I stopped using upvotes/downvotes at all on Reddit. Unless you were on New, exclusively, it didn’t matter how often you got on Reddit, anything you were seeing was at least fifteen hours old. Any conversation was already done. Any up/downvotes you put in wouldn’t matter at all and probably just got ignored by the system. Anything you had to say would only appear to you, in reality it just dropped to the bottom of the sea, never again to be seen. Thousands had already spoken, somehow, and you were just walking through a snapshot of the past, already said and done.
For now, it’s much smaller here. Sometimes I find myself upvoting a post just to let the person know that somebody actually came in here and gave a fuck about what they had to say, that they aren’t talking to themselves in an empty room.
It makes sense to care a bit more, for a lot of reasons. We’ll see how long that vibe can sustain itself.
I miss the internet where we tricked our friends into looking at a picture of a man’s gaping asshole with zero consequences instead of the one where you have to put a little manual strike through “tits” just in case somewhere an algorithm will autoban you for it.
Honestly who keeps doing that crap because things aren’t that locked down fuck sake.