@colinstu oh man, I had a lot of this at work.

I had to look up on how I could fix some programming related things, and Reddit came up many times in my search results, but all subs where privated.

Not that it was a really big issue or anything, but that's one big source of information just gone from the internet! (Well, at least until most of those subreddits unprivate)

Now imagine stack exchange (the biggest help source) going down... 

@colinstu

Alt Text:

@FreyjaErlings writes a series of tweets:

"Watching everyone slowly realize in realtime that reddit being down means a major source of practical knowledge and advice that is searchable on the general internet is gone, and so is everything that reddit had replaced.

"I have been yelling about walled gardens and the destruction of the internet so long that the internet decided to give everyone else an object lesson, or something.

"NOW let's talk about how the emergence of reddit as the central for all this was born out of search engines becoming less and less useful over time, eh? Feels like an exploitable niche"

@colinstu I love DIscord, and think it does a great job of recreating the sense of community-driven moderation that IRC used to have, but there's a 100% chance that its going to face this same problem someday, likely soon.

Platforms are just a terrible way to organize the Internet.

@colinstu Yuup. I search. for. everything.

Professionally, I solve complicated problems with poorly documented hardware and software. 80% of the time, or maybe more, someone has asked my exact question on a subreddit, and I can glean some really useful information from the post.

Just today, I'm already realizing how screwed I am.