1. Started a small mutual fund and retirement fund when I was just starting out and still in undergrad. I did not have much and was fully self sufficient. But someone came to my job and showed us how retirement plans worked and convinced me to start one. Same with a mutual fund. I never put more than $20-$40 in each because I didn’t have much but boy did that pay off.

2. I purchased a small condo in the city with some of the money I put away in #1. Just sold it recently (20 years after purchasing it; lived in it for 5 years, rented it out for a profit for 15 years). I made a lot of money off that sale. More money than I’ve ever seen at once.

3. My spouse and I have always lived below our means. Now we’re not frugal - we go out for nice dinners, travel, have kids. We also have good jobs. But, when we purchased a house we could have afforded to get one that was $600k and instead opted for a smaller townhome in a nice neighborhood for almost half the price. Living this way has paid off more than I could have ever imagined. Both of us don’t have to work. We travel whenever we want. We could technically both stop working in our 40s/50s and probably be fine. It’s a feeling of freedom. We’ve never over-extended ourselves. When our colleagues and friends were buying expensive homes and expensive cars and extending themselves, we just didn’t do that.

I starting using Reddit in 2010 or so when I was going through health issues and was looking for information. I became very active on Reddit over the years, occasionally helping to mod a couple of communities. I am not a hugely “online” person, but I loved Reddit as a source of information and advice from actual real people. Particularly for those of us living with chronic health conditions, Reddit in particular was hugely important.

But I don’t use Reddit anymore. The whole API fiasco was the last straw for me, and I also just didn’t see it remaining a vibrant place full of valuable information. So I deleted my accounts and left. Haven’t been back since.

I downloaded the public beta and so far it’s actually been really good. It appears to have solved an issue I had with Verizon reception so that’s nice. Loving all the little improvements.

Issues I’ve run into:

• if I try to rearrange my homescreens, it causes the phone to crash
• at first I could not pick a different Lock Screen but that issue sorted itself out after about an hour.
• occasionally the keyboard does not appear when I go to respond to a text message. But it’s not consistent and closing and reopening the messages app solves the problem.

So far battery life seems the same. My phone did run hot yesterday for a few hours after updating (which happens with every major update in my experience), but today it is normal temperature and running fine.

This is what gets me. Christian Selig pointed out in a number of interviews that Reddit could have easily made this work without alienating a huge segment of their user base. I get this vague feeling lately like CEOs are intentionally trying to tank their products, because no one so well paid could actually act so dumb.

Here’s my hope as a 40-something who came of age when the internet was just taking off.

I REALLY HOPE this is the push we need to move away from corporate-owned social media. I have high hopes for federated platforms and forums that are much more like what the internet was when it started (but better because now we have mobile devices).

I realize a lot of people see social media as being some evil thing, but we also fail to realize how much good it has done. Marginalized communities have come together online and formed real movements. People living with health conditions have been connected to one another for support and also life-changing resources and care. People who were isolated because of disability found communities.

I would like to see old-fashioned blogs and RSS make a comeback. I’d like to see forums and federated sites like Lemmy take off. I’d like to see social media sites that have been given way too much weight in society collapse. I don’t think government or reputable media outlets should ever be using a corporate for-profit entity as a means for distributing information.

Yes these are exactly the kinds of communities I’m hoping will get replicated on Lemmy.

Health-related communities, particularly those for specific medical conditions. Those are the communities that really become a lifeline for people, help them through diagnoses or just difficult times, and can serve as an excellent resource. I was active on r/diabetes_t1 on Reddit and am trying to get a community started here on Lenny.world (!T1diabetes).

I would love this! At least for Mastodon and Lemmy, which I consider somewhat similar. I use Mona for Mastodon and would love have a separate tab within that app for accessing Lemmy. I just really like the design and feature set of the app and having it extended to Lemmy would be so nice.

Too late for me. It’s just one other social media company subject to the whims of an irrational rich tech bro. Not interested in that whole scene anymore. Reddit is forever tarnished.

Ha, I used to have that same reaction! Had to turn my notifications off for exactly that reason.

That is a good point and I fully recognize it’s nearly impossible to draw the line somewhere. But this situation is just so extreme. Like it’s not just someone who went out on a boat, maybe got caught in bad weather because they weren’t paying attention to the forecast or didn’t make needed repairs on their boat and got stuck. Even if someone was out boating for leisure you could chalk it up to an honest mistake or just boneheaded decision. But there’s something about taking such a HUGE risk of intentionally paying $250k to go down to the ocean floor and then necessitating a harrowing rescue that puts so many other lives at risk that just seems incredibly different. It’s way beyond any line most reasonable people could even fathom.

Reality too is that there’s a good chance they won’t be found in time and I’m sure rescue crews know that. Just hope no one else here hurt in the process.

I think it’s a mentality that people tend to develop when they are insanely wealthy. This notion that because they have extreme wealth, nothing can touch them. I know a family who is very wealthy. The father does things all the time (extreme adventures and travel) that just seems incredibly dangerous. He seems unaware that these little adventures present danger that not even all the money in the world could save him from.

Highly doubt it. I’ve been watching coverage and it seems pretty unlikely they will be found before their oxygen runs out (assuming they are even still alive and haven’t died as a result of an implosion).

What irks me with all the coverage, however, is that no one is pointing out the potential harm to all the people involved in trying to rescue these people. The Coast Guard and other outfits undertaking the rescue attempts are put in danger the whole time they are out there. And of course there’s the cost involved as well.

I don’t care how much money I had, there’s no fucking way I would have gotten on that thing or done anything that involved going down into the ocean at that depth.

Reddit is only valuable because of the content users provide. If you don’t post valuable content, the site is worthless. Reddit can force subs back open, but they can’t force users to submit the content that makes the site valuable to begin with.

I think it’s certainly possible.

For people who were more than just the causal browser/lurker, Reddit was an amazing place to not only obtain information about very specific things, but also to connect with other people. I have type 1 diabetes and the ability to connect with other type 1 diabetics to commiserate, share information, and seek help on Reddit was like nothing else anywhere else on the internet. I have a few other niche interests that also only had communities on Reddit.

Years ago, these things (health conditions, niche interests, etc) all had their own separate forums scattered throughout the internet. One forum might have a few dozen people, one might have a hundred or so. But Reddit quickly became the central place where we could connect. Whereas forums could maybe attract a few hundred people, subreddits could connect with THOUSANDS. There’s not yet been anything else like it.

Unfortunately, we made the BIG mistake of relying on a for-profit, centrally owned company to function as a town square. Same with Twitter. We found value in sharing information and connecting through these platforms, only to get screwed over by billionaire CEOs.

Hopefully we have learned our lesson. Hopefully something comparable will take Reddit’s place. It’s not going to happen over time. I never expected Mastodon to replace Twitter overnight. But slowly, very slowly, at least some people are seeing the downfall of corporate social media and will hopefully slowly switch over to federated alternatives. I don’t think it will happen quickly, nor will it happen for everything. But I do think it’s already happening. And it will happen faster if we get some good mobile apps.

I have almost completely stopped using Reddit (and I was a huge Redditor for about 12 years). Since it was first released as a beta, I have only used Apollo. With that option soon gone, I decided it was just best to cut Reddit ties and switch over. Lemmy is not Reddit (yet), but I think once there are some decent third-party apps, it definitely has serious potential.

I think it’s the fallout of allowing private companies to monetize the internet. Way back in the early days of the internet, it was a pretty de-centralized experience. Then we started centralizing things, companies realized there was revenue to be made, and those companies (because they were corporations) valued the money over the people. Capitalism, basically. Only way to fight this is to take the internet back to what it was in about 2006.

If people don’t use Reddit or Twitter or Facebook, those companies have very little value. The value in any social media is generated by the people who use those things. If there’s no people, there’s no value.