Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?
Reddit is pushing the new redesign which seems half-baked attempt at competing with facebook.
What sites/forums can be considered as alternative to reddit or its parts?
For the record, you've been marked as shadowbanned for the last 7 months.
I _dont_ want my social identities linked together.
Maybe I’m the odd one, but I’m constantly making new reddit accounts. I always just generate a random username and a random password, that I don’t store because I just don’t care or want to. I have different logins for all my devices because I don’t want people associating my reddit account with my personal blog and so on.
I've been forcing myself off Reddit and to search out specific forums and sites. It's an old (I meant odd) mix out there, some have obviously been using phpBB for years, some are brand new with lots of mechanics, and some are tied into other sites that have drastically helped my hobbies.
For Reddit, besides the time-sink/image click portion, it doesn't hold much water for indepth hobbiest communities.
The short life of a post and terrible search result in a large portion of each sub being the same post, iterated daily. You don't get around that with a forum BUT, and this is important, forums for these hobbies are often attached to sites specific laid out and updated so you see the bare basics before getting to the forum. Subs can have a sidebar all they want but it's clear a lot of people gloss over it daily.
EDIT: The more I think on it, the more Reddit has splintered into subs and their sidebars/communities just being single login web rings/forums.
Specific example, numismatics
There's /r/coins, coins4sale, papermoney, colonialcurrency, banknotes, maybe 50 more. In reality there's a few main ones which are easily grouped together on a dedicated site similar to Numista's forums
Because of this, I like to think of Reddit as a deeper version of Twitter. It’s a fine source for discovery and can work ok for discussion, but the good content is usually elsewhere and there may be a lot of context you’re missing depending on who you follow (or what subreddits you read).
There is a lot of overlap between subreddits too; and while the sidebar content is often out of date, in many communities it serves as a repository of community knowledge to answer common questions, etc. This works well for communities already structured like this (the LGBTQ community on Reddit is a great example).
But yeah, I worry that the redesign is seriously screwing with the core DNA of the site and turning it into yet another MySpace-like content graveyard.
In some marginalized communities, there is a tendency for the most marginalized people to impose their needs upon the entire group, which drives away many others. As a result, many physical LGBTQ resource centers and online forums are the fiefdoms of a few people who are easily “triggered” and create strange rules to manipulate people. These places tend to be especially unwelcoming and intimidating to people who recently discovered their identity.
Reddit’s mod system (and the fact if the mods go nuts you can easily create a new sub) actually helps protect against some of this by allowing subs to avoid excessive moderation of “marginal” content (usually discussion that brings up legitimate issues that may upset some members of the group). It’s easy for users to join anonymously, so no fear of your family finding out that you’re trying to figure out your same-sex attraction.
Users also tend to gravitate toward the subreddits with the most permissible rules, then filter out into smaller, more specialized subreddits as their interests grow. To look at a subreddit as consisting of the subreddit itself is limited; you also have to look at the other subreddits it’s users post in to get a real feel for the “community”. Reddit allows these Venn diagram relationships between spaces and communities in a similar way to how they occur in real life.
Also, Reddit has a big advantage for marginalized communities in that the site admins are relatively responsive to (and has provided moderator tools for dealing with) harassment, and Reddit is large enough it won’t wilt under a sustained DDOS like many independent LGBTQ forums periodically do.
The forums I’m talking about are really more “community support” for people dealing with tough personal problems (both through actual conversation and shitposting of memes). Because it’s very easy for users to enter and leave communities, Reddit is fantastic for a community that by its nature is a bit of a “revolving door” (as many LGBTQ subs are).
All that said, the idea of independent “forums” is all but dead at this point. Existing ones will continue to exist, but new ones don’t exactly pop up anymore. The use case has largely migrated to Discord, which is even more difficult to discover because it’s not searchable with Google.
How do you end up making friends in places like Reddit? Does it get started from noticing a person and then a PM being sent and talking through there?
I would say that Facebook and Twitter also had their share of killing the classic forums, unfortunately. Which are a much structured way to find and organise conversations.
But many, perhaps focused on topics that young people would gravitate towards, are dying and it does seem newer generations prefer Youtube, Reddit and others over old style forums. But these also tend to be superficial with fleeting connections, a lot of trolling and bad behavior, with any kind of in-depth discussion usually not possible.
In my experience Reddit moderators do this, not Reddit.
For some reason heavy handed moderation is now the norm across every medium-large sized subreddit. I don't know if it's a cultural thing, there's some top-down pressure, or the nature of the kinds of people who become (and stay) mods.
But I'm finding it more and more the case where mods feel the need to heavily regulate conversations/posting preemptively based on arbitrary personal worldview on what is 'good' content for the subreddit, instead of coming in to help when there's actual problems and situations where downvoting simply isn't enough.
Facebook and Twitter went down this road hard too, but at least they weren't doing it via "community leadership" but instead via the predictable slippery slope of centralized content controls.
Who knows maybe I'm spoiled by HN or naively expect large scaled up organizations/systems to stay as functional as they were when they were smaller. But I don't think it's always a lost cause, many big organizations have maintained high quality - given proper management and push-back against the negative forces which cripple large companies (such as becoming extremely risk adverse).
That seems like a fair description of Metafilter as well, which is a poster child of "moderation that works" in some quarters. At some point the moderation drifted to shepherding the conversation in particular directions, though that may be to appease users who'd cause problems if it went any other way.
Recommend against generalizing (which is good advice to apply to indie boards as well). I could just as easily say phpBB scrubs the identity out of many (and frankly insofar as certain sets of smileys, signatures, and other craziness "defines" other communities, in a way...it does)
If any of you have any good alternative to follow soccer please let me know. I want to get out of reddit too.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/
That may have a few to check out.
However, I still agree that forums tend to have better communities than subreddits over all, and the specialised ones really outperform the ones on said services. If your interests aren't purely in a general/top level subject (like music/TV/games/sports as a whole), you'll probably find better discussions on specialised sites.
I've also noticed a fair communities using chat esque services like Discord now, and those seem to be a lot more active than subreddits are.
And well, if you're after tech stuff... you're already posting on the best Reddit alternative for that field.
I recently realized that I was spending way too much time on Reddit, so I started only briefly scrolling through Reddit once per day without reading comments, and relying more on HN, twitter, and a few blogs for news. To feed that itch to belong to a community, I started commenting on HN more, and continue to go on JQBX and belong to a few slack channels.
You can uncheck the style in settings or switch between https://old.reddit.com and https://new.reddit.com for temporary testing. The settings also allow you to view the profiles in legacy mode separately.
For the tor browser the i. design ( same as https://www.reddit.com/.compact ) is the best, though, in particular since it's better not to resize the window.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/7ul5k9/hey_were_here_...
This is exactly the transformation Twitter went through. They changed the UX to make it more advertiser friendly, and when people started using alternate clients to get around it, they cut off the API.
Frankly I think the community will hate it but because it’s really hard to move millions of individual communities, Reddit likely won’t lose too many users.
Not that it affects your overall point, but it's worth noting both that the new design has a rather nice 'compact' view, and that their new ad placement method (right in the post stream) could have been done with the old design.
I keep hearing this but I made an account recently with no email verification. Recently as in one week ago. I put in a no email address actually. YOu can go sign up right now, leave the email field empty and hit next, you can do the whole sign-up process without an email.
Anonymous posting is the core feature of Reddit, so if they kill that the site is dead. It’s also Reddit’s biggest problem with advertisers on two fronts: it prevents them from linking out to external DMPs for most users and it makes it easy to post content that is offensive to advertisers.
Is that really true? Didn't Reddit get big because Digg made some ill-advised changes and its userbase picked up and moved en masse to Reddit?
https://steemit.com ties into a crypto currency, you can get paid for content there
First off, the main reason there's no de facto "Reddit alternative" (Like Reddit was to Digg) is because it's nearly impossible to grow a community based around thousands of topics from scratch.
It's a massive "chicken or egg" dilemma where you need a steady flow of users (1000's per day or more) to provide the necessary community "value" to other users. And even then, the users are scattered all over the place with all kinds of different interests, making it hard to keep them around and coming back for more.
I've kept an eye out on all the competition that has come and gone (hundreds of them at this point), and most of them don't make it even one year before throwing in the towel.
Building a link-sharing/discussion platform is one thing (anyone can do it), but populating it with active people is a whole other beast and probably 100x harder, requiring routinely time consuming tasks such as blogging, promoting the blogging, and trying anything and everything to get the word out. This is where most people fail, and the saying "build it and they will come" is utter BS.
It also doesn't help that Reddit has copied (probably unintentionally) many of the things we added over the years to try and differentiate from them. We had their new "cross-posting" feature many years ago, but ours is named "mirroring" where you can add an existing post into other tribes (our version of sub-reddits). We also had the ability to add "related links" for years now, and I've noticed they added that feature to their "mega-thread" topics, and I'm sure they will make it a site wide feature soon enough.
Reddit gets millions of daily visitors from SEO alone, and all of that SEO is dependent on their user-generated content. For MANY search terms, you can find a Reddit link on the first page of the Google results.
At this point we've had to pivot (focusing on bloggers/creators and their audiences) because we understand that we can't directly compete with them.
They have financial incentive to ban at the slightest provocation, restricting everything to safe and predictable "high-level dialogue" that can't challenge the status quo.
Reddit thrives on multiple levels of "dialogue" segregated into their own communities. Its pro-growth vs SA pro-elitist stance. Thats why SA will never be a reddit alternative.
It's a shame it's been mostly abandoned.
In so many ways it was reddit long before reddit even existed, and was superior to it in so many ways.
My impression was that Usenet was abandoned mostly because it had a ton of spam, and at the time there was no good solution to that.
These days, spam is not nearly as much of a problem, so the only obstacles to its adoption of it are most users' ignorance of it, their psychological dependence on their web browsers as their primary online communicaton tool, and most importantly the network effects of reddit and other web forums being much more popular.
People who live there don't have these problems because they have big kill lists, know which groups are interesting, and only download new stuff, which is pretty spam-free.
It's a shame.
alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die will never be forgotten.
Thanks for reminding me of that.
That got me thinking that there should be a subreddit for old internet stuff. And, of course, there is: [1], though sadly this is almost all memes from the early web days, not pre-web. There's also [2] and [3], but they mostly seem to focus on current BBS and Usenet needs, not on the BBS' and Usenet of the pre-web days.
There's also:
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/AsOldAsTheInternet/
Where you should be able to turn your good karma back into something you can use to buy food.
I want to submit https://postwith.me for consideration. Our Twitter profile (@postwithme) describes it as: "Building a better social community through civility, data privacy, and a meaningful exchange of ideas."
I wrote it as a side project over the past several months and then launched it a few weeks ago when the Facebook stuff was happening. It's getting a fair amount of traction and increasing engagement. We are still way within the "do things that don't scale" phase.
From a tech standpoint, it is completely serverless. S3/CloudFront hosting a React front-end (React Native apps almost done), API Gateway with Lambda functions, DynamoDB and Redis.
Happy to answer any questions about the site or the tech stack.
Quora is also showing signs of hardening of the arteries in its old age ... not really fun places to go to if you're not fully indoctrinated in the groupthink.
But you're absolutely right that more and more I'm receiving notifications of questions like "What do Liberals do for fun?" "Why do Liberals hate Donald Trump so much?" etc, etc etc.
Obvious trolling to spark anger, snark, or vitriolic response. It's toxic, and a damned shame.
Slashdot yes, but I would have to disagree on Voat being an old-timer hive.
I'm sure they're algorithmically picked, but it seems to be heavily polluted with things phrased as questions that are really just rants/complaints, political provocatism, naivete, bragging and showing off privilege (interestingly, frequently tied with seemingly being very naive); the ones that depress me the most are questions being asked by people who clearly must have been incredibly sheltered and repressed. For some of those, I am glad there's a place like Quora for people to actually get those questions answered, but Quora itself doesn't seem to be great at highlighting interesting questions.
The only problem with voat is it's probably the Mos Eisley of the internet now, since every time reddit kicks out the racists or the fascists or the bullies they all say they're going to voat.
and Voat, Slashdot.
Also, thanks for the Snapzu and Soylent mentions, those are new to me.
Already alexa rank 1000
If it's running on incentivized crypto-asset structure then I personally feel unless you're wanting to take advantage of uneducated/unaware population, whereby as the value/price of the crypto-assets go up then society's wealth is unreasonable/unnecessarily reallocated weighted towards the earliest adopters, then I personally won't be using such services. I started to read their whitepaper and it looks like they're attempting to create a "stable coin", however those inherently seem to have similar problematic issues.
It is different enough from modern Reddit that I wouldn't call them competitors anymore.
If you want to do your own Reddit here are some clones, largely PHP based:
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/77bhdx/phpbased...
Maybe self-hosted forums will make a comeback.
Here's a selection of post titles currently on the front page of voat.co:
- Syria chemical attack was false flag operation by US
- Didn't some vegan, muslim, woman shoot up youtube a week ago?
- A heavy redpill from a man who knows what he's talking about.
- Congressional Dick Pics
The default greeting/nickname on that site for other users is nifa. How is that okay at all?
What is nifa? I am guessing it isn't the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and other organisations that come up on google.
nvm, found it apparently: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nifa