Just saw that Reddit has removed Aaron Swartz from the list of co-founders, and was wondering, what online communities do you really like that serve the need for discussion and play which aren’t HN?
Reddit has become a heavily censored website that supports only one political viewpoint. For instance, I cannot say on reddit that BLM by definition checks off all boxes for a terrorist hate group because I will be banned. This goes for large swaths of society in general where people have gone from free speech advocates to raving lunatics ready to censor, ban, cancel, and fire anyone who does not support their views.
Next reddit will start with free speech and, if it becomes popular, eventually the anti-free speech people will move in and turn it into reddit.
A "free speech" platform is not enough of a value proposition for mainstream users to migrate. The only people who will be incentivized to move will be toxic/fringe/controversial people and their followings. If you want to make a community for those people, go ahead. See gab.com, voat.com, 4chan.org, parler.com etc... All these places are similar to reddit/facebook/twitter but without censorship. However, the whole point of a "free-speech" platform is to encourage an open exchange of ideas. If you only serve one side of the political spectrum, what ideas are you exchanging? It's just an echo chamber.
My point is that a real competitor to reddit will be highly dependent on some technical innovation that convinces a "normal users" to migrate. Our only hope is that this new platform will be wiser in terms of censorship policies. No normal person is going to waste their time signing up, actively post, check, and sink their time into a platform who's whole pitch is "a twitter/reddit clone with less users, but you can say racial slurs".
So I‘ll use my mom as an example. For most of my life I used message boards and chatrooms to get my internet experience. For decades this women had no idea what she was missing out on. Eventually they mainstreamed the stuff I’ve been using for people like her. They go to Reddit now because we used to go to Reddit, they sit on Facebook now because we used to sit on message boards.
The stuff the tech minded people use today will be the stuff people like my mom will use tomorrow. She doesn’t know what she’s missing out on again. So we absolutely have to keep innovating.
The problem with alternative sites like these is that these do not try to be their own thing and instead focus on being an "anti-reddit". Which - given how political reddit is - already resulted in creating a site that you describe. It's called Voat and it's dominated with right-wing politics and consipracy theories and it is pretty much unusable for anything else. There's not a single community on Voat that is worth suffering through pages of political nonsense. Gab has the exact same issue.
The problem is not that reddit doesn't allow free speech, the problem is that these sites became the front of war for people who live and breathe real-world politics. That type of content seems to dominate everything else on these websites and turns off people who just want a nice little community to discuss their niche hobby.
I believe the next reddit won't be a site that advertises itself for allowing free speech; I think it will be one that bans real-world politics and does it's best to keep it this way.
It seemed to me that shill mods started to back off around August when some of the rioting and arson started getting old and having the opposite of the intended political results. And, now that we are a month from the elections they are no longer interested in censoring as it probably won't have an effect especially since people have already started voting.
I agree somewhat but the solution is tricky. You've described two problems, actually: 1) Community norms/culture and 2) censorship/banning. Ideally, the "next Reddit" would/should allow flagging content that is hateful/hurtful while providing a sensible (and formally regulated) means to appeal flagging, censorship and banning.
Ultimately, the Internet at large needs to grow past this adolescent stage that yields to mob rule and crudely divides people and ideas into "good" and "bad" without any discussion or nuance.
Reddit has always leaned incredibly liberal, that's not new. But some of the most active subs sport borderline extremism for conservatives as well - and that viewpoint would be shared and upvoted plenty, just like ACAB or sympathizing with Chris Dorner will rise to the top of /r/politics.
Online communities without moderation exist, and they're usually cesspools. I don't think they'll catch on like reddit did.
I think the left wing has adopted the view that they are good fighting evil and the ends justify the means in anything they do, which of course is not compatible with free speech and subject to political abuse. Online communities without moderation have always existed. Pre-internet BBS's were full of what people would call "cesspool" stuff although it would be considered tame today. Today cesspool means generic conspiracy theories. Obviously a big right wing one is politicians and pedophilia which congress just passed a resolution about WHILE there is this whole real thing going on with pedophile island, Epstein, and, yep, politicians. So it is hard to sort out which is 'cesspool' and what are attempts to censor reality and hide crimes coming from the political establishment.
Any board where they just remove flagrant porn, gore, and violent threats would be OK and would last until the general public learned about it.
What the past few years have shown me is that we need a place for serious discussion that is not influenced by bots, propaganda, and astroturfing. Public opinion and awareness on current events on sites like Twitter and Reddit is getting swayed by all sorts of bad actors and this is wreaking havoc on our society. I think if we actually care for a healthy community, the future is in communities with verified identity so that there is actually some sense of accountability from the people that post there. Whether these types of communities will gain any traction is another story...
I think in that case, people need to pony up something of value to contribute and participate in such an environment. There are a few cases where I think this has succeed, in communities like ChangeMyView on reddit... Paid communities are kind of already starting to take off. I wonder if you could couple a subscription model and a minimum word count, with heavy moderation (of the right kind)... It'd be hard to pull of.
I’d really love to see an exodus back to Internet forums. I forged a lot of great relationships while I was growing up on forums, and I learned programming through hacking on extensions for little communities I was running.
I remember those times dearly but if I were to be objective I think content and comments ranked by appropriateness is still a superior format than chronologically-based forum threads.
I think federation is still a half-measure. Instead of one big AOL, you have several smaller AOLs who talk to each other.
The system I have in mind would allow you to use the same identity seamlessly across any instances you come across, port the content while retaining threading and identifiers, and clone an existing instance within minutes.
You could import the entire moderator action tree from the old instance or leave it behind.
NNTP, which can be decentralized. I have wrote a NNTP server software, although it may help to implement some other things to go with it, such as: federation with other NNTP services (which might or might not use the same software; the protocol is the same regardless of what software it is using), web interface (I have some requirements, such as requiring the NNTP server information and message ID to be displayed even if scripts/CSS is disabled), email subscriptions (many people prefer mailing lists, and this is a way to make such a thing to work), etc.
I am working on quitting reddit and joining the "homebrew website" camp as the bulk of my online presence. I don't expect it to be the next reddit, because I don't want a next reddit. The internet on social media is big, fast, and dehumanizing. I want the internet to feel smaller, slower, and more personal. I think the only answer is for everyone to build their own website. Unfortunately there's not much money to be made in that.
The solution will be separate forums, in which the forum owners have a stake in maintaining a healthy community. Reddit has willingly allowed itself to be overrun by politics, and it's now bordering on being disinformation. An example is the Libertarian subreddit, which has been completely overrun by liberal and trump supporters. People who visit it get visibly confused.
There are a number of projects for building reddit-like communities . Lemmy and whatever the *.win websites. People are also workign on federated solutions which would remove the hassle of having to create an account for each separate website (https://github.com/ProjectHoot/)
Going back to having separate forums would be great actually
The problem with Lobste.rs (which arguably is also the key differentiating point) is their invite only system. Unless you know someone who's already in, there's no way to get an invite
You can get invited via https://lobste.rs/chat which is what I did. Since most users on chat are US based, requesting for an invite during that timezone would be the best. I was asked for proof via GitHub/twitter (there's probably more options) and then I got a mail with the invite link.
Next reddit will start with free speech and, if it becomes popular, eventually the anti-free speech people will move in and turn it into reddit.