Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
Today's subreddit strike showed me just how reliant I've become on reddit including my local subreddits and adding site:reddit.com to all my web searches.
Going forward, are there any good comprehensive alternatives to reddit?
298 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadThe moderators are limited in number and absolute in power, you can't make new subs (I asked for a few and was declined), and the community is more tight and discussion-oriented (which is a good thing IMO, but I never quite felt like I fit in so I don't comment often).
1. People are discouraged from being too negative about posts, but posting negative articles is fine. This led to people occasionally linking articles containing invectives about some subject they didn't like, but you're not supposed to respond to the article with invectives. It produced a natural asymmetry in the conversation and felt really passive aggressive.
2. The long post format is a noble goal, but personally I couldn't see the incentive in putting in a ton of work to craft a thoughtful, researched, and thorough post only to have it read by maybe 20 people then buried after a day. If I'm going to put that much work into a piece of writing, I'll create a blog where it will at least have some more permamence. I think in the end the long post format attracts people who enjoy the process of writing itself--which is fine--but it simply doesn't equate to higher content. A lot of the opinions in those long posts are still underbaked, and the length doesn't improve them. Tildes threads can be a grind to read while producing little information.
https://tildes.net/register?code=UBZX0-DBQOR-H2W6A
https://tildes.net/register?code=IYUPP-2VZHD-EPZWM
https://tildes.net/register?code=TW3P3-YK0LZ-L7FLY
https://tildes.net/register?code=MAUNA-6IE43-OY86X
https://tildes.net/register?code=8RC2T-40G03-AFSYF
https://tildes.net/register?code=INH4U-7HC5H-AESTL
https://tildes.net/register?code=92S7J-WQR3B-I7OQJ
> "Most of the existing users have the ability to invite others, so if you know someone that has an account, you can ask them for an invite."
https://tildes.net/login
https://stackdiary.com/reddit-alternatives/
The current VC investors should also consider if the existing CEO is fit for the role, given their apparant personal attacks and defamation against a third-party developer, and the public proof that these were unwarranted.
A lot of the existing alternatives skew to the left or right of the political spectrum. The ideal platform would welcome all, and not witch hunt one or the other. Tildes seems to fit that but is invite only. Squabbles also, but it's not /quite/ the same as Reddit.
Forums are the way to go for now.
What I would love to see is a hand-picked curated list of forums, a la dmoz but for social, with reviews.
For local things, consider instead Facebook groups and nextdoor... not that I think that those are good alternatives. There may be a slack channel or discord group too - though those fill different (but often similar) roles.
One of the issues that you'll see with this is that you'll need multiple accounts to handle the disparate sites (well, many of them have a sign on with Google or Facebook) - there's no "one stop spot for everything".
And despite claims of power hungry mods on reddit, it becomes clear why something is needed if you spend any time looking at Nextdoor and Facebook.
Saidit is a publicly funded, opensource alternative to Reddit, that uses the same old.reddit code. For anyone who doesn't like the Fediverse, Saidit seems like the best option.
Looking back, man usenet's format was kinda similar to reddit wasn't it? Usenet with voting.
Idk about y'all but this is actually kinda super fun. I'd love to reintroduce some modernized takes on old school platforms. The internet was more fun before everything got consolidated anyway.
I don't like the UI, to much white space, one of my main issues with reddit
Going through the code and issues, i have suspicions its a bit over engineered in the wrong ways and will have trouble continuing to scale, like they are already seeing. it doesnt matter your using hip rust frameworks or w/e if you cant write sql queries or architect the app to run fast...
I dont get the fediverse thing or its importance. If you think back to old forum communities, they were ad supported or corporate backed and usually attached to some kind of greater site as a feature(even this is just a ycombinator feature to begin with) If anything, connecting everyone is a bad idea.
Really we just need message boards, with modern features like tree comments, effective uis, that can be monetarily supported. they need to be part of an existing place on the internet, not just a place for the whole internet to be together. There can't be vc funding involved. Reddit being a company with internal corporate culture and profit motivations is what ruined it. without vc, their goal could be just to exist and slowly and sustainably grow, this all wouldn't have happened.
I joined a Mastodon instance with 3k+ other users and made several hundred posts.. until one day when login failed. Turns out the admin lied about a lot of things (like backups) and an unpaid bill wiped the machine.
Migrations are not possible when original server is offline, so I lost many months of content.
Running an instance by myself is no fun, community is the point. I see no obvious solution but wont personally ever touch another ActivityPub based social media.
>Running an instance by myself is no fun, community is the point.
I might be missing something (in which case pardon me), but isn't one of the strengths of a federated system that you could "roll your own" just to host your account and then engage on other servers with that account?
I'm imagining it as email, and your email provider accidentally wiped your account. My perception of the federated reddit clone might be off, though.
As for community, you have to seek out users on other servers to follow in order to bootstrap yourself, but once you've done that, their posts will federate to your instance and vice versa. You can also go directly to other sites and copy the thread link into your instance to interact with it, or if the site supports it, you can log in via OAuth with your own account and interact natively with the content on the other instance.
Google EEE'ed
Lemmy is the best-known in that list, but Kbin and lotide both look pretty promising, too - making my decision of which to spin up as a personal instance much more challenging :)
[1] https://brutalinks.tech
Noticing that it's more like HN than reddit, in the sense that there's no equivalent to a subreddit AFAICT. Fine for my purposes, but are there any implications around that when it comes to federating with e.g. Lemmy or Kbin (which very much do have subreddit-like subtopics)?
The idea (maybe not very well communicated in the README and other docs[1]) is that each instance would correspond to a "subreddit" with its distinct community. The federated aspect however still allows users from other instances to subscribe/participate. In my personal opinion building services that group multiple interests is a step in the wrong direction creating redundancy to the concept of federation itself.
[1] https://man.sr.ht/~mariusor/go-activitypub/brutalinks/as-a-r...
I'd encourage anyone to at least check them out.
1. Link Discovery 2. Discussion
There are a few options for Link Discovery. I have a bunch of fora and sites hooked up to an rss reader (the old reader, since google shutdown reader) which does pretty well (although I'd like it to do a bit more). The link discovery thing is like the equivalent of having channels on your TV. You can stream any program (website) of a huge number but a channel gives you a reason to think about a specific one right now. I've been looking at https://pinboard.in/popular/, but it doesn't support rss which is a shame.
There's really nothing to compare with reddit for discussion of the links though (and that includes scoring and karma and responses etc). And a big part of that is because of network effects. Reddit is where the discussion is happening, because it's where the people are because it's where the discussion is happening. What's really awkward here is that some of the alternatives have ended up as seeding around communities that were too toxic for mainstream reddit. That toxicity will make it harder for them to grow.
I do find myself wondering what a system that connected my rss feed reader with global comments about webpages might look like.
Newsblur has this. It would probably be fine with more people. Occasionally there's something interesting, but usually there's no much of anything.
It's a cluttered user experience, though fairly configurable once you've started to find your way around. It's definitely a kitchen sink style tool, however.
EDIT: It's bottom left, sorry. I browse the web in a mirror.
You see this on subreddits such as /r/IdiotsInCars and /r/Earthporn.
The former allows the user to upload videos while the latter is for images. This helps the user have a more pleasant experience because it reduces/eliminates
- popup fatigue (worldstar, local news sites, etc.), - back button hijacking (CNN, local news sites, etc.), and - walled gardens (NYT, Newyorker, WSJ, etc.).
I think reddit could encourage their users to attribute (some if not most would) by adding an optional source (sauce) link field to post forms. Might be nice to have a way the OP/mod could approve a crowd-sourced source edit.
It got to the point where I don't bother unfolding the video unless it's embedded.
These sites should just give up, provide the URL to the raw video file, and let users play them back in whatever way works for them.
Ah! I was telling myself the same thing last month (how is it possible in 2023 that things which seemed solved _years_ ago, actually still do not work?), when I was trying to watch some recording of a sport event. The site proposed several players (generally 3).
3 different computers (Linux_A, Windows_A, Windows_B).
Linux_A with browser_A: only player_A worked OK.
Windows_A with browser_B: player_A some days worked, some days didn't; player_B and player_C worked OK.
Windows_B with browser_B: player_A gave audio but no video; player_B stuttered; player_C didn't work ==> no success with this OS+browser combination
Windows_B with browser_C: only player_C worked OK;
We can note that among those combinations, we had two systems with the same OS and the same browser, and yet the behaviour was completely different.
> These sites should just give up, provide the URL to the raw video file, and let users play them back in whatever way works for them.
Why did they only charge $10 a year for this gem of a tool?
It boggles my mind.
I don't think replacing Reddit is just about throwing a toolbox at the problem
I don't think they necessarily have to be the same thing, but the voting for links to bring quality ones to the top, and the choosing of which site to be looking at today is very much like having a TV channel.
Lots of people find themselves watching films that are being aired on specific channels, despite the fact that they had access to that film for years on a streaming service and didn't watch it. I think of the link discovery aspect of Reddit as similar to an aggregated DJ or TV channel.
Reddit is a low-effort replacement for traditional forums, solving several problems of traditional forums:
1. One account for all communities. Nobody wants to make 100 accounts, whereas it's really easy to just click "join" and start participating in a new subreddit.
2. Consistent, uniform, familiar interface with Markdown for text. The old PHPBB etc. forums all had different layouts and slightly incompatible markup. And Discourse is just weird.
3. Easy to stay "casually engaged" with the community because of the customized per-user front page and the ability to group communities together with multireddits. Whereas with individual forums, you need to get email notifications or manually check several different sites to stay connected, which is much higher-effort. Also, it's easy to passively follow a low-population subreddit in the hope that it gains more users, while you're much less likely to make a new account on a forum that seems quiet. This helps keep the appearance of a high active population in niche communities, because people are less likely to forget about the community and can easily drop in and out.
4. Easy discovery of new communities and being a name brand makes it easy to attract users: people just assume a subreddit for X exists. The alternative is that they'd have to hunt around for a forum that will probably be low-population anyway.
5. Upvoting and downvoting helps the community moderate spam and bad actors. It also creates incentives to post content, in the hope that you get upvotes. Yes, there are problems with the system, but I think "the market has spoken" to some extent on this: the individual enjoyment of voting outweighs the systemic incentive problems associated with it.
It's easy to say that Reddit is "just" the two things that you mentioned, but that to me is reductionist to the point where it obfuscates why people prefer Reddit for discussion compared to other options.
Note that Discord has many of the same advantages over its alternatives, and I think similar points are relevant for both platforms.
And how many are actually run by the city government?
I never understood this point. Reddit provides zero discoverability.
THIS. i have seen so many people put Discord forward the last couple weeks a reddit replacement, and have wondered what they were thinking. Its a totally different format. The two formats can compliment each other but can't replace each other. its like saying sms is replacement for email because they are both text based messaging services.
To some extent, this is what Artifact.news is doing though it's mostly mainstream news right now.
They have a neat feature that aggregates comments across different articles covering the same topic.
I think this might be pretty close to what you're looking for. It's an RSS feed reader with a platform for discussions.
If anyone else is interested I made a browser extension you can use to batch delete your Reddit posts and comments: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...
Let me know how it works for you if you try it! Still fixing bugs.
There was more discussion about this exact issue in the thread about Shreddit from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36257981
A lot of people are using Reddit's data request form to get a copy of their own content before deleting it.
Maybe somebody could set up a site where users can send in their personal backups, and they can be combined into a sort of 'shadow Reddit'.
Much better way to protest I feel like
AES is symmetrical
For the actually discussions or more niche content, there isn't much. There are some Reddit-specific alternatives popping up, but unless Reddit itself really dies I doubt they'll get much traction. Your other options are the other social media platforms, which have their own issues and aren't quite the same.
That does replace the literal aggregation feature, but how do you go about finding good sources for your RSS feed?
I'm genuinely asking. I mucked with RSS lightly a decade ago and dropped it largely because of reddit.
1. Public: these would be democratically run forums. The users would actually be able to vote for moderators, and perhaps even rules around them. This would be ideal for things like r/[country] or r/[city].
2. Private: these would be traditional forums run by the people who found them. It should also be possible for the "person" who runs it to be a corporation or similar group.
3. Personal: This would be a users own "twitter" like feed.
Other things I think would be needed are:
1. The owning company be a foundation like wikipedia, run as a non-profit.
2. The data and code should be open, so that if anything happens a clone could be setup.
3. Site wide minimal content rules set by the owning foundation. There are some things that should not be allowed at all.
4. Built in trainable AI agents. Moderation is a huge task and I believe it's on the site to supply appropriate tools. By trainable agents, I mean efficiently integrated machine learning models that moderations can personally update and train per sub to help them enforce the rules.
See how the alt right infiltrates gaming groups. The reasonable voices are outnumbered and taken over.
But also, this could be an excellent platform to experiment and discover systems that DO work. I think it's worth trying in any case, as the status quote already "doesn't work" in an even worse way. Special interest groups grab control and there is no way at all to unseat them.
Goes both ways (if you insist to use the traditional political compass). GCJ is a perfect example of that. I use the "terminally online" word for these people rather.
Sure GCJ and other overly leftist subs are annoying. But there is a world of difference of spamming “[video game] is secretly about trans fem boy communism” by GCJ types. Vs alt right groups talking about (real life) minorities not deserving equal rights.
Subjectively, I avoid any overly politically forced sub. However let’s not push the “both sides” argument.
In my view, terminally online interest groups are responsible for the current protests against Reddit. Several of the smaller low traffic area-specific subs that I frequent have been taken offline (some threatening permanently).
For better or worse, the best moderating schemes on a moderately large group is via a paid position. At least there a mod has a "boss" that you can hope to appeal to should they abuse their power. May not always work but it's more security than hoping an admin pays attention to a subreddit's drama.
I always envisioned some kind of reddit where you could simply appeal moderation actions through a dedicated report system and if some mod goes above and beyond a certain threshold of reports, the community gets to vote on booting them out
So, if that's your thing, check it out. If it's not, probably not a good fit and the "better approach" to moderation probably won't go in your favor.
tbh how is this different than most subs?
this is a feature, not a bug...it keeps these people out of the real world and glued to their keyboards where their blast radius is limited to their own echo chamber
This is not preferable. Extremist bullshit is the only product of echo chambers. Eventually it breaches containment and becomes a real world problem.
I tend to avoid politics online -- even if I agree with them. They're rarely useful and I'm just not interested, in a lot of cases.
You can have righto subs on it, nobody is going to stop you or ban you. For example in the past they removed moderators of f/communism for excluding users pushing the libertarian flavors of it
Here's TOS
I'm sure you can find two or three right wingers capable of doing all this. Maybe at least for a few weeks :)What the fuck?
> Apologizes for violence towards children.
What is this sub for?
I'm still learning but am trying to start a worker coop as well
This is my biggest gripe about Reddit. Unlike hobbies or interests, I can't change my country of birth or (easily change) the city. So when you get banned from a geographical sub, you have no alternative. Some of the moderators have a specific bent of mind, and do not accept any other views. A typical example is /r/india which is totally under the control of radical anti-Modi mods. I got even banned from there for posting in another sub _that had been recommended to me by Reddit's algorithm_ !
Most geographical subs are extremely liberal leaning. I'm from Hungary and in /r/hungary pretty much 99% of the posts are anti-Orban. Same with /r/europe pushing the general federalist EU agenda [0]. Or just /r/politics for the US, good luck going against the MSNBC meta.
0, which ends up funny when the topic is food and suddenly everyone becomes hyper-nationalist
Younger demographic that is somewhat tech savy, is not happy with Orban? I am shocked! How could that be?
I'm not from Hungary but I have low opinion of Orban. All the Hungarians I've talked to had nothing but bad things to say about him. Is he well liked or at least tolerated in Hungary?
I've been banned from my city reddit for simply stating that crime was becoming a problem. I've been banned for supporting trans rights. I've been banned for explaining stock based compensation. For describing and linking to AI tools.
Reddit's moderation system is authoritarian and capricious.
I think it would greatly improve the site if communities using generic terms were instead replaced with disambiguation pages that linked to related communities, and that this process could be triggered automatically so that as terms become generic the communities could be remounted.
You don't get anything like this on big centralized platforms like Twitter or Facebook. If you get banned by their opaque, highly automated moderation systems, you're just out of luck unless you evade the ban. The network effects and the costs of switching off them are just far too high.
Good moderation at scale is impossible[0], and the Reddit/Discord/etc model deals with this pretty decently by leaving most decisions to individual communities.
[0]https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-t...
I'd like to have moderated comments be opt-in. The moderators can exercise their power and label something spam, hateful, or wrong or whatever, and if they do that job well most people will consent to having their perspective limited. But it should always be a choice, and people should be able to choose no censorship at all, or censorship of only the worst content.
That Kbin instance is getting slammed and trying to scale up right now - many identical /r/{subreddit} are now available at /m/{subreddit} (m for magazine) thanks to some of the prior subreddit mods I guess?
I wonder how many extremists contributed to the reddit code base over the years.
https://kbin.social/modlog
It's an attempt at mapping subreddits to places in the fediverse.
https://browse.feddit.de/
I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere.
But some others have still been the best places to get early information on certain topics. For example /r/stablediffusion had a lot of people posting their novel uses and techniques for image generation. The QR code topic which is now blowing up here was already being talked about on reddit a week ago.
It's incredibly frustrating to discover a potential new hobby, check out the subreddit, and go to the top posts all time, only to find pages on pages of low-effort crossposted memes that are often barely relatable.
It's also super frustrating being in one of those hyperfocused niche hobby subreddits and getting memes, and people treat you like some sort of wet blanket if you voice any opposition to low-effort content.
Something similar happened to me in the bicycle space, which turns out to have a lot of forum activity as well. Seems some of the oldguard never switched to Reddit in the first place in both communities.
One niche hobby sub I’m part of grew over 120x due to the pandemic. The mods cracked down hard but it had the side effect of suppressing quality conversations as well.
I think they found a good balance but you forget how big the sub is now until some meme slips through the cracks, and has 10x the number of upvotes compared to usual posts.
It splits the community and the meme version will tend to have 100x the users but that's ok imho. You'll find the meme free offshoot will have the same feel as the early smaller community and will be much better if the topic really does interest you.
From the very start people warned that it would water down content and replace thoughtful discussion, and so it did.
It was great for engagement though, I guess.
Even for cycling, there are about 8 subs that I'm on, and one out of the bunch is strictly focused on serious fitness & performance discussions, whereas the rest are sort of free-for-alls loosely based on the subreddit's sub-genre.
If there are no subs within the subs, might just gotta suck it up and scroll past the memes. Or start a discussion and find like-minded folks to branch off.
Would you mind sharing?
I moderated a cycling community (r/mtb) that grew to about a quarter million subscribers and I had a really difficult time keeping the low effort content at bay.
When communities grow to a certain size they lose their niche audience, and lowest common denominator posts bubble to the top and drown out quality content.
That said, I like PinkBike.com for MTB stuff and Hacker News for tech stuff. Those are really the only two forums where I actually leave comments these days.
It isn't just the quality of the posts that degraded though. r/MTB for example hasn't gotten as spammy as most other subs. But the quality of the community has gone to shit, and thats almost worse because that was the main value it originally had. There really good gear discussions and technique help is gone. Most posts get 1-4 comments, almost all of which are "where this at?" or "what bike u hav?" that there is no community anymore. No discussions, which to me was the real value of the sub.
There is one subreddit that I don't feel comfortable mentioning because it covers a deeply personal and sensitive topic. But I joined that community back when it had 5k subs (it now has 300k). That community saved my life in many ways and provided therapy and healing by discussing a sensitive topic and help with recovery for people who were going through a similar traumatic life experience that I was going through at the time. It was an invaluable support group. Many of us knew eachother (by anonymous usernames of course), and helped eachother cope through very tough life experiences.I even participated in a few IRL Meetups. People would write research and high-quality content on there that rivaled academic content available at the time, several actually went on to do PhD research in this previously-unresearched niche. It was such an exciting time and such a healing and powerful community.
That community is 300k people now and a complete disaster. Way too many posts, most of which are off-topic. The remainder of the posts are non-constructive rants (which were previously banned). To make matters worse, there was a period of time where the community became unsafe and a mod from an opposing group had become a mod of our support group and was doxxing people in a way that ruined a few people's lives (I was luckily mostly no longer an active participant by this time, and mostly just lurking and providing occasional guidance). The community is now very rage-filled and is nothing like the quality support group/community that I was able to participate in.
Reddit is all about the communities. But it has become so commercialized and mainstream now that it has lost its original value. I don't want to scroll through a feed of memes and low quality shit posts or reposts. I want discussions and q+a forums with people who are passionate about topics, hobbies, life experiences, and shared interests. I want real discussions, not another algorithm-driven social media network spamming garbage at my eyes.
The Digg migration was the first step towards Reddit's Eternal September, but Covid lockdown was the final nail in the coffin.
Reddit is the complete opposite these days. Censorship (often arbitrary) and banning are out of control. In extreme cases they ban users for making a joke, I've seen that more than once. So when you check old threads and look at the usernames, you'll find quite a few of them don't exist anymore because they were banned. On top of that, each subreddit has their own moderators/dictators that quite literally simply remove anything they don't like.
My theory is that a significant portion of persistent trolling is caused by that. Users are or feel treated unfairly, they're bitter about it and then some of them come back with an alt account and disrupt the community. Then there's the animosity between some subreddits too, like you hinted at. A good portion of reddit these days is drama. Since it drives engagement one way or another, the admins are unlikely to crack down on it.
If the comments under posts become too active, it is downrated and disappears from the front page which reduces the rates of people commenting on it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089
You'll also note things like "when the comment is too deep the reply link disappears" which creates a bit more friction for carrying on what would likely be unproductive threads.
Things around controversial topics also get downranked (whereas on Reddit hot topics move to the top of the list).
There's a lot of automated tooling in HN that reduces the amount of manual moderation that is needed by making it harder to have posts that contain things that need moderation.
While I sympathize with newbies, the incessant “My First Blinking LED” posts get old really fast. Especially when said LED DOESN’T blink, and they post a Fritzing thing instead of a circuit diagram.
AskElectronics is pretty good though, in large part thanks to Davide's moderation. Losing places like that is sad tbh.
There's certainly a place for these, as everyone needs to start somewhere, but having a better home for these would be welcome.
In our model, as soon as anyone you trust in our graph says "this is a 101 type post/comment" we can realize you are not interested in seeing it and de prioritize it in your feeds/comments while still showing it to other newbies or to people who have expressed an interest in engaging with that kind of topic.
The easiest solution seems to be to allow filtering of content based on tags. In most cases, the memes were tagged as such. Had I been able to simply say, "Don't show content with the `meme` tag," I probably would have spent a good deal more time on reddit, browsing and contributing.
For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/search/?q=NOT%20flair%3AAccess...
You won't see any of the posts titled 'Access' in that search.
On old.reddit a number of subs that I followed had those as quick links (e.g. a "click here to see /r/cats without posts flared 'mourning or loss'")
I don't think much thought goes into hosting on reddit or elsewhere. The people who like reddit, setup on reddit, the people who like Discord setup on Discord.
In the absence of reddit, I have no clue where many would go, there's no obvious place I would go.
- I (and/or my community) wants/doesn't mind psuedo-anonymity.
- I want a community that can quickly grow, not bound by region
- It should be easy to share links
- It should be easy to setup a longer form discussion
Discord for example would probably only satisfy 2/4 conditions.
But yes, there is no one glove fit all replacement as of now. If only because most new alternatives can't satisfy item #2 without some major money being put into advertisement.
I feel like I've seen the opposite, generally- there was always kind of a tension between serious posts and memes, but in the past few years it seems to have become much more common to see subreddits with a counterpart strictly for memes (/r/chess and /r/anarchychess being a recently popular example).
I’d say that Reddit used to be like that, but that they’ve been actively undermining that, because that’s not what they want to be any more. New Reddit (2018, I think) showed that they really don’t care about that aspect.
New Reddit forces post lists to be massive space-wasting and thumbnailed stuff. On my laptop’s screen, it tends to fit about one and a half items per screen, and is clearly oriented around doom scrolling: consuming content. When you view a post, you can see about six comments at once, mostly only top-level ones with occasional second-level ones. Actually, it seems they might have improved it recently: last time I tried it, I think you couldn’t get it to display beyond third-level, and it would only expand one level at a time, whereas now it seems to expand more at once (though it’s still way too aggressive in its collapsing) and go up to fourth-level before going deeper takes you to a single comment thread view with hopelessly bad history management that makes anything but always opening in new tabs just about completely broken. Anyway, they’ve severely hobbled the threaded comments system, because they’re optimising for massive subreddits where comments average vapid. Basically, anti-community.
By contrast, Old Reddit fit about a dozen items per screen, and required action to see an item at anything but a tiny size (70×70 or so), because it cared more about the comments thread. And it tends to fit about a dozen comments on my screen, and you can actually view nested comment threads meaningfully, and it all just works way better. Because it cared more about community.
Communities depend on a much better commenting system than New Reddit wants to let you have. HN and Old Reddit are both way better.
I’m fairly involved in r/rust. If Old Reddit ever disappears, so does my remaining use of Reddit, because I don’t think you can maintain a decent community without it.
Reddit are forsaking their link discovery and community discussion roots, and becoming just mass social media and memes, and they’re making major technical decisions which enforce this, even for the subreddits that want things the way they used to be.
The memes and jokes have gotten so poor they just look plain stupid. A majority of the AskReddit posts are useless questions posted by kids and teens that make no value and only get posted to make the OP's look "cool". That said, it was once a good way to get news, and now with the stupid commercial push by the company it has now lost almost all of its status
Why should your posts on r/knitting and r/samurai be linked together in the same account? How often are people seeing the same person across Reddit communities and it ends up being helpful?
The orangered inbox and tracking of karma on Reddit provide some encouragement to use a single site for this all, but can we solve that in diffuse communities? Is karma actually a benefit to users, or should it be hidden anyways?
With that said, I opened up https://communick.news on the weekend to try out Lemmy and I wouldn't mind having a few hundred of you there to help me bootstrap it.
Before I used reddit, I had an account at an Audi forum, a different account at a tennis forum etc.. Reddit is so much better. I'd rather some 'bluesky'-like competitor vs every community going their own way.
I always called it a low effort forum of forums. Low effort because all you need is one account and you can wander about and annoy people in any community. But that was reddits strength - you didn't need to register and keep track of different accounts and sites.
> I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere.
The issue with focused reddits is once all the interesting shit has been posted and questions have been answered, where is the value in the community? At that point the sub has saturated and cant grow and the members are bored so memes and shitposts take over. I mean how many times can the same "n00b here - how do I dive into X" question be answered before users either ignore them, down-vote them or tell them to search the forum for similar answers already posted? Its stagnation that any community will face.
Realistically, most Reddit users don’t want that and won’t migrate to smaller niche communities. Smaller niche communities that currently exist are way better than the Reddit versions 9/10.
New Reddit needs to have a better way to sort this content out. Maybe extra arrows for funny/not funny?
The tech focused can move elsewhere, but smaller communities with not so many tech savvy users will probably stick to where it’s more convenient.
Facebook groups had a really great interface that I thought worked well.
There are still Forums out there running phpBB.
I think the ultimately a replacement if one is found should be easy to use and easy to find information in.
We can look for and/or build Reddit substitutes, but just my 2c, this is a fine prompt to question not just the instantiation but the concept itself.
most of the political/activist/policy-driven discussions on reddit have no impact on the real world and lots of energy is just dissipated into typing that goes in to a db and no further
case in point...most local subs are mobilized against NIMBYs...but NIMBYs tend to voice their concerns at City Council meetings (where it matters), not on the internet...guess who wins?
reddit just takes the energy out of activism and dissipates it
To talk about media, hobbies, and maybe even to foster professional skills. I feel those were the most valuable communities.
I have better luck online. Heck, I had better luck in mobile game guilds. And the pandemic honestly made things even worse, worse in a way that has longer term effects than I ever predicted.
I can have a whole multi-post rant about the fall of social hubs, the futility of Meetups, and simply the difficulties of a late 20's male trying to find a friend group their age, but that's probably too tangential for a post asking about online communities.
This person has been thinking hard about this: https://twitter.com/Prigoose, https://prigoose.substack.com/
The only better place in theory is up north in Silicon Valley. But I'm not sure if I want to move and drastically up my cost of living in the process.
Agreed that there's not great resources for local discovery, beyond Discord groups and Meetups (which sort of died during the pandemic)
I've never been happier having stopped using it!
Also, the ham radio guys like groups.io, which is where yahoo groups migrated to. There are a lot of groups there on specific things, like Yeasu FT-857D transceiver. Groups.io has per-group file storage, which is handy for this.
Anyway on USENET, you can access it via google groups, but it's a bit non-obvious. Here is an example group:
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.math
But how can you find groups? You click on "all groups and messages" on the top, then enter a search term and hit enter. Then click "outside my org". When I do this for the term "france" it shows "4635 groups outside your organization". Open the list and look for the groups that have "." separators, for example "alt.france".
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.france
The ones without the dot separators are google groups- if you post, the message does not go outside of google. I don't know if you can create a USENET newsgroup through google groups- probably not.
It's kind of crap for discovery, but OK once you have a set of groups you use often.
Edit: actually a better way for discovery is a website like this: http://www.harley.com/usenet/master-list/index.html Once you have the name of the newsgroup, just append it to the groups.google.com/g/ (also the site provides a link).
There are some NNTP servers that are not connected with the wider Usenet that I like (SDF, tildeverse), but of course they suffer from extremely small and niche membership.
How do you browse it, how do you post to it, how is spam prevented?
I've been running a forum for 15 years. It's now horrible, outdated software, full of bugs and probably security holes. However, it works. It has an active community. It requires almost zero maintenance on my end. A cheap VPS will do the trick.
Before Reddit, people would just type in "forum" when doing a Google search. That should still do the trick. For example a Google search for, how to tie a knot "forum" brings up many forum discussions.
With Reddit, or Reddit alternatives you don't have to worry about all that.
Arguably, that is one of the things that keeps the quality of content higher.
Likewise, it is too easy to post on Reddit allowing for the easy low content/quality material to make its way there more frequently.
Quoting from A Group is its Own Worst Enemy - https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownw... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 ) - from four things to design for:
> Three, you need some barriers to participation, however small. This is one of the things that killed Usenet, because there was almost no barrier to posting, leading to both generic system failures like spam, and also specific failures, like constant misogynist attacks in any group related to feminism, or racist attacks in any group related to African- Americans. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.
> Now, the segmentation can be total—you’re in or you’re out, as with the music group I just listed. Or it can be partial—anyone can read Slashdot, anonymous cowards can post, non-anonymous cowards can post with a higher rating. But to moderate, you really have to have been around for a while. It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.
> Now, this pulls against the cardinal programming virtue of ease of use, but ease of use is the wrong goal for social software. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you’ve got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction, toward the individual, when in fact, the user of a piece of social software is the group.
i do miss threaded comments thou
I just follow a few interesting people for whatever topics I want to follow. In fact the “for you” page has been giving me decent recommendations lately.
I barely use twitter these days. The platform is falling apart. If you aren't a paying subscriber you will be deboosted, blue checkmarks are the ones that get raised to the top first. I also resent having to wade through a sea of bot garbage that aren't even real people. Just algos from Russia and other lovely places that are programmed to pop up and froth and foam if they see a keyword.
Old twitter was fun though, back when it was real people.
It also isn't a charity venture even though he is quite rich now (owns Square, etc.) It is a corporation, so it will be set up to monetize in some way. I like to think that people are getting sick of being the product for some corporation.
Pretty sure that a large # of those "people" you refer to are actually bots. If they're mostly noise and mostly tied to something political they're probably a bot. Take a look at a sampler. If they only seem to pop-up whenever Biden is mentioned or only ever talk about a single thing especially at odd times of the day..
It’s kind of fun to see the extremes of both sides get engaged by reality.