One thing I've been a little surprised by is the idea that, even if the API pricing was reasonable and these apps weren't shutting down, that they wouldn't be heavily and severely impacted by the fact that 3rd party apps will not be able to access NSFW content. Reddit has a LOT of porn on it. Preventing 3rd party apps from accessing that content is a pretty good indicator to me that they're going to completely get rid of that content, eventually. People keep making Digg references, but I'm not sure the real answer won't actually be Tumblr.
I don't think porn is the primary use of Reddit for many users. There are other source out there and it's relatively easy to replace it. At least for the more generic genres.
What Reddit good for is communities. Especially niche communities (including NSFW ones). That will be much harder to replace for users. But also Reddit is miserable in its new web UI and mobile app. It's so much worse than many third-party apps that, I believe, most users will likely quit Reddit altogether.
I don't have any proof and if I knew where to get it I would supply it, but reddit's porn scene is huge. There are almost 5m people just on /r/gonewild
If the "Map of Reddit" project is any indicator the total NSFW subs are about one-third to one-fourth the size of the total non-NSFW subs. That's a non-trivial amount of use to gamble with, but the legal and regulatory headaches may make it necessary.
It may even be higher than that, because some of the usage of the other subreddits may be a consequence of being co-tenant neighbors to the NSFW subreddits, making it easy to move between the two kinds of content on the same site.
Which as a url, doesn't necessarily trigger corporate or school blocks unless the gateway is whack-a-mole filtering on subreddit names as well, and I suspect quite a few of those are designed not to reveal the nature of the content through the name alone.
Map is generated by clustering subreddits based on users who comment across subreddits, so I don't think you can infer much from the colored area. That's just background for each group of the graph.
I’m not saying it’s small. I’m sayin most of it is easily replaceable content-wise. My hypothesis is that NSFW communities (what’s hard to replace) are a relative small fraction of all NSFW subs.
> One thing I've been a little surprised by is the idea that, even if the API pricing was reasonable and these apps weren't shutting down, that they wouldn't be heavily and severely impacted by the fact that 3rd party apps will not be able to access NSFW content.
Oh no they absolutely would be. And that ad-supported application won't be allowed anymore either.
But given the API pricing both are second-rate issues, they don't matter because the API pricing makes third-party application non-viable anyway. You don’t worry about your cancerous moles when your femoral artery has been cut through.
They recently made it impossible to view NSFW-flagged content from a logged-out session, which makes me wonder if they're struggling with it too (this may also be a geo-restricted thing, I'm visiting from a UK IP address).
Ah, interesting. To be fair, super-majority of users on mobile are already authenticated in the app, so I don’t think it would be any loss. I guess, maybe for people who don’t want to be tracked about their NSFW browsing.
Still curious how Twitter was a pass, but Tumblr/maybe Reddit are no go. Maybe the way ads are being shows when there’s NSFW content?
I'm not convinced it has anything to do with ads. The redirect isn't necessary to just not show ads for Kibbles N Bits on bestiality porn subreddits.
It does have two other effects though:
- Inflates registered user count, which is useful ahead of an IPO
- Maps very niche porn habits to individuals, to way finer degree than your PornHub favorites/history. I don't know of anybody reselling this sort of data, but also don't work in this space.
Twitter is way smaller than the media makes it seem. It's in the second tier of social media, along with Twitch, Snap and Pinterest. It's not a major marketing channel for any of the big brands with strict brand safety guidelines. Note that pushback on NSFW content is usually just a price negotiation tactic of big brands on their biggest marketing channels
That's a good point. I use twitter primarily for adult content and still get ads.
I've never consumed NSFW content on a NSFW sub on reddit. I do however run into NSFW content all over the site on random posts across reddit. Some much more NSFW than others. I wonder how they will define that content.
I'm a new twitter user but I have literally never seen NSFW content on twitter other than occasional war clips from Ukraine. I mostly use twitter for financial info. Compare that to Instagram where you just get bombarded with it.
That is my experience as well. On twitter I don't see adult content without looking for it specifically vs Instagram pushing me in that direction. Reddit will expose you to nsfw content but there are big differences between recommendation engines pushing you in one direction and the different ways you can consume reddit as a user.
r/all, frontpage, only following niche subreddits, only following your city's subreddit, only nsfw content, only gaming subreddits, only memes pages, only gardening etc.
I remember when this happened for Robinhood during the Gamestop debacle, Google decided to simply remove all the one star reviews. I expect something similar here.
If you sort the reviews by Most Recent, you'll see many one-star reviews. Perhaps not enough to skew the main score, it is cached or some other reason.
Apollo is shutting down too. I will probably continue to use Reddit, but exclusively on browser where I can block their ads and scripts. The moment they shut down old.reddit then I am gone for good.
Would you pay a subscription model for access to Reddit? If you're unwilling to pay in any way whether its watching ads, API fees, or a subscription, my guess is they'd be happy you're done for good.
(If your answer is yes: well, I think they are dumb for not offering a paid, ad-free version).
I was absolutely willing to pay for it, and I did (Reddit Gold subscription) for a few years!
And then I was banned for no apparent reason. A 9-year Reddit account, Reddit Gold for several years, moderator of a moderately sized community. I had never posted anything controversial, never gotten conduct warnings or subreddit bans. Never got an explanation despite multiple appeals.
A few months ago they unbanned me. Still no explanation. My theory is that maybe somebody at Reddit saw me complaining on HN a few months back.
I've moderated communities, and mistakes happen. I recognize how difficult Reddit's job is. And I realize it's just impractical for them to provide personalized customer service.
However, I will never give them my money again unless I get some transparency about why I was banned.
Otherwise I'm not willing to become invested (emotionally or financially) in Reddit again because I am thinking to myself: "I could probably be randomly banned again at any moment."
My 11 year account was just banned as well. I don't remember posting anything terrible recently. So not sure what's going on, but I won't be appealing or making a new account or going to the site anymore.
I would not, because reddit doesn't deserve my money. A different organization running a similar but different site would get money from me, but that doesn't really exist.
The dichotomy isn't really "ads" vs "subscription" in most cases; it's "ads + data harvesting (with negative societal externalities)" vs "subscription vs data harvesting (with negative societal externalities)". I am willing to use such a service as a parasite, but not as a paying user.
I happily paid for Premium for years, I've gotten a lot of value out of Reddit and I wanted to make sure that they got money even though I blocked all their ads. I cancelled when they announced these API changes since it's the only leverage I have.
A paid ad-free version of their site isn't really good enough though. To keep me happy I need to be able to keep using third party apps on mobile, maybe something like 'exempt requests from Premium accounts from API billing'.
I would pay for an Apollo app subscription model since the main reddit site and app are comically bad in UI/UX. But as we've seen in the last month reddit is not interested in that kind of option.
One of the core features of reddit is that far too many people use it with anonymous accounts. Its a good way of saying things that they don't want their families/friends/work/governments to know.
So a paid ad-free version simply doesn't work for these people.
Reddit not only doesn't have anonymous accounts, new pseudonymous accounts can get shadowbanned after the tiniest mistake (yes, this is a huge violation of netiquette, but then reddit is basically built assuming that people are going to violate it, so...)
I paid for Boost on Android, but the value proposition of a food third-party client is more clear to me than Reddit itself ironically. I get an extremely small amount of tangible value from Reddit, so little that I prefer to rack up an arbitrary amount of Karma and then delete my account periodically, which sort of resets my relationship with it. Most of that Karma is just shit posting.
That's how I already use reddit. I tried their mobile app and it was so garbage I just use it in browser in desktop mode to avoid the annoying "Reddit is better on mobile" lie that I had to click past every time. I really don't understand the difference and obsession of using old.reddit vs regular. As far as I can tell, it functions exactly the same only with a bit of UI uplift. As for adblock, the modern internet is virtually unusable without it. I don't care about how much it hurts webhosts, ads are intrusive, obnoxious, sometimes/often a security risk, and I'm never-ever-ever-ever going to click on one anyway.
I really like old.reddit but is there any stylesheet trickery that makes it more bearable on a small portable screen? I used to use i.reddit.com which was a very stripped down mobile friendly version of the site but it has been shutdown in the last year or so...
17 year reddit member. Went from fark to digg to reddit. I guess its on to the next thing. The APi changes seem to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
I mean, obviously folks will move on to something. But it seems like nobody has ever been able to make money off of huge Fark/Digg/Reddit style "big, public, multi-community" sites. I can't imagine anybody ever trying it again.
I feel like the overall trend is just moving back to smaller independent communities. Kind of like the webforum days but with Discord instances instead of webforums.
Discord "servers" aren't independent communities. Discord will be the next platform to get MBA'd, and then it'll be off to somewhere else. I'm not sure how they've survived this long, frankly. They have no visible source of income except Nitro, and I can't imagine that comes close to covering expenses.
> I can't imagine that comes close to covering expenses
That's the fundamental problem with corporate-owned mediums. It is impossible for them to exist long term without being ruined by commercialization because that corporate owner must make a juicy profit sooner or later or else shut it down.
The only viable long term model is decentralization where nobody owns it, so nobody needs to profit from it and the operating costs are shared.
Email (1970s) and Usenet (early 80s) survive in perpetuity because of this (I know most people have forgotten about Usenet but it's still around). It's important to take these lessons to heart. Reinventing yet another proprietary platform with a single corporate owner just to see it inevitably die off when profits must be squeezed is exhausting and a treadmill we should get off of.
No hard feelings, but I feel your reply was a bit unnecessary? Did you read my comment and think I felt that a Discord server was actually... separate from Discord, the company?
I wrote my post on HN, for an audience of people who understand that stuff already.
What I meant is, for most purposes, a Discord server "feels independent enough" for most people. Yes, your data lives on Discord's servers and they could yank the plug at any moment. You don't actually own anything. Again, I wrote my post with the assumption that HN readers are knowledgeable about such things.
No offense was meant. It seemed like your post drew a distinction where there isn't one. Even from a non-technical perspective, the Discord server system is roughly the same as the Reddit subreddit one. My point was it doesn't represent a shift to smaller communities or parallel old-school forums at all.
Wasn’t there some talk a few months ago about Microsoft putting in an offer to buy Discord and the creator of Discord not being interested in selling? I recall it being a big deal and then it wasn’t. - penalty because MS never actually, publicly extended the offer.
Reddit reportedly made $350m in revenue in 2021. If you don't know how to make a profit from that with a site that was basically finished a decade ago and outsources all its moderation to volunteers...
Yeah, how do you not make a profit with that revenue?
This is one of the big problems with running stuff in Silicon Valley. You have to pay so much f'ing money in terms of salary/rent/etc, even a business like Reddit that would be wildly successful by almost any standard anywhere else in the world is actually a money-loser apparently.
I understand that Reddit was founded by some big brains like Aaron Swartz (RIP) and that scaling it is not trivial, but also it is not exactly cutting edge rocket science either. It's... a threaded discussion forum, lmao.
They're kinda tricky to scale, because each logged-in user sees a customized view of every single thread. Which certainly defeats a lot of the most trivial caching strategies.
But on the other hand they lend themselves pretty well to horizontal scaling via partitions/sharding/etc because the vast majority of your transactions will involve a single post or a single subreddit.
They added realtime chat stuff, and that's trickier I guess, but also TBH they could drop that feature entirely and I don't know who'd really care.
1. Bring back old.reddit.com.
2. Make the app less insanely shit and annoying. (Didn't they buy a better app just to kill it at some point?)
3. Require third party apps to show ads.
4. Fire half the employees. No way you need 400.
1,2) don't turn a profit, especially if most users are indeed not using new reddit. It's probably better to let users customize new reddit and figure out a different stylesheet. Some 3rd party apps do this.
3) I'm guessing this isn't easy to do because there's still some division of ad revenue between the creator, the ad provider (usually google/apple in this case), and Reddit.And if you require ads and all ad revenue to go to reddit... well, there goes any incentive for others to make apps. 3rd party devs aren't charity cases either.
4) that is good for showing a profitable quarter, not good for generating actual revenue.
Most of the old guard is still going. How well is debatable. Ebaumsworld, Slashdot, Fark, Cheezeburger, and Something Awful, among others, are all still kicking around. Shadows of their former selves, but still around.
I agree with you on things beginning to fracture off again. We've cycled forum expansion and consolidation since forums started. The big consolidations were Usenet and Reddit (aka Usenet 2.0). Their downfalls have let to the new expansions and we're seeing it.
New web forums and Discord will be the norm for a while. We'll see the Usenet 3.0 challengers start the new round of consolidation until the new Usenet 3.0 comes in. That took a while last time.
It is a positively wild thought that running Ebaum's World could remain profitable in 2023.
Who on earth is their audience? I feel like as kids in the early aughts we already perceived Ebaum's as a sort of second fiddle reposter site to the primary sources we found dumb internet stuff. It's crazy to me they're still running all this time later.
Well, let's be honestly. Ebaumsworld is a mess these days. Complete garbage of a front page. Submissions with no comments. Seems like a graveyard that's still operating somehow but probably mostly on automation.
I'll probably still end up on Reddit for whatever it can provide for a while. Seems like the death spiral will be a slow decay more than anything and I'm not seeing any replacement for random facts and tidbits of knowledge, memes, or shitposting at the moment.
It's a platform. If it was a protocol anybody could run their own Discord server, which you cannot. (Discord "servers" aren't servers, and you don't own them, Discord does.)
There are some bad incentives to Discord the company, but at its core the program merely provides a chat protocol like IRC. I think you've only proven the point that any protocol can be used to be a dick.
I've thought a bit about intentional communities --- communes, utopian towns, and the like. The thought occurred some years back that amongst the most successful intentional communities are college towns. These are, hands down, some of the best places to live, and certainly on a per-population basis, in the US and Canada, based on a wide range of measures (though housing costs tend to be higher than surrounding areas).
There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite small towns to be found around the world, though the US might be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or college. Some public, some private (though virtually all benefit by public financing of research or student aid / loans).
These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns, even for relatively small schools.
As to what makes these tick ... I don't have any solid evidence, but I've a few theories:
- There are a number of associated populations for the institutions, with widely varying residency periods. Students pass through in 2-8 years typically (net of transfers, drop outs, extended undergraduate programmes, a/k/a "five year" and "six year" plans, and graduate / professional programmes). Faculty tend to remain much longer, often much of their professional career (40+ years). Alumni may settle in the region (though most do not). And there is the "town" (vs. "gown") component, which may be sympathetic, adversarial, or a mix of both --- residents of the community who are not directly affiliated with the university. (Instances of town-gown conflict, including actual armed battle and shooting wars, date back to mediaeval times, e.g. the St. Scholastica Day riot of 10 Feb 1355.)
- The school itself has a central organising principle and mission, which many other intentional communities lack.
- The school has associations with other institutions, organisations, and agencies, some of higher learning, many not, and tends to form strong relationships with government, business, cultural, and religious sectors.
- Since the 19th century, official government recognition of the significance of both higher education and research has resulted in an increasing degree of official sanction and financial support, initially the German Humboldtian model, technical schools (e.g., M.I.T., founded in 1861 in large part to support the U.S. Navy's newfound interest in steam propulsion), land grant universities (organised in the US under national acts of 1862 & 1890), and the modern research university (largely spawned by the Manhattan Project and Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) and formation of the US National Science Foundation, and widely emulated in other countries). In the UK there is a distinction made between the Ancient Universities (Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin), the Red Brick Universities, chartered in the 19th century, the Plate Glass Universities, chartered between 1963 & 1992, and ... whatever comes after. See: <https://www.ukuni.net/articles/types-uk-universities>.
Note that universities themselves don't necessarily make money directly (through tuition), though some are extraordinarily wealthy (e.g., Harvard (~$50 billion), Yale (~$40 billion), Stanford (~$38 billion), Princeton (~$35 billion), see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...>). Those funds tend to come from grants (both government and privately-funded research), alumni donations, and increasingly technology licensing. In the case of Stanford, real estate is a massive contributor. Schools often also benefit from tax breaks and other legislative relief and exemptions.
So, you say, that's really interesting, dred, but how do you translate that to online communities, especially those for which locality and location are not central elements, as they are for brick-and-mortar institutions?
I don't know, though ... I've been pondering just that for a decade or so.
The insight does suggest a few solution-shaped objects and/or characteristics, however:
- A key failing of venerable fora is that the membership often becomes exceedingly stale. Not only do new members fail to arrive, but the more interesting and dynamic members of the old guard often leave as both the noise floor rises and the clue ceiling drops. Reward for participation simply decreases. Universities subvert this by pumping fresh students through. I suspect HN's YC affiliation and fresh founder classes in part aids HN in this regard.
- A forum is almost certainly not a freestanding enterprise but an adjunct to another institution or set of institutions. Again, HN serves, but does not profit, YC.
- Universities are mission rather than profit driven, and both teaching and research are a key element of that mission. This ... plays poorly with the notion of a VC-funded online community start-up. Ezra Klein in a podcast on media earlier this year noted that a key challenge in organising new ventures is that the profit motive and VC / investor interests tend to conflict strongly with journalism's prerogatives.[1]
- Several of the most successful previous online communities formed either directly through or closely affiliated with educational institutions. The Internet itself, email, and Usenet directly, Facebook originated on the campus (and with the student body) of the most selective-admission university in the world, and I'd argue that Slashdot's early tech-centric membership was at least strongly academic-adjacent.
- Universities are focused not only on the present moment, that is, streams, but on accumulated wisdom and knowledge. Here, HN is less a model than, say, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, in which something of a community forms through the editor community which creates (and fights over) the informational resources being created. Wikipedia doesn't quite have a social network, though various discussion pages and sections approach this.
- On the "small" bit, there's both a selective-admissions and graduation element that academia shows. That is, you don't just let anybody in, and, after they've "completed the course", they're graduated and moved on, with the exception, again, of faculty and staff. Just how that translates to an online community I'm not entirely sure.
- Another element of the "small" bit is that universities are organised: into colleges (that is, interest areas), departments (specific faculty), courses (specific topics of study or interest) and sections, that is, specific groups or meetings of students for lecture and/or discussion. Individual class size is a key dynamic, and much of the experience of the past 75 years or so shows the challenges of scaling lectures and the profoundly different characteristics of a small seminar (say, 5--15 students), a modest upper-division class (25--30), and moderate-to-large lectures (50 -- 1,000 or more students). Strong interactivity is sharply curtailed above about 15 students, and the options for interactivity above about 50--100 are near nil. Choosing how groups are organised, who's permitted in, and what size limits exist, as well as communications between various divisions (sections, courses, departments, colleges, universities) all come into play, as I see it.
And then there's politics. One of the notorious elements of universities is how various divisions rival amongst one another, gatekeep, define what is in (or out) of a specific discipline's remit, resist challenging new concepts, and form cliques and fads ... just like any human domain, only more so. I have a nagging suspicion that online communities might in fact have similar tendencies, and that these would also have to be subverted somewhat to avoid pathological development.
There are a whole slew of other factors --- techical capabilities, UI/UX, online abuse, legal issues, privacy and identity, spam, propaganda, surveillance, censorship, etc. So many dumb ways to die.
________________________________
Notes:
1. "How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...> Which is to say: unless you're planning a pure-play advertising monetisation model, which is to say, the Sidam Touch (advertising turns everything to shit), you won't get funding.
I've thought a bit about intentional communities --- communes,
utopian towns, and the like
What makes HN work is two things. One, dang's insanely great moderation work. HN's guidelines are simple, opinionated, and tailored to a specific niche user audience. Dang is an excellent benevolent dictator, enforcing the guidelines with world-class skill and kindness.
Two, there's no direct profit motive with HN. Can't underestimate that. It is optimized for user happiness rather than anything else.
These factors work great for an online community but they don't have easy analogues in the physical realm.
There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite
small towns to be found around the world, though the US might
be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or
college
These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns,
even for relatively small schools.
I agree that college/university towns in America are generally pretty nice places. Not utopias but generally cooler than others, as a vast generalization.
I always see them as kind of a... unique byproduct of a flawed system.
The average lifetime earning advantage of a bachelor's degree was about $1 million cumulative USD last I checked. So schools can charge a lot of money, and it is still a good deal, and people will pay that money, and the government subsidizes a lot of this via grants and loans.
So you have a gigantic money faucet pouring money into the town, and a lot of people (students, faculty, and graduates who never move away) who have certain demographic traits: they tend be more intelligent and/or more driven and/or are more educated and/or enjoy more privilege.
And that certainly creates a certain kind of place, although I think the key factors are hard to duplicate elsewhere w.r.t. founding intentional communities.
(Although, maybe that is the ultimate lesson: found your intentional community in the shadow of a giant money faucet and/or a privileged niche community)
Another element of the "small" bit
Yeah. Small is key. I founded a (now defunct) online niche community that had a very committed fanbase. I viewed smallness as our moat, actually. Big players could never be as small as us; could never have the "small town" or "local bar" feel. This is still an extremely viable business plan for a lot of things IMO if you are willing to stay small and target a max of like... several fulltime employees. There is a lot you can do with a business if e.g. $250,000-$500,000 is your target revenue and are content with that rather than trying to conquer the world, but that requires you to bootstrap and avoid investors more or less.
I think Reddit's approach was awesome, actually. A bunch of small, mostly-independent communities (subreddits) under a single roof.
It would work if they could downsize and have a razor focus on the core functionality people actually care about. But no, they have to enrich investors, and pay SV rent and SV salaries, and therefore can't turn a profit even on hundreds of millions of revenue.
I hope a leaner operation takes their approach and runs with it. I have seen a few mentioned in this discussion. And the StackOverflow network has AFAIK managed to prosper with an approach that is somewhat similar if you take a 50,000ft view.
I'd agree that dang's role is key to HN, though pg also set things up in terms of direction and focus. I've been diving into some of his comments on HN, goals, initial direction, and lessons learned. These are informative and address topics, questions, and issues frequently raised over the ensuing 17 years. Both execution and constitution matter, IMO.
What you discuss regarding the enabling mechanisms of college towns is fair commentary, though it should be noted that there are other money faucets which don't create the same effects: natural resource extraction economies, excluding the rapid boom/bust variants, don't give rise to the cultural aspects of a college town. Tourist attractions may, if, say, arts and culture are significant elements of this (say, a Sedona or Ashland, OR, or Bayreuth), though it can be difficult to disentangle tourism from other elements for larger destinations (Disneyland and Hollywood in the Los Angeles region, San Francisco as distinct from its economic and tech-sector activity). Heavily merchantilistic cities can draw wealth, but are less effective with culture (again, trying to isolate for those without a major academic centre, so NYC, London, and Paris would be confounded examples). But a Hong Kong or Shenzen or Dubai or Singapore whilst having an extraordinary merchantile / trading role, does not have a commensurate cultural or academic one.
And at the other end of the scale, you can have college towns which are too successful. I'd put Stanford and environs here: Stanford, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Los Altos, say. These are so wealthy that the cultural amplification of the educational institution is dampened by the lack of affordability of the region (housing, etc.). Several of the US East Coast college towns have similar issues.
There's still something particular about the college town dynamic, and I think the points I've raised are fairly key to it.
Regarding Reddit:
The larger encompassing community was useful for a time, but with brigading and even just having a smaller sub appear on the front page or cross-posted to a larger one, the local in-group culture could very easily get overwhelmed. (This is hardly specific to Reddit, and there were examples of trolling and other cross-newsgroup attacks on Usenet.)
Reddit does little to foster conversation. I still miss Google+'s dynamic of having a Notifications pane which showed all threads in which there was ongoing discussion (whether it directly involved you or not), and both presented those threads and enabled replying directly from the Notifications pane. This meant that:
- Conversations could continue for a prolonged period of time. Days, weeks, even months or years in instances. And do so productively. (Yes, the thread host would have to delete spam and trolls, but a well-tended thread was a delight to behold.)
- Other participants would be made aware of the ongoing discussion, and could choose to rejoin if they wished. Or to opt out (mute the thread). Again, with a principled and intelligent host, this could result in long-ongoing discussions.
On Reddit, a comment reply generates a notification only to the author of the comment replied to. There's no sense of a thread-notification (or even some smaller region, say, the three or five preceding comments' authors). This means that conversation tends to die rapidly on Reddit.
For HN there's a similar issue, though with the "Threads" link it's possible to see if there's been general response to a specific comment of yours. There's no notification mechanism, and unless a third party is higher up on the thread, they're not going to see the activity within their own Threads view.
The G+ mechanism can be abused, of course, and is again affected by scale. On G+, a "thread" consisted of an initial post and up to 500 replies, a limit I saw reached occasionally. This limited total participation, though it seemed to be sufficient for most discussions. I'd make a practice of splitting off sub-discussions or linking a continuation thread to preserve integrity of the origin discussion. With 500 comment slots, 20 people would have an opportunity to comment 25 times each, which is reasonably comprehensive.
One feature Reddit has that's underutilised (and underpowered, in terms of features, notably search) is the built-in wiki. That could serve far more than it does as an informational repository. There are some subreddits which make good use of the wiki, far too many which ignore it completely. Not being able to search the wiki means it's a bit of a roach motel (text checks in, it never checks out), but ... the concept is useful.
though pg also set [HN] up in terms of direction and focus.
[...] Both execution and constitution matter, IMO.
100%.
that there are other money faucets which don't create the same effects: natural resource extraction economies, [...] Tourist attractions [...]
Yeah, there are other distinct factors with college towns relative to other money faucets.
- The (putative, anyway) core mission of colleges is one of education and research. There's a hell of a lot of other stuff going on at colleges, to the point where that core mission often feels like an afterthought, but it is a unique factor relative to the other examples we can name.
- While colleges sure love to suck up money, it is not their core focus in the way that it is for a corporation.
- Colleges have a markedly younger demographic than just about any other money faucet we could name
There are more of course.
And at the other end of the scale, you can have
college towns which are too successful. [...]
These are so wealthy that the cultural
amplification of the educational institution is
dampened by the lack of affordability of the region
100%.
On Reddit, a comment reply generates a notification only
to the author of the comment replied to. There's no
sense of a thread-notification (or even some smaller
region, say, the three or five preceding comments'
authors). This means that conversation tends to die
rapidly on Reddit.
This is very true for me, especially on large threads with more than ~100 replies.
Ultimately I don't find this to be a dealbreaker but it is for sure a shortcoming.
One feature Reddit has that's underutilised (and
underpowered, in terms of features, notably search)
Yeah. On the subreddit I moderate(d) we saw the same questions over and over and we wanted the wiki to be the solution to that. But realistically nobody looks on those wikis unless a mod or somebody explicitly links them to the wiki.
I don't know what the solution is there. A wiki is such a different paradigm w.r.t. a threaded discussion forum. And their functionality overlaps. I don't know how you weld them together.
To really make it work in a synergistic way there'd need to be some thoughtful integration. First we'd need to define the purpose of each.
This is an admittedly arbitrary distinction but IMO it would be useful to have the wiki be a place for higher-quality information that has been accepted as canonical or at least reliable by the mods and the community.
This would need to be coupled with a way to "bless" or "promote" information from discussion threads to the wiki. And a helpful and magical way to automatically surface relevant wiki information in threads, for example if you are asking a question whose answer already lives in the wiki.
The wiki search should, as you say, be better. But the underlying problem there is split-brain syndrome: the bit of information you want could lie in the threads and/or the wiki. At a bare minimum there needs to be a unified search.
On Wikis: even with search, most people simply won't look at them. Search is most useful for a very small set of power users ... and for mods who are looking for the appropriate cluestick to whack an offender with. Even with a relatively small wiki, I'm often struggling to find content I know (or am pretty sure) exists. The whole thing reads like an intern's summer project, and I strongly suspect it was.
The notion of having both an ongoing transactional dialogue and an accumulating finished work, somewhat analogous to a financial journal (transactions) and statements (finished works) is something that I've long wanted to bring to online discussion. Again, Wikipedia (and similar projects) most closely resembles this, though even back in Usenet days there were newsgroups and the periodically disseminated FAQs of accumulated knowledge and behavioural norms.
Determining what each should do is key. There's a long history of discussions being bundled up as books (lectures, meeting notes, bull sessions, etc.), of serialised publication, of collected letters or other epistolary exchanges.
There's the case of Stack Exchange which as I see it somewhat has the opposite problem: it tries to treat the transactional discussion as the finished work, with a great deal of feather-ruffling. I'd think that SE would benefit from a different approach in which the live / current Q&A discussions are allowed to happen, but examples of especially good answers being canonicalised and surfaced in search, perhaps refactored into articles.
Another problem with knowledge corpora is that they both get out of date and/or are subject to malicious (or simply uninformed or misguided) edits with time. These are problems which long predate online versions and variants (one joy of mine was discovering a 19th-century encyclopaedic edit war: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...>).
Ultimately, this requires real work, with procedures and time devoted to review, screening, and updating articles. It's not what every group will want to take on, but some most definitely would see benefits.
I think it's interesting that subreddits and things are shutting down or going dark collectively, but I haven't heard of a concerted effort on the part of users to stage a massive "log out" and "day off" from using Reddit.
If a significant chunk of the userbase logged out and didn't use the website for a day or two, that would actually impact the bottom line. So why not organize a "users union"?
It's mods, not users, that hold a lot of the power. The mods are small enough in number to coordinate. Indeed for many of the popular subs, the mods are all the same people since some mod mod dozens of the most popular subs.
That's actually a problem, but for action like this, it's an enabler compared trying to coordinate reddit users, who are a disparate bunch.
I use reddit exclusively though Apollo, so that will happen whether I like it or not starting June 30th... have no intention of installing the Reddit app.
What works is if people genuinely lose interest on the service.
From 2013 to 2020 I used Reddit on a daily basis. Ever since then, my hatred and mistrust for the platform only grew, and I lost interest on it. I still have RiF installed, but truth is I seldon go there to see anything.
I won't even bother doing anything. I'll probably just not ever going to log back.
I don't use reddit much anymore, the problem is that most interesting communities i know have moved to discord that is a garbage alternative in my eyes.
You can't find the best posts for any given time range, you can't discuss one thing at a time, everything just disappears after everyone has paid very little effort to write something because its gone quickly. It's fragmented, low-effort, digital dementia and i hate it.
I don't understand the appeal of discord and really hope someone creates an actual alternative to Reddit.
We're in the chat cycle of the internet. We went through this with AOL chatrooms and IRC in the 90s as well. I'm not the most massive fan of chat in place of forums either but that seems the trend lately. Even on Reddit, a bunch of communities have Discords you can join. Maybe some new web forums will spin up, though it looks like much the software remains the same as it has been for a while.
True, it's probably also closer to a feed, and creates more engagement with less thoughts involved.
The problem i think is it massively lowers quality, searchability and generally just creates this fogged-out state of mind when looking for or researching something besides plain "relaxing in a groupchat".
the appeal of reddit is that you get a bunch of discussion on one topic, vs discord, my discussion on a topic is spread out over one or many discords. i really just use discord for communicating with groups of people that might all know each other under some interest. i wouldn't say that discord is an alternative to reddit, more of an alternative to slack.
It's recycled stuff, heavily curated, things stay up a lot longer than they should, you can't even use vote counts to gauge popularity of something, everything even remotely contentious gets manipulated to hell, substantiative discussion gets drowned out by low grade witticisms that aren't even witty, or dumb answers all to get a vote or two, that's if you ever even get a good answer to anything. And that's not even including the corporate problems such as this API thing and deliberate destruction of UX. The site sucks, the only reason anyone uses it is because you need critical mass to move communities. It will happen, and it can't come soon enough.
I find that HN is similar to one of the slower subreddits. There's a handful of subreddits that I read regularly, most of which are quite slow. Most of the "Local" subreddits (e.g. /r/seattleWA, /r/Albuquerque, /r/houston) have their own flavor. On the other hand, places like /r/mechanicalkeyboards are fairly authoritative sources on their topics.
Once you leave the "Defaults", you find a much less frantic and much higher signal to noise ratio.
Yeah, and I'm stuck in a couple of niche communities there because that's where they are, but even then the bleedover from elsewhere is suffocating. I was excited about federating community sites, but now I'm actually convinced that requiring an account for a particular community prevents drive by and low effort interaction. One site for all communities is a bad idea.
I, a user of Reddit, will be able to generate an API key. Obviously I'll have to associate a CC with it (or whatever their new process is), but I can generate one for free.
Why can't I use that for my local Apollo or RIF client on my phone? Why must Apollo or RIF be involved on that end at all?
I only dabble in reverse engineering web apis these days, but wouldn't it be exceedingly possible to write an unofficial API and run an app off of that?
It's not pleasant work, but especially with LLM advances, I feel like keeping up with the shifting DOM would for sure be doable, and in fact one of the main reasons Reddit started out with an API: better to provide a path for programmatic access than make the only option outside of your control...
Possible? Yes. Reasonable? Almost certainly no. It's not just that you'd have to constantly keep up with changing content (which might even be hidden through endless obscure javascript) and all sorts of possible filtering mechanisms on reddit's server side, you'd also make yourself vulnerable to a boatload of issues if you want to publish your app in official channels, since you are violating reddit's TOS. The cost to benefit ratio is exceedingly unfavourable. Since reddit has a huge following, some people might try, but I wouldn't bet on anyone succeeding in a big way.
Seems like the exact sort of problem that an open source codebase is designed to handle. Even just 10 random devs sending PRs to a github repo will always outpace the changes reddit makes since they're bottlenecked by having to push to millions of users. Coincidentally, the types that would contribute most likely wouldn't care about publishing it either, since it would be FOSS anyways giving users little incentive to buy it.
It's worth noting that Reddit's own app uses their official API. The whole thing is OAuth2. They could have easily just said "Only Reddit Gold users can use external apps" and have avoided all this fracas.
Now, it would take very little for someone to dig around and find the official Reddit API keys (OpenID/OAuth2 client key/secret) and just impersonate the official Reddit apps. I would never suggest that someone do some googling and discover threads like https://github.com/TwidereProject/Twidere-Android/issues/147... where such things are discussed.
DOM is not very "shifting" in projects like these... The longer the project lives, the more tests it accumulates. A "good" practice is to rely on element ids for automation (i.e. clicking, finding form inputs etc), but often times it's not possible / hard to know in advance what the id will be, especially with all the HTML generation going on... so, tests would often use XPath to find where to click.
And nobody really wants to change those tests... I mean, yeah, there will be changes ever now and then, but not a lot and not enough to render out-of-date scrappers completely useless.
I started experimenting with this, I don't think it's that bad to do. I don't think scale will be overwhelming either. Mostly my problem is motivation. Trying to efficiently store and retrieve comments is an interesting problem.
I think my big takeaway here is the absolutely horrific way spez has handled this situation down to outright lying about his interactions with third-party app maintainers.
This is such an obviously good solution to covering API costs that it becomes clear that the actual goal is not to cover API costs, but something else - probably to kill third party apps.
Best I found is Tildes, it is invite only and a small community as Reddit used to be years ago focusing on quality conversations. There has been a high influx of new users there.
People also recommend Lemmy but UX I do not like it and it lacks a good client.
Tildes is quite pleasant from what I've seen, I understand why but the invitation only nature is limiting at the moment. I've yet to be able to register.
Lemmy seems like the right alternative but it needs work. The docs to setup your own server are all wrong and outdated (docker). I just went through it a day ago and I had to fix half of what it said in order to get it working correctly. (Yes I will do a pull-req to improve this once I am satisfied with my setup)
The other issue with federation is picking an instance. There needs to be more initial connection between instances. By this I mean it needs to be much easier to subscribe to a community on another instance. Right now you have to copy paste parts of the URL into your instances url.
Some sort of shared authentication across the fediverse that identified your instance would enable something like this.
My Lemmy instance just went dark and tosses 404 errors about JSON responses. Its also now removed from the join-lemmy.org site and some of the trackers.
And to be honest I have no idea if it will come back....I guess this is the risk of choosing instances.
I considered buying a domain and setting up my own instance..If for no other reason than to be in control of the account I use for this reason (of course the domain i priced has been picked up since it seems the migration is happening and i missed the boat.)
> it needs to be much easier to subscribe to a community on another instance. Right now you have to copy paste parts of the URL into your instances url.
On my instance at least, you can click Communities and just browse the list and subscribe to whichever you want.
You need users to have a social network and users, at most, want to enter an email address and password to get an account. And then they want it to work normally.
I you want a site for hackers, you can just write it in your own lisp dialect (; but if you want a social network you have to make it much, much easier. Not sure the decentralizers understand just how critical that is.
Also users, aside from a few loud ones, really do want at least some minimal moderation.
They don't understand or at least the current implementation states as much.
You have to first pick a server to join, then join that server. Once in, you're typically presented with local server content only. To see federated content, you have to select "All". Same story with looking at communities. Local first, All by selection only.
You then have problems with the style of Federation. If I create a community one Lemmy instance called tech then you create the tech community on another, we now have two tech communities separate from each other. Given your default community view is local, this presents a problem. You've already got a lemmy.ml technology community along with a beehaw.org technology community. It can quickly spiral into a mess of unintentional duplication.
Absolutely. It's why I haven't really cared about Mastodon. I'm an engineer and it absolutely seems like a correct approach to me but it's never going to appeal to the general public outside of engineering-adjacent crowds.
Reddit pushes its own app so hard--so obnoxiously hard--that I can't imagine they are terribly concerned about any of this. And, come on. They can charge what they want for their dogs-squeezed-into-guitar-cases library of content. We all can.
I have been on reddit for a long time, and have watched the steady beat of their user hostility drum. The only thing keeping me there now is old.reddit.com.
I think Tildes is pretty good, but their subreddit-equivalent policy is bizarre—only admins can make them, and they will only make them if they see demand. This is a chicken-and-egg problem that will prevent many niche topics from finding a community, the way they did on Reddit. I hope it's just marketing talk covering a technical limitation instead of a genuinely permanent flaw.
What I know Tildes does not want to be a full Reddit replacement. I do find their model of moderation better than Reddit. I have already seen some Reddit mods asking about moderating communities in Tildes.
I would say federation is a must as it will spare us from the next migration (there is a rule: centralized or proprietary services *always* get worse as time goes by).
With all these protests and shutdowns it seems there's a decent chance of reddit dying very soon. It's a shame because adding "site:reddit.com" to my Google queries was the only way to avoid (most of the) SEO bullshit and get opinions by real people.
