What exactly were you expecting, a thesis project or documentary or something? As far as I can tell, petykowski just wanted to recreate the typefaces used on the Underground's digital signage. That's fine. Not everything has to be some magnum opus.
I'm speaking as a graphic designer who's been obsessed with typography for decades. Craft and taste are qualities I ordinarily pay a lot of attention to, and if petykowski had talked to anyone affiliated with these typefaces, I'm sure it would have been fascinating. But it's also important to remember that these faces are not in the same category as a high-end serif or something. They serve a bluntly functional purpose. The medium for which they're designed is entirely different. Of course they're simple and easy to copy; that's the point.
So I'm not sure how you are defining "craft" or "taste" here. These designs are crisp and legible. Your comment feels a little like somebody looking at an icon of Clarus the Dogcow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow) and saying "Ah, but where's the dimensionality? Where's the realism? Can this truly be considered a rendering of an animal? How lazy."
I personally love pixel/dot-matrix typefaces. I hadn't known about this project, so I'm grateful that somebody went to the trouble of doing this.
I mean—like 97% of users just post comments that are a single emoji anyway, so I'd say the level of discourse on Instagram is barely a step above that "Yo" app that was a thing a while ago, if anyone remembers that.
Reddit buying third-party apps to adopt a few token niceties and then kill them wouldn't be a middle ground. Anybody who uses those apps would see exactly what the game was and be just as outraged. It would still be a tantrum, figuratively speaking, just a more expensive and passive-aggressive one.
"Incompetence and lack of awareness" is what you get when management starts taking their community for granted.
There is only one appropriate, effective response to disrespect, and that is to not reward the offending party.
I made it a matter of principle to not use the Reddit app. Even if they removed all ads and made it an acceptable user experience, I'll never use the app as long as they are harassing me about it.
It's simple. Don't reward bad behavior.
Sometimes, denying obnoxious people something they want means denying yourself something you want.
The issue is for every person like you and me, there are 10 or 100 others who put up with this crap, and reddit attracts people, centralizing communities, giving you little option for alternatives. It drains activities from forums, etc, toward itself as it is presented as a more convenient solution. I for one will try to undo my past contributions to accelerate its decline. The blackout is unlikely to work, but I hope it can be longer (a month or something) to encourage people to find alternatives.
I think you're right, partly. But I also think that a lot of the people who put up with it are the passive ones who don't really contribute much to communities anyway; they're just there.
The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.
The more invested you are, the more screwed you feel. That's something that a person like Huffman is incapable of grasping, to his company's detriment.
I don't think the blackout alone will end Reddit. I don't think any one thing will end Reddit. I think, similar to Twitter, that it'll be a series of things: indignities large and small that successively alienate the people who matter most to these companies whether the C-level/marketer types realize it or not.
And at some point, similar to what I expect will happen to Twitter, Reddit will simply no longer be relevant in the way it once was. Whether they understand why is another question, but to me, it's always been clear.
tl;dr: Reddit the company is just a dumb pipe. Reddit as we think of it is a culture and community. That culture and community is defined by a relatively small collection of people who are on there because they care. When enough of them get disgusted enough to go elsewhere, Reddit—both the company and the community—will cease to exist in any meaningful capacity.
Reddit once faked tons of users making posts. I have a feeling they'll look for ways to do it again.
I wonder how hard it would be to have a series of bots that harvest posts from other social media sites, add a little 'human' LLM magic to it, and make it look like actual people are posting lots of content?
> The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.
I suspect strongly that these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years. You simply don't hear much about it, because de-platforming them muzzles most of them, and if anyone does complain elsewhere it's easy to smear them as Nazis or whatnot. I mean, they can't effectively defend themselves against that sort of lie when reddit has scrubbed their comment history from anyone else's view.
OP didn't claim that. You're giving a very uncharitable reading of the argument.
Fact is, the best people on Reddit have been leaving for many years. There have been many purges, of many scales. The fact you didn't hear about them helps demonstrate OPs point (their actual point, not the one you put in their mouth).
And those purges are just one thread in a long tapestry of disrespect towards moderators and users of the site. Spez in particular has been caught lying, editing people's comments, making false accusations, etc on many occasions.
They claimed that "The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits" were driven off ("these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years.")
Small groups and individuals can be extremely important. It's less about the raw numbers of 'how many <X> did we gain/lose' and more about 'what kind of tone are we setting'.
When Reddit allowed /r/the_donald to flourish, what sort of message did that send? When there was a purge in/of leftist communities, what sort of message did that send? Politically, what Reddit allows is actually quite narrow, and it's trending toward mainstream sanitized neoliberal center-right (aka 'advertiser-friendly').
When Reddit started to corral everyone into one shitty app by breaking the mobile web experience, what message did that send? And now, what message is being sent with this API cash-grab?
Reddit's positioning is constantly chafing against Reddit's core demographic. The people who operate Reddit don't understand what they want (aside from $$$), don't understand their customers/content providers, and now seem unwilling to even listen to their customers/content providers.
Many messages stacked up over the years eventually form a story. What's the story of Reddit?
Those people aren't common on the default subreddits, which might make it feel like there is not much community. But in the places that count, the more niche communities that actually have real community, those people are still around.
Besides, its a question of scale. There are loads of people like myself who make effort-post/comments sporadically on a few different platforms. There is enough such people that there can be (and is!) several viable twitter-like platforms at the moment. There's no reason the same can't be true for reddit.
I commented about a month back how the /r/programming seemed dead in the last two years compared to Hacker News. It’s not even close to what it used to be, and I suspect the new design and other bad choices contributed to that. It’s like the really good programmers who made interesting comments I learned from left. But of course I was downvoted and someone said HN users are “probably inept nerds like me”.
I never wanted to use the reddit app. Must have caved and installed it one day. I use it now, and it doesnt feel different from the site.
Say what you want about HN, but at least the contrarians bring out opposing views. The bigger reddit subs have a mob mentality that use to annoy me, and now scares me. People are itching for a chance to hate, and pile on from every angle. It's childish, naive, and most of all vindictive and bitter.
The point isn't that it's different or the same, the point is that the very definition of the site is that all content and moderation pretty much is created by users, and that the users hate being forced to install yet another app when it works fine for years as a mobile webpage. There was/is a spirit to reddit and it's being destroyed and if you love something and someone takes steps to change the thing you love into something you don't then you're going to resent and hate it. There's also the idea of not feeling powerless and at the mercy of every corporation by banding together to try to effect change. But you act like it's just a bunch of immature kids who are pouting about something silly. It's deeper than that.
I agree with the poster above, since at this year most of people are accustomed to install an app to interact with a website. It’s not where we wanted the web to be, but also it’s a minority that find it annoying.
My parents are technical sheep. They'll do what a site tells them to, even if it bogs down their phone, adds notifications, and inserts yet another advertising tentacle into their life. They won't be mad because they don't understand. As an engineer, I think it's reasonable to be mad for myself and those that don't know better.
> The bigger reddit subs have a mob mentality that use to annoy me, and now scares me.
It has gotten way worse right? Or is it me getting older? Many subs are like sects with a razor thin point of view allowed that is shifting constantly. It feels like insane people are pushing every BS problem as a do or die proposition and that those are dominating.
The Reddit app is a worse experience than users currently have on mobile with 3rd parties. Reddit let this go on for years and has now decided, without warning, to make the product worse for a lot of users including myself.
I use Apollo to aimlessly scroll through Reddit (probably too much) and now I'll use that time to learn something and find other communities that are less disruptive.
There's a million ways Reddit could've gone that would've been less user hostile.
> I for one will try to undo my past contributions to accelerate its decline.
This is a great idea. I'm going to bulk edit then delete my old comments (I recall reading somewhere that editing them overwrites the original field in the database whereas deleting just sets a deleted flag).
Destroys the value that I've created for free for that shitheap, plus it's helpful to make doxxing me harder.
Yes, I had to run the script several times, but it eventually edited and got rid of stuff that was super old. Basically every single comment made by me is gone (which I wanted).
I ran it before the blackout though, not sure how it would work with Reddit in its current state.
I lurk in a few subreddits that have well established forums outside of Reddit (decades old with tens of thousands of users) that are the top Google results and I'm always a bit amazed that people will still post on Reddit instead of using those other forums where they will get much, much better answers.
Your own comment doesn’t include any specific examples of these communities, which I think reflects the big problem: discovery. As big as HN is, I rarely see it mentioned anywhere that’s not HN-adjacent. I’d love to hear about some of these other communities, but I do suspect they’ll each have varying features, cultural norms, and suboptimal onboarding guides for newbies. Especially if they’re decades old.
I think if you’re “in-the-know” and have grown with some of these high quality forums/communities for years, you’ll lose touch with understanding what new users need to join as the quality and depth of discussion become higher and deeper.
Sure, I mostly understand. I meant amazed more like the context of the OP of Reddit draining people away from other forums. Amazed that all it takes is saving them 15 seconds of creating a new account, often on a forum that has better features than Reddit, for them to prefer Reddit. It doesn't take much for people to opt in to a centralized internet.
The forum software itself may be unfamiliar. Does it have better features than Reddit? Some do; others don't. Does the forum have really bizarre rules or conventions? Subreddits can too, but it seems to be less common. Will my first ten posts get held for moderation? They probably won't on my 17 year old Reddit account.
It would be nice to see a federated identity/reputation system take off though. I'm thinking of OpenID plus [some other technology that probably exists, but isn't popular] where any of many service providers or my own website can confirm my identity, then offer vouches from other forums along the lines of "Zak has been a member of [community] for 2 years, posted 473 times, and has not been banned as of [date]".
I don't know about this argument. "Everyone else is doing it so there are no alternatives." I believe less in this argument every year.
* There are alternatives. Like for me it's Mastodon, IRC, SDF and the Tildes. Now there's this thing Lemmy bouncing around out there which is a straight up federated clone of Reddit. Are they all kind of different from Reddit yeah, are they smaller yeah, so what? The alternative is you can go help make them better. You can help create.
* None of this stuff is essential for life, work etc. Reddit is not an essential service. So why would it be such a big deal if you totally changed your media consumption habits to basically anything, like let's say just start reading one newsletter from one publisher you think is ethical, and that's it. Seems fine to me. Your world will keep on turning. You'll get more fresh air.
* I just don't feel that what the masses are doing is such a huge issue. Fuck em. I read stuff on and participate in a bunch of little communities now, still use Reddit too but will never use their app, I would absolutely survive if Reddit disappeared tomorrow.
Not trying to pick on you btw, just trying to address the mindset of "<insert dickhead Internet site here> has all the users and therefore is the only option." I just feel like this is all much ado about nothing. Reddit's not a big deal. Let it burn, let it shine, let it do whatever, life's gonna go on and as humans we're creative so if they suck we'll find better things to do.
I would add a small counterpoint to your second point. For me, reddit is becoming pretty essential in my life. Since Google has been taken over by blogspam and ads, I struggle to find reviews or opinions of things I buy or use. I use google to search reddit to find comments relating to thing I'm interested in. Those comments might be astroturfing or paid support too, but it's easier to sus that out by searching past comments and painting a picture of the user. It's not perfect, but it's much better than trusting the authenticity of random blogs save a few I have bookmarked.
There's a second response: to not reward AND punish the offending party.
I've been recommending people to replace their content in Reddit with literal gibberish (from random generators), and then delete their accounts. Each person doing this makes Reddit data less valuable for LLMs, and eventually it means that not even Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. would ever bother paying for API access.
I sunk 15 years of myself into reddit. I am there in all my teenage angst, and you get to see me mature before your eyes.
I can't just delete. I've helped people there, and been helped. If my data is part of a corpus that betters humanity, than so be it. Hopefully one day that corpus will be released under a FOSS license.
I can relate to your intentions, but keep in mind that, when you leave your data there, you're effectively encouraging people to keep using a user-hostile platform that will likely wall those people's content in. In the long run, you aren't making humanity better - you're worsening it.
Instead a better approach is to migrate whatever you deem useful in your Reddit history to another platform. And then remove it from Reddit, either by deletion or replacing it with gibberish.
You might also be interested in this text, as food for thought:
Even more valuable info will be generated, and I don't think that we should just cram it there like that. We would be exposing this new info to information loss.
And someone might say "I won't post it there", but once the person leaves some info in that site, they're encouraging others to interact with it, and generate more info there, in that walled garden, instead of somewhere else.
Note that the potential of information loss in Reddit does not come just from users deleting their stuff. It's also mods (including automod) and Reddit Inc. itself. One day Reddit will decide "we're going to flush out old content!", and here goes your info anyway, no matter if you deleted it or not. Or Reddit itself will go off, and the info in it will be lost, just like the info from the forums that Reddit itself killed. That's the main reasoning in the link that I've provided, and you know what, I think that the author is 100% right.
Also note that there are ways to reduce the information loss. People can - and IMHO they should - migrate that info, before removing it from Reddit.
I think that you're looking at the info present there _now_ in a short-sighted way, without realising the consequences elsewhere.
EDIT: and as another commenter highlighted everything has been archived already. The info loss will be way, way lower than you think.
>The thing is that there's a lot of valuable information that I don't think we should just delete like that.
Agreed. In the past 2 days I've been overly annoyed as both days I've had multiple google queries dump me to seemingly useful threads that I can not see because of this foolish nonsense of shuttering communities in "protest".
I’ve once held a similar view, but then realised that kind of data really isn’t worth holding on to. I deleted my 15 years worth of posts and account, and felt a massive weight had been lifted. Reddit had a negative effect on me, and freeing myself of that was well worth it.
I should also mention that Reddit archives exist, so those post will live on somewhere.
That's how Meta pulls you in, but reddit has always felt less user-focused than subreddit and comment-focused. Read a link, make some smalltalk about it asynchronously for a few hours, move on.
Reddit is probably among the least sticky social media sites because of it.
It may be less sticky from a social perspective, but its comprehensiveness is (was?) its strength to me. I often search Reddit for very specific questions about a range of subjects. That's what I come back to it for.
(Although it's been a while now; the user hostility is just too much).
>I did this with facebook and it obliterated my social connections.
Huh... I did this with Facebook and it basically changed nothing. I was forced to text my friends life updates, that was it.
Out of every social media site I've quit, Facebook seemed to have the lowest impact on my life(as long as I or my wife checked it every 1-3 weeks for Events).
It seems Facebook has an ability to make you feel popular without actually making you friends. I'd be skeptical of the 'friends' you make on Instagram. I've made a few over the last 6 years, but since quitting, I really only talk to 1-2 of them rarely.
It's not a problem with reddit. I've been there maybe 15 years and never had a single "friend". I rotate the accounts every year or so, not a big issue.
I would've agreed with you 5 years ago. However, my weak connections seem to have thinned themselves out—the people I'd only ever see on FB have gotten bored and stopped posting there. Everyone else, I have other means of contacting.
i don’t in my hometown and didn’t go to school near my home state.
old friends get harder to see every passing year. it’s just incrementally harder to stay in touch given the geographical distance. i do text and visit when i can
Are / were they really 'friends' though if doing so obliterated your connections? Most people tend to misclassify being friends with being open & friendly with another.
There’s nothing wrong with having acquaintances that aren’t close friends though. I always see this argument and don’t get it.
Yea, my “true” friends will contact me anywhere, but it’s nice to have a small network of people I know that I can invite to stuff or even better yet invite me to events and activities. They may also become close friends at some point.
Yes. Putting people through hoops and then going "were we really friends if you didn't do it for me, huh, HUUUUH?" is a "I'm the main character" mindset.
A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.
> Yes. Putting people through hoops and then going "were we really friends if you didn't do it for me, huh, HUUUUH?" is a "I'm the main character" mindset.
Interesting point.
> A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.
Oh. You have zero self-awareness. Got it.
Since you can't figure it out yourself -- you are doing that first thing in that second thing. Your poor friend.
> A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.
If you put them below “work people”, they’re not a friend. Or rather, you’re not a friend.
Ah yeah man totally wanting to jump through hoops (email was just an example), installing shit like wechat, kik, tiktok etc is the same thing) totally makes me the 'main character.'
That's something this strategy helps to trim out. Who I want to talk to and jump through hoops for, and whom I don't.
Yeah, I’ve been using BaconReader for years. It’s going to stop working soon and I’m simply going to stop using Reddit. I used to use it for more but the last few years I only use it for porn and I recently discovered that the redgifs site is great for that. Obviously not everyone uses Reddit only for this purpose but I suspect that when the third party apps go dark redgifs will get a nice bump in new users.
Is jumping from one corporate ship to another a good idea? At some point they peak and become greedy. I don't know what's the solution. Can we have better open source alternative and people fund it? Recently I learned DPRreviews went down because Amazon didn't profit enough from it. There are way too many stories like this.
Sure - the next corporate ship will torch VC money until they can't, they'll go user hostile then the next corporate ship will have received VC money to torch to fill the void
In the game of prisoners dilemma if someone chooses to defect (bad behavior) rather than cooperate, and you choose to cooperate (reward bad behavior), bad behavior becomes a winning strategy, so you can expect even more bad behavior in the future.
Prisoner's Dilemma is a good example but probably has a lot of bias due to its naming convention. I think I prefer the Stag's Game for this situation. And honestly, the Stag's game is probably more applicable to this situation.
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Both players have the choice of picking "Rabbit" or "Stag". "Rabbit" is the independent choice, you score 1 point for picking the Rabbit.
"Stag" is the cooperation choice. You get 10 points if both players pick stag, but 0 points if the opponent picks Rabbit.
Its not so much that the current situation is a betrayal (ie: Prisoner's Dilemma), as much as the current Reddit situation is picking a short-sighted, still profitable, choice. (Rabbit). But by picking Rabbit, they're screwing the community (who has gotten used to picking Stag / scoring 10 points instead).
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Unlike the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Stag's game is bimodal. If both players are picking "Stag", the Nash Equalibrium is to continue picking stag forever more.
But if for some reason, a player ever makes a mistake and picks "Rabbit", the game switches to Rabbit-meta and neither player ever has a reason to go back to pick "Stag".
That's assuming that everyone has a good grasp on what's going on, and considers this funny-picture-App to be their top priority.
That's the issue with operating on principle:
We HN users might be aware of this particular issue, but there's thousands of products that we use, because we're unaware or don't have the energy to fight.
So with all the exploitation, abuse and pollution that you indirectly support, why do you expect most users to draw the line at a weird website?
I can't believe they would do this AND kill off third party apps. I'm with you on not rewarding reddit, they have become very user hostile all the sudden.
I was going to ban personal reddit use this week but I already broke that to read this topic and respond to the one dev that replied to it.
Exactly, don't take it personally just vote with your feet. Reddit doesn't owe you anything. The flip side is that you don't owe it anything either. If they do something you disagree with, that is their good right. But you are of course under no obligation to stick around.
In any case, it looks like Reddit is going to join the ranks of long forgotten startups on a slide towards basically being empty shells of their former selves. More interesting to ask is where the users, content, and attention will go.
I never really cared for Reddit. The signal to noise ratio just feels wrong to me. Lots of people yapping about whatever and just not a lot of stuff that interests me. I lurk in a few sub-reddits but as communities they are pretty weak.
Might be a nice one for Elon Musk to buy. But I'd recommend he does that at a big discount. This company needs the same kind of shock therapy that Twitter received to have a realistic shot at surviving. Including a big layoff round probably. I get that people are still upset about what happened at Twitter, but they too were on a long slide towards irrelevance. It's debatable whether Musk's intervention is going to be good enough of course.
I find it funny people have been going on this anti Reddit turning profit crusade, but ignore the fact Reddit is pretty similar to Facebook groups, just has much better ui and indexability
And everyone I know in real life who uses Reddit on a daily basis is also in at least 2-3 FB groups. Be it a local mom/dad group, Costco group, the car they own, or something more niche
They’re not big Zuckerberg fans but they’re much more accepting of him making billions than the Reddit shareholders
FB groups also utilize mods who work lots of hours for free. So those who say Reddit cannot IPO because of the free labor are wrong
Just because every single comment complaining (rightly) about Reddit’s current behavior does not include a comparison to Facebook does not mean it’s ignored.
People can dislike two things at once, and it doesn’t need to necessarily be said. Three, even, if they’re feeling frisky.
Unless there’s a post specifically about Reddit and Facebook, then you shouldn’t expect people to even bring up Facebook. It’s at best barely relevant.
The outrage from users that Reddit is trying to do what everyone in the tech industry does makes no sense
And furthermore, if they give up the IPO focus, let’s say they don’t do the obvious and sell to Meta
What do they do? Layoff 80% of employees? Cut down the servers? Obviously if they are going to screw over the investors, no one will give a penny to another funding round
If, theoretically, the investors really don’t have a majority of votes, like someone here mentioned, the 2021 funding round was the last one, Reddit just burns it’s cash until it shuts down
Okay, and? Bytedance is also profitable. Apple is also profitable. Netflix is also profitable. They all do vastly different things to achieve profitability. What works for one company won’t necessarily work for others.
Just because another company is profitable does not mean it needs to be mentioned every time Reddit is, and that was my entire point.
People don’t even necessarily have a problem with Reddit trying to become profitable, but with the extreme disregard for their users they’ve shown in the last few weeks. Is that common between all the companies above? No. And certainly not to the extent Reddit has shown. And that’s what all these topics have boiled down to.
I’m sure if an article comes up which talks about Reddit and Facebook, then Facebook will come up in conversation. Unless that happens, there should be no real expectation for it to come up organically.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That'll give you a sense of the basics.