Thanks for replying. I personally enjoy it more without the personal ranking system. I think it stopped a lot of people from contributing for fear of public (and evident) disapproval while giving some people motivation to flood the site with low quality content just for the points. I still like the up/downvotes though but as a metric for the content, not the user.

In your own personal opinion, what’s the motivation for keeping an eye on karma? How would the experience change if you didn’t have the possibility of racking up points/karma at all?

Thanks a lot for the explanation!

This, this and this. Remember this? That’s what we’ll look like to future generations when they look back at our Metagram Tweet Toks*

Noob question here. Does that mean each instance must hold the totality of the content it knows about?

You might be right. I’m new here but so far I’m amused and surprised by the amount of ‘classic’ memes going around.

I think for many of us in the mid 30s early 40s it boils down to having experienced a version of the Internet where content was king, not personality. Anyone could get their website out there but it was what you put in it that mattered, not who put it there (unless you were an actual celebrity). You could bump into all sorts of new information just by clicking from link to link. Then we saw and experienced first hand the rise of the search algorithms, the echo chambers, click bait and the cult to fluff that social media became pretty much since the beginning.

The Internet we have now is certainly shinnier but only the way plastic is. When I look at the information being churned out and that gets passed around more often I can only think about it in terms of pollution. The equivalent of styrofoam pellets being manufactured for single immediate use that cover the information sphere and that just end up making people’s life worse in the long term. Twitter, Meta and the like (none holds a candle to TikTok though) are no different from the factories that have been spilling poison down the drain for decades. The latter pollute our physical space, the first pollute our emotional an mental environments.

I honestly don’t think I’m being a grumpy old fart (though I am). This is the reason I preferred reddit a while ago and why I now came here. It sort of feels like those days when ‘browsing’ was about stepping out of your own world experience and into completely different ones.

End of rant. Thanks if you made it here. :)