About a month ago, I got locked out of my Reddit account. I tried my password to no avail; I checked any device I should’ve been logged in on; no dice. I was pretty sure I knew my password, but I was starting to doubt it. No problem, I’ll just hit the password reset—only the email never came.
This is when I started to realize something was wrong.
At first, I assumed it was my mistake, and started to second-guess myself. Had I actually changed the password to something randomized and couldn’t remember? Had I just been relying on autofill? Had I ever even connected my email account to my reddit account? I sent a message to support, but never heard back. After about a week, I was convinced it was never coming back. I started to realize I had somehow been hacked. I remember checking the link for my profile and seeing someone had switched it to private.
I was bummed. It felt stupid to be so bummed about losing access to something laughable like a website account, especially Reddit—but I’d had that account for fourteen years. I’d hit the homepage before. I’d made thousands of comments and posts. And now, I was faced with the possibility of it being all gone.
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I’m sort of in the middle generation with social media. People younger than me grew up with it: the internet and even social media was ubiquitous by the time they were really making memories. People older than me remember a time truly without it. I remember having a computer at home for about as long as I can remember, but it was just a device in the basement, a tool of my dad’s work. We got computers at school eventually. I got my first cell phone when I was in middle school—fairly early for my peers—and my first smartphone sometime in high school.
I don’t remember signing up for my Reddit account, but I remember registering for YouTube. I couldn’t tell you who I’m subscribed to (I’m all-in on recommendations), but I’ve basically never deleted a video from my “Favorites”; if you scroll back far enough, you can see the kind of stuff I favorited as a kid: drumming content, large explosions—just guys being dudes. (Similarly, I have very little idea what subreddits I’m a member of, so that list is its own timecapsule.)
Eventually, I did get in contact with a kind admin, who helped me get back in. I had to delete some likely-AI generated comments (I’m a baseball guy, not a basketball guy—I do not and have never had an opinion on Steph Curry), but thankfully nothing incendiary. I’ve started to use the account again, but trepidatious, as if easing my way into cold water.
Admittedly, my Reddit usage has started to wane, focusing mostly on a couple of subreddits rather than being the start and end of my online presence. Being away from Reddit was a bummer, but it might’ve pushed me even a step further away. But it also made me think about how fragile all this is. As the internet has gotten more and more narrow, more siloed, a huge percentage of my internet usage is tied up in a handful of “social media” sites. When one thread starts to fray, the whole tapestry goes pretty quick.
My Reddit usage has gone down from its peak (somehow, I’m not going to pretend I’m not still a pretty prolific user), but it’s still the central node in a lot of my online life. It’s more or less the center of my baseball fandom (alongside Fangraphs, my beloved), and I still regularly browse /r/anime and /r/leica, among others. It’s the first place I turn if I have a question about something, especially a hobby, and the first place I’d go to ask a question (I suspect many of you are already appending “reddit” to your Google searches).
Reddit’s never really figured out a way to make any money besides ads, or ways of mobilizing its vast userbase and chokehold over the topic-focused discussions it usurped from forums. But it’s still a single, centralized site. There’s still a handful of popular fan-sites on probably any topic, but completely losing access would really suck.
Ultimately, this is a personal issue, a sole vulnerability that locked me out of a single account, rather than a systemic issue, but it just highlighted to me how fragile this little network is. I could get my daily dose of baseball, anime, and underwater basket weaving content elsewhere, and like I wrote about recently, prioritizing these might be for the best. But it also wants me to think about ways to build a more resilient network.
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