Hello! Welcome to rDrama! What follows is a brief rundown of key features and mechanics of the site to help ease users into their time here. Whether a dry, enormous wall of text is the best method of providing that is debatable, but at the very least it should serve as a handy reference material for some parties. There are no jokes or wit to be found on this page: this is strictly dry documentation.

Dramaconomy

The economy of the platform, built on a pair of proprietary fiat currencies. This economy is the foundation of the platform, and virtually all user actions are taken out of a desire for personal enrichment.

Currency

• Dramacoin (dc) - The primary currency, somewhat analogous to karma. One (1) dramacoin is awarded to a user for every vote they get on a post or comment. Upvotes and downvotes both pay 1dc, except during "double xp" events which are exactly what they sound like. Other methods of amassing dramacoin include, but are not limited to, Marsey submissions, the casino, the lottershe, hat commissions, betting threads, user exchanges, treasure chests.

• Marseybux (mb) - The premium currency. Marseybux spend exactly the same as dramacoin, with the only exceptions being the Grass Award. Marseybux are given out in tiered monthly stipends to paypigs (among other benefits) of rDrama's Gumroad. Marseybux are also the usual currency for payouts of site contests, events, and coding bounties.
  
  
  

The Shops

rDrama has two shops, which will be discussed in this section.

• Award Shop - The Award Shop is divided into three aisles: Graphical, Status Effect, and Profile Upgrade.
  Graphical awards make obnoxious graphics appear on posts. Each item includes a description of its effect, but, for example, the Wholesome award will make the Marsey variant of the Reddit Wholesome Seal (Tene) float around the screen and bounce off the walls. Applying more Wholesome awards to that thread will add more wholesome seals. All graphical awards stack (with the exception of Confetti), usually up to 5. Graphical awards also pay the recipient (unless self-awarded) 10% of the award's cost.
  Status Effects apply a status to the recipient for a set duration of time, also explained in the item description. The Ban award bans the recipient for 24 hours, the Pizzashill award requires the recipient to make their comments a minimum of 280 characters for 24 hours in honor of our long-time incel longposter @pizzashill, the Marsey award only lets the recipient type in Marsey emojis for 24 hours, and so on. Each House also has 1 House-specific award at the time of this writing, though that number will increase in the future.
  And, finally, Profile Upgrades are expensive, high-end items that will permanently improve the recipient's site experience and give them an animated profile badge related to the upgrade. This ranges from admin-tier powers such as permanent Unblockable status, the inability for people to unfollow the recipient, an unmuteable profile anthem, the ability to see users' alts, to view private profiles, and more. All dramacoin spent in the Award Shop is recorded and at certain intervals, profile badges are awarded and each tier grants the user a permanent 2% discount at the Award Shop.

• Hat Shop - The Hat Shop is an inconveniently large collection of user-submitted, Carp-approved hats that users can buy to wear on their avatar. Static hats are 500dc/mb each, animated ones are 1000dc/mb each. Hats are equipped after being purchased by pressing the "Equip" button, and an unlimited number of hats can be worn. It will cycle through them at random with each pageload. Hat designers receive 10% of the sale price for each sale of one of their designs. Purchasing hats also drives up the hat collection tally on the buyer's profile, and at certain intervals (capping at 250), users are automatically granted hat collector profile badges.
  
  
  

The Casino

Marsey's Palace, rDrama's very own digital casino, has four games at the time of this writing. Total winnings (or losses) are tracked on users' profiles, and daily as well as all-time leaderboards are found on each game's page. There are plans for more in the near-ish future, including Marsey racing, peer-to-peer poker, and craps, as well as an in-casino shop that will allow for unique skins for slot machines, custom decks of cards, and more.

• Roulette - Users bet on a variety of outcomes upon which the roulette wheel can stop, with variable payouts based on odds. Unlimited bets can be placed. Results come in every five minutes and are constant across the site.

• Blackjack - Get closer to 21 than the dealer without going over. Dealer stands on 17. This is not pure RNG; we use four decks and they are literally shuffled. It is not rigged and it does not learn from you. It is pure math.

• Slots - Slot machines don't require an explanation as far as I'm concerned. Odds are fixed and each spin is entirely random based on those odds, with a variety of possible combinations and payouts. A jackpot feature will be added.

• Lottershe - The lottery. Buy tickets, make the jackpot increase. One lucky user will be awarded the entire thing every 10 days, along with a profile badge indicating their immense skill.
  
  
  

Miscellaneous Economy

• Every comment a user makes has a 1:100 chance of generating a treasure chest or a mimic. Treasure awards the user 1-1000 dramacoin, mimics will steal 1-500.

• Every approved Marsey submission pays 250 dramacoin to the artist. Marseys are discussed later in this document.

• Administrators will occasionally host betting threads for sporting events, spree shooter racial identities and victim counts, election results, and drunken whims. Bets are a flat 200dc each, and all users who voted for the winning choice receive the total amount bet divided equally among them.

• Every profile has a "Send Dramacoin" and "Send Marseybux" button and users frequently solicit goods and services in exchange for currency.

• There are, somewhat obviously, other minor ways in which currency is earned and spent, but those are relative edge cases and will be mentioned as necessary throughout this document.
  
  
  
  

User Experience

Profile/Identity

Users have robust customization options, for both their chosen outward "aesthetic" and for their own personal site experience. This section deals with the first tab of the Settings Page.

• Theme - Users can select from a number of starkly different and visually pleasing themes, from the retro Win98, to the retrofuture Tron, to the simple yet elegant Coffee and Dramblr to 4chan and beyond.

• Background - Users have the option to set a background to fill the whitespace should they so choose, either one of many preset backgrounds, or, for paypigs, the ability to upload their own. These can be either static or animated.

• House - Users have the option of joining one of four rDrama Houses, which will be discussed later in this document.

• Profile Picture - The user's avatar or "pfp" - self-explanatory. This can be animated or static.

• Banner - Also self-explanatory. The banner at the top of a user's profile and the popout module when their name is clicked. Static or animated.

• Username - Users have the ability to change their username at any time and at no cost. The original username is always reserved to them. The next field allows for customizing the color of one's username.

• Pronouns - In the interest of maximum inclusivity, rDrama allows for users to set any pronouns they desire in this field. Pronouns cap at 5 characters each, but if one has a specific neopronoun that is longer, administrative exceptions can be made.

• Flair - A short message that appears beside your name, maximum of 100 characters. Site emojis and regular emojis are allowed and encouraged. The next flair allows for choosing the color of one's flair.

• Profile Anthem - A song that autoplays on a user's profile. This can be done by simply inputting a YouTube URL, or via direct MP3 upload.

• Bio - Self-explanatory. Tell the website about yourself, or insult them.

• Friends and Enemies - Perhaps even more self-explanatory. Tell the world who you love and hate. Users are notified if they are listed as a friend or an enemy.

• Signature - A paypig-only feature, and a throwback to the forums of yesteryear.

• Private Mode - Hide your post history from both search engines and other users. Users with the All-Seeing Eye profile upgrade can see through this.

• Spider - A friendly spider will crawl across your screen when you are browsing rDrama.

• Filters - Users can disable both slurs and profanity should they so choose. rDrama shibboleths will also automatically replace a number of words and terms with the Slur Filter enabled. Both are enabled by default and disabling them is discouraged so as not to take the internet so seriously.
  
  
  

In-Depth Experience

• Advanced Settings - Users also have access to a number of customization options for browsing and off-site links via the Advanced Settings Page, such as Reddit and Twitter replacers (i.e. reveddit, unddit, nitter, etc.), the number of threads per page, the ability to disable the flashier graphical effects here for lower-end hardware, and so on. Each option is explained in full on the Advanced Settings Page and will not be repeated here.

• Custom CSS - From the CSS Page, users can add custom CSS to both their profile for all users to truly make it their own, and edit the site's CSS itself for their local viewing experience.
  
  
  

Badges

rDrama users have a particular fondness for collecting Profile Badges - small graphics indicating an achievement, contributing art to the site, highly visible bait, being featured in news articles, participation in an event, an admin's lust for them, and other such things. A full list of badges can be found here. New badges are issued relatively often and displayed at all times on the popout profile module, and user profiles themselves.

Leaderboards

The Leaderboards can be accessed via the Trophy icon in the topnav on desktop, or bottomnav on mobile. Users can see where they stack up against their digital peers in a growing number of categories. There is currently no benefit to Leaderboard placement beyond bragging rights, but this is planned to change in the future.

Markdown/Posting

Users have a number of options to visually spruce up their posts as well as adding interesting mechanics to them. These can be found under any comment or thread entry field by clicking "Formatting help". This document will provide an overview of common actions. Users familiar with Reddit markdown will be aware of a number of these already.

• Bold/Italics - Surrounding text with ** on each side will make it bold, and * on each side will italicize it. For example: **bold** *italics* would show as bold italics.

• Linebreaks - Users can add extra linebreaks to post with standard HTML by typing <BR>. Pressing the Enter/Return key will only result in a single linebreak.

• Hyperlinks - Links can be added to a thread or comment via HTML, or with markdown like this: [This will link to Google](https://google.com) will appear as This will link to Google.

• Media - Pictures and videos can be included in threads and comments as well, in two different ways. The simplest way is to just upload the media directly to the post via the Photo icon underneath the text entry field. Third-party media can be embedded with markdown as follows: https://imgur.com/example.png Note the exclamation point in the beginning, the empty brackets, and the image hotlink in the parentheses. YouTube URLs and Imgur URLs will automatically embed the media without any markdown, however.

• Patting - Users have the option of giving a reassuring fondling to their peers. For example, if one wishes to pat the writer of this documentation, one would simply type :@carpathianfloristpat:. It is always just colon, at sign, username, with pat at the end, followed by another colon. This will appear as .

• Polls - Users can include polls in their threads and comments by surrounding poll options, each on their own line, with either && or $$. The ampersand is single-choice, the dollar sign is multiple choice. Poll option formatting would be $$Choice A$$ and so on to allow for users to choose "Choice A" along with other choices, or &&Choice A&& to restrict users to only one choice.

• Headers - Users can include headers or large text of varying sizes by including one or several hashtags/number signs at the beginning of the line, followed by a space. Sizes range from 1-6, with 1 being the largest, 6 being the smallest. So for a very large header, one would put the following text on its own line: # Large header whereas for a smaller header, one could do ### Smaller header or ##### Even smaller header.

• Spoilers - Spoilers can be hidden by surrounding text with two absolute value signs on each side. The author of this document was going to include an example, but codeblock markdown doesn't play nicely with spoiler markdown.

• Pings - Users can ping one another in the expected manner, by simply typing @username which will notify the user as well as link to their profile.

• Ping Groups - Ping Groups are groups of users who can be pinged by typing !pinggroupname to notify everyone in that Ping Group. Existing Ping Groups can be joined or browsed from the sidebar, or by clicking here. So, for example, to ping every member of the Chuds Ping Groups, one would simply type !chuds which will appear as !chuds and notify every member that they have been mentioned. Pinging Ping Groups which one is not a member of costs 5dc per recipient and pays it to them in order to minimize spam.

• RNG features - rDrama has taken and improved 4chan's greentext and #fortune commands, while also adding #roll and #factcheck. Users can get their fortune, roll a four-digit number, or factcheck a post by adding the requisite command anywhere in their thread or comment.
  
  
  
  

Holes

Holes are rDrama's equivalent of subreddits, and the author of this document has a tremendously low opinion of them.

• Cost - Holes cost 50,000dc to create.

• Expiration - If a Hole has no new posts in any 7-day period, it is automatically deleted. There are no refunds. The creator is, however, granted the rare Hole Neglecter badge.

• Subscribing - In order to subscribe to a Hole, users must navigate to the Hole itself (/h/toomanyxchromosomes, for example) and click "Follow Hole" at the top of the page. This will notify the user when a new thread is posted there. One can then unsubscribe by pressing the Unsubscribe button that it will change to.

• Restricted Holes - Some Holes are restricted by default, meaning one must opt into them (above) for their posts to be visible. All Hole owners have the option to restrict their Holes, though some such as /h/chudrama, are both restricted and gated behind a 1488 Truescore (total votes received) requirement.

• Aesthetics - Hole moderators and owners can change everything about their Hole, from the CSS for all users, to the Marsey at the top of the page, to the sidebar image, and more. A battery of custom @Snappy quotes is available on request.

• Moderation - As would be expected, Hole owners can appoint moderators, and these moderators can exile people from the Hole. Un-Holed posts can be moved to the Hole by reporting them with /h/HOLENAME, and posts can be removed from a hole by a moderator reporting the post with /h/.
  
  
  
  

Holigays & Events

rDrama has events, both recurring and one-off, which change the site in varying ways. These include, but are not limited to, double XP (2x coins per vote received), event-specific banners, forced themes and soundtracks, limited time cosmetic awards, a badge for all existing users commemorating the event, and more. A list of some rDrama Holigays follows.

• Homoween - rDrama's first ever Holigay, runs throughout the month of October. Homoween is a big deal. A sitewide playlist plays on every page, the layout is completely redone with a dynamic banner that changes as the big day draws near, there are around a dozen seasonal awards, new badges are everywhere, and as of Homoween '22 there is the beloved ZIPOCalypse game in which Zombies battle the Vaxxmaxxed.

• Fistmas - Christmas! Another big one, similar to Homoween in terms of temporary features, although Christmas-themed instead of horror-themed. Runs throughout December.

• New Queers - Immediately following Fistmas is the New Queers bash. User-submitted yearly banners, double XP, and discounts on celebratory graphic awards.

• Donkey Kong December - Runs every year from April 2nd to May 9th. Browse rDrama with a custom Donkey Kong playlist, special awards, DK-specific art and more.

• Black History Month - Users who aren't confirmed Black are required to buy an N-Word Pass from the Item Shop in order to be able to say nigger. N-Word Pass proceeds are paid to confirmed Black users at the end of the month as reparations. POC-themed banners also replace the usual roster.

• rDrama's Birthgay Bash - Every year in May, rDrama celebrates its birthday. New, permanent celebratory awards are released, a commemorative badge is issued to all users, and Double XP coupled with shop discounts ensures visual chaos.

• The Gaythering of the Juggalos - rDrama proudly stands with los and lettes around the world and is down with the clown until we are six feet in the ground, ninja. Expect Double XP, Dark Carnival-themed usernames, and clown banners.

• Future - Future Holigays are planned to be added to the roster as available man hours dictate. These include, but are not limited to: a week celebrating /u/Bardfinn's birthday, Ramadan (Ramranchadan), Thanksgiving (Spanksgiving), May Day (May Gay, an LGBT-themed communist event), and an unnamed Fourth of July event.
  
  
  
  

Art As A Feature

The full rDrama experience is built on user-submitted art in three primary categories. This section will address that content.

Marseys - Marsey is that adorable orange-and-white cat you have surely noticed all over the place by now. There are over 2,000 variants of Marsey in emoji form usable across the site, and countless hundreds of others in our banners and sidebar images. Artistically inclined users are strongly encouraged to create their own Marseys and submit them via the Marsey Submission Form with a name and tags (in order to be easily found when using the Emoji Picker). Marsey Artists get a profile badge for their first, tenth, and hundredth approved Marsey. Holigay-themed Marseys during their respective events also earn a unique badge for that event that year.

Banners - The long, horizontal image at the top of every page announcing where on the internet the viewer is: rDrama.net. Users are encouraged to create and submit their own banners by uploading them here. Note that banner artists receive a profile badge for their first approved banner, and rDrama routinely hosts events soliciting banners around particular themes in which users can earn a limited time badge and/or Marseybux payouts.

Sidebar - Each page also has a fun image in the sidebar. As with the above two items, sidebar images are user-generated and submit here. A successful sidebar submission earns the Sidebar Artist profile badge.

Chudrama

rDrama, while a self-proclaimed “fun speech” rather than “free speech” platform does seek to allow established members to express whatever legal opinions they desire. Upon reaching 100 truescore, /h/chudrama is accessible and can be added to a user's main feed and notifications via the Unblock button at the top of the page. In Chudrama, any opinion goes. The slur filter is disabled, the Chud Award and admin-imposed Chud status effect both do not apply and users cannot be labeled chuds via content in Chudrama. Viewer discretion is advised.

Houses

As with the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, rDrama users have the chance to join one of four unique Houses. These are, in no particular order: Vampire, Furry, Racist, and Femboy. At the time of this writing, House functionality is fairly limited although there are plans to significantly expand it. Current features and a few upcoming ones are detailed below.

• House Icon - Members of each House have a small icon beside their username indicating their allegiance. Founders of each House (i.e. all of the original members at inception) have the same icon but with a crown above it. Changing Houses removes the crown.

• House-Specific Awards - Each House currently has access to one (1) award unique to that house which will cause a thematically appropriate status effect to the recipient for a period of time. More House-specific awards are planned, but ihatecodersihatecodersihatecodersihatecodersihatecoders development is on hold due to a temporary manpower shortage.

• House Cup - Borrowing further from the Wizarding World, the rDrama Houses will soon be locked into a fierce competition for seasonal supremacy. Details to be announced as development time permits.

• Sorting Ceremony - A Sorting Hat-style quiz is in the works for users upon account creation which will automatically sort them into the most fitting house.
  
  
  
  

Chat

rDrama has a native chat feature in development and currently in a usable, though user-neglected state. Chat is accessed via the chat icon (topnav on desktop, bottomnav on mobile), or by visiting https://rdrama.net/chat. Occasionally, during big real-world events such as sports championships and high profile court cases, chat will be converted into an Orgy in which the event in question is streamed and as users watch and comment together on events as they play out. Contrasted to regular chat, Orgies typically see triple-digit turnout. New features are in the works for chat as a whole, although at present, this requires a dev proficient in React, which rDrama lacks.

Moderation

While rDrama is by no means a free speech platform, it does strive to eradicate the contemporary internet-wide problem of incompetent and abusive moderators.

• Modlog - All moderator actions are logged and publicly visible to all members, accessible at https://rdrama.net/log. Users can sort by moderator, by action, and by action taken by a specific moderator. rDrama prides itself on holding unpaid internet janitors accountable for their actions.

• Banned Users - A full list of banned users can also be accessed from that page, including username, date of ban, duration of ban, and the moderator responsible. Unban Awards from the shop lower the duration of both user- and moderator-imposed bans by 24 hours each.
  
  
  
  

Archives

A record of all historical posts in some of rDrama's subreddits pre-migration can be accessed at https://rdrama.net/archives. Currently, this consists of /r/drama, /r/deuxrama, /r/dosrama, /r/zweirama and /r/dtama along with the full logs of the 2021 NNN Reddit powermod Discord server that rDrama compromised and leaked. Additional subs can be added provided there is sufficient interest.

Source

rDrama is free and open source and a staunch supporter of open source software in general. After being banned from GitHub, the repo was moved to rDrama's own Gitea instance at https://fsdfsd.net/rDrama/rDrama. Users are welcome and encouraged to submit their own changes and to peruse the source at their leisure.

Changelog

It is recommended that users visit /h/changelog and press the bell button at the top to follow it, as substantial updates and changes are logged there for user visibility and as a means of soliciting feedback from the community.
As of 25 April 2023, changelog entries are now recorded in this thread, to which users can subscribe for realtime updates. Less substantial changes are logged here, contrasted to the former /h/changelog Hole in which only fairly large updates were posted.

Mass Casualty Event Events

rDrama leans heavily into coping with the incomprehensibly tragic absurdity of modernity by making sport of it whenever possible. Mass casualty events—typically spree shootings and their inevitable rapid politicization—are thus the subject of routine administrator-hosted betting threads as to the identity and/or motive of the perpetrator, allowing for users to profit from the tragedy while chronicling and later ridiculing the wild speculation across social media and the American news cycle in the immediate, chaotic aftermath of the event. The default template of options and a brief explanation of the rules can be accessed here, for reference.

This is to be considered a living document and will be added to and updated as needed.

v1.06 | documented the changelog restructuring, corrected event dates, updated Marseybux limitations to only be Grass Awards; minor formatting changes

Here's a Eurobeat song about Marsey trolling on the internet

Here's some folk songs about !jinxthinkers

I was looking for the origin of "lunchtime rowdies" and found this super active site. Apparently economists don't have much real work to do so they spend their time gossiping, hating on minorities and shitposting.

It's legit economists

Random shitposts

So much racism against

Their snappy is various versions of "tell your mom"

Funny shit on there, check it out.

Note: The UI is older than digg, zero images, completely opaque upvote and username system. Probably impossible to infiltrate

What is a redditor? Is it a person that merely uses reddit? Or are there spiritual qualities of a person that makes them a redditor? Can a person be a redditor without using reddit? Can a person use reddit without being a redditor? I ask because the term "redditor" has become mixed up in a whole lot of other ideas, including consumerism, soullessness, atheism, etc.

I'm interested in your opinions, so please leave a comment below. As for me, here's my current theory on what makes a redditor...

1. Complete Deference To Mainstream Opinion: Modern redditors will almost always follow the general thrust of mainstream opinion. I hope that my readers will understand that I'm not referring to whoever holds the most power in society - this is a thing that swings back and forth as time goes on - but rather what are considered generally acceptable opinions, especially as expressed by the media and corporate interests. Having mainstream opinions is not unusual, obviously (otherwise they wouldn't be mainstream, right?), but what is unusual is complete deference to those opinions. Most people have at least some thought process and disagreements with mainstream consensus.

2. Celebration of Dweebishness: I don't mean that redditors are dweebs - many of them are, but that's not the point. Everyone has low points, everyone feels afraid or sad or lazy at times. The difference between a normal person and a redditor is that redditors celebrate their own dweebishness. They celebrate their lowliness and refuse to even consider changing. There is a psychological element of inferiority at play here. They don't think they are capable of being better, and they are afraid of failing in the process of being better, so they linger in a familiar heck.

3. Rejection of Normalcy: This is the other side of Point 2. Anything that is things that "other people" do is instantly negative. Sports, Family, Popular social media, Religion, Homeownership, and being well groomed are all classic examples. Again, the hatred of these things is mostly a reflection of their own sense of inferiority. They don't think they can be normal, and thinking about themselves in comparison to others makes them feel inferior, so they reject normalcy as a whole.

4. Obsession with Objectivity: In any issue, redditors believe, if something can't be proven with logic, it is worthless and even harmful. The biggest example of this is reddit's neurodivergent atheism. They don't just not believe in God, they are obsessed with their lack of belief in God. For instance, getting pissy when someone says "Thank God". To put it another way - they only live in their Ego Mind. They've cut off any connection to anything deeper within themselves, chalking any conflict up to a variety of mental illnesses (see also: point 2). Another example is living in pods. "Living in pods is more economical and better for the environment. It's dehumanizing, you say? I'm going to need a source for that claim. Clearly, you're being irrational, so you are mentally ill, so you will need to take some anti-depressants."

5. Pseudo-Anonymity: On reddit, you don't form connections with individuals, you form connections with content. It would be extremely unusual on reddit to remember someone's username and think of them as an individual user with idiosyncrasies and tastes. The difference between reddit and 4chan, however, is that anons are literally anonymous, and suffer no real repercussions for acting strangely, whereas on reddit you get punished, both by karma and being banned. There's two sides of this - on the one hand, reddit as a website encourages this with the technical details of the website, where usernames are small and they all look the same. On the other hand, all redditors act in essentially the same way. They have the same opinions and behaviors. This, of course, ends up leaking into the rest of their lives.

6. Obsession with Things apart from their Intrinsic Qualities: This is a super-wordy way to describe "franchise consumerism", because the consoomer meme doesn't capture the absurdity of these people. Consider Star Wars, for instance. The original Star Wars trilogy were genuinely good - not in a nerdy sci-fi sense, but just as movies. There had lovable characters, an engaging plot, a simple theme about good and evil with a little bit of heroes journey stuff. Star Wars fanboys, however, don't care about the movie, they care about the franchise. They think that it was the laser swords and jedi that made Star Wars good, so they consume any piece of media that has laser swords and jedi - for instance, the Prequels and the Sequels. Another example is LotR - one of the greatest pieces of fantasy ever written, with masterful and poetic writing and themes about how insignificant people can play a big role in resisting evil - is reduced down to the setting and characters and "lore", so they obsess over any piece of media with those elements.

7. General Sense of Negativity, Dread, and Cynicism: Redditors are negative about everything, unless it is one of their pet obsessions. Everything is going down the drain in the world for redditors. The greedy corporations are actively ruining X, before long X will be gone, X isn't even that good anyways, X used to be good but now it isn't. The world is a few years away from ending and we will all starve to death, earth is overpopulated so anyone having children is evil, even if we get our guys into office, the other guys will ruin it from the shadows. Nothing is good about the world, everything is 100% bleak. Ironically, the best example of this is the opposite: /r/WholesomeMemes, which is a response to this overwhelming sentiment. Even the posts about hecking doggos are laced with a bitter irony or two-facedness - this is all just a short distraction until we return to our nihilistic existence. This contributes to Point 6, because redditors try to escape this with muh nostalgia and returning to an "idyllic youth". It is contributed to by 2 and 4, because being so obsessed with their ego mind, they are unable to accept their own flaws. I think their is a psychological element here as well, where redditors project their own flawed state onto the world at large.

8. Humor is Repeating Things: Redditors think that the peak of comedy is repeating things. They make references, quote movies, etc. Outside of that, their comedy is post-ironic self-reference to - you guessed it - other funny things. This is the notion of a circlejerk.

9. They think they are significant: To be fair, reddit has 50 million daily visitors. However, only 1% of those users comment every month. That leaves us with 500,000 active redditors worldwide. If all of those redditors were in the United States, they would make up just over a thousandth of a percent of the population. (Assuming US population is 330 million). Any redditor that you see calling for a revolution is calling for 0.001% of the population to go against the other 99.999%. They have no power whatsoever.

Tldr

Man buys over a million cds, Vinyls, and cassettes from a failed company in an attempt to start the company over again. Abandons his family and buys and moves into a warehouse in another state in one of the most violent cities in America. Spends over half a million dollars to get cockblocked by the city for zoning violations and gets robbed over 30+ times. He sneeds about the city and it's inhabitants on twitter documenting his journey. He's also trying to build a fusion reactor and a science museum in the city

MY CASSETTES!

Backstory

Murfie was a startup company that focused on the digitization of physical media into digital media. People would send their CDs, Vinyls, and cassettes, which the company would store in their warehouse and rip the contents onto their own platform for people to stream. Murfie even allowed people to buy and sell with other users on their platform.

During sometime during early November, the company asked all of it's current customers to make sure they renewed their current subscription before November 17th. No more than 5 days later, the company sent out an email to it's customers saying that the compnay was ceasing all operations including the website. This abrupt shutdown shocked everyone, that even that former CEO had one idea what had happened .

The situation only continued to spiral out of control. Murfies ToS had a clause that promised its customers that they would return all of their physical media in the case the company shut down (For a small shipping fee of course ), but with all of their services down, customers had no way of getting back their cassettes and cds. In total, there were close to a million CDs, cassestes, and Vinyls left somewhere in limbo. Unsurprisingly, people were soying out about this:

😢 Our first “startup” client was Murfie. We’re super proud of being part of their story, and our world is better off because of their music-ownership-focused journey.

They have my 100+ cd's and $1000+ dollars. nothing to be proud of if they leave people in a lurch.

At this point everyone had lost hope that they wouldn't get their stuff back. Until one determined man showed up.

John Fenley

SHOW MORE

I did a poll a while back asking what I should write about. Surprisingly "my old boomer times" won by a large margin. So I present you with a history of MUDs, the thinking man's multiplayer game.

Telnet

Back in the 1800s (yes, that's how far back I'm going) Americans invented all kinds of awesome things: telephones, machine guns, movie cameras, record players. Two of these devices, the typewriter and the telegraph, were combined into something even more powerful. The keyboard of one typewriter sent electrical signals to control a typewriter at a distant location. This was known as teletype. It's how big organizations like militaries and multinational corporations sent data for about a century.

Teletype Model 33.

Eventually Americans invented even more cool stuff like mainframe computers capable of doing time sharing. This meant they could respond almost instantly. You could connect a teletype to the computer but that was suboptimal as the teletype couldn't print as fast as the computer could think. So the printer was replaced with a video screen, and now you had a dumb terminal. It could show text on a screen and accept text input but that was about it. These came into use in the 1970s among big organizations that could afford to pay for the luxury.

A DEC VT100 terminal. This is the standard terminal that's emulated in software.

Another revolution quickly followed in the 1980s with microcomputers, little computers so cheap that an individual person could own one. These were not very powerful at first but they were smart enough to pretend they were a dumb terminal and connect to mainframe. It's a computer emulating a terminal emulating a teletype.

Telnet being used for something more serious.

Why waste your time with this history lesson? It's important to understand the environment we're dealing with here. The Telnet protocol that you use to connect to a MUD is all about text. The technical details of how it gets from one place to another are more advanced, but in the end it's just alphanumeric characters going in and out like a machine from the 1800s.

Gaymers Rise Up

As universities got mainframes capable of time sharing, computer games soon followed. Among the most revolutionary was 1976's Colossal Cave Adventure. The player explores a cave system made up of a network of rooms. Each room has a text description and it can have items in it for the player to pick up. The player gives commands by simply typing in what they want to do. Many more games following this formula followed and the text adventure genre was born.

Don't get eaten by a grue.

Zork was among the most popular of these new games. Some nerd at the University of Essex loved to play a version of it called Dungeon. In 1978 he decided to make a multiplayer game based on it, which he naturally called Multi User Dungeon, and the MUD was born. In 1980 the university was connected to the internet, exposing MUD to the whole world.

UNIX Nerds Emerge

The roots of the MUD genre were now firmly planted but it would be many years before it bloomed. There were a number of technical obstacles which made it prohibitively expensive for all but a lucky few to play MUDs. The internet was only available at a few dozen universities and major computer companies, most of which frowned on using it for monkey business like playing games. By the late 1980s there were several MUDs running on commercial networks like CompuServe and AOL but these charged obscene amounts for connection time. Microcomputers like the PC became available but were still far too expensive for an ordinary family to get just to play games. A modem had to be purchased separately and these were incredibly slow and expensive as well.

Remember how to calculate your THAC0.

Despite these challenges, the 1980s saw great progress. A new nerd monoculture was sprouting in America and Europe, one that would prove to be fertile ground for the emergence of MUDs. The UNIX operating system and C language were taking over university computer science programs replacing a hodgepodge of weird proprietary systems. This made it much easier to share code, which would be crucial in the golden age of MUDs. There was compatibility in culture as well. Every nerd liked The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons.

Explosion

Ultimately MUDs would explode in popularity not because of some revolutionary idea from a creative genius but simply because computers got better and cheaper over the years. By 1995 you could get a Windows PC with a modem for a reasonable price. The fiber optic backbone of the internet was laid and in the early 1990s the government allowed it to be used for commercial purposes. University computers became powerful enough that running a MUD wasn't too big a drain on resources.

Around 1990 a few free (as in Richard Stallman eating something off his foot and calling it "GNU") MUDs appear. Most MUDs in the future are descendants of these, especially the enormously influential DikuMUD. However there are also all kinds of MUDs with their own unique codebase, some of them quite bizarre like one based on LISP. The most enduring are true labors of love, often based in a university computer science department and passed down from one class of students to the next.

A map of the city of Midgaard. DikuMUDs generally kept the same layout.

Some MUDs were for roleplaying. You were expected to stay in character pretending you were an elf or a Romulan or something. As shameful and embarrassing as it was to engage in this type of behavior, it had a charm. You were essentially cooperating with the other players to write a story in real time. If nothing else, you could learn how to write quickly under time pressure. Some of these artsy-fartsy type MUDs let you create your own areas and even program them. It was kind of like Second Life except without graphics or Bardfinn. With no graphics and such a simple user interface it was easy to add whatever gameplay mechanics you could think of.

But most were simple hack and slash affairs. You go out to an area appropriate for your level, preferably in a group, and hunt for mobs. When you find one you type something like "kill orc" and enter combat, taking turns attacking each other. Occasionally you "kick" or "cast magic missile" or whatever your class' special power is. When you kill it you get xp, gold, and maybe equipment. This should sound very familiar to you. MUDs were inspired by D&D and in turn became the basis of MMOs. EverQuest, the first MMO to achieve mainstream success, ripped off DikuMUD to a large extent.

Legacy

The golden age of MUDs lasted until around 2000. During this period they were really the only game in town. There were multiplayer FPSs and RTSs but nothing that gave you a similar experience. On a 56k modem it took a few seconds just to download a jpeg. Internet connections were much less stable, frequently cutting out for a second or two. So text still made sense as the medium for a multiplayer game.

Then MMOs arrived like Spanish conquistadors, bringing ruin for our civilization. Better PCs and better communications technology like DSL finally allowed the dream of a "graphical MUD" to come true. These were the shiny new thing. Why read walls of text written by some random 20 Finnish nerd boy when you could be looking at 3D graphics instead? If you had any normie friends they would be playing WoW, not words words words. Of course some MUDs have survived and are still thriving today, but the age when there were a thousand running at a time with all kinds of creative new ideas is over.

You can't compete with graphics like this.

So why do I lament the passing of this era? Is it just nostalgia for a time when ska ruled and action movies had real stunts? No. It's more. That was a time when we were free. Free to express yourself. Free to make your own world. Free to implement any crazy gameplay system you wanted. Free to be a Romulan. Jolan 'tru, dramanauts.

Please join me in celebrating our wonderful rdrama users, y'all are beautiful.

.

Did I miss anyone? Please contribute.

Edit: goddam, there's a lot of self doxxers here...