I remember Digg being as shitty a useless get-rich-quick non-idea fad as Reddit that I visited a total of 5 times during its lifespan. Both sites pitch link sharing as the most easy to implement possible thing you can do and still have a web 2.0 site; A way to justify the owner of the site being the king - i.e, the guy who gets all the profit from this. This and you can write one line comments on the links. After many revisions, you can now almost have the functionality of an ASCII text editor on these sites. It's a miracle that there is ever any good content on Reddit at all (well, actually it's just Murphy's law). If you are able to have a useful discussion on Reddit, you are literally abusing the platform for something it's not intended for. You get banned for saying anything neutral because the subs are full of circle jerking product consuming lowlifes who downvote you (not unlike the alcohol bar format) and when you get too many downvotes you cannot post anymore, and the UI makes it harder to read downvoted comments.

I don't see how investing in reddit is any different than any ill-designed shitcoin. It's literally just as useless. Unlike Dig, I actually came across reddit posts a total of 3 times in the last 15 years of my software engineering work when I had to look something up.

Web forums in the early 2000s were already a stupid design: You want to discuss a topic? You have to roll your own server and decide what ad-hoc protocol in the form of {phpbb,invpb,...} to use, then "grow" a "community" (aka the suckers who so happen to frequent your forum) and try to sustain it with. Then the mods eventually disagree with people due to human nature and long time users get banned? Literally open any old web forum ever and you will see tons of people with 10K posts that are banned because one day the mod felt like banning them forever. I really hate this stupid fucking community format, as I just want to discuss topics and I don't give 2 shits about who so happens to be the "official community". If I want to talk about my reverse engineering work, I really do not care what some moderators think about the way I talk; I just want to talk about my subject and let anyone who cares join the discussion. If people disagree with me because they don't like my spelling, they should block me one by one, not be decided by a centralized committee. It's amazing how many people have the opposite attitude, it's like they came on the internet thinking it's an extension of some social drama shit like high school.

Now let's look at Freenet: I press the "new forum" button and the topic is up forever as long as there is one person reading messages thus propagating them (at the end of the day any individual can backup whatever he cares about and restore it at a later date, all within the simple protocol) and moderation is done at the user end like it should be, by subscribing to filters. At least that's how i _think_ it works, you can never be sure with these kiddie p2p projects. Freenet is basically a hack around webshit but it gives an example of how things should work and how they could have worked 20 years ago if the US government didn't assassinate Napster and set forth millions of copyright / "CP" panic muppets to get outraged about the imaginary threat posed by data transmission.