I'd note that Reddit has a number of glaring structural flaws that would be simple to improve upon.
- "Local" board admins/moderators run fiefdoms and act in capricious ways.
- The downvote is too powerful, too easy to abuse, and its overuse leads to echo chambers. Unpopular opinions don't need to be talked about or even seen, just hit that button, lol.
- Accounts are weirdly pseudonymous but retain a running post history and gain strength over time. Throwaway accounts are apparently encouraged but are usually penalized in a way that isn't obvious or transparent to the user. There's therefore a thriving market in "high karma" and old Reddit accounts, which are bought and sold in large numbers for small dollar amounts. This is widely abused by the marketing and astroturfing crowd.
- You can also buy upvotes and, crucially, downvotes. This, too, is widely abused.
...And I could go on all day. It's not only a bad site, it's a poorly-conceived site and a future competitor should not copy its mistakes.
A complete implementation would quickly get huge, bloated, and slow. Any "forumchain" that requires it retain its entire activity history forever will fail.
That said, Mastodon is sort of like that... It's a sort of partial implementation of a fundamentally similar idea.
No offense, but this sounds a lot like a comment made by someone who a/ doesn’t understand blockchain, b/ doesn’t understand high traffic websites. I don’t understand the former but have a fair understanding of the latter, but even then not at the scale of Reddit.
Blockchain is “great” for distributed data. How many people do you know would want to run a node that hosts a few TB of data and requires equally copious amounts of bandwidth?
If you meant that you think we should have federated services that interact with each other using an open protocol, I’ve got great news for you! Mastodon uses ActivityPub to federate and is a Twitter replacement. Lemmy and KBin both implement ActivityPub as well and are more geared towards forum-style use like Reddit.
Regardless of the underlying technology that’s chosen, I think the real issue is that everything ends up being centralised. That gives individuals/companies too much power. If every community has its own subreddit, then each reddit policy change is going to offend/infuriate some part of the user base.
If a community forum decides they want to ban $content, it only affects that community and nobody else cares.
Every forum doesn’t need to be connected with everything else. There’s very little benefit from a scuba diving forum to see posts about tennis or sneakers. The only reason Reddit is popular is because instead of having aggregating clients that show a bunch of different topics from different interest groups, we let the servers be the aggregators.
I guess what I’m describing is usenet, where your usenet client just shows you the things you were subscribed to. Gah I’m old.
I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but a blockchain doesn't require that every user runs a node. And any "blockchain" application usually involves some off-chain brokers for performance reasons, which yes users would have to trust to some extent, but they'd also be able to cross-check and switch brokers (or run their own) if they ever lose trust.
So a blockchain forum is doable in a similar way as NFTs. Would require caching on the read side, and unless your users are posting important enough stuff to warrant high xact fees, off-chain write batching.
The real obstacle is that like NFTs, it'd be solving a mostly theoretical problem. Barely anyone cares that a forum is owned by someone, and you need a ton of users to gain traction.
I think the worst part of Reddit is the moderation/censorship. I think anything allowed by the First Amendment should be allowed on Reddit. I think disenfranchising bigots, racists, et al. does more harm by driving them to a true echo chamber like Truth Social.
Other than that, there have been MANY times over the years I wrote out a useful comment (eg tech support type stuff) only for it to hit me with “this thread has been locked” or one of those automod things where I don’t have enough history in that particular subreddit or I didn’t flair or whatever else.
> The downvote is too powerful, too easy to abuse, and its overuse leads to echo chambers. Unpopular opinions don't need to be talked about or even seen, just hit that button, lol.
And you haven't noticed this is EXACTLY how HN operates too? Oh the ignorance is strong in this one.
Reddit has restrictions on votes as well. The restrictions are not necessarily visible to you. You can click the vote button but that doesn't mean your vote is actually counted. There's "vote fuzzing" and lots of other deceptions at work.
Dude, you can't even downvote. You need 500 points, which, unless you're very smart or very lucky, doesn't come all that quickly. There are, as a rule, far fewer downvotes than upvotes here, in comparison with Reddit, which means that there's less homogeneity of opinion: It's easier to voice contrarian or unpopular views -- and they're more frequently engaged with, rather than just hidden in a facile way.
Also the rules here are basically transparent.
On Reddit the downvote is far more powerful and frequently employed, and a lot of the rules are opaque/arbitrary. It's a terrible system for free discussion.
I don't understand why you are so negative about this. It's very easy to sign up for Lemmy.world, takes a few minutes. It's not a matter of opinion. Are you opposed to the platform for some reason?
Lemmy is so depressing. Half of the posts there are either complaining or reminiscing about Reddit, the other half is political news and the ensuing tribalism. I love the idea, but the platform desperately needs not only more users, but better and more creative users.
I like Lemmy a lot, switched over from Reddit a few years ago and it's so much less toxic. I just filter out all the political stuff and political keywords. Feels like a small Reddit before it was massive and filled with bots and spam.
There's plenty of Reddit forks. Lemmy is a fork by the fediverse people that looks pretty much the same as the old Reddit.
The problem isn't the software, it's attracting and retaining a community. It's the same exact problem you have with Twitter: when the shenanigans started, people created five competing forks, fracturing the user base of people willing to migrate. And now, most of them are back to Twitter, because that's where the action is.
Reddit did a lot of things that riled up a minority of users (API changes, the "new Reddit" redesign, etc), but they'd need to upset a majority for the platform to crumble. And I bet this won't happen here; no way they'd allow of the "top 50" subreddits, like /r/aww, to enable paywalls.
Mind you, we're having this conversation on a link aggregator site owned by a company...
Reddit is convenient. It's literally all your interests in one place. And for some interests, it's the best place to go.
Most people don't care who owns the platform. Someone always will. It's as abstract as someone telling them that they shouldn't be letting Apple or Microsoft control their OS. To a regular person, the "Linux alternative" isn't freedom, it's letting Canonical run the show.
Arguably Canonical's hold on the community is much looser than Apple or even Microsoft. Because much of Ubuntu can be forked, much like RHEL was twice forked regardless of RedHat's wishes.
Mastodon servers too have a very loose hold on their communities.
Because in the end of the day centralisation of content wins. The same reason that facebook is still the best place for many people in many places of the world to advertise/discover events, or sell/buy stuff, despite its horrible UX for this kind of things. The current problem is not making a good website for X specific thing around human interactions, but how to put things together.
It might take a lot of money. Circumstantial evidence indicates that some of the most influential mods are being secretly paid by nation states to promote certain narratives. In a few cases they might even be direct employees of state security services using fake online identities. These are on subs for politics and culture where there are no real "experts" as such.
I will accept payment to be an expert mod for a bloomingkales reddit clone. just let me know when you need me and I'll let you know my bank account number for the transfer.
This is the problem for switching sites. It's very hard and usually requires a drastic failure of the site to get people to move off. Inertia is huge and most people don't care.
It took a huge effort by Musk to get people to use Bluesky.
He's talking about paywall-gated discussion boards? Such things have never really worked well before, and they'd work even worse on Reddit. (Where people rely heavily on semi-anonymous throwaway accounts, and which, generally, doesn't encourage detailed or technical discussion.)
Dying thing displays yet another symptom of dying.
Did they not lose a satisfactory number of users with the API changes?
Why not add more advertising?
Edited to add: I'm wondering if these paid subreddits are going to be to compete with OnlyFans type content. I'm not a target market for much, but I can't think of a forum topic that I'd be happy to pay a subscription for. Useful information tends to find it's way to the open internet.
I went from 3hr/day to never visiting it since Apollo was killed (July 2023 I guess? Time flies). Lemmy is enough, I can’t do 3hr/day on it but it’s actually a bonus.
I realized Reddit is only marginally better than others (TikTok, instragram, etc..) so switched to better alternatives (curate my own feed with rss)
From the article it seems like they are considering a 'creator garden' model like patreon.
Ex: you like podcast/streamer/whatever Y. You pay to support Y (via reddit). Y has a paid section of the 'official' subreddit for subscribers. If reddit could figure out a way to provide hosting for Y... or some other kinda value add... it isn't the worst idea? I mean why use patreon, if your fans already have a community on reddit? Plus less friction is always nice for the subscribers. A paying user who logs in can see the 'public' and 'paid' portions of the sub at the same time.
I'm not on either, but supposedly using the patreon app is kinda meh. Private discords seems better, but if your already have a userbase discussing your work on reddit, why not?
I honestly think the biggest issue is the reddit brand. Most people now see reddit as "that one place you get user generated answer from google". Or still see it as "where the insufferable folks are". But that isn't universal. I suppose reddit doesn't have to eat all of patreon's lunch, just some.
(I don't have reddit, patreon, or discord accounts, so...)
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 88.6 ms ] threadhumans pay for things that make us feel better.
The play is pretty simple, you just deprive the subreddits of experts. Someone has to have enough money to buy them.
Edit:
Maybe devs need to go a little underground to usenet and irc. Just for a change in seasons, I remember it feeling cool.
Usenet and IRC were never owned by anybody, what the fuck did we forget?
- "Local" board admins/moderators run fiefdoms and act in capricious ways.
- The downvote is too powerful, too easy to abuse, and its overuse leads to echo chambers. Unpopular opinions don't need to be talked about or even seen, just hit that button, lol.
- Accounts are weirdly pseudonymous but retain a running post history and gain strength over time. Throwaway accounts are apparently encouraged but are usually penalized in a way that isn't obvious or transparent to the user. There's therefore a thriving market in "high karma" and old Reddit accounts, which are bought and sold in large numbers for small dollar amounts. This is widely abused by the marketing and astroturfing crowd.
- You can also buy upvotes and, crucially, downvotes. This, too, is widely abused.
...And I could go on all day. It's not only a bad site, it's a poorly-conceived site and a future competitor should not copy its mistakes.
These ideas need to be floated because it’s for everyone. No getting rich off this kinda stuff.
That said, Mastodon is sort of like that... It's a sort of partial implementation of a fundamentally similar idea.
Blockchain is “great” for distributed data. How many people do you know would want to run a node that hosts a few TB of data and requires equally copious amounts of bandwidth?
If you meant that you think we should have federated services that interact with each other using an open protocol, I’ve got great news for you! Mastodon uses ActivityPub to federate and is a Twitter replacement. Lemmy and KBin both implement ActivityPub as well and are more geared towards forum-style use like Reddit.
Regardless of the underlying technology that’s chosen, I think the real issue is that everything ends up being centralised. That gives individuals/companies too much power. If every community has its own subreddit, then each reddit policy change is going to offend/infuriate some part of the user base.
If a community forum decides they want to ban $content, it only affects that community and nobody else cares.
Every forum doesn’t need to be connected with everything else. There’s very little benefit from a scuba diving forum to see posts about tennis or sneakers. The only reason Reddit is popular is because instead of having aggregating clients that show a bunch of different topics from different interest groups, we let the servers be the aggregators.
I guess what I’m describing is usenet, where your usenet client just shows you the things you were subscribed to. Gah I’m old.
So a blockchain forum is doable in a similar way as NFTs. Would require caching on the read side, and unless your users are posting important enough stuff to warrant high xact fees, off-chain write batching.
The real obstacle is that like NFTs, it'd be solving a mostly theoretical problem. Barely anyone cares that a forum is owned by someone, and you need a ton of users to gain traction.
Other than that, there have been MANY times over the years I wrote out a useful comment (eg tech support type stuff) only for it to hit me with “this thread has been locked” or one of those automod things where I don’t have enough history in that particular subreddit or I didn’t flair or whatever else.
And you haven't noticed this is EXACTLY how HN operates too? Oh the ignorance is strong in this one.
Also the rules here are basically transparent.
On Reddit the downvote is far more powerful and frequently employed, and a lot of the rules are opaque/arbitrary. It's a terrible system for free discussion.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
https://lemmyverse.net/
It does not have as many users as Reddit, but a Reddit paywall might drive more users to Lemmy sites or other alternatives.
Only later might they care about what server they are on, but that's a great place to start.
There's plenty of Reddit forks. Lemmy is a fork by the fediverse people that looks pretty much the same as the old Reddit.
The problem isn't the software, it's attracting and retaining a community. It's the same exact problem you have with Twitter: when the shenanigans started, people created five competing forks, fracturing the user base of people willing to migrate. And now, most of them are back to Twitter, because that's where the action is.
Reddit did a lot of things that riled up a minority of users (API changes, the "new Reddit" redesign, etc), but they'd need to upset a majority for the platform to crumble. And I bet this won't happen here; no way they'd allow of the "top 50" subreddits, like /r/aww, to enable paywalls.
We didn’t realize we gave up being owners.
Reddit is convenient. It's literally all your interests in one place. And for some interests, it's the best place to go.
Most people don't care who owns the platform. Someone always will. It's as abstract as someone telling them that they shouldn't be letting Apple or Microsoft control their OS. To a regular person, the "Linux alternative" isn't freedom, it's letting Canonical run the show.
Mastodon servers too have a very loose hold on their communities.
That our sector of people is likely now the minority on Reddit, and the dynamics required to replicate the e.g Digg migration today might not exist.
This is the problem for switching sites. It's very hard and usually requires a drastic failure of the site to get people to move off. Inertia is huge and most people don't care.
It took a huge effort by Musk to get people to use Bluesky.
It's not a good idea.
Did they not lose a satisfactory number of users with the API changes?
Why not add more advertising?
Edited to add: I'm wondering if these paid subreddits are going to be to compete with OnlyFans type content. I'm not a target market for much, but I can't think of a forum topic that I'd be happy to pay a subscription for. Useful information tends to find it's way to the open internet.
I realized Reddit is only marginally better than others (TikTok, instragram, etc..) so switched to better alternatives (curate my own feed with rss)
An obvious one would be porn, but then why would one pay for it on reddit as opposed to one of the existing platforms?
Ex: you like podcast/streamer/whatever Y. You pay to support Y (via reddit). Y has a paid section of the 'official' subreddit for subscribers. If reddit could figure out a way to provide hosting for Y... or some other kinda value add... it isn't the worst idea? I mean why use patreon, if your fans already have a community on reddit? Plus less friction is always nice for the subscribers. A paying user who logs in can see the 'public' and 'paid' portions of the sub at the same time.
I'm not on either, but supposedly using the patreon app is kinda meh. Private discords seems better, but if your already have a userbase discussing your work on reddit, why not?
I honestly think the biggest issue is the reddit brand. Most people now see reddit as "that one place you get user generated answer from google". Or still see it as "where the insufferable folks are". But that isn't universal. I suppose reddit doesn't have to eat all of patreon's lunch, just some.
(I don't have reddit, patreon, or discord accounts, so...)