I decided to use this as a good excuse to delete Reddit. I find myself going to it too often, and scrolling for too long, and afterwards I feel worse about the direction of humanity and down about the world. I’m not getting anything positive from it so for my own mental heath I’m deleting the app.
I stopped using reddit about a year ago (shadow banned... no idea why). I deleted everything reddit from my browser history so it wouldn't pop up as a suggestion or auto-complete and that was sufficient.
I quit reddit a while ago and found it very rewarding. I used to argue with people all the time -- yes under subreddits like r/ProgrammerHumor because I disagree with other people's opinions or because their technical understanding is simply wrong -- anyway, it turned out to be a great decision. I realized that most of the time it is pointless to convince other people of anything (people won't admit you are right or don't have the background to understand it), and I should just simply spend my time elsewhere. Most of the memes on ProgrammerHumor are some form of reposts anyway. I spent time on my hobbies and actually reading/learning/trying out new stuff in programming, and my mental health is in a much better place now.
You must’ve been subscribed to some news/current events related subreddits. My subscriptions are all hobbies and specific games that I’m interested in. Reddit is my escape from all the stuff you mentioned. I use Apollo to browse and comment on my phone. I’m really upset about the API changes. I really want to see people come together with a solution to migrate away from Reddit.
Aren’t there any angels out there who would be interested in funding Christian (and/or the developers of other 3rd party Reddit apps) to develop a new back end using the same APIs? Then it would be pretty smooth to move over.
Early this year, I added a blocklist for Reddit on my PC and deleted the app. I did it upon the realization that for me:
1. It was a time waste. It was entertaining, but more often than not, it wasn't useful or helpful at all. Classic short-term gratification.
2. Various issues with how it was run started to frustrate me. Advertising appearing as genuine posts, poor moderation / mod abuse. Also seemed to be a conflict algorithm, outrage and irrational ideas were disproportionately popular compared to real life.
The smaller communities on the site were good, I'd like to see them find another place to exist.
But yeah, I used to think that self-control and discipline was all that was needed, but creating actual barriers like blocklists etc is actually pretty good.
Not OP but I just straight up deleted the play store and internet apps on my android phone using https://adbappcontrol.com/en/. That way I can't download it or just mindlessly browse to it when I'm bored. I have had this setup for a year now and not had any issues needing info or apps when I am away from my computer.
$20 a year and acts as an ad-blocker too. NextDNS is another one. It's nice you don't need to install anything (other than configuring DNS). Using DNS for ad-blocking also avoids the "we noticed you're using an ad-blocker" popups.
I've blocked twitter and reddit for almost a year now. My mental health and work quality has improved dramatically. The only thing I miss is sports and local news, I wish their was a website that was social media for just those 2 things.
You've gotta remove the default subreddits which are largely dog shit. Seriously, whoever decided that trash like "r/prequelmemes" or even "r/formula1" should qualify to appear on reddit's home page needs to get a new job.
They moved from curated default subreddits to algorithmic some time ago (with some exclusions for NSFW and controversial subreddits). That said, even the curated selection wasn't always good, I think I remember f7u12 making it to the defaults at one point.
Having defaults sucked anyway because any subreddit that ended up on there was almost guaranteed to plummet in quality. IIRC the only subreddit that managed to avoid that (way back when I still used reddit) was /r/science because they had strict moderation to stop it from turning into a mess of image macros and DAE posts.
I hear ya. I haven't been getting anything positive anymore out of Reddit for several years at least. And now I'm getting tired of witnessing their greedy nonsense. I can't support it. I went cold turkey on Twitter last year, and it definitely looks like it's time I do the same for Reddit.
I created multiple reddit accounts- one for programming and math stuff, one for books only, one for general stuff, etc.
I quit the general one two years ago because of Reddit's dumb monoculture.
I kept visiting math, cs, and book subs. And helped people with high school math concepts, cs book suggestions, etc.
As a person born in a middle-of-nowhere smalltown, Reddit added a lot of value to my life. And I tried to do the same to others. I had a good running.
All good things end.
I am concerned about how it perfectly substitutes Google. Whether I need to search for quirky not-so-famous movies, or I need recommendation for Neuroscience textbooks, I searched Reddit with Google. With subs shutting down and going private, I wonder how longer will this last.
I think it depends a lot on the subreddits you subscribe to. I mostly use it for engaging in hobbies that I find rewarding and as long as I moderate the time spent it is not wasted. Same as Youtube. If I had to rank, I would say HN is worse in that regard, as you can't even ignore certain topics
You’d be hard pressed to find social media that doesn’t trend towards toxicity, but Reddit in particular seems to have a culture of users that want to feel superior at any cost. They’re always looking to put down others and they’re often rewarded for doing so.
I've found it to be overly hostile over the years in any tech sub but also in anything political. Meanwhile the really interesting subs have been push away
I can't see how many points your comment has and I don't think you can see how many mine has. All we know is that a majority of others have not downvoted our comments because they are not grey.
This breaks up the impulse to dogpile or blindly conformally agree. It asks users to think about their votes because it removes the motivations to be impulsive.
maybe that's the problem? there are much better avenues of getting help for programming than reddit. i'm saying that as someone that not once has ever visited reddit for a programming bit of advice. every web search i have ever done for programming has been found elsewhere. clearly, i am not everyone, but for those that think this is doom, there is greener grass in other pastures.
We set up https://discourse.haskell.org a few years ago. It's reasonably active, but topics still tend to get more engagement on /r/haskell. I expect it comes down to discoverability and convenience: people are already have accounts on Reddit, know to look for topical subreddits there and are comfortable with it.
It would be great to get more people on the Discourse rather than Reddit. Would love to hear suggestions for making it easier for people to find!
I was a Lobste.rs user for a while, but their admins are very patronizing so I left. One day in 2020, I made several posts (see below) on a variety of topics and because they were all articles or software I had written they couldn't decide if I should be banned, so I left.
It is probably easy if you know people there. Unfortunately I don’t and neither my German friends (already asked on German IRC etc). It’s hard to find a way into that community if don’t already know English speaking people who are in this niche.
In case anyone has an invite to give, I’d be happy to use it: hn@<nickname>.dev
Why, it's closed to new members so no one comments. It's not a place to replace reddit. You are better off going to slashdot.. similiar level of conversation as reddit and many more comments and similiar number of daily stories compared to lobste.rs
Suggesting that slashdot has a similar level of conversation to Reddit is deeply depressing regardless of how accurate it might be.
My slashdot ID is six digits. I check in about thrice a year and leave sad.
For me it's like going to a podcast festival. Everybody's a bearded white 40 year old man. They're mostly saying things that make sense but there's an uneasy sense that I've walked into an echo-chamber.
Frankly, I think relatively insular communities are better for the web as a whole. In particular "anybody can invite people, but you're responsible for your invite tree" is a pretty healthy way to foster a community. It ensures a basic level of decency, and a high level of trust.
IMO, the option to deal with invite trees like the other site should be an option everywhere. Some basic moderation tools, like being able to view and ban an entire invite sub-tree should be available for things like Discord servers.
The issue with insular communities is they're insular though, and often by definition exclusionary. The nice part about something like reddit was if I picked up a new hobby, I could reliably find a community for it there. If I take up kayaking, it's unlikely that the insular music BBS I'm on has more than a handful of kayaking enthusiasts on it, and for just a general hobby, I'm not even sure where I'd start on trying to find an insular community for that hobby.
There's many interests I've ended up getting more involved in because I could easily join a subreddit that was about that without much effort, and then over the years, by osmosis, I learned and saw more of it while I was engaging with the other subreddits I was more active on. Smaller communities just don't offer that sort of convenient diversity of interests and experiences.
Slashdot was great, until better discussion forums came along. Going back to Slashdot after more than a decade of old style Reddit would be like scratching my nails down a chalkboard. Unpleasant in many ways.
The problem with lobste.rs is that I'm not sure that the people whose opinions I want to read give a shit about jumping the hoops to get a membership, you know what I mean? All the people on it are people who cared enough to be on it.
The worst part about this is that blind Reddit users are being left completely without a solution, and won't be able to read Reddit at all. Multiple attempts at engagement with Reddit itself have been ignored. See the discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
That's why the blackout needs to be permanent. If even 25% of the users have no clue what's happening and thinks Reddit is crapping out for a couple days they'll shrug their shoulders and use it 48 hours later when it's back up. I don't understand what they think they're protesting by timeboxing it .. Reddit can afford wait it out 48 hours and plan for that.
I guarantee people are going to get an error they can't view the subreddit without reading why they can't.
The mods only power in life is on Reddit. If they give that up they lose everything. Once in a while some crazy stats like 5 mods control 20% of the top 500 subreddits pop up, I’ve never tried to validate but there is definitely a small group with a lot of power among mods
Their entire purpose in life is being a Reddit mod, they’re the ones people expect to kill Reddit?
People always say that Reddit depends on these mods for free labor, which is true, but there's a reason that the mods do this free labor. They enjoy the power/responsibility/community/whatever they get from it.
Hah, yeah, I've made this same comment on Reddit flippantly on a bunch of subs. I'm not shocked it's a joke subreddit closing down permanently and not something like r/aww or something that would make a difference.
Screen readers. Reddit is mostly text and image content. Computer vision has gotten incredibly good at understanding images. Just take a look at models like GPT-4 and Segment Anything Model.
I am no expert, but the /r/blind people appear to disagree about whether this is adequate, they evidently think a screen reader for the web site or the Reddit app is much worse than the apps they are currently using.
Didn't they say somewhere the API fees won't apply to accessibility focused apps today? Either way, reddit will be dead if they go through with this, so let's make sure the next big thing we pick has accessibility in mind out of the gate.
Here's one source https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752804/reddit-exempt-acc... I thought I saw a post from an actual reddit employee about it, but I can't find it now. They said they need to stop treating accessibilty as an add-on and promote it to the same level as other features.
People keep repeating that but I can't find any official announcements about it. I think it's fake PR lip service. Even the Verge article about it says nothing concrete and just speculates about apps that may qualify. The r/blind mod has no idea which apps reddit has claimed to contact.
The trick is what does that even mean? If an app has great accessibility but is used by a lot of non-disabled people too, is it disqualified?
A quote from /r/Blind [0]:
> Apollo has without question been the most accessible social networking app I have ever used, or are even aware of. It allowed me to enjoy using Reddit, as well as become a moderator of multiple Disability focused subreddits like r/disability, r/epilepsy, r/EverybodyGames, and r/DisabilityPartyTime, among other communities.
> Apollo is and has always been a pleasure to use, and allowed me to leverage all manner of accessibility tools from UI Scaling, Magnification, VoiceOver, VoiceControl, Describe, and even just the app’s amazing searching, filters, and more that often don’t even exist in Desktop regardless of platform, and at any price. It is one of very few social networking apps that support iOS Braille Terminals.
I assume that means "we'll allow a clone of Apollo that claims to only help blind people, because it will get little traction with a different name and wink-wink advertising and the number of users who use it will be orders of magnitude less". The problem was never the API, but the lack of ad revenue.
We get it, a lot of subreddits are going on strike to protest the API changes. I just wish this forum does not become the place-to-be to discuss how much reddit sucks. There's been at least 3-4 stories about the reddit API changes on the frontpage of hackernews for the past week at least.
Further, Reddit was arguably the progenitor of HN. My understanding is that HN was basically PG's project when Reddit ported from Lisp to Python to prove you could run that type of site in Lisp still (and also as the proto-community on reddit moved away from tech and startups to more general interest).
A single subreddit is functionally equivalent to HN. But HN has no provision for communities to form around niche topics. It’s just everyone in the same room talking about the same feed of stories.
Talk about it, sure, but we've had multiple threads already about the site's new API policy, and at least one thread about subreddits boycotting. I think OPs point (which I generally agree with) is that we don't really need multiple threads discussing specific subreddits doing the same thing.
HN might as well just run the headline that Reddit is shutting down permanently. All the major subs are either temporarily or permanently shutting down in protest.
Do we have a federated Mastodon-esque system to replace Reddit yet? Its the only way to ensure the community survives at this point; Reddit leadership has already proven they only wish to harm both shareholders and the community at large under the guise of "increasing shareholder value" and shove their fiduciary duty under the bus.
I agree that Twitter is far from dead but you’re choosing a bad example.
> The main Twitter video view metric is triggered when a user watches a video for at least 2 seconds and sees at least 50% of the video player in-view.
So anyone that had the (auto playing) video in view for two seconds as they scrolled through their feed. Multiplied by the number of times it’s in their feed. It’s a pretty meaningless number.
That’s exactly my point. A tweet with 237k retweets was thrown out as a evidence that it’s not dead but I’m asking on what basis 237k is a lot or not a lot.
Genius CEOs thought Fed money printer and covid were forever too.
You’re not a genius CEO. If the experts get it wrong all the time (and spend a ton of effort promoting what they “do right” to shape perception) why believe you saying 2 successful vids is a lasting trend?
Social media has exposed there is a depressing number of easily titillated by big numbers rubes in the world.
Lindy effect, Goodharts Law; the last 60-70 years are an outdated af zeitgeist to perpetuate.
Putting aside the dubious methodology behind that metric, I’d like to point out that’s precisely the wrong metric to be paying attention to. You need to look at the traffic and retention numbers of the power users, and better yet the critical users in the social graph. Power user traffic has declined 25% since Elon.
The reason why this number is more important than overall user growth, is because social networks don’t decline, they chug along, until the collapse all at once, like a bridge with a key support knocked out. By studying the collapse look of Friendster, MySpace, Snap (which technically still exists), this predictor of collapse has been identified.
So yeah Twitter is dead. The rest of the network just doesn’t know it yet.
Twitter exists because of celebrities, politicians, journalists, musicians, etc. And those users have largely not migrated to Mastodon. Maybe you could argue they're promoting more on Tiktok now, but that's a bit of a different platform.
BLACKPINK and Taylor Swift both tweeted today. So did Barack Obama, and Stephen Curry. And CNN, ABC News, CBS News, and Fox News are all constantly updating their Twitter feeds.
Meanwhile the big Mastodon draw is... Kathy Griffin? And her last Mastodon toot was... March 31. Guess she got bored of only getting 100 likes per post.
You seem to be confused. It doesn’t matter if Mastodon is going to replace Twitter. What matters is that Twitter is dead. Then I laid out why the collapse has already started. This shouldn’t be controversial. Twitter has been losing users for years now.
Celebrities aren’t trendsetters. They’re laggards. To use the hockey metaphor, they always skate to the puck, not where it is going. Case in point: Every band was on MySpace until well after the collapse began.
Not for everybody but it is for a lot of people. Pretty much everyone I followed in my hobbies have switched over and I don’t go back to twitter anymore, and have more content than I can keep up on in Mastadon. I’ve been perfectly happy with it.
This is how I feel as well. People always say that Mastodon will never replace Twitter because it’s either a) too hard to sign up for, b) no enough people on using it. However, since it’s federated, I feel the easier to find people and posts that are more akin to my interests on there. I just joined a midsized software dev focused instance and followed a few tags for my hobbies and my experience is great. It almost feels like Reddit in that way.
Why do you think it is supposed to? I've been using mastodon for almost a decade and it's been a great experience from the start but I would say pretty different than twitter. Personally I hope Twitter refugees won't ruin the magic of it. It being a bit more niche is great, just like with hacker news too.
From what I've seen, only for niche programming or highly technical circles.
My "normie" friends don't even want to try something polished like Signal. Mastodon would have to be heavily simplified, polished, and maybe sponsor some exclusive influencers to actually take the spot of Twitter.
There's nothing wrong with that, per se. The larger issue preventing widespread adoption is that the authors really don't want you to modify/customize the software in certain ways. The slur filter was hard coded and unmodifiable for a long time. There was a ton of drama around that, all because the developers don't like right wingers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hvz2l9/...
Lemmy is a good alternative for certain subreddits who want their own website. It's not a replacement for the entire reddit platform though, and I don't think any of the reddit alternatives really come close in that regard.
its not the only way to ensure a community survives, forums have existed before reddit and will exist later. You even have examples of communities that left, created their own version of reddit and seem to be doing fine.
> Reddit leadership has already proven they only wish to harm both shareholders and the community at large under the guise of "increasing shareholder value" and shove their fiduciary duty under the bus.
reddit isn't a public company, so unless the current owners who are the ones putting all this in motion are looking into self-flagellation they haven't proven a thing.
The reality is that reddit is huge, and most users couldn't care less about all this drama.
> The reality is that reddit is huge, and most users couldn't care less about all this drama.
That seems like a strong statement. Currently on /r/all, top posts 1, 3, 5, 6, and 14 are all regarding this. Some pretty major subreddits are planning on joining in on the protests.
it's a fair criticism when you limit it to the users being affected, when you start talking about the owners(the current shareholders!) willingly eschewing fiduciary duty and damaging shareholders as if the owners were trying to hurt themselves it loses all meaning.
>Do we have a federated Mastodon-esque system to replace Reddit yet?
Yes - it's all the sites that people link to on reddit :-P
For the record, there's something happening to all the big Social Media sites over the last few years
IRC/Freenode - dead, replaced by Libera, but not nearly as vibrant as its heyday
Twitter - dying, replaced by Mastodon, Bluesky, and Instagram, none of them really capture the magic that was twitter, Bluesky feels a lot like Google+, Mastodon is regularly policed by people demanding that people not act like it's twitter.. and Instagram is for kids...
Facebook - seems to be dying, they've blown things with their advertising model, and the automagic content moderation is/was also a fail (it either judges everyone far too harshly, or not at all), the users are heading to FB's other sites (Instagram) or Tik Tok
Reddit - dying (but is this temporary?), being replaced by Lobsters, Hacker News, maybe more
Tik Tok - facing serious regulatory challenges in Europe and the US.
It's inevitable that things will die/change, I do find it really interesting that the big ones from the last decade are all suddenly finding themselves on the outer.
One of the exceptions is YouTube, which faced serious competition from the likes of Tik Tok, but still appears to be generating content/high readership, and seems largely immune to the absolute garbage that's been uploaded over the past few years (conspiracy nuts, politics, etc)
It's quietly enabling all of the best topic/product/niche-specific commmunities out there. https://discourse.mcneel.com as an example is a thriving treasure trove for CAD/Nurbs/product modelers/architects/etc.
How is it bad? It's a message board by topic, sorted by last activity, and supports all kinds of media / preformatted text / replies / notifications / etc. If you don't like the community or subject matter, that makes sense. But what else are you looking for?
I'm trying to forget it. Honestly Discourse is truly awful. Navigation is terrible, finding stuff is terrible, the UX in general is just so bad compared to what it tries to replace (BB forums).
How it is any different from a streamlined BB forum?
* Topics are sorted the exact same way as a BB, by default.
* Posts have all the usual multimedia features.
* The search actually works.
* It's super fast and minimal.
I'm generally curious what your UX frustrations are here...
1. You click a search result and the content that showed up in the search result snippet is not on the page you get linked to because it's only lazily loading the N most recent replies and there's been more than N since it was indexed by a search engine
2. When you try to Ctrl-F search it hijacks it with the server side search, it is slower than the browser search. It also does not reliably default to search in this thread, and sometimes fails to find content that's on screen even.
3. The WIP reply draft is synced across all your tabs, which can be obnoxious if you're trying to read one post to reply in another topic based on its contents.
I was just thinking today how I'd like to forget about Discourse. They overrode fucking ctrl+f to redirect it to their shitty search, and if you bother to activate an actually useful search tool like the one that comes in your browser, you can just get fucked. They use heavy amounts of javascript to load only a few comments in the DOM at a time so you can't find a damn thing.
Terrible, terrible system that should've already been replaced by static html + htmx.
I'd add that Discord is also a modern IRC / Freenode. That seems to be one of the primary places people are flocking as they abandon most current social media sites.
Three things. (1) User identity. (2) Moderation. (3) Storage and bandwidth. If you don't mind using different identities across subreddits, or are fine using some OIDC provider, you can replace a subreddit with something like a phpbb installation, a classical forum. Its moderation tools, while somehow different, should be adequate to thwart spam and whip rule-breakers into shape. Running somethig picture-heavy, even 1/10 of r/pic, would cost considerable money though.
I plan to avoid the platform as I can, but I worry the admin response will be to revoke the communities from their current moderators and install more cooperative scabs, which will have a profound effect on these communities. I'm not sure what the future holds, but reddit can't walk it back now, so I think it will end badly.
HN — Mastedon is like “fetch”: it’s not going to happen. Does no one on this site understand there are an infinite number of easier ways to be social than a engineers dream of a self serve social network?
Twitters real issue is that it’s dated. Have you seen modern social networks? They are highly visual and much more stimulating for better or worse. Copying Twitter might as well be like copying a 1920s radio for how outdated it is. Complete paradigm shift since then with messaging and video.
Not all change is good, progress for progress' sake is an example of this. The more "visual and much more stimulating" nature of those "modern social networks" stands to "dated" mostly text-based communications as "high sugar deep fried processed" food stands towards "traditional" food made with fresh ingredients. Sure, the kids will gorge themselves on it but they'll end up as obese adults suffering from low insulin sensitivity a.k.a. diabetes type 2. Twitter itself already resembles a Twinkie compared to the home-cooked lunch served by NNTP so it is not as if copying the Twitter model is something to aim for.
> All the major subs are either temporarily or permanently shutting down in protest.
But I'd just add there is a pretty major difference between "temporarily" and "permanently". Major kudos to r/ProgrammerHumor and other subs that are doing it right - saying they will be shutting down indefinitely unless Reddit changes their stance.
Just saying you're only going to shut down for a couple days is essentially theater - Reddit can certainly wait out some popular subs being down for a few days. More generally, that's really the only way protests have a way of achieving their goals, by saying you'll engage in some behavior (or boycott) until your demands are met, or at least met with some change. Anything that's time limited is pretty much doomed to fail. For example, I'm not sure what the organizers of the recent Amazon "walkout" hoped to accomplish. That wasn't a walkout, it was lunch.
reddit the company doesn't produce any content. they rely on people creating communities, cultivating them, and actively moderating them (for free!). i'd say that gives those creators more of a claim to ownership than the platform hosting that content. reddit doesn't exist without them - what value does the site have if they kick out everyone who "occupies" reddit.com?
would you participate in an online forum only populated with chatbots?
> This will be educational to them when they are all banned and replaced with chatbots.
If they are replaced with chatbots, then I'm sure that the result will be educational to somebody. Not necessarily with the conclusion you imply, though.
> But I'd just add there is a pretty major difference between "temporarily" and "permanently". Major kudos to r/ProgrammerHumor and other subs that are doing it right - saying they will be shutting down indefinitely unless Reddit changes their stance.
A permanent closure of a popular sub is 100% going to lead to Reddit declaring the sub abandoned, replacing the mod team, and reopening. Has happened many times before. Not sure if programminghumor in particular meets that popularity threshold though.
I mean, there's plenty of people lining up to have the "authority" of an internet mod, but not so many that can be trusted not to set up their own petty dictatorship or get bored when they realise what mods actually mostly do.
If not paid in dollars, mods get paid in power and authority. Interacting with mods who accept power and authority as payment goes about how you’d expect.
There is something wrong with me that in the 90-9-1 rule, I need to be the 1%. I see a forum, and I can't stop myself from commenting or posting. Getting invited to moderate happens naturally after that.
I recall one popular but controversial subreddit's founder (think it was KotakuInAction) shut down the subreddit because he didn't like what it had become, and the admins demodded him and gave the sub to its other mods.
That's a pretty different case, and exactly why I asked the question.
I have heard of cases where essentially a mod went on a power trip/tantrum and wanted to shut down a subreddit, but that behavior specifically angered the vast majority of subscribers to that subreddit. I think the optics and reality of that are very different from a subreddit shutting down to protest the API changes (in some cases, subreddits held polls).
Well, I'll be deleting my account and am texting / uploading stories on my other social media accounts to ask my friends and connections to do the same. Reddit has taken the content and hard work of 1000s of users, monetized it, and now wants to shut the gates.
> Do we have a federated Mastodon-esque system to replace Reddit yet?
Maybe they can go to whatever platform the banned subreddits reformed on. Unfortunately many of the subreddit communities that are now being screwed over in the same fashion by Reddit were cheering on that behavior when others were targeted.
Both Lemmy and Kbin are part of the fediverse and are seeing explosive growth for the last few days. Once the initial barrier of confusion about how federation works is gone, they are actually pretty promising and I can see a lot of people migrating for good there.
The Apollo founder addresses this directly by saying it's just not an interest of his and that it would be a very large undertaking that he isn't wanting to do atm
If I recall correctly, the first version of reddit had an extra "username" field when admins submitted a post, to make it look as though the site had users.
> Will you build a competitor? Move to one of the existing alternatives?
> I've received so many messages of kind people offering to work with me to build a competitor to Reddit, and while I'm very flattered, that's not something I'm interested in doing. I'm a product guy, I like building fun apps for people to use, and I'm just not personally interested in something more managerial.
> These last several months have also been incredibly exhausting and mentally draining, I don't have it in me to engage in something so enormous.
This strikes me as weird. He could literally call up any VC firm in the world right now and tell them he'll point his endpoints to a new backend if they give him some money. He doesn't even have to be involved in that part of the business. Just let them figure it out (with their own choice team) and he'll re-rig the app to it.
This is still an pretty substantial amount of effort, and a lot of risk. I really don't blame anyone for not doing this, especially if they also have another successful business that they are running already.
Building the backend component for a social media site like Reddit is much much much harder than slapping a frontend onto an existing API. And it's en entirely different engineering skillset (distributed systems) that many app developers don't have. You really think they are "oblivious to this"? The reality is it's hard to do.
There’s a small but real chance that this movement turns into a mass exodus from reddit. Mismanagement can absolutely kill social media companies, and when it happens it happens fast. Take the mass exodus from FreeNode as an example.
The thing to watch for is if the admins take control of any major subreddits. That’s what killed FreeNode.
There most likely won't be. Reddit is Usenet 2.0. With Usenet, it was a diaspora. Sure, we had some sites like Slashdot that started in 1997 but even that was still targeting link aggregation focused discussions on tech related topics and there might only be a handful a day at times. The exodus from Usenet was to internet forums.
The exodus from Reddit seems to be to disperse among a combination of other forums, some Reddit-like sites like Tildes and Lemmy, and Discord.
Once we go through that for a while, we'll maybe have another consolidation again once a new round of companies give it a go. At least that's my hypothesis.
I think this conflict has been long brewing and has little to do with Apollo, and more to do with powermods running many subreddits not liking that the bots they use will get charged for API usage.
I think powermods don't want to draw the slightest attention to themselves (because users and press would start looking at them a bit too closely) or how/why they use bots.
The overwhelming majority of popular or even "popular niche" subreddits are moderated by a small handful of people, some of whom have moderation powers in hundreds of subreddits. A lot of mods have gone to the trouble of trying to hide it by using alts, but a lot of them just don't care / are proud of how many subs they mod. I'd be shocked if a number of them aren't getting paid or otherwise compensated by groups like PR firms.
Speaking of which, you know who else doesn't want to pay for API calls? Said PR firms, who are known to scan reddit posts for mention of client names so they can do damage control and manipulation.
These people run their subreddits like fiefdoms and they'll do petty nonsense like shadowban you from every subreddit they moderate because you accidentally piss them off in one.
At one point it was common to post in any of a number of subreddits powermods didn't like and discover you'd been preemptively shadowbanned because their bot was scanning for posts in those subreddits.
I think that's unlikely to happen, this is largely anecdotal but while most redditors started on 3rd party apps, I've seen a lot more casual friends who only use Facebook or Instagram gradually move on to Reddit using their own app.
These people likely make up a large enough number that Reddit no longer feels the need to cater to their original audience. Maybe it's just me, but Reddits been feeling a lot more like Facebook for the past couple of years.
Most existing alternatives can't handle the 10000x user growth. They'll be down for enough weeks that reddit will be able to wait out the exodus's momentum if they tried.
Even if that wasn't the primary blocker, most alternatives exist to host primarily politically partisan communities.
Why not update the API contract that if you use the Reddit API you need to render the ads? If you don't render the Ads they can come up with some pricing model. Seems like Reddit's pricing is designed by an MBA intern who just joined silicon valley.
That would require the API to also include ad information. I think putting a sensible price on API access would make this a bit simpler, though (and allow for a paid ad-free experience as well). The core issue isn't so much paid API access as the price being so crazy high it can't possibly reflect how much reddit would normally be making from the users of these apps, so instead looks like it is aimed at just shutting down 3rd party apps entirely.
These “protests” strike me as strange. Ostensibly, everyone’s goal is for Reddit to reverse their decision. However, I can’t help but think many users want to quit Reddit, and this is the straw that is breaking the camel’s back.
Reddit has its moments but I still enjoy it. It's a fun time sink between sets at the gym or if I'm stuck on a bike pedaling and have tired yet again of Duolingo.
That said, I have a tendency to filter a fair bit to avoid the major problems but there's going to be some news that I should hear but is not good news either.
I had a chat the other day with a friend. He's deleted the app as he's been on it quite heavily and needed a break. It's certainly something I've heard out of some people. Meanwhile, there's others looking for where the migration is going, assuming a Digg to Reddit type migration.
I’ll be honest, HN is the last place I’d expect to find people who underestimate the difficulty of creating a social network, but every single post about Reddit lately has had one or more comments about how the creators of Reddit clients should “just” make their own backend and take their users with them.
This. As it stands, third party clients are default dead due to Reddit’s decision. You can either accept the need to adapt or accept death. Is it easy? No! Is it necessary? Absolutely.
I wonder if the short time frame on the API changes is influenced by not wanting to give any competitor a runway to spin up an API-compatible endpoint. I.e we want to kill third parties now, not let them run for 5 months and swap api.reddit.com to api.slashdot.com on the 6th month.
I don’t think it’s a bad idea, and I’m sure there are people who want to do it and also understand the challenges they’ll face. But a lot of people in the comments seem to express a frustration that it should be so easy for people who have created a good client to draw the rest of the fucking owl, if you will.
Dude, don’t kill my velocity. My `create-next-app` command just finished and I’m going to wrap up this side project by Sunday evening. I’ll be starting with the Frontend first. /s
The subreddit system makes this incrementally more doable for aggrieved subreddits: they have a better shot of uprooting enough of just their little community and convincing them to move. There's a decent number of users in those smaller subs that don't really have a wide membership in others so moving is more reasonable for them.
But this: a) is only a little easier, it's still really hard to move even a tight-knit and smaller community like that, and b) really doesn't apply at all for third-party client developers, whose users surely use and belong to a wide spread of the subreddits, so the task for them is more like "replicate Reddit overnight."
Also, a move isn't really a move unless the content comes along for the ride. I hope ArchiveTeam is on the lookout.
The smaller the subreddit, the easier the move, but there's still the discovery issue, especially since centralized "platforms" are starting to turn into centralized points of failure.
The hard part of making a social network is the userbase accumulation. Apollo already has the userbase, if they switch all the api calls over to their own backend it truly wouldn’t be that hard. Especially considering the money involved.
The only sticking point is in all the people who want things to be “federated” for whatever (generally bogus) reason.
It's hard if you want it to be a social network, and hard if you want it to be under one domain. If it's a forum to talk about hats for cats at hatsforcats.lol that's not hard, and that's pretty much what the web was pre-Facebook.
Is Reddit/Twitter "better" because everything is in one place? Maybe. But then it's a hard problem that requires money, and we end up where Reddit/Twitter are today.
I mean, it's 2023. Web-based simple threaded conversation platforms should be absolutely trivial to develop/clone/deploy.
I'm not convinced building a Reddit is hard, at all.
But getting a mass adoption of users to make it worth using is.
Which is why I'm continually surprised some startup+VC combo doesn't just build it and then pay the top 1000 broad-to-niche influencers out there to sign up and start relentlessly hawking it on their various social medias.
That’s the thing though. It’s not purely a technical problem. Building a Reddit clone may be easy (I don’t know, I’ve never tried), but building a social network is more than just building a web app!
The hard part is dealing with abuse. If you could guarantee that all content posted will be kosher and in good faith, building a basic scalable Reddit backend is not super hard.
Really? IME most devs are incredibly bad to underestimate the complexity of apps and problem domains where they don't have any experience.
I'd say an app like Reddit is especially prone to this because most decent devs probably could recreate the core UX (subreddits, posts, comments) in a couple of weeks. The really hard part is all the features people don't usually think about (mod and admin tools, for example) plus scaling up to millions of concurrent users.
The hard part of building a tech company isn't the tech, its users, staff, and money. These 3rd party apps have the first two, and that would be enough to convince someone to find the third for them.
The only limiting factor is ambition. And on a site with quite a few people from the startup world who see that the only thing in the way is the technical difficulty of building the service then it shouldn't be unexpected that people are saying they should take their users off to a new platform they build themselves. Because that's the kind of crazy thing that startup people think about.
Yeah, I don't understand why everyone seems so content to settle on imaginary solutions. Even if this was something he possessed the knowledge to do, he's bound by the timeline Reddit has laid out, and there is no way that is feasible, even if he did have 100x the users that Apollo actually has.
Ha are you joking? This site is exactly the place I expect to see that kind of sentiment. It precisely matches HN’s reputation; it’s been a cliche since Dropbox launched.
This organized “protest” is starting to look like a great move from Reddit to flush the userbase to replace with new users. Field burning is a commonly used (unsustainable) technique in agriculture.
Yeah, that comment doesn't make a damned bit of sense, unless there are 50 million people out there who are like "man, I'd totally switch to Reddit if their shitty app had more ads, there were no third-party apps, and the site was worse. I had no idea their CEO was such a scumbucket! This revelation makes their company and product significantly more attractive to me."
Social media users are notoriously fickle. If you have a vast, devoted community of longtime users, the last thing you want to do is drive them all away.
I think Reddit just got too entitled: forgot how much they rely on their users and figured they could get away with anything because they're just too indispensable to fail. It happens.
Those suckers keeps signing up anyways, the content and communities just don’t matter, except when it chases off new people and stifle mobility and prevents continuous growth.
The value of Reddit to human society at large and the value it provides the corporate that owns it are not at all aligned. There’s a potential they negatively correlate, even. They need new people going through the gates to the Library of Alexandria, and the books are just means to it.
They already had the tools to do that, and extensively tweaked the platform to have two completely separate interface and user base for reddit:
- the homepage, /r/all, the default subs, served on the new reddit page and app
- the obscure and basement level subs that won't ever see more that a few thousand users (shout out to /r/donteatjimmy), probably viewed by people stuck on old.reddit or a third party client
Heavily pushing the former, and further pushing the latter into a dark corner would have sufficed. They'd had little to no backlash, and could have still boasted huge user engagement etc.
They already had the invite only and private sub mechanism, that could have worked to push the old users into communities that don't get advertised, and potentially have them pay for access.
All of that just to say, there was probably many realistic and not so complicated ways to deal with renewing the user base, all of them looking like better business decisions to me. With the current approach, I'm not sure where they'll get new users from, I don't see the TikTokers moving to Reddit whatever they do, and my grandma isn't coming either just because the furry subs have gone away.
That would make sense except a large chunk are their most valuable users for attracting people to and keeping them on the platform: moderators and power users who submit links. You can't have the 90% of users who never vote, submit, or comment on anything without the 10% who do.
ironically this is similar to what Reddit is doing.
a group of folks are unilaterally making a decision that most people probably don't care about, but some minority would push back on, if given a chance
I think they're caught in a pickle because they've sold "discounted" bulk API access to ML model training companies, discounted relative to the baseline that Reddit was planning to charge these client apps.
At least that was the speculation on HN when the story first came out.
hmm...It wouldn't be controversial to say that r/ProgrammingHumor is heavily centered on this concept. And I mean that as a participant in it for I don't know how long.
> It wouldn't be controversial to say that r/ProgrammingHumor is heavily centered on this concept
humor is not necessary toxic, and toxicity can have many different levels, making toxic jokes is one level, distort facts, aggressively attack, flood, moderate unwelcomed opinions is another level.
I'm sure they will have plenty of volunteers to be head mod for the day but how many of those people have so little to do that they are willing to continue after that?
I don't practically see how a popular subreddit can shut down. Corporate can just install different mods. The user base mainstreamed a long time ago, and I would be surprised if there was much on-principle meaningful collective action.
OTOH, taking away someone's beloved app, hitting them with big usability downgrade... that's not just principle, and they could lose those users.
There's a process (/r/redditrequest) where people can ask the admins to assign them as mods of abandoned subs. The existing mods of a requested sub can object, and it's really only supposed to be used when there is no active mod account, but I'm sure someone will eventually say "they're squatting on the name /r/ProgrammerHumor, can I have it instead?" and the admins will approve it.
There are some subreddits which are more seperate from the mod team (How much does it really matter who runs r/aww? It can run on inertia for a very long time, for sure), and where a very small contributing group can provide content to a much wider and more casual reading group.
But then there's some where the mods and other highly active users are a more active part in making it what it is. Think subs with weekly book clubs, or game challenges, or what not organised by the mods. Is Reddit going to get staff for all these niches to deliver the same level of experience? Probably not.
Actually, they do. A Reddit only consisting of r/AskReddit, r/aww, r/pics and r/tifu provides less value than just using Instagram/Twitter.
Most of the casual users I know use Reddit for a few small meme subreddits and topics that are too small for their main-platforms. If those are down, Reddit is dead to them.
(Of course Reddit could try to send their staff each down a different rabbit hole to fit them into the communities. This would be fucking hilarious. I hope this doesn't happen but if it happens, I'll have my popcorn ready.)
339 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadI just stopped using it. I think that calling it will power sounds too dramatic.
The dislike started small, and it grew into a hatred, and it kept increasing until it hit a tipping point. I quit Reddit in one day.
I still have a books focused, and a cs/math/programming focused accounts that I use sometimes.
Aren’t there any angels out there who would be interested in funding Christian (and/or the developers of other 3rd party Reddit apps) to develop a new back end using the same APIs? Then it would be pretty smooth to move over.
Not necessarily. If you really want to lose hope in humanity go to the advice subreddits.
1. It was a time waste. It was entertaining, but more often than not, it wasn't useful or helpful at all. Classic short-term gratification.
2. Various issues with how it was run started to frustrate me. Advertising appearing as genuine posts, poor moderation / mod abuse. Also seemed to be a conflict algorithm, outrage and irrational ideas were disproportionately popular compared to real life.
The smaller communities on the site were good, I'd like to see them find another place to exist. But yeah, I used to think that self-control and discipline was all that was needed, but creating actual barriers like blocklists etc is actually pretty good.
$20 a year and acts as an ad-blocker too. NextDNS is another one. It's nice you don't need to install anything (other than configuring DNS). Using DNS for ad-blocking also avoids the "we noticed you're using an ad-blocker" popups.
For browser you can use a domain blocker. Firefox mobile has an extension LeechBlock that can do that.
I quit the general one two years ago because of Reddit's dumb monoculture.
I kept visiting math, cs, and book subs. And helped people with high school math concepts, cs book suggestions, etc.
As a person born in a middle-of-nowhere smalltown, Reddit added a lot of value to my life. And I tried to do the same to others. I had a good running.
All good things end.
I am concerned about how it perfectly substitutes Google. Whether I need to search for quirky not-so-famous movies, or I need recommendation for Neuroscience textbooks, I searched Reddit with Google. With subs shutting down and going private, I wonder how longer will this last.
This breaks up the impulse to dogpile or blindly conformally agree. It asks users to think about their votes because it removes the motivations to be impulsive.
The mods are hard at work making sure HN stays a place worth visiting.
It would be great to get more people on the Discourse rather than Reddit. Would love to hear suggestions for making it easier for people to find!
Writing Your First PAM Module [c] [unix] (rkeene) - https://lobste.rs/s/qbsk6y
hunter2: Smartcard-based password manager [security] [show] (rkeene) - https://lobste.rs/s/3rufnm
Build CC: Cross-compile build tool [programming] (rkeene) - https://lobste.rs/s/2g4hfh
Simple SAML Identity Provider Framework (IdP) [programming] [security] (rkeene) - https://lobste.rs/s/nrle0e
Roku Reddit [programming] [show] (rkeene) - https://lobste.rs/s/nbxufp
Chrome disables support for mandatory features of HTTPS [rant] [web] (rkeene) - https://lobste.rs/s/shqzk5
HashCache [programming] [show] (rkeene) - https://lobste.rs/s/hq2ckd
sse3-emu [c] [show] (rkeene) - https://lobste.rs/s/xekrci
Defense Enterprise Linux (2011) [linux] [pdf] (rkeene) - https://lobste.rs/s/x5wgwr
pipethread: It is what it does [pdf] [programming] (rkeene) - https://lobste.rs/s/yu5lfw
In case anyone has an invite to give, I’d be happy to use it: hn@<nickname>.dev
:)
My slashdot ID is six digits. I check in about thrice a year and leave sad.
For me it's like going to a podcast festival. Everybody's a bearded white 40 year old man. They're mostly saying things that make sense but there's an uneasy sense that I've walked into an echo-chamber.
IMO, the option to deal with invite trees like the other site should be an option everywhere. Some basic moderation tools, like being able to view and ban an entire invite sub-tree should be available for things like Discord servers.
There's many interests I've ended up getting more involved in because I could easily join a subreddit that was about that without much effort, and then over the years, by osmosis, I learned and saw more of it while I was engaging with the other subreddits I was more active on. Smaller communities just don't offer that sort of convenient diversity of interests and experiences.
I guarantee people are going to get an error they can't view the subreddit without reading why they can't.
Their entire purpose in life is being a Reddit mod, they’re the ones people expect to kill Reddit?
A quote from /r/Blind [0]:
> Apollo has without question been the most accessible social networking app I have ever used, or are even aware of. It allowed me to enjoy using Reddit, as well as become a moderator of multiple Disability focused subreddits like r/disability, r/epilepsy, r/EverybodyGames, and r/DisabilityPartyTime, among other communities.
> Apollo is and has always been a pleasure to use, and allowed me to leverage all manner of accessibility tools from UI Scaling, Magnification, VoiceOver, VoiceControl, Describe, and even just the app’s amazing searching, filters, and more that often don’t even exist in Desktop regardless of platform, and at any price. It is one of very few social networking apps that support iOS Braille Terminals.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/1447ibp/what_apps_me...
I guess it's time for reddit to complete the cycle as well.
I wonder who will take reddits lunch and how far they will go with it.
;# code starts here
written in perl.
This is a subreddit I look at sometimes, too. So it's pretty relevant, I think.
Also, people are probably interested to see if Reddit will collapse or not. And to find out where people will go instead.
Do we have a federated Mastodon-esque system to replace Reddit yet? Its the only way to ensure the community survives at this point; Reddit leadership has already proven they only wish to harm both shareholders and the community at large under the guise of "increasing shareholder value" and shove their fiduciary duty under the bus.
> 107.7M Views
You sure about that?
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1666203439146172419
> The main Twitter video view metric is triggered when a user watches a video for at least 2 seconds and sees at least 50% of the video player in-view.
So anyone that had the (auto playing) video in view for two seconds as they scrolled through their feed. Multiplied by the number of times it’s in their feed. It’s a pretty meaningless number.
> 845.9K Likes
> 237.6K Retweets
In a day and a half for a ten minute video of a guy in his basement talking. It isn't even a video platform.
https://twitter.com/BTS_twt/status/1296701109340237824
So does 237k retweets in 2023 mean the network is as vital as it was in 2020? I have no idea what basis this argument is being made on.
You’re not a genius CEO. If the experts get it wrong all the time (and spend a ton of effort promoting what they “do right” to shape perception) why believe you saying 2 successful vids is a lasting trend?
Social media has exposed there is a depressing number of easily titillated by big numbers rubes in the world.
Lindy effect, Goodharts Law; the last 60-70 years are an outdated af zeitgeist to perpetuate.
The reason why this number is more important than overall user growth, is because social networks don’t decline, they chug along, until the collapse all at once, like a bridge with a key support knocked out. By studying the collapse look of Friendster, MySpace, Snap (which technically still exists), this predictor of collapse has been identified.
So yeah Twitter is dead. The rest of the network just doesn’t know it yet.
See:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/17/twitters-top-users-are-posti... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29196654/
https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.6109
BLACKPINK and Taylor Swift both tweeted today. So did Barack Obama, and Stephen Curry. And CNN, ABC News, CBS News, and Fox News are all constantly updating their Twitter feeds.
Meanwhile the big Mastodon draw is... Kathy Griffin? And her last Mastodon toot was... March 31. Guess she got bored of only getting 100 likes per post.
People who are only interested in virality and clicks and drawing as large an audience as possible are welcome to stay away.
Celebrities aren’t trendsetters. They’re laggards. To use the hockey metaphor, they always skate to the puck, not where it is going. Case in point: Every band was on MySpace until well after the collapse began.
Twitter has all the inventive in the world to artificially inflate view counts and have done similar, sketchy things recently[0].
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-...
They mainly focus around open source software. Admins are great, and the server is fast and reliable.
My "normie" friends don't even want to try something polished like Signal. Mastodon would have to be heavily simplified, polished, and maybe sponsor some exclusive influencers to actually take the spot of Twitter.
There's nothing wrong with that, per se. The larger issue preventing widespread adoption is that the authors really don't want you to modify/customize the software in certain ways. The slur filter was hard coded and unmodifiable for a long time. There was a ton of drama around that, all because the developers don't like right wingers. https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hvz2l9/...
Lemmy is a good alternative for certain subreddits who want their own website. It's not a replacement for the entire reddit platform though, and I don't think any of the reddit alternatives really come close in that regard.
> Reddit leadership has already proven they only wish to harm both shareholders and the community at large under the guise of "increasing shareholder value" and shove their fiduciary duty under the bus.
reddit isn't a public company, so unless the current owners who are the ones putting all this in motion are looking into self-flagellation they haven't proven a thing. The reality is that reddit is huge, and most users couldn't care less about all this drama.
That seems like a strong statement. Currently on /r/all, top posts 1, 3, 5, 6, and 14 are all regarding this. Some pretty major subreddits are planning on joining in on the protests.
Yes - it's all the sites that people link to on reddit :-P
For the record, there's something happening to all the big Social Media sites over the last few years
IRC/Freenode - dead, replaced by Libera, but not nearly as vibrant as its heyday
Twitter - dying, replaced by Mastodon, Bluesky, and Instagram, none of them really capture the magic that was twitter, Bluesky feels a lot like Google+, Mastodon is regularly policed by people demanding that people not act like it's twitter.. and Instagram is for kids...
Facebook - seems to be dying, they've blown things with their advertising model, and the automagic content moderation is/was also a fail (it either judges everyone far too harshly, or not at all), the users are heading to FB's other sites (Instagram) or Tik Tok
Reddit - dying (but is this temporary?), being replaced by Lobsters, Hacker News, maybe more
Tik Tok - facing serious regulatory challenges in Europe and the US.
It's inevitable that things will die/change, I do find it really interesting that the big ones from the last decade are all suddenly finding themselves on the outer.
One of the exceptions is YouTube, which faced serious competition from the likes of Tik Tok, but still appears to be generating content/high readership, and seems largely immune to the absolute garbage that's been uploaded over the past few years (conspiracy nuts, politics, etc)
It's quietly enabling all of the best topic/product/niche-specific commmunities out there. https://discourse.mcneel.com as an example is a thriving treasure trove for CAD/Nurbs/product modelers/architects/etc.
Truth is, for me, I just don't use it - it's as bad as Slack IMO, but I'm sure that a lot of people are finding it worthwhile
* Topics are sorted the exact same way as a BB, by default. * Posts have all the usual multimedia features. * The search actually works. * It's super fast and minimal.
I'm generally curious what your UX frustrations are here...
2. When you try to Ctrl-F search it hijacks it with the server side search, it is slower than the browser search. It also does not reliably default to search in this thread, and sometimes fails to find content that's on screen even.
3. The WIP reply draft is synced across all your tabs, which can be obnoxious if you're trying to read one post to reply in another topic based on its contents.
Glad most forums use xenforo.
Terrible, terrible system that should've already been replaced by static html + htmx.
Back in the day, that was the World Wide Web. Federated gardens are a modern invention.
Is this true though? Are the subs which normal people visit are shutting down too?
There's the list so far. Definitely some heavy hitters in there.
Note that if you want to see the full list you'll have to click through to the second thread, since they hit the character limit :)
You should be able to view instances without joining. Checkout my instance: https://reddthat.com
Ps. I've disabled email verification for a short period to allow the influx to happen.
Feel free to come join reddthat.com if lemmyWorld doesn't work for you
> 357 users / month
> These instructions are written for Ubuntu 20.04.
I use FreeBSD and no link to the source anywhere within the manual..
But I'd just add there is a pretty major difference between "temporarily" and "permanently". Major kudos to r/ProgrammerHumor and other subs that are doing it right - saying they will be shutting down indefinitely unless Reddit changes their stance.
Just saying you're only going to shut down for a couple days is essentially theater - Reddit can certainly wait out some popular subs being down for a few days. More generally, that's really the only way protests have a way of achieving their goals, by saying you'll engage in some behavior (or boycott) until your demands are met, or at least met with some change. Anything that's time limited is pretty much doomed to fail. For example, I'm not sure what the organizers of the recent Amazon "walkout" hoped to accomplish. That wasn't a walkout, it was lunch.
would you participate in an online forum only populated with chatbots?
If they are replaced with chatbots, then I'm sure that the result will be educational to somebody. Not necessarily with the conclusion you imply, though.
We're not there yet.
A permanent closure of a popular sub is 100% going to lead to Reddit declaring the sub abandoned, replacing the mod team, and reopening. Has happened many times before. Not sure if programminghumor in particular meets that popularity threshold though.
That's like immigrant jobs: You can take them away but there aren't hoards of passionate volunteers chomping at the bit to replace them.
The day to day is mostly deciding whether borderline comments should be removed and whether a post contains too much self-promotion.
I like Internet communities and am willing to volunteer some time to help some be more successful.
If this was even 1 year ago, things would be different. But it's not.
(I moderate a major subreddit)
There is something wrong with me that in the 90-9-1 rule, I need to be the 1%. I see a forum, and I can't stop myself from commenting or posting. Getting invited to moderate happens naturally after that.
I wish I was the 90%.
Do you have examples, specifically when a subreddit went dark in protest and Reddit replaced the mods?
I have heard of cases where essentially a mod went on a power trip/tantrum and wanted to shut down a subreddit, but that behavior specifically angered the vast majority of subscribers to that subreddit. I think the optics and reality of that are very different from a subreddit shutting down to protest the API changes (in some cases, subreddits held polls).
Maybe check out beehaw.org
https://lemmy.ml/
Maybe they can go to whatever platform the banned subreddits reformed on. Unfortunately many of the subreddit communities that are now being screwed over in the same fashion by Reddit were cheering on that behavior when others were targeted.
Yes we do! It's called Lemmy - it's built on ActivityPub, is Mastodon compatible, and people actually use it!
https://lemmy.ml/post/1147770
Knowing HN users, I don't know why Lemmy hasn't been all over the front page. It works brilliantly.
RIF, Apollo and narwhale apps should all team up and create (or partner up) with a reddit clone.
All the founders of these apps just seem oblivious to this.
Or maybe there's a dead tight contract they signed or something but I'd do it anyway.
Not oblivious. Read the post by Apollo developer at https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
Relevant excerpt:
> Will you build a competitor? Move to one of the existing alternatives?
> I've received so many messages of kind people offering to work with me to build a competitor to Reddit, and while I'm very flattered, that's not something I'm interested in doing. I'm a product guy, I like building fun apps for people to use, and I'm just not personally interested in something more managerial.
> These last several months have also been incredibly exhausting and mentally draining, I don't have it in me to engage in something so enormous.
The thing to watch for is if the admins take control of any major subreddits. That’s what killed FreeNode.
I wonder how these old websites that seemingly no one uses still churn out money?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=digg&hl=...
EDIT: Note that it's a common slang word in Norwegian, hence why it still appears as a search term there
I found one thread with 9 comments. In the popular section. And it devolved into someone calling another an 'asshole'.
The exodus from Reddit seems to be to disperse among a combination of other forums, some Reddit-like sites like Tildes and Lemmy, and Discord.
Once we go through that for a while, we'll maybe have another consolidation again once a new round of companies give it a go. At least that's my hypothesis.
E.g. fandom is doing as good as ever despite many leaving in protest events.
Time will tell which this is.
I think powermods don't want to draw the slightest attention to themselves (because users and press would start looking at them a bit too closely) or how/why they use bots.
The overwhelming majority of popular or even "popular niche" subreddits are moderated by a small handful of people, some of whom have moderation powers in hundreds of subreddits. A lot of mods have gone to the trouble of trying to hide it by using alts, but a lot of them just don't care / are proud of how many subs they mod. I'd be shocked if a number of them aren't getting paid or otherwise compensated by groups like PR firms.
Speaking of which, you know who else doesn't want to pay for API calls? Said PR firms, who are known to scan reddit posts for mention of client names so they can do damage control and manipulation.
These people run their subreddits like fiefdoms and they'll do petty nonsense like shadowban you from every subreddit they moderate because you accidentally piss them off in one.
At one point it was common to post in any of a number of subreddits powermods didn't like and discover you'd been preemptively shadowbanned because their bot was scanning for posts in those subreddits.
These people likely make up a large enough number that Reddit no longer feels the need to cater to their original audience. Maybe it's just me, but Reddits been feeling a lot more like Facebook for the past couple of years.
Even if that wasn't the primary blocker, most alternatives exist to host primarily politically partisan communities.
We might start seeing more of these with the enshittification of all of today's social media landscape.
That said, I have a tendency to filter a fair bit to avoid the major problems but there's going to be some news that I should hear but is not good news either.
I had a chat the other day with a friend. He's deleted the app as he's been on it quite heavily and needed a break. It's certainly something I've heard out of some people. Meanwhile, there's others looking for where the migration is going, assuming a Digg to Reddit type migration.
Is it harder than trying to influence Reddit by these "protests"? No, because the later has 0 chance of success.
Probably pretty tinfoil (on both sides) though.
But this: a) is only a little easier, it's still really hard to move even a tight-knit and smaller community like that, and b) really doesn't apply at all for third-party client developers, whose users surely use and belong to a wide spread of the subreddits, so the task for them is more like "replicate Reddit overnight."
The smaller the subreddit, the easier the move, but there's still the discovery issue, especially since centralized "platforms" are starting to turn into centralized points of failure.
The only sticking point is in all the people who want things to be “federated” for whatever (generally bogus) reason.
Better yet: cloudflare/etc’s preexisting backend.
apollo is 20x times smaller than regular reddit according to app store stats.
Is Reddit/Twitter "better" because everything is in one place? Maybe. But then it's a hard problem that requires money, and we end up where Reddit/Twitter are today.
I'm not convinced building a Reddit is hard, at all.
But getting a mass adoption of users to make it worth using is.
Which is why I'm continually surprised some startup+VC combo doesn't just build it and then pay the top 1000 broad-to-niche influencers out there to sign up and start relentlessly hawking it on their various social medias.
I'd say an app like Reddit is especially prone to this because most decent devs probably could recreate the core UX (subreddits, posts, comments) in a couple of weeks. The really hard part is all the features people don't usually think about (mod and admin tools, for example) plus scaling up to millions of concurrent users.
The only limiting factor is ambition. And on a site with quite a few people from the startup world who see that the only thing in the way is the technical difficulty of building the service then it shouldn't be unexpected that people are saying they should take their users off to a new platform they build themselves. Because that's the kind of crazy thing that startup people think about.
"Apollo dev should create his own backend and show them!"
OK..? He'll take his 600k users, most of whom never contributed content, and do what exactly? Create his own little dead forum that runs only on iOS?
It's not a technical problem, let's stop pretending there's a technical solution. Plenty of reddit clones exist already (many even open-source).
Social media users are notoriously fickle. If you have a vast, devoted community of longtime users, the last thing you want to do is drive them all away.
I think Reddit just got too entitled: forgot how much they rely on their users and figured they could get away with anything because they're just too indispensable to fail. It happens.
The value of Reddit to human society at large and the value it provides the corporate that owns it are not at all aligned. There’s a potential they negatively correlate, even. They need new people going through the gates to the Library of Alexandria, and the books are just means to it.
- the homepage, /r/all, the default subs, served on the new reddit page and app
- the obscure and basement level subs that won't ever see more that a few thousand users (shout out to /r/donteatjimmy), probably viewed by people stuck on old.reddit or a third party client
Heavily pushing the former, and further pushing the latter into a dark corner would have sufficed. They'd had little to no backlash, and could have still boasted huge user engagement etc.
They already had the invite only and private sub mechanism, that could have worked to push the old users into communities that don't get advertised, and potentially have them pay for access.
All of that just to say, there was probably many realistic and not so complicated ways to deal with renewing the user base, all of them looking like better business decisions to me. With the current approach, I'm not sure where they'll get new users from, I don't see the TikTokers moving to Reddit whatever they do, and my grandma isn't coming either just because the furry subs have gone away.
a group of folks are unilaterally making a decision that most people probably don't care about, but some minority would push back on, if given a chance
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplet...
I see many announcements that other subreddits are going dark to protest.
The api changes seem to be the biggest thing.
I am wondering if anyone in the c-suite has taken notice or if they just have blinders on for the IPO.
Honestly it is a tough spot to be in. But if you think about it, without the users and moderators, reddit has nothing.
Edit: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ce...
At least that was the speculation on HN when the story first came out.
To answer your question, the move is of course discussed in the sub, and yes the reaction seems heavily positive.
toxic vocal minority often drives narrative. That's why anonymous polls are important.
hmm...It wouldn't be controversial to say that r/ProgrammingHumor is heavily centered on this concept. And I mean that as a participant in it for I don't know how long.
humor is not necessary toxic, and toxicity can have many different levels, making toxic jokes is one level, distort facts, aggressively attack, flood, moderate unwelcomed opinions is another level.
I don't know how much work the mods do but I do know a lot of people are willing to do it.
OTOH, taking away someone's beloved app, hitting them with big usability downgrade... that's not just principle, and they could lose those users.
Admins? There aren't enough.
But then there's some where the mods and other highly active users are a more active part in making it what it is. Think subs with weekly book clubs, or game challenges, or what not organised by the mods. Is Reddit going to get staff for all these niches to deliver the same level of experience? Probably not.
Most of the casual users I know use Reddit for a few small meme subreddits and topics that are too small for their main-platforms. If those are down, Reddit is dead to them.
(Of course Reddit could try to send their staff each down a different rabbit hole to fit them into the communities. This would be fucking hilarious. I hope this doesn't happen but if it happens, I'll have my popcorn ready.)