Reddit 3016 imagines what Reddit will look like 1,000 years in the future
The entire project took four years to create
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Your support makes all the difference.Filmmaker Blair Erickson has unveiled a project he's been working for the last four years - an imagining of what Reddit could look like 1,000 years in the future.
Erickson, an avid redditor and CEO of a San Francisco-based visual effects company, got the idea to create the site after his photoshopped image of a futuristic Reddit front page became one of the site's most popular posts of 2012.
Encouraged by the response, he took the project further, eventually creating Reddit 3016 - a fully-functioning website with clickable links which offers a glimpse into the far future.
Unsurprisingly for Reddit, things aren't all that different - despite the huge advances in technology that occured in the previous 1,000 years, Reddit 3016 is still using that early 2000s layout.
Reddit users clearly enjoy the same content in the third millennium, but with a futuristic twist - the top post, from the popular (and real) r/historyporn subreddit is an image of a statue of an 'ancient astronaut' on Mars' capital city. Cleary, 1,000 years after the the release of the film, future humans have forgotten that The Martian wasn't a documentary.
There's a few fun pokes at some of Reddit's favourite topics, too - a post on r/atheism is an article about 'Valvetopians' still praying for the arrival of Half Life 3.
One post, titled 'Check out my vintage ride!' links to an image of SpaceX's Dragon capsule, and another announces that 'Holoflix' has bought the rights to the Bible, with "three new chapters" coming out soon. Naturally, r/gonewild is still filled with NSFW pictures, but now they're all of sexy cyborgs.
The level of work that went into the site is amazing - most of the links go to real-looking websites, like The Huffington Planet, Hologur and MindTube. Erickson's almost managed to simulate an entire futuristic internet.
Speaking to Sploid, he said: "If you read graffiti in Roman bath houses you see human beings make... the same silly things even thousands of years in the past. Who's sleeping with who. What kind of foreigners disturb their xenophobic feelings. Who's a badass. What they like, what they hate... So I wanted to play it out in a fun futuristic way."
Writing on Twitter, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian called Erickson his "hero" for creating the site. However, Erickson says the offical reaction from Reddit was lukewarm, claiming links to his site were deleted by moderators.
But who knows what goes on behind the scenes - as Sploid points out, all the drama might just be a publicity attempt.
At any rate, if you have any apprehensions about the future, take a look at Reddit 3016 - even if the sun gets destroyed and humans reach The Singularity, Reddit will be just the same.
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