PWAs, and the hybridisation of native applications becoming just frontends for cloud services. We’ve seen them all, used them all, and we even buried some.
I still remember the first time I discovered the concept of a web forum. It was mind-blowing.
I suddenly had the freedom to communicate with people in a moderated space about all sorts of topics. In Romania, the biggest forum for us, tech nerds, was Softpedia’s Forum. Believe it or not, it’s still alive and well. You could call it Romania’s own Reddit, five years before Reddit was launched. Mock Eastern Europe all you like, but when it comes to IT and network infrastructure it was ahead of the West for nearly two decades, and in some ways, it still is. Long story short, forums quickly led me to blogging, doing online editorial work, and later — during the infancy of MOOCs — software development. Forums became uninteresting because I was looking for more structured forms of online publishing, and software development became interesting because I could suddenly control the entire pipeline, build the forums or build the platforms I was going to publish on.
Fast-forward to 2023…
The Reddit meltdown is particularly interesting to me, as it’s one of the oldest forms of online presence, still trying to put up a veritable fight in a very different world than the one it was born in.
