/r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification
I remember stumbling upon /r/antiwork a few years ago and being so happy I'd stumbled upon a thriving movement that so effectively criticized one of the core principles of society that everyone takes for granted - that everyone must effectively sell their labor to someone else (unless they're rich enough to opt out, or clever enough to create some business or invest their way out).To me anti-work is the recognition that forced wage labor is not acceptable, and that technological advancement and automation should enable greater freedom for individuals to spend their time how they choose. We could already have this reality today if we just implemented a universal basic income, but until the boomers retire from office that's just not happening.I haven't browsed the subreddit in forever but just took a look, and it's sad to see it's just a bunch of stupid memes now. Every decent subreddit eventually devolved into a bunch of stupid memes. Travel and digital nomad subreddits are just people posting Instagram style pictures of themselves or asking the same dumb questions over and over again. Crypto subreddits seem to consist primarily of 14 year olds asking "when moon".Reddit in 2008 was amazing - similar to Hacker News in comment quality (which has also lowered significantly). I watched the site devolve - with the advent of memes, pun threads (thankfully that's gone now), hivemind, and quality discourse being replaced by sarcastic low-effort one-liners and downvote sabotaging of any contrarian viewpoints regardless of the substance of one's post.We need better alternatives to Reddit, or Reddit needs to fix the mess because the post/comment quality there is straight trash there. All the default homepage subreddits are trash. I don't know how any co-founder of Reddit could look at Reddit today and be proud of what they've created knowing the forum of intelligent and productive discourse it could've been.