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?
I see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities. Each community has its own set of reasons for hosting itself on reddit vs other locations. Therefore I would predict that in the absence of reddit, not every community would move to the same place.
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.
>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.
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.
I was a long time reddit user (I created my first account in 2007), and I eventually left for this reason.
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.
I haven't really had any luck yet. I was a Farker back in the day, but went to Reddit while a lot of other people were going to Digg. Back then I loved Reddit as a social news site, but now I really dislike it because it's mostly a meme and image aggregator. (IMO it was the memes, image macros (Advice Animals) and meta references that killed that site.)
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.
I was an OG r/mtb subscriber and loved the content for years. I noticed more and more low-quality content slide in around 2017-2019 and I stopped frequenting it. It was one of my favorite subs back in the day. By the time COVID hit, that sub was a dumpster fire of low-quality posts it became a complete waste to even visit, I felt dumber after visiting it each time.
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.
There may be other factors too, not just popularity and user numbers. It could be coincidental but over the years HN has not deteriorated in the same way as forums like reddit have. I strongly suspect it's in part to due with moderation as well. The hackernews approach is very straightforward and sensible. They only act if really necessary, otherwise users do the housekeeping themselves by flagging and downvoting anything that doesn't contribute in a useful way. Which works well.
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.
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.
That community ate away at my soul. We had a good group of core users, but by my estimate about a third of all submissions were from karma farmers and new users shitposting memes and image macros. (Or people complaining that I wasn't allowing shitposting memes and image macros.)
The Digg migration was the first step towards Reddit's Eternal September, but Covid lockdown was the final nail in the coffin.
This isn't always the case, but I found that if I'm looking for a serious discussion, I gotta find the sub within the subreddit. For movies, there are a few that communicate they are about serious film discussion. But between the 2 or 3 subs on serious film talk, I found truefilm to be more in-depth than not.
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.
> 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.
I wish we could divide forums into 101 and 202 (as in college levels) streams. Newbies need a place, but I don't want to be their guide (in most cases). Newbie/101 energy kills a lot of places.
Sift (https://sift.quest/) is working hard on doing exactly that. We don't have enough users to actually show it off yet, but at our core we're building around a user reputation/relevance graph that we think will let people curate streams like that.
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.
Sorry it took me a few days to see this. Right now we have trust per person, and a separate "preference" by topic. Our end goal is to do trust per person per topic.
Yes, I frequent subs like r/Electronics, r/Arduino and r/ElectricalEngineering.
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.
Same with the various web development subreddits as well. Copious amounts of content from "My First Website", to "am I doing intro-level CSS thing right?", and "can I still get a React job?"
There's certainly a place for these, as everyone needs to start somewhere, but having a better home for these would be welcome.
This has frustrated me incredibly in a few different subreddits I frequented. There was some really welcoming, high-quality content, but then there were also terrible, low-calorie memes. The people that enjoy the memes definitely seemed to scoff at any criticism.
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.
I experienced exactly this a couple of years ago in /r/espresso. Fortunately the low-quality memespam pushed me to look for alternatives, and I found Home Barista forums, one of the best quality web forums I've ever participated in.
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.
I had a similar experience. /r/turning had no memespam and good wood turning content, but I found the actual American Association of Woodturners forum to have very wide breadth and high quality information.
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.
Communities tend to end up with a memes allowed and strictly meme free version of the community once they grow to a certain size.
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.
Perhaps personal ai based filters that each user can train is an option. I know personally that there are topics or opinions that I just don't care to engage with or read and it would be lovely to be able to train my own filter to just censor all that out of my feeds. I currently use reddit user blocklist as a partial solution, but it's a rather crude tool.
> I see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities.
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.
But the magic of reddit is that I can browse all my communities in one place.
Playstation, Audi, Cooking, Tennis. It's super convenient to have a single account for all of this.
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.
Not just in one place, but sorted by popularity, so that you don't need to read 100 headlines per day - you can just review the top 5 posts for the day across ALL the communities you're interested in.
Maybe the model going forward is to go back to the use of RSS feeds from each of the discrete sites that you frequent? Not sure if RSS is a thing these days though.
> 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.
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 think a diffusion of communities to better forum software would be the best replacement for Reddit.
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?
A directory tracking where different communities are migrating (or trying to migrate) would be awesome. With Reddit down/private I can't go on Reddit to coordinate the migration outbound.
A directory of best communities on the internet sorted and nested by topic would be great. A web directory 3.0. Whether they are on Reddit, mastodon, phpbb, discord.
> Each community has its own set of reasons for hosting itself on reddit vs other locations.
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.
There is no need for them to be in the same place, if the different places where they can talk with each other. So like you, I am also expecting people start looking into the the fediverse, disperse around a bit and reconnect. Instead of one global village, we need a globe of diverse villages.
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.
The thing is people want something where they have lots of communities like they do with Reddit. The ease of going there and finding something that is interesting for you is super easy. Switch it out with niche forums andit now becomes checking each niche instead of seeing what pops up. Multiple accounts multiple urls.
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.
> I see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities.
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.
That's less true for communities that are focused on things that change over time. For example, TV show subreddits have plenty to talk about each time a new episode is released. Or maybe a better example, the Java subreddit has its share of "how do I dive into X" questions but also plenty of discussions about new and upcoming language changes.
Some subs can't have images or ban memes. It's the fault of mods if content is LQ. The tools are there. Some subs won't let you post if you're account is new or you have low karma. What Reddit should've done is delete the free karma or karma farming subs.
I only use Reddit when I am doing research, since it seems to be a straightforward way to see information written mostly by real users. The Frontpage in my opinion is utter trash - it's filled with woke bullshit, ignorant crap and other reposts of old posts that can be anywhere between a year and 5 years old.
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
> 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 tech focused can move elsewhere, but smaller communities with not so many tech savvy users will probably stick to where it’s more convenient.
> 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.
New Reddit needs to have a better way to sort this content out. Maybe extra arrows for funny/not funny?
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.
Reddit does another thing that is very important to me: 3. Content Rehosting
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's been a little better lately, but their video player kinda sucks ass. Scrubbing usually causes total lock for me, requiring a reload of the entire page. Sometimes the video and the controls will get stuck but the audio keeps playing, even if you fold shut the player on old.
It got to the point where I don't bother unfolding the video unless it's embedded.
> Honestly, I can't believe it that here it is 2023(!!), and there still exist sites that can't figure out reliable cross-browser video playback.
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.
In general, I agree I'd also rather _not_ have web players.
However, in the specific case I am talking about, the videos were more or less 6 hours long, so I'd rather not download the whole high resolution stuff (and likely see the process fail), but be able to skip parts and/or watch/download a few parts in lower resolution and other ones in high resolution.
I know Reddit search isn't great, but the ability to search at all is useful. Compared to e.g. Discord where threading is weak at best and searching is borderline useless because it's a chatroom, not a forum.
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.
>Compared to e.g. Discord where threading is weak at best and searching is borderline useless because it's a chatroom, not a forum.\
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.
Importantly, reddit allows the creation of microforums. Not everyone has the time, energy or ability to build out a full site with a complete forum to make it worth everyone's while. I see Facebook & Discord taking Reddit's piece of the pie in the short term.
Personally I don't see a significant portion of the Reddit user base leaving over this. Basically every major and minor city in the USA has its own subreddit. How many of those users are really going to leave and switch back to Facebook groups?
Does it? Search for $topic on Reddit and you are guaranteed to find forum posts related to $topic, and very possibly at least one forum (subreddit) dedicated thereto. On the broader web, there's no guarantee of finding anything at all. Plus you can look at other people's subscriptions and posts to see what they follow. And sometimes you can just take a wild guess and go to /r/$topic and it will be what you're looking for. It's definitely better than zero.
after you and another commenter suggested it, I checked it out. It does look pretty interesting. Unfortunately I can't find any way to import my OPML so I'm a bit stuck. The discovery of feeds contrasts rather poorly with my podcast player. And forcing me to manually copy a whole bunch of hard to find urls one at a time is not a fun onboarding experience.
If you click the gear in the bottom right (at least of my screen) the menu that pops up will have an option called "Import or upload sites". That has an OPML upload option.
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 can also look at it as discussion forums for pretty much any topic with single sign-on. Think of anything and you'll probably find it plus porn of it on Reddit with a quick search.
There is also original content. A few weeks ago someone made a similar argument, so I went to three of the subs I most frequent (boardgames, woodworking, and baking). The very first post of each thread was original content. Someone had made their own themed version of a game, someone had made a woodworking project, and someone had baked something. Since those subs are now dark, I can’t share similar links this time.
I've been having this exact same idea. Basically a way for any RSS reader to discover comments from anywhere. Of course you run into the problems of moderation and latency, but I believe some clever systems around prefetching and shared lists of verified and banned users could work.
But the main problem I've run into for link discovery is the voting system. If you actually want a distributed system counting votes becomes expensive fast.
I'm not sure the rss comparison really works. The link discovery and discussion are one and the same because they are being driven by the same community. Significant reaction and discussion of one post leads to more posts extending that premise, and then more discussion, and so on.
I don't think replacing Reddit is just about throwing a toolbox at the problem
This is literally what Digg did to self-destruct, in that they basically eliminated user powers and created some automatic feed. And, it died literally overnight.
> The link discovery and discussion are one and the same because they are being driven by the same community.
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.
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 :)
Those three were the ones I was able to try out (and that seemed to work reasonably well). Do you have a sample Brutalinks instance running somewhere? If so, then happy to give it a whirl and add it to my list of options :)
There is a demo instance where I test the latest code[1], but my purpose as a developer is to make the project better not to admin/moderate a discussion platform. My hope was that communities come together and put up their own servers.
I dig it; you've made my self-imposed task of "figure out which of these I like best" that much harder lol
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.
Fair enough. For my purposes I only really need a single subreddit-equivalent for my own (prospective) instance; my worry's more around making sure my Brutalinks instance can make sense of the various multi-interest instances/services out there.
They serve different purposes. You might not be able to find even one person in your local area who shares your specific niche interests, but on the internet you can find hundreds or thousands of the most engaged and knowledgeable people on any given topic. Online forums also serve as a repository of knowledge that you can search through and learn from.
I've spent 6 years trying to find a proper reddit alternative and coincidentally 6 years in my local area trying to find ANY local friend group for interests I have.
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.
I feel for you man. I live in Brooklyn where I can meet all the weirdos I want (though the fact that we're so spread out makes having a 'community' hard sometimes). So I get why Reddit and its ilk would seem like the best available option. But if at all possible, I think moving to where your people are is going to scratch the itch more holistically.
That's the strange thing of it all. I'm not necessarily in Los Angeles proper, but I'm in a suburb and am fine driving downtown. There theoretically shouldn't be a better place to find some 20's people interested in various geek/tech content. I'm sure the groups are there, but I'm not sure where to look.
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.
LA is a stranger place than it seems if you haven’t lived elsewhere as an adult. SV is definitely not the only better place, though the candidates may be similarly expensive due to the density you need (Boston, NYC, etc.).
You can't have in-person conversations when the community is supporting someone with a rare disease. However, many conversations don't fit into this class, and some would be better happening in-person. All of these things are true, so you still need Reddit alternatives.
Amen. I stopped using Reddit when their new website got released a few years back. Not for any ideological reason, just because their new anti-user patterns killed my enjoyment there.
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
I would love to see an alternative that really focuses on moderation. Perhaps something that has three flavours of subs.
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.
Democratically voted mods will never work for any moderately sized forum. The problem is the forums would be brigaded by terminally online “interest groups.”
See how the alt right infiltrates gaming groups. The reasonable voices are outnumbered and taken over.
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.
It's definitely a hard problem, but also an extremely important one as real life democracies also suffer issues like this to some extent. Obviously you'd need a bunch of rules around who could vote to prevent brigading, e.g. tenure and activity on the forum at a minimum.
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.
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).
Yeah, that's the big issue. There's no incentive to want to be a public unpaid moderator, except arguably bad ones. Someone wanting to run for power creates and runs some of the worst communities out there.
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.
Agree. It's already democratic in Reddit's current form in the sense that anybody can just start a community to replace one with moderation they don't like. The subreddit with the moderation that works the best often wins out.
This is not remotely democratic without discovery. E.g. if you start an alt, the original would need to be force to display the alt as an alternative. Otherwise it's too easy to control the narrative and prevent anyone from even finding out about the alternative. Today, the primary sub generally actively bans any mention of alternatives. Also the most obviously named forum will attract the new users simply because of the name.
what about of each breakaway pointed to reach other under an opposing views area, where people can go to read the other side, or the group that's breaking away?
I use https://raddle.me/ but it's small for now. They seem to have a much better approach to moderation; the moderation logs are open and admins don't let them go full authoritarian. But the API is lackluster. It's open source however so hopefully it should improve
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
I'll save a bunch of people some trouble. This is a politically-"leftist" site (top current thread is "How did you get into anarchism", along with something about ACAB). It's not really a general purpose Reddit alternative.
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.
That's just how the community developed. Reddit was spicy as well at the start
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
Content Policy
Content is prohibited if it is bigotry i.e.
Promotes white supremacy, queerphobia, transphobia, misogyny, classism, ableism, body shaming, antisemitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, speciesism or age discrimination.
Sexualizes minors or promotes adults having sex with minors.
Trivializes or makes light of rape.
Apologizes for police or military brutality, imperialism, eugenics, genocide.
Apologizes for violence towards children.
Is a pornographic image/video (however, nudity is permitted if it's non-pornographic).
Is wilful copyright infringement (however fair use is acceptable).
Is a "dox" i.e. personally revealing information about a person or persons including but not limited to name, identification number, address, phone number, photograph.
Advocates for arson, bombing and/or killing people.
Is instructions on how to design and/or produce explosives.
I'm sure you can find two or three right wingers capable of doing all this. Maybe at least for a few weeks :)
It was specifically made to be a left-wing alternative for reddit back when the admins were beginning to crack down on the leftist subs like r/fullcommunism and the like. Not sure how it could ever serve as a full-on replacement, it never wanted to be.
it is if it's anarcho communism or syndicalism but not capitalist aka neoliberalism. But it's isn't necessarily left of mainstream progressives it's a different left with different goals, ideals, etc... I'm personally a syndicalist socialist leaning anarchist but pragmatic too in that I don't think we can tear down capitalism completely or even want to instead DAOs and worker coops need to gain strength, as does labor unions and mutual aid networks could handle things like universal basic income etc....I have some libertarian and Georgian philosophies as well...
here is an interesting reading list with anti-left / post-left anarchism references: https://raddle.me/wiki/reading (and not just "ancap" capitalist libertarianism which doesn't belong)
I'm still learning but am trying to start a worker coop as well
> This is a politically-"leftist" site (top current thread is "How did you get into anarchism", along with something about ACAB)
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
It's completely different than the subs I browse. But I avoided subs of a particular political persuasion or another. I was mostly looking at technical subs with good, apolitical moderation.
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.
> 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.
> 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].
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_ !
>A typical example is /r/india which is totally under the control of radical anti-Modi mods
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
> I'm from Hungary and in /r/hungary pretty much 99% of the posts are anti-Orban.
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?
Forum sliding and bots may be driving these things. Forums are historically pretty easy to manipulate and Reddit isn't so different from other BBs that have been around for decades now.
Reddit's moderation system is the worst on the internet. No rhyme, no reason, no restitution. You're completely at the mercy of little fiefdoms and people who are sometimes on power trips.
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.
The problem isn't just the petty tyrant fiefdoms, it's also the exclusive claims on generic terms like "news". So, instead of generic news, you find hyperpartisan content on "r/news". Once someone cybersquats on a generic term, other perspectives are forced into qualified subreddits that more accurately describe their bias, "r/conservative".
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.
Reddit's moderation system is among the best of any big platform because of how easy it is for people to start their own communities if they don't like the moderation on a particular sub. And these new communities actually will get traction if enough people are upset about the original sub's moderation - see the whole meirl vs. me_irl situation for an example of this. (There's also r/gamingcirclejerk vs. r/shittygaming - the original sub still gets more posts, but the large, active discussion thread community moved entirely to the latter because of the former sub having some crazy BS happen with the mods.)
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.
The killer feature imo would be a forum with moderation that only moderates and doesn't censor. Right now Reddit is unusable if you have an opinion contrary to the hivemind. Go on any r/country or r/city and you would be astonished at how far the politics of that sub deviate from the politics of the people who live there.
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.
For technical discussion groups: USENET. Either moderated newsgroups or even unmoderated ones for obscure enough topics. Spam is the issue, but not much spam on USENET these days.
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:
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".
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).
An interesting take on Usenet. I have a subscription for downloading binaries, but every time I've dabbled in text posting, I've found a few incredibly abandoned groups that are the exclusive domain of some of the most ridiculous spam I've ever seen.
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.
I was a big Usenet nerd, then switched to Reddit in the late aughts. Went back today and it was a ghostland, at least the stuff I used to frequent. Guess I need to look better, ha.
I was a USENET addict- long ago I had a shell account on "world.std.com" (The Software Tool & Die)- they were the first dial-up ISP, located in Brookline, MA. Anyway at some point they stopped- by which I mean they stopped billing me and people moved on to the web. But for at least a decade they left the machine running, and I could use it no charge.
So anyway, on a shell ISP, you read and post news with the "trn" command- "trn" is a text-only newsreader client.
For discovery- well USENET was in the filesystem. So "comp.arch" is located in /usr/spool/news/comp/arch. So you could just "find" and "grep" to discover new groups. Also there was a newsgroups file that had the full list- I forgot the name of this.
For the web today? I know there are for-pay sites, don't know any free ones. Maybe others do. Google groups was kind of good enough if you only frequented a few groups.
I just tried it with claws-mail. Here is a quick start for Ubuntu (this feels like 1999):
apt-get install claws-mail
claws-mail
it forces you to create a mailbox, don't worry about this (you can delete it later). Once you have the main screen:
Configuration->Create Account
Name of account: USENET
Protocol NEWS (NNTP)
News server: news.eternal-september.org
Check This server requires authentication
Fill in USER ID and Password you got from email after signing up with Eternal September and close.
Now right click on mailbox USENET, select subscribe to newsgroup.
Whenever a site does something "bad" (Twitter and musk's BS, Reddit with their API nonsense, etc) people's initial reaction is to look for a site JUST like it but without the bad thing. That feels like stage 1 of grief: denial. Denial that the thing you loved is no longer the same. Maybe it's dead, or maybe its changed in such a drastic way thats its no longer the same thing. Regardless, I have never seen a successful website or service start from the premise of "we will be just like thing X, but without the bad thing". You need more than that. You need a vision. And I'd argue your initial motivation needs to be something positive, not negative. If you're initial motivation is "this website is doing something bad, so we need to make a similar site that doesn't do that" then you are motivated by a negative emotion, which will only drive you so far. You'll be driven by anger which might get a bunch of new users, but that emotion will fade, and after a while what will you have left? That isn't to say that situations like this aren't a great opportunity. Far from it. It's just that the opportunity requires people to think creatively. For sure learn from the mistakes of these companies, but also don't just create a clone that positions itself as a direct competitor or a home for refugees. That's just depressing and a recipe for failure.
I disagree completely. Facebook was just Myspace without the terrible UX. Google was just Yahoo but better. Tech businesses can easily move in over each other if there is a way to make it noticeably better.
Facebook did not start as a competitor to MySpace. It started as a niche social network for universities, and then eventually branched off to be a competitor to myspace. By the time it did, it had already positioned itself as a unique product. That's quite different than say, people upset with Reddit over the Apollo situation looking for a Reddit clone with a better API policy, or people who like Blue Sky because it's "Twitter without Elon Musk".
> Regardless, I have never seen a successful website or service start from the premise of "we will be just like thing X, but without the bad thing".
Reddit itself received a massive influx of users from Digg after the unpopular Digg v4 change. For me and many others, it was just like Digg but without the bad thing. Admittedly that’s not how Reddit started - in fact, Reddit had been around for 5 years already at that point - but you could say the same thing about Mastodon, which was started in 2016(!), or Lemmy, which was started in 2019.
>people's initial reaction is to look for a site JUST like it but without the bad thing. That feels like stage 1 of grief: denial. Denial that the thing you loved is no longer the same.
it makes sense if you were raised in the early 2000's forums. I don't know what framework it was, but there very much was a feel where many sites had the exact same forum UI/UX, just different theming and color. Only difference was who was hosting the site and who browsed it (which would inevitably have some overlap). So migration was almost seemless.
Reddit technically has some ancient open source part out there, but even if you remade the UI/UX, social media in the 2020's is a completely different landscape.
>If you're initial motivation is "this website is doing something bad, so we need to make a similar site that doesn't do that" then you are motivated by a negative emotion, which will only drive you so far. You'll be driven by anger which might get a bunch of new users, but that emotion will fade, and after a while what will you have left?
The theory is that
1. the site's own qualities stand out and you get enough power users to keep content flowing if you hit a certain critical mass. This is the part I have yet to see under "anger", unless you count Reddit itself after Digg.
2. the people are what make a community, so if those people stay you got a community. Of course, this doesn't take into account that some people may simply just leave social media as a whole if the experience isn't already seamless for them. So you create a power vacuum.
Also keep in mind that users =/= website creators. Faster horses and all that; the user don't generally know what they want, simply what makes them comfortable.
I think I agree with your premise, but maybe not the delivery, but I also think the other comments about the Myspace -> Facebook and Digg -> Reddit moves are significant enough to believe the opposite. These days IMO users don't want to re-learn something that's not just ingrained into daily life, but ingrained into minute-by-minute routines.
Personally, the biggest platform move I've made was the switch from IGN boards (objectively the top 1% of message boards at the time) to Reddit. During the switch it felt completely wrong and different, but as time passed I saw how much more Reddit offered compared to a traditional message board. I hope there's something out there that would make me feel the same with this next transition, but so far I don't see much for me yet. All I can see in the near-term is (hopefully) more productivity.
Reddit is just one place I read content. The other is https://lobste.rs/ I am always looking for interesting technical content to read. I want to learn. I would like to read your technical blog!
If you don't have a blog, then you could try what I do, I promise it's minimal effort and easy to maintain and host and it costs nothing financial (except time you use to write)
Go to GitHub, create a repository and tick the checkbox for including README.md.
Then go to README.md and click the Edit icion in the top right corner.
Write into this README.md file whenever you blog, creating a markdown heading with the blog post's title. You could include a date if you want.
Please do this! It's a low tech solution to content to read.
- Built-in realtime chat rooms instead of threaded comments on all posts, complete with presence, @mentions, markdown support (check faq)(mobile & desktop web supported currently).
- Trending based on chat activity and time decay.
- Search, notifications, follows, themes, other settings like block a user.
I'd taken some time off the project over the past several months to focus on regular work/life but still planning to release new features and push the project forward, with an upgrade to chat/presence to be released imminently and long-form posts to follow.
Have been blessed to see people from all over the globe use this silly site I built because I wanted to use it myself.
If you find it interesting please let me know how we can improve it etc.
Also if you think you could bring something to this project and have interest feel free to reach out by email.
hey sorry about that, I just checked and apparently for unknown reasons codepipeline just pushed a commit to prod that wasn't supposed to go out! site broken atm sigh, please check back in ~hour or so and apologies! working on a big change and unsure how it went through.
I really hope not a lot of people does that. Looking for knowledge or guides i don’t want to be stuck with the worst part of the internet as what blogs have become. There’s a reason all of us are using site:reddit.com.
Yeah, that's totally reasonable. I guess it comes down to personal choice. Do people want to leave their content / writing with a company that doesn't have their interests in mind?
The one being promoted the most on migrations subreddits is Kbin (particularly kbin.social for sign-up). It federates with Lemmy as well - apparently some folks think the Lemmy devs have questionable moral character so decided not to promote Lemmy as a primary option (hell if I know, didn't look into it).
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?
Seems there are complaints about both dev teams - Kbin devs are apparently fascists or something in that vicinity, and Lemmy devs are apparently tankies or something in that vicinity.
> Tankie is a pejorative label for communists, particularly Stalinists, who support the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism–Leninism or, more generally, authoritarian states associated with Marxism–Leninism in history. The term was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring uprising, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.
---
It's been expanded to include those who support other authoritarian left political philosophies. It tends to be anti American. A quick rule of thumb is "if you picture the parades in the country featuring a large number of tanks, those who support them are likely pejoratively called 'tankies'".
Tbh I want to know their country of origin - if it’s the US then that’s likely bs being spouted by conservatives imho. I feel like the left, even far left in the US are all anti authoritarianism, so it’s bizarre reading that.
Reading up on it I guess the main instances moderation does not live up to their rules & is what the issue is about. Whether they’re really in support of being anti-human rights or just incompetent at moderation I dunno. I hope the latter vs the former, guess we’ll figure it out over time - which communities will be ran well vs the ones that aren’t.
As a matter of policy? Like you can't work on one of these platforms if you don't comply with their ideology? Or more like "this is the shitty place we've come to as a society?..."
I wonder how many extremists contributed to the reddit code base over the years.
There was some discussion and links about it in the “Building a Better Rust Community” post yesterday. The post is inaccessible today due the protest against reddit, but will be back tmw.
Comprehensive? No. Nothing even comes close to the scale that reddit has for the niche that Reddit has.
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.
>Comprehensive? No. Nothing even comes close to the scale that reddit has for the niche that Reddit has.
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.
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.
I think the more trustworthy reviews of products through sentiment is what I will miss the most. I really never read reviews anywhere else. I was even excited about https://www.looria.com/reddit doing review aggregation.
There's many problems with forums though. Different UI/UX interface. Different requirements in order to be able to start using. You have to register a new account. A lot of friction before you are able to join and participate in a new community. Many forums will also require you to have certain amount of useful posts to avoid spam etc.
With Reddit, or Reddit alternatives you don't have to worry about all that.
> 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.
Perhaps some friction is a good thing. Registering an account isn't exactly a huge burden, especially in the era where your browser will pre-fill and store the credentials for you forever. Maybe if it wasn't so easy to pop in and karma farm / spam / meme we would have some more thoughtful discourse online again.
I've written a bit about this before, but fundamentally Reddit has a misalignment between the needs of the user and the needs of the platform[1].
There's a great list of alternatives here, https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/yttdlc/... though if you are choosing one, I'd highly encourage you to find / try one that relies on a federated or a paid model. A free model will eventually end up in the same situation we're in today.
Somewhat related, but I'd love for Apolloapp to break free from the Reddit API and simply become its own thing. It's backed by, depending on how you measure things, probably almost 50% of the Reddit community as it is. With some VC backing, or simply just crowdfunding to start things off, and continuous support from the subreddits that have gone dark, it could very well become a thing.
Apollo has recreated the easiest 5% of what reddit is.
Hosting at scale, content moderation (just the bare minimum to remain legal in various jurisdictions), plus all the internal bureaucracy that is involved in employing more than just yourself or a handful of people (complying with government regulations and paperwork for employee training, salaries, benefits) are all things that Apolloapp is not.
Getting a bunch of people to agree to not use reddit for two days (or longer) is a hell of a lot easier than getting that same number of people to agree to support Apolloapp as the New Reddit.
I don't disagree with the difficulty of the task. I'm just saying that IF there would be an alternative, Apollo would probably be the best starting point, at least if one were going for fast scaling.
Although I actually (and REALLY) hope you are right, I think a purely non-profit alternative would be doomed to fail. And my argument for this is pretty simple: How often do non-profits out-compete for-profits? Sometimes, maybe, but rarely.
I would be interested to hear how you measure Apollo usage to say it's backed by 50% of Reddit.
I've never used it and don't know anyone that has. I read a stat yesterday that only about 5% of Reddit traffic comes from 3rd party apps (might be incorrect) so I'm curious what impact it has beyond just a client for reddit. (I'm vaguely aware of some moderation tools that Apollo has.)
I don't mean the usage of Apollo in particular, but my understanding from what I've read is that according to some metrics, almost 50% of Reddit have gone dark, partly in support of Apollo. It's already the unofficial alternative to Reddit, except also kind of being Reddit at the same time.
This is the loud minority fallacy. I foresee less than 1% of the community actually willing to leave reddit. Spaz knows this. They are just really noisy, but not so many people care about the third party apps.
The difference here is that even though there is a loud minority, and I agree with your assessment of 'less than 1%" of actual Reddit visitors, almost half of Reddit is not accessible anymore. If there ever was an opportunity to create an alternative to Reddit, now is probably the time, and Apollo is probably the best starting point.
I've seen Lemmy paraded around, it ha promise but you gotta diy your community. My biggest concern with the fediverse is trust. Trust takes a while to establish.
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 have been burned by Fediverse so badly I will never go back.
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.
>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 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.
This is correct. While it's true that running your own instance is far from simple if you don't have server experience, in my opinion it's the ideal way to interact with the fediverse. I run my own instance, so I know my content is regularly backed up and I have access to the entire fediverse (many larger instances will block other instances at the server level for moderation reasons, so users on those servers are unable to see any content from the blocked instance).
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.
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.
This exact situation is why federation is valuable. It allows us to separate the "shape" of tool that we want from the people who run it.
Reddit is a useful concept: a series of communities with voting and hierarchical discussion. It also provides aggregation (ability to see a feed of all your communities) and discoverability. Individual forums get you some way, but don't solve the aggregation thing (which is a primary way I use Reddit: scroll through my "Popular" feed). How about we just design some form of system that allowed people to build their own aggregated feed of a group of individually hosted forums? That would be (a) cool, and (b) we've just done federation.
I thought the Fediverse is a non-starter because a critical mass of the admin base and userbase are openly hostile to searchability, which punts "discovery" right out the window.
Reddit has been building utility as a storehouse of decently-curated answers to questions that Google can crawl. Fediverse content can't fit that use-case if admins kick out crawlers and users are terrified of having things they post be found in the future.
Trust is very important e. g. Facebook or even Twitter alternatives. For reddit alternative, not so much. I don't care about my reddit profile, I rotate them frequently anyway.
I've been curious about this; is rotation or segregated accounts more complicated when operating in the Fediverse? It seems like you're meant to have a single identity across everything.
Not particularly. I spun up accounts on quite a few different lemmy instances yesterday when certain instances were getting hammered by traffic spikes. Things seem to have settled down now, but it seems like jumping to a new account is very easy. I worry that it will make it harder to deal with trolls and spammers though if they can just create a new account on another instance at will.
Reddit is also like one group per topic(generally), I mean there's branches of topics and breakaways but in general there's usually a main sub on a topic where you might have 50 Facebook groups. it's nice to have more silod content, IMHO.
Looking at Lemmy instance sizes was a kick in the gut. I thought for sure there would be tens of thousands out there on various forums, but it's more like hundreds. The monoculture is worse than I thought.
Why do we keep using private residences to host these parties, when we could be having them out in the streets where no one can take ownership of them?
Reinvent usenet with modern web technology. All posts replicate, with verifiable authenticity, and the website presentation remains up to the instance host on what it should look like.
Run a node, host an API for 3 bucks a year so that mobile clients can pull data. Run a website, host it with free accounts and spam it. Let people decide how they want to pay - wallets or eyes - but just stop hoarding the damned conversations.
I have not found any serious alternatives. The main problem is the chicken and egg problem where no one cares unless other people are using it. I created my own alternative as a side project (https://zsync.xyz) with some differences (eg. tags instead of subreddits), but there are no users - and why should there be?
I used to use Reddit pretty heavily, but I stopped when I realized outside a few small use cases it wasn't benefitting my life and was mostly a time sink. I find that HN and Twitter is enough for my "social media" needs.
I do hope we see a better alternative to Reddit though, one focused on fostering high quality. Reddit was like that in 2008-9 when I joined, but in just a few years devolved into the meme dumpster and PC hivemind. The Reddit founders and their investors (cough YC *cough) should be embarrassed. It's like raising a child prodigy with the potential to cure cancer only for that kid to grow up into some grifting alcoholic bum who just smokes weed all day and survives off of fake disability benefits.
For example during COVID, Reddit was extremely toxic and hostile to any questioning of COVID lockdown policies. You couldn't even talk about travel in travel forums without being shamed as some kind of murderer and downvote censored to oblivion, let alone questioning the justification of lockdowns, border restrictions, and vaccine mandates.
Reddit has had an extreme woke left bias for a long time such as in its main subs like /r/politics. Of course this extremity on one side breeds counter extremes on the other like /r/TheDonald. The hivemind nature of the site ultimately makes everyone more divided and worse off.
The killer feature of Reddit (or any other silo) is that you don't have to maintain it. Even when your interest change and hobby x no longer interests you, the content you put there stays there. I've seen so many small community websites come and go, fall into disarray, succumb to spam and eventually close down. Maintaining pages long term is hard.
It depends what you're looking for. To replace the link aggregation features, I've gone back to using RSS over the past year and I'm pleased with it. I get the same news that is spread across the various subreddits, and often times news sites will report on stuff directly from reddit.
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.
I've seen RSS been brought up a couple of times. But I wonder how people use it. I use RSS, but for news and such I don't want to follow specific sites, because they just tend to post way too much stuff I don't give two hoots about. I've tried in the past and compared to the articles voted forth on Reddit it just feels like digging for gold in a garbage dump.. Are there any curated feeds? Or even something like a feed based on voting?
I don't use reddit directly as a user, but last night I was googling a tech question that had a bunch of
relevant results in Reddit threads... only to find that the relevant subreddit had been put into "private" mode in protest of API changes, leaving the content inaccessible.
So even though I don't necessarily pull up Reddit just to read, it does provide a good archive of questions and answers or other useful explanations in search engine results and losing that old content would be tough.
I had the same experience trying to search some medical-ish* questions last night. It would be a shame if adding "reddit" to searches stops being an effective method to find non-SEO human content.
* Medical-ish as in trying to find out if people with the same condition as me have had good/bad experiences with a particular OTC supplement. Certainly not looking for treatment or diagnosis via Reddit (or any online avenue) :P
Practically every reddit post up to today is archived. In theory, someone could create a gigantic static site with the data. But in practice it would be very expensive especially if you want fast loading times.
Almost abandoned, full of spam, but still there: a decentralized network where anyone can run their own server, serving just to them or to someone or too anyone the groups they want. Groups are far more discoverable than Reddit subs and they work pretty well. Bonus: messages can be stored and then indexed locally as anyone might wish.
In general: using a platform owned by someone else meant no real guarantee, being part of a communitarian platform, owning the bit we are interested in, means we are Citizens peers, between peers.
If Reddit concern you try to imaging a fleet of leased connected cars, your webmail (with someone else domain name and no messages on your iron), even the "modern smart city" where anything is a service.
I'm not sure I see a ton of the benefits to federation, but it kind of lets a lot of services which would otherwise compete get a more substantial user base off the get-go. There still are no services with a user base to provide a comparable experience to reddit, but it has to start somewhere.
We don't have a community yet, but sift (https://sift.quest/) is aiming to be a comprehensive alternative.
We've got some new ideas around dealing with cross posts:
* posts can have multiple tags and be findable from any of them
* all posts to the same url map to the same backend node (so you don't get as many duplicates)
I'm actually most excited about what we're trying to do with regards to the low effort content and degradation of communities aspects.
At our core we're actually a reputation/trust/"how much do I want to see things from this person" graph that has recently pivoted to being a Reddit alternative. This means that (once we get the community going and our algorithms tuned up), we should be able to offer you much more ergonomic ability to choose how much of what kind of content you want to see (people who like memes can post them, but you can choose not to see them.
We're still in alpha and don't have much of a community yet, but we're adding features fast and will be very friendly and responsive to any feature requests you have.
HN is just for tech. Sometimes I want to discuss non-tech topics. Nowhere is better than Reddit IMO. Discord and chat apps have so many noises that I always feel overwhelmed to keep up with the flow of chatting.
lobsters could, it's much better in some aspects as it's kinda like a self hosted subreddit and it's open source(rails). dev.to might be another good option, it's also open source.
For the last few years, I've mainly used reddit as a way of sifting through search engine results to a better answer more quickly: e.g. "what is the answer to x reddit". I've been sick of overly SEO-optimized websites that are full of fluff and ads and don't easily surface information. I'm curious, if people do move from reddit, what my new search term will be.
Using the Qbix platform you can assemble your own reddit, and then invite people to it, in a matter of hours.
It's free and open source, and runs on PHP. Any commodity host that runs Wordpress should be able to run it, but if you want you can use Node.js
It also integrates with Discourse, if you want to have a robust forum software that is also actively developed by a sister team.
PS: If you do play around and install it, you should apply to https://qbix.com/ecosystem so you can be a host. Qbix is going to eventually join the fediverse but right now it's more about being a viable decentralized replacement for Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc.
Check out an app called Artifact, if you're looking for that infinite scroll on published articles relevant to you.
It's made by the original founders of Instagram, and they're using AI in some interesting ways, e.g. rewriting clickbait headlines. Their Reader View is nice too, though I wish I could set it as default on each page open.
Unfortunately, lack of a website I can use on my desktop browser makes this unusable for me. Also I am not sure any of the user generated content on this app would be discoverable by search engines. I fear it will be locked in forever.
Today I realized how much of a habit I was in checking certain subreddits like r/boardgames and r/woodworking. Probably three times today I have gone to Reddit out of habit, only to remember that I no longer have access to my customary subreddits. I’m hoping this time of blackout will break me of the Reddit habit.
Scale comes with time and engagement - right now, nothing is at the same scale. If the API costs, accessibility issues, and lackluster mod tools issues are not resolved in a timely and amicable manner, the scales will change as they have done time after time.
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.
It’s not a one to one alternative but I’ve gradually moved from reddit to twitter to get my news and find interesting takes on whatever topics I’m interested in.
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.
Since Musk took over, I've been getting recommended a lot more right-wing topics and people. Maybe they were always there and just getting suppressed by the previous management, but I suspect there is a finger on the scale to try and push discourse in that direction.
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's changed so much in such a short time since the acquisition. The quality of responses that are boosted to the top are so poor that I frequently wonder just how those people get through the day. Not to mention that I constantly get notifications to subscribe to people who I've never once interacted with before. I've heard of BlueSky, do you know if it's any similar to the Twitter of the late aughts/early 2010s?
BlueSky is invite-only and it's something the previous Twitter founder is putting together. I am skeptical it will go anywhere, not just because of network effects asking everyone to switch to a new platform, but also because well, if he had all those years to fix Twitter and fiddled while Rome burned, why would his new venture be any better? Would it follow the same original path as Twitter? E.g. having an open api allowing app developers to make something for everyone, then remove it?
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..
I’d like to think that people might use this opportunity to move to distributed options like rss with forums operated independently or maybe federated alternatives but neither of those options are easy enough from an end-user standpoint to get traction against the next big link-aggregator site
I use https://raddle.me/ but it's small for now. They seem to have a much better approach to moderation at least but the API is lackluster, but it's open source so hopefully it should improve
Comprehensive? The internet would be my first choice.
The fact is, all community organization online being on one site is an awful idea as we see with this and other things that have happened in the past. Communities should host their own forums.
Searchability... The truth is that Google isn't a search engine, it's a content aggregator now. It doesn't even index the internet! And it blocks valid results, for reasons ranging from "its a pirate site" to "we don't want you knowing these things". This site:reddit.com thing is a workaround, because sites like reddit have taken over enthusiast run information depos on the internet. Looking at it now, it's a bad idea to have all that information in one place, no?
There was a P2P Reddit alternative some time ago. The problem with it was that you had to install a program on your computer, so it can sync with the network. I doubt it still exists, but the idea was intriguing. Anyone remember the name?
4chan? It doesn't touch the scale and breadth of Reddit and I was always a little uncomfortable the handful of times I visited. Maybe because of no-rules /b/ but there are definitely some wholesome boards out there.
It's really up to your interests, but I'll say /news/ because that's what I used Reddit for mostly. Here's a handy list: https://wiki.bibanon.org/4chan_Boards
Not entirely related but a few years ago I started a side project with the aim of teaching myself a few new tools, and solving some of the biggest issues I had with reddit. [1]
Since then, reddit has addressed a lot of these themselves (crossposting, submitting text and link together) but in quite a bolted-on way.
I would love to see a site that rather than just being a reddit clone, takes all of the lessons learnt from reddit over the years as a base and better enables these communities and discussions.
I totally agree on the general superiority of tags vs. subreddits, and did the same for my Reddit/HN alternative https://zsync.xyz . I can see the case for private communities/forums, but I think tags make more sense for most use cases.
My main complaint with Reddit since the early ~2010s has been the crap post/comment quality. In 2008/9 when I first joined, the comment quality was very high. Then memes, puns, one-liners, and hivemind took over and ruined the site.
An ideal Reddit would be able to show you posts/comments that you're most likely to enjoy, such as via a "sort by" option tailored to you, or other sort by options like an "insightful" that actually works and doesn't just give you low effort one-liners that add nothing to your life.
High quality content in general needs to be better incentivized, and right now it's not. Anyways I have a lot of ideas around that I wrote elsewhere so will refrain from dumping then all here [1]
The challenge with developing a Reddit alternative however unfortunately is not technical, it's overcoming the chicken and egg problem where nobody cares about your site if no one else is on there.
I think something that would incentivize those longer-form interactions would be to remove the upvote/downvote system and replace it with something similar to what SA had back in the day, where you could label posts with "Insightful", "Funny", "Off-topic" and the like. I find that too many people will only say things that they know will get them karma, which leads to that hivemind that everyone hates. Having a system where you can put a numerical value on someone's "importance" to the site will only lead to users minmaxxing their responses.
That's a good idea. I think upvoting can still work though particularly if the platform can use your upvotes to infer what kind of content you like and give you more of that.
Something I toyed with for comment quality was having a way to only show comments by people subscribed to the subreddit your viewing, to avoid brigading from other parts of the site, and sorting comments based on reactions, to be able to filter out 'funny' replies from insightful: https://github.com/kraftman/TenTags.io/blob/bc6f3046dda4815b...
Are there any other good sites that also have cascading comments like reddit and this site? I've realized that it's the best format for reading discussion for me. Any flat structure just won't cut it.
I'd like to see an alternative Vanguard-style (the investment group) owned by the people for the people. I wonder what that would look like? E.g. socialize the hosting costs and take votes on new policies.
You might be interested to a look at hawker.social. It combines reddit with features of Patreon (subscriptions) and discord (sub channel). You can also use it as a substack style publication!
90% of the time there's a forum for the subject that's a better option anyway. For example, the College Football /r/cfb area is periodically entertaining but the Rivals.com network is significantly better for the same thing anyway.
I found that blocking Reddit as part of the parental controls on my home network was beneficial anyway, considering just how much stuff falls under the umbrella of availability on that site.
As a news aggregator it always felt untrustworthy and slanted anyway.
And really beyond rivals.com, your team-specific forum is even better. I was a frequent poster on shaggybevo before it became surlyhorns, and still hang around there. Though there are some absolutely unhinged posters on them (you get that with most smaller forums I've found).
I call BS on the "capricious bans". Tildes bans rarely (only one person has ban power on the site), and when it does, there's some discussion around it.
Occam's Razor: If someone got banned, it's more likely that they were being an asshole than that the admin of a site that's been running peacefully and smoothly for 4-5 years is suddenly on a power trip.
Takes somewhere between 48 hours and a week to generate the first invite codes, though. (Those are the two closest moments at which I checked before and after I had invites available)
Tildes is great but it's a lot more analagous to HN than reddit.
The 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).
It has some nice things going for it, but it has a few issues that can be off-putting.
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.
My email has been public for ~10 years and running on Google Workspace for just as long. I get roughly 2 spam emails / day. Maybe 1-2 false negatives and false positives per month (both these rates have been getting worse with gmail).
What do you use Reddit for? The answer is going to be subject-matter dependent.
For me, Discord has already replaced 95% of my Reddit use -- and not because I'm anti-Reddit, but just because community activity has migrated to Discord naturally. The remainder of my Reddit use is mostly "a search engine sent me there."
Yeah, but that last bit is so valuable. How often have I answered a technical question by adding "Reddit" to the search query. Having discussion indexable raises the value of any community.
I really have a problem with Discord how to choose a discussion, find a link and stay on topic. I see Discord as a modern IRC tbh but far from Reddit. Perhaps im using Discord in the wrong way. May i ask which type of communities do you follow in Discord ?
Subreddits related to development and programming tried to create programming.dev, which is a federated alternative, but the registering is failing for some reason, possibly because of too many accounts being generated. Anyways aside from that it has good content.
Reddit is complete garbage, also influenced by GOV.... just as much as FB if not more. I stopped using when I got banned for politely asking the medical community about why my ears were (and still are) ringing from the J&J shot.
There may be alternatives to specific subreddits, but there is no Reddit alternative. There is only one macro network like Reddit, and that is Reddit. Maybe that network effect breaks, but I doubt that happens because of this.
Interestingly, one of the largest started as https://patriots.win/ which was created in the wake of the notorious the_donald subreddit's quarantine and ban. Top posts still get 50-200 comments and 1000+ upvotes, and it seems to have fairly high volume with hundreds of new posts per day.
They branched out to become a general reddit-like alternative with other supposedly neutral and separately moderated subs, but the other ones have far lower activity levels - see their version of /all: https://communities.win/
Google has completely messed up the archive. When they first took over, I could find my earliest posts from 1981 or so. Last time I checked, my earliest post was listed as some time in the early 2000's. Pretty sad, really.
It doesn't have the hyper-local capabilities that reddit has but metafilter.com deserves a shoutout. It has an established community, has been around for _ages_ and is a good replacement for /r/all and the like.
For tech issues, I recommend stackexchange and the various gpt-based products that repackage it. Phind.com is pretty good, but they're move back to gpt 3.5 has really neutered the quality of answers.
For general discussion, there is no alternative, and reddit was not an option even before today. I was active on two non-tech subreddits: /r/judaism and /r/buttcoin. I am a classical liberal politically, but I am also an Orthodox Jew. I was banned across several accounts for respectfully stating Jewish beliefs in /r/Judaism and for saying that hating Jews isn't acceptable "anti-zionism" in /r/buttcoin. (I'm an anti-zionist, and my statement that hating Jews isn't ok led to a ban from the subreddit for "defending Zionist agression" or something equally absurd.)
I've seen media become more polarized in the last ten years or so. There is little left and right discussion. There are places where left is OK and anything else is fascism, which is ok to ban. On the other side, there are conspiracy theories, and anything else is lies by communist pedophiles and groomers to discredit great patriots. (I guess I'm a fascist and a communist because I believe Trump is a criminal and men can't get pregnant.) HN stays pretty clean by avoiding politics, but if you're looking for good political discussion, please make your own site. I'll help with the infrastructure, and maybe some good discussion will come of it.
If you're wanting the links it could be an idea to check the sub on archive.org and add the different sites that appeal to you into an RSS feed. No option for the discussions though.
There is no a one for all alternative to Reddit. There are few promising tech as Lemmy or Kbin because they work with ActivityPub as Mastodon. What I have seen many don't like the free speech nature of ActivityPub and run away if they see a tech with an instance not of their liking.
But Reddit tipping point started because most of 3rd party clients are closing as Apollo, none of current alternatives have a good client as Reddit clients.
There are few centralized alternatives you can look up as Tildes, Lobsters and stacker news (focused on Bitcoin and Nostr).
Right now there is a vacuum, and who knows how that void will be filled, especially for niche and local communities.
At the moment, I'm shuffling my time in between these
* Tildes (tildes.net)
* Lemmy (join-lemmy.org)
* kbin (kbin.pub)
Another place I like for community stuff is Discord. Yeah it's an instant-messaging platform and its target demographic is mostly gamers, but you can likely find one related to your city, and they added a "forum" option where you can easily participate. But it's proprietary, so you never know when they'll pull the rug like Reddit did.
Slashdot is really more like HN's predecessor. Mostly tech news focused. It faded in popularity after Digg became a thing and allowed all sorts of topics.
Slashdot was rocking in the late 90s when Digg didn't even exist. I started reading it when it was published by Rob Malda as his personal blog on his own server in his own dorm room.
Along with Usenet, webrings, blogs, the original BoingBoing and the Illiad strips at userfriendly.org (dead, search for archived pages on archive.org) it is among the places of yesterday's Internet that I miss the most.
It's much older than Reddit but used to be as popular early/mid 2000s. There are topics and the front page automatically tailors to you location (or at least I think that's why I keep seeing UK news).
The community has a number of in-jokes that have been running decades, it also has FP comment spam, usually a racist or similar ASCII art comment. That was my takeaway from it...
Ah, that makes sense, thanks for letting me know. But in saying that, I'm in the Netherlands and 100% of the stories on my frontpage were about things happening in the US.
Big Tech is still US centric, so it's not surprising a tech focused site would have US focused stories.
Having said that a lot of the stuff isn't US centric, like recent stories being "Linux Foundation Announces Collaboration for 'Open Radio Access Network' Prototypes" or "Debian 12 'Bookworm' Released" or "OpenAI, DeepMind Will Open Up Models To UK Government"
That's a fair point. I guess I was coming to it from a "Reddit alternative," and on Reddit I've curated a much more locally relevant feed over the years. Big tech news I already keep up with via HN.
How about we take this opportunity to go back to the old internet to a time where real free speech ruled. Remember how reddit started off, where ANYTHING went no matter what (as long as it was legal)?
Do people have the courage for that anymore? I certainly do, and I'd love to hear from those who disagree in complete free speech for the next Reddit.
When you're the less moderated alternative to a popular platform, you end up with a huge fraction of the users who got banned from that platform.
For the most part, average people do not want to talk to the people who get banned from mainstream platforms. People who post images of children in bikinis described as jailbait are creepy. People who advocate political violence are scary. People who share shock content are disgusting.
Perhaps you don't make exactly those value judgments, but most people do. They will avoid your platform because it's full of people they don't want to talk to or hear from.
It's important, but so is community building. Most communities function best when there's some degree of moderation. For example, people would prefer that the speech in their bird watching community is limited and trolls are kept out. Putting up with abrasive behavior in your community isn't brave, it's just masochistic.
It is true that some communities on Reddit weren't possible because they were not permitted to allow some of the content they were allowing.
You can make the community building tools so much more powerful too!
If people want to make a bird community and ban all pro-hawk posters, that's perfectly fine. The issue's are around the secrecy in administration.
How about adding the following:
- Removing shadowbans
- Allow users to see all deleted comments if they opt in
- Allow users to see all banned accounts/reasons they got banned.
Imagine a page for each subreddit which includes a list of banned/removed comments. It would be quite telling on the moderation if that list was mostly non-spam disagreements.
How about including an internet "Bill of Rights" for free speech, illogical arguments, etc to try and help guide the flow of discussion, similar to how /pol/ has this in their rules - https://i.4cdn.org/pol/1493993226750.jpg
Nothing in there would be regulating them, just more transparency so users can see who gets banned and whether or not they want to view deleted comments.
I'd probably turn off deleted comments in a r/games subreddit but would 100% have them on for a political subreddit for example.
I have come to understand that due to rhe paradox of tolerance some form of moderation is absolutely necessary for the long term health of a community:
"The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Another way to frame it in terms of moderation is "in order to maintain open tolerance, we must be intolerant of intolerance". Ironically it was a Reddit thread that helped me understand that tolerance is a social contract: once one side breaks it, we need not be tolerant of them any more.
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.