20260404 - My Soapbox :-) #mysoapbox

My Soapbox :-) #mysoapbox

20260404 - Saturday

Recently, I've been spending too much time on Reddit. I only made my account at the beginning of this year, and I think I joined far too late to get much enjoyment from it. By far too late, the main thing I'm referring to is with AI. One of the few subreddits I'm in is for cross stitch, where pretty much every other post is someone asking if a pattern is AI or not or they're posting about being scammed by an obviously AI pattern...

However, the much more egregious and annoying thing for me is product recommendations. It has become so normalized and pervasive and it kills any enjoyment I'll be feeling in a given scrolling session. There was one post I saw on instagram that really got me in a tiff about this, but I have long-blocked the account that it came from. What it boiled down to was that she was recommending an item from temu, but worse in my opinion, she was in the comments advising beginners to buy it as well. It was the type of product that was not essential to what she was doing, and would not be essential to a beginner at all. Really, the thing looked like it was built for a landfill.

On the other side, reddit isn't as bad with reccomendations, but what I do see more often on there is dissatisfaction from buyers getting crappy supplies from crappy suppliers. I mainly started noticing this with friendship bracelets, where people buy value packs of thread from amazon and get upset when the threads fray quickly or that they can't buy specific colors consistently on their own. It's something that feels so obvious to any more experienced maker.

The lack of discresion on both sides, I think, is what's getting to me. People who are shilling out products relentlessly combined with buyers who are not thinking critically. I'm not above purchasing things I don't need or that aren't from the most transparents sources, but I've tried my best throughout the years to avoid thoughtless buying, especially with craft supplies. When you're interested in practicing a hobby (or five) and don't have the most space or money, you should be considerate and thoughtful when choosing what you will actually use long-term.