Redwhat?

So it’s been a month now and I’m still trying to decide if I should keep my Reddit account or just delete it.

I’ve signed up for a couple of forums so far, mostly vintage photos but a few others. Some of them I’ve deleted because there is only so much one-upmanship I can take now that I have graduated from middle school, and others I’ve just stopped looking at because mostly they’re full of people telling other people everything that is wrong with what they just did. The vintage photo ones are mostly still fun, though an increasing percentage of them are clearly modern AI forgeries and that annoys me.

The more I deal with AI, the more I think that particular genie needs to be stuffed back in the bottle and fired into the nearest star along with most of the soulless tech bros who promote it and the plagiarists and bullshit artists who use it. As one meme I saw put it, AI has accidentally made me believe in the existence of the human soul because I’ve seen what art looks like without it.

I have made a total of one comment so far in my Reddit experience – a recommendation for Hank’s Skedatil sauce in a hot sauce forum, in response to a question that was explicitly looking for such recommendations. It’s a great hot sauce if you’re looking for something that is tasty and won’t rip your lips off, which isn’t really what most of the people on that forum want if their posts are anything to go by. Mostly there’s a lot of preening along the lines of “This stuff is also used for crowd control in a number of police states, but I found it too weak to put on my pizza” and so on. It took several days for my comment to post because apparently you can’t just post things – you have to be approved to post things. I understand this, as it keeps the nonsense to a minimum, though it does make me question the approval process for some of the things I’ve read.

I think my comment got an upvote, though I don’t know if that was from someone else or if I just accidentally clicked on something (can you upvote your own post?), and I don’t know how one would go about checking that. I suppose it’s moot now. That was a week or so ago – an eternity in internet time – and nobody but me remembers that thread ever existed now.

I think the hardest thing about Reddit is that it feels like you’re standing at the edge of a vast sea of, well, not quite knowledge but at least information, with no particular way to find any of it. There’s no real index. I haven't figured out how to see a list of the things I've signed up for. You can search for topics, but I haven’t really found the tricks that one is supposed to use to get any meaningful results from those searches and in any event every time I stare at the home page my mind goes blank and I forget everything I was ever interested in.

My life chugged along just fine for decades without Reddit, even if you limit that to my internet life, and I don’t think I’d miss it if I just walked away.

But so many people keep telling me that it’s this cornucopia of information, amusement, random nonsense, and/or train-wreck fascination that I keep thinking I’ll give it another day, another few days, just to see if any of that materializes.

We’ll see.