giving up on /r/vandwellers

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that the /r/vandwellers subreddit has bloated beyond recognition, and beyond usability. This is largely a function of youtube and instagram influencers <spit> pushing hashtag-#vanlife. Here are the immediate problems as I see them:

/r/vandwellers hits 1 million

I wrote in Sept 2019 that the vandwellers subreddit had ballooned to a half-million readers.    It recently went over 1 million: 1,009,721 readers Yay. This might be a Good Thing if the readers of vandwellers were, you know, van dwellers.   The overwhelming majority are not.    from frontpagemetrics:   When I started there were about

non-drivers and vanlife

There have been a recent rash of posts from young adults in /r/vandwellers saying stuff like this: >I want to live in a van but don’t know how to drive What?  These aren’t high school underclassmen ineligible for drivers licenses.  These are young adults who have never had a license.  What is going on here?  None

backchannel: /r/vandwellers low-effort trifecta

This is the sh1t that saps my will to contribute to the subreddit.  vague post title question that has been address over and over in previous discussions drug-related username  

backchannel: vandwellers OBES

There is a thing in online forums called an Obligatory Brave Exit Speech (OBES), in which one stands in the doorway and explains why one is leaving.    This one really isn’t like that (it’s not grandstanding), and contains some ideas worth discussing. I am well and am currently holed up until the pandemic situation

Covid-19 refugees

Folks displaced by the pandemic-inflected economic downturn are starting to pop up in /r/vandwellers.  It’s not a bad place for them to start figuring it out. The posts look like this: 

Backchannel: My homie lost his van…

from this reddit post Please be careful with your wiring! My homie lost his van and I lost all my belongings since I was living out of it. An uncharitable translation would be “I just burned down my buddy’s van after he let me crash in it for free.”   ..and posts about his bong

how much power from 100w solar and an isolator?

this response was unwieldy in the reddit editor so I moved it here.  I am chiming in on a helpful response by another commenter. In this thread, OP stipulates: 100w of panel w/pwm controller 100Ah AGM an isolator 150w of loads and wanted to know how many hours he could run the loads each day.

article: /r/vandwellers hit 500k subscribers yesterday

/r/vandwellers is a subreddit (like a subforum on a forum). I had no idea it had that many folks reading it.  The majority are likely van-curious,  but there is a rocky core of ‘dwellers.  🙂 I prefer reddit to forums because it is more poster friendly: easier to up/downvote posts ability to edit posts ability

backchannel: ad hominem == blocked

This is how you get identified as not being worth the effort: from lennyflank via vandwellers sent 3 hours ago: comment reply Blah blah blah. Unlike you, I care not only for MY “rights”, but for those of others too. That’s because, unlike libertarians, I am not a selfish bastard. and then … from lennyflank