For the first time in nearly 3 years I haven’t visited Reddit for 3 days. I can’t go back after realizing that Reddit has become little more than a propaganda/ advertising machine.

This is upsetting. As an information junkie, I adore Reddit, but that being said this isn’t my first flight from it. When I was younger I worried that anything I liked I was addicted to. This wasn’t the case, I simply had impulsive draws towards these things, like Reddit, Fallout 3, or Magic The Gathering. So I often ran from these things, in grand spectacle, making a show of going. I acted like I was the main character of a show, as many in their youth tend to emulate.

As I got older, and developed my self control muscles, these things held less sway over me. So I returned to things I loved.

This time I leave reddit simply because I discovered a grim truth. It’s little more than fluff. This is predictable, based off something I call the Cycle of Cool.

I am sure there is a more scientific name for this and I doubt I will be the first person to deal with the idea, yet here we are.

The COC starts when a novel thing is introduced in earnest. Sometimes its a website, a store, or a hobby. People flock to it craving something about it. I think it is the authenticity of it. For a small time it stays hidden, in hipster territory, eventually emigrating to the golden plains of popular. Sometimes it remains in this popular stage without getting bloated or corrupted, the Vlog Brothers are a good example of this, but more often that not, the thing begins to phase out the more divisive elements of itself.

First, the barrier to entry is effectively lower, and the specificity of the thing is disregarded, or to put it another way, the Vanilla stripe in the Neapolitan becomes markedly larger.

Next comes, the influx of capital. Living in a capitalist economic structure, the monetisation of popular things is near inevitable. Adverts pop up among the thing, and people begin to seek ways to eek a living out of it. This churning of the waters eventually attracts big fish, who buy the whole thing out, and often gut the heart out of it.

Those who were true to the original begin to leave, their passage is quiet, trickling, and decided. While the site might bloat and continue to grow, it grows without those people who loved it for what it was. Those people, march on, through the wastes of the new in search of a new promised land, in search of the next cool patch of ground.

We are losing. Friendly Fascism is winning. They understand it now. The internet is losing its wild west status. As I dig just a little deeper I see it. Arron Schwartz died, and Reddit soon decayed into a propaganda machine, 4Chan’s moot left the site, leaving it to moderators, why did he leave? Did he sell out? Was he threatened out? Who knows. What I do know is there is an unsettling manipulation of daily content, and that sites that used to tell the truth, are now bending it, and stifling descent. It’s unsettling how much like 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 the internet has become.

Websites are not immutable. This is one of their largest draws. They like so much of today embrace change. That being said I have seen websites crash and burn. Cracked.com used to be my premiere website, that site that was always open in a tab no matter what. Then, it began a long slow descent. Articles got less and less reliable, with the facts being cherry picked, and the sources interpreted more and more loosely.

This is the nature of things. as they become popular to grow more and more bland, and eventually turn into little more than hollow specters of their former selves. Sure, cracked.com still exists, but it isn’t the same goofball place  it was. It’s dead inside.

Unfortunately, it seems the internet’s mega giant Reddit, has begun to make it’s steady decline into nothing more than a facade of its former self.

Reddit, is a website that touts itself, unofficially, as a harbinger of democracy. Those posts that are most popular get pushed to the heap of content. Sometimes those posts are little more than fluff, other times they  deal with much more serious claims. But for the average user you can rely on the idea that the community has chosen the frontage content for better or for worse.

Or is it?

I have been a long time user of Reddit with several accounts. My newest one was an  effort to cultivate only content that I wanted to see, so I started by unsubscribing to all of the default sub-Reddits. A sub-Reddit for those who do not know, is a smaller section of Reddit, that tends towards one specific subject.

One of the more interesting sub-Reddits I came across is called Undelete. This particular forum’s self prescribed task is to track down popular content that was for some reason deleted by the administrators.

One of the posts most recently deleted outlines the descent of Reddit from haven of democracy to little more than a puppet of administrators. The veracity of the statements outlined in this post have yet to be tested as true, but the post is reinforced by Reddit’s covert punishment of the author.

According to the author  she or he has been shadow-banned. Meaning that while he or she can see  his or her posts, no one else can.

The points discussed within the post are troubling, and the reaction, the deletion and suspension of the author in a covert way, are troubling. One can say the website has some explaining to do.

I have struggled with depression since I was 13 years old. I did not know what it was called then. It was more just a crippling loneliness, a feeling I was unwanted or forgotten and through the years the condition did more to wreak havoc on my life then any other force, destroying relationships, causing health problems and loosing more friends than I care to count.

That said, when I caved and sought a therapist she encouraged me to be social. I decided the best way to do that was to get back into what I had called and addiction, Magic the Gathering.

I’d first left magic in huff because of my depression. I equated any loss with a personal attack, for me loosing was judgment, a reaffirmation of what I believed inside, that I was a loser, and any win was a fluke, the cards gave it to me. Every pack I did not pull a card worth more than the pack was a gut shot, proof god hated me. I was a mess, and I took it out on those around me, Including my first magic mentor, and a good friend that I grew to hate simply because he was a better player than me, and would say still is. The culmiation of this came when I lost to him on at friday night magic, our relationship already strained I threw a fit at loosing badly at draft, the situation was of course ridiculousness  My freind had put in the hours, researched how to draft m12, and picked an amazing deck out of the card pool, I had practiced but not as much as he had, and I was already in a bad mood drawing poorly, and again blaming either god or fate, I remeber now with a cringe saying “obviously something doesn’t want me to play magic.”

I walked away after getting 300 dollars deep in a then defunct Mage blade, deck. I did not do anything with magic, and I wanted nothing to do with it, I felt like an addict withdrawing, and I tore down all the posters and stopped playing it with my friends. I went into one of my classic tropes, the video game stupor. 5 hours daily of Skyrim later I was still unhappy and Finally caved and sought professional help.

My therapist told me I had to go be social. I had all but failed at it when I met a friend of mine randomly, he was working and told me about a new magic store in town that had just opened. I reluctantly visited, and my life has  been different ever since.

I found a new world, a world full of people who liked me, people who would teach me, and encourage me not to give up. Not only that I found myself wanting to learn about my hobby and so I became a student of the game. Magic began to teach me lessons, like focus on the present moment, persistence and practice pays off,  you don’t have to reinvent the wheel but sometimes it is fun to, and to never give up until the game is over.

Now, as I struggle onwards with depression I find myself less and less affected by it.