It’s hard to beat GIMP.

I don’t think people actually would, if push came to shove. They’re just expressing nostalgia for a simpler time, which is pretty easy to understand, given all the dystopian effects of social media and smartphones.

I think smartphones have done a lot of harm, but they’ve still done far more good, which is why we use them. Especially in poorer countries where smartphones are often people’s only access to the internet.

That said, there’s nothing stopping any of these people in the article from being the change they want to see in the world. Not to send anybody to Reddit, but r/dumbphones is a fast growing subreddit for people that want to try that. A lot of the users are Gen Z who never got to try them and want to give it a whirl.

I think the “metaverse” is already dead. Zuckerberg tried to make it happen and it didn’t, and Meta doesn’t have the money to keep pumping into it. I think Meta will still produce the Quest headsets as a cheap alternative to the new Apple ones, but the idea of just hanging out in the metaverse is simply not going to happen.

I don’t know whether the Fediverse will “happen” for the vast majority of people who aren’t very tech savvy, but I’m enjoying it and it’s replaced Reddit for me.

If anything is going to be the next big thing in tech though, it’s AI. The fact that my 65+ year old parents know what ChatGPT is, and have used it, is unreal to me.

I really owe Steve one for opening my eyes to Lemmy. I’ll certainly never go back to Reddit, other than perhaps the occasional Google search for an IT question somebody solved 10 years ago.

But as far as actively contributing? Having a Reddit account? Nope, I’m done. I was very active on Reddit, and I haven’t posted since the announcement.

But despite me and many others leaving, I really feel for Christian and the other developers. They really got fucked. The 30 day turnaround was an absurd notice to give someone, and Steve didn’t have any defense to give for that, according to this article. He seems like a really ruthless, uncaring person.

He definitely has a choice. As a founder of Reddit, if he really believed that this was the wrong move, he could refuse to do something he disagreed with and make the board essentially have to fire him.

I walked away from a well paying job myself several years ago because I disagreed morally with choices being made by the company. It is absolutely something that people can do, especially someone of his means.

Unfortunately we live in a society where it’s easy to separate responsibility for actions taken at work with actions taken personally; indeed, that is the whole premise of a limited liability company. But I still hold Steve personally responsible for his choices, and I think he is selling out the values of Reddit, and his own values if he ever had any, for money.

Drug dealer character Stringer Bell in ‘The Wire’ had a good scene where he talked about the business strategy of repackaging and renaming something when you are unable to raise the quality of a product. Just rename it and customers think it’s better.