this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Agreed. I miss things about reddit with its communities. There are parts of that browsing experience that a smaller userbase is simply unable to replace.
At the same time I have too much disgust with what happened to go crawling back because I need my content fix like some kind of addict. I mainly enjoyed Reddit for the long story posts on things like AskReddit or HobbyDrama, but it's not like Reddit has a monopoly on "lots of text you can read".
I've swapped over to reading ebooks instead, which I had entirely ceased doing since Reddit, and it's been wonderful getting back in touch with that. After all these years I'd somehow never read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for example, so as one door closes another opens. It's no true replacement, I did prefer the short story style of AskReddit and HobbyDrama, but it's not bad enough that I'll lose sight of why I left.
Honestly I miss reddit circa 2015. Obviously before The Idiot and half the world lurching toward fascism - but also back when "fuck off, Nazi" was treated better than being a goddamn Nazi.
The proliferation of "civility" is poisonous to online discourse. It is always the wrong metric. Trolls love being polite monsters. r/Politics even went a step further and demanded all opinions be taken in good faith. Do those idiots know what trolling is? Do they not understand bad faith... as a concept? It only works because people mistake it for good faith. Demanding everyone do that is a gift to trolls.
Moderation requires common-sense identification of who's being an asshole. It's never about no-no words. If a script could handle the job, we would let it.
Lemmy has far too many communities with rules going 'never be rude to anyone ever!!!' and then zero enforcement when someone calls you a cunt for gently correcting their grammar. That is the worst of both worlds. Anyone sincerely trying is going to hold back from just dealing with assholes appropriately, like an adult, but those people are then left with no recourse against pointlessly toxic shitheads. I don't want a screaming match. I want words to matter.
Also if you enjoy Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett has a similar deep snark. Discworld's a whole mess of books but you can kinda jump in anywhere. I recommend Guards! Guards! or Going Postal. He did Good Omens with baby Neal Gaiman, and they'd write chapters separately, then throw out every joke they'd bought thought of.
You're right about moderation, but I think it's actually not an easy feat for someone to have really well-tuned common sense when it comes to tone over text. I know a lot of people in real life who text like total dismissive assholes, and if I didn't actually know them I'd think they were being dickwads because they speak in real life completely different to how they type online.
Since ebooks have taken over my casual text consumption, would you say Discworld is accessible enough to just go from the beginning? There's a lot of books in there, but I wouldn't mind having all that to cruise through over a long term.
Dismissive dickwad behavior is good, actually - if you're dismissing Nazis. Or anyone else who deserves a blunt rejection. It is fine and valid to deny people civility, when their rhetoric is inherently abusive. Respect and patience have limits.
Swearing at people absofuckinglutely has its place in online discourse. If not for the assholes themselves - then for the people they're trying to fool.
Anyway.
Discworld has a few parallel threads. Release order starts with The Colour Of Magic, which is fun and short, but not exactly top-notch material. See explanatory flowchart. Those first few novels have a real Season One vibe.
The traditional introduction seems to be whichever book catches your eye. Or whichever you happened to find first, if you'd heard good things about the series. That's how I wound up reading Ringworld by Larry Niven, because cultivating your interests in the 90s was a much fuzzier experience.