Fair warning: today's new activity brought me into what are not--to the vast, surfing community probably--the deep, netherworlds of the internet, but about as deep as I'll ever want to go. It's not that anything weird was going on (not that I saw), but I'm only willing to travel so far along the road of internet terms and subcultures...for now I'm still liking what I can see and whom I can meet in the world of actual, physical things.
It started a few weeks ago when I was chatting with an old high school friend and used a pretty slangy term. It surprised him, owing (I'd assume) to the fact that I was 17 when we were last close. A lot can change in (haysoose kristo!) 16 years. His response to my use of this slang term was "you're the last person on earth I'd expect to say that. Next you're gonna tell me you're a Redditor."
My response to *that* was, "well zero chance of that, since I had to look up that term on urbandictionary.com just now," and that was the end of that part of the conversation. And while I did find the meaning of the term, I didn't investigate any further.
Today's New Activity: Trolling the Pages of Reddit.com
Ok. This is one of those things that apparently everybody else knew about and I was just in the dark on, because I could tell from both the urbandictionary.com and Wikipedia pages on the subject (as well as my own friend's reference to it) that reddit.com fanatics seem to have a special level in hell already reserved for them. They are those people whom other, non-Redditors seem to love to hate. But what is all this business about anyway?
So. Reddit.com is a website where registered users (Redditors) upload links to, well, just about anything you can imagine. I saw everything from wildlife photography to cartoons to edited-for-humor gifs and links to articles of all variety. Just anything that has the ability to entertain or inform was represented.
In a certain way it was cool. I mean I always wonder where those people who are CONSTANTLY posting links to things on Facebook (like all day every day) are getting them. Maybe they just drop by sites like this one for one-stop shopping.
I'm sure there must be all sorts of history to the site and its users that I'm not aware of and don't care enough about to research, because I came across the term "upboat" (a derogatory term to describe people who give lots of credit to redditors who post stuff that gets ranked highly (don't know the ranking system and don't care)). And apparently Redditors claimed at least partial credit for launching Stephen Colbert's "Restoring Truthiness" campaign, though the claims to credit weren't exactly echoed by him.
Anyway it was an interesting place to visit, but like most everything on the internet that has fervent followers, it did not captivate me such that I'll be joining the ranks. As it is I am beginning to feel overwhelmed by all the EVERYthing in my life that I need to do and want to do. I don't think adding another website to tool around and waste time on would be the best move right now.
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