There is an old joke about the difference between a service provider and a "service preventer". Often the difference is the type of power we allow them to have over the users.
There are many domains of modern society that serve specific service roles, that should never have been given over-reaching power to also monitor and judge outside of a court order, but they do.
Finance used to have secrecy but no anymore, tax is now open book. Transportation and mobility is checked and prechecked. Free speech is being eroded both by snowflakes and copyright trolls. The slippery slope has no boundary and rolls into an avalanche.
In fact human living is basically a type of operating system, as we all juggle on a daily basis tasks, resources, input/output, storage, cache, and states. The concept of dashboard is an essential operating system tool, and on a human scale it is basically your bank, tasks, calendar and inboxes. Plenty of "self improvement" concepts then translate neatly into operating system best practices, such as using FIFO or LIFO to manage allocations, planning ahead to break deadlock situations, managing parallelism, and JIT garbage collection etc.
I fully agree that physical aspects of libraries cannot be fully replicated with databases and searches.
Discovery indeed comes in many forms, sometimes by proximity, other times by serendipity, size of the book, even what sits on the recently returned racks.
In a similar sense, I mourn the death of printed phone books and yellow pages. And printed encyclopedia, dictionaries and atlases.
The loss of the physical formats removed forever, extremely interesting aspects of browsing and learning from these sources.
The Reddit situation reminds me a lot of the China situation:
"A major player, having built a near dominant position in the global flow chain, starts misbehaving. The entire world tries to de-risk by finding or bootstrapping alternatives."
A decade ago probably nobody thinks there is any chance China-derisking is doable, but from today's vantage point it is becoming more and more likely.
In the same way, there appears no easy alternative to Reddit right now, but never say never. Having planted the seed of distrust, an exodus from Reddit can happen anytime the critical mass is achieved.
Perhaps now is the right time to revamp Usenet to bring it up to par with the Reddit of today. I am also thinking that email / mail lists, forums, and even old protocols like finger and gopher are all worthy of upgrades, and these were all small parts of a true proven p2p, decentralized, self-hosted social networking environment and may even enjoy a new popularity, if developers work on modernizing them.
Last year my Samsung S20+ suffered the notorious "green vertical lines" and then soon after the "white out screens" (a pandemic-level hardware failure wave that has been widely reported), rendering it impossible to see clearly what is on the screen, even though everything else was still working.
Luckily because I was playing with scrcpy, I immediately knew it was my solution.
By using scrcpy to connect to a PC, I could still unlock the screen with my pattern or thumbprint, and when the app asks for passwords it is still possible to use the onscreen keyboard.
There are many domains of modern society that serve specific service roles, that should never have been given over-reaching power to also monitor and judge outside of a court order, but they do.
Finance used to have secrecy but no anymore, tax is now open book. Transportation and mobility is checked and prechecked. Free speech is being eroded both by snowflakes and copyright trolls. The slippery slope has no boundary and rolls into an avalanche.