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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

In many ways, Reddit reminds me more of the "old internet" than Facebook or Twitter. There seems to be better discussions, more variety, and even quite a bit of experimentation going on within certain subreddits. It feels like a freer place and that much I like. I still don't like that people get into their own bubbles and do little to bridge the gaps between political and ideological differences, but it certainly feels more exploratory than the other two.

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>I still don't like that people get into their own bubbles and do little to bridge the gaps between political and ideological differences

Leaving your comment moderation duties up to majoritarian voting is inevitably going to do that.

Also internet anonymity brings extremism out of people.

IRL, when debating another person, most people IMO wouldn't be at least half as extremist as they're on reddit or HN

The Facebook-based comment sections on some news sites make me question that.

Anonymity is part of it, but I think an understated part is just lack of community. The people are just names on a screen and it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that they’re people.

The interface of reddit and HN kind of encourage this. Old PHP BBs used to have avatar pics and signature blocks and stuff that distinguished your post as yours. It sort of anchored your “content” to an identity, so over time a community develops and people start to develop reputations and stuff. That doesn’t happen as much when everything is visually indistinct from everything else.

Agree

The obvious way out of that is to join bubbles that are aligned with your interests rather than political views. If your interest is politics then find a better interest :)

That's a remarkably privileged and blasé take, denying the importance of civic engagement.

Posting in political subreddits is not "civic engagement."

Civic engagement happens in the real world, not by commenting on reddit, fb or Twitter.

Civic engagement happens wherever people discuss politics

That would be quite an exaggeration. You can already see in this thread how fast the conversation deteriorate into completely meningless quibbles.

100%. Having a "passion" for politics was abrasive to my relationships with friends throughout high-school and returned very little value to me (save the short-lived energy I got from stupid internet debates).

Some people don't have the ability to not be concerned with politics.

If you mean like a bad habbit i agree.

Pretty sure doublepg23 was referring to those of us who aren't straight, cis-gendered males. Politics directly affects us, sure the rich among us can run to lavender marriages and try to cover up their innate desires, but the rest of us will end up being fed to the wolves.

For us, going to a rural town or even many suburbs elicits the observation "It smells like dead gay people" as you've entered an area where you may get lynched for being yourself. Even here in Seattle, non-straight couples are getting violently assaulted for being out in public with their significant other. The state of affairs is rapidly getting worse for us!

Every now and then when I access Reddit not logged in from somewhere I get reminded of this. If you curate what you are subscribed to it will be much better. About a year ago I wrote a little Python script in about an hour or so that subscribed me to every single state-level or above location-based subreddit (there is a webpage that you can go to that lists them all, I simply scraped that). I have learned so much about different cultures just by reading posts from people around the world posting things about their area.

can you share the script ? I'd be very interested in trying it out.

Sadly it was wiped when I reformatted awhile back. But it’s rather trivial to implement if you know a little python. The website I scraped is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocationReddits/wiki/index

It took a bit of finagling to exclude the US college and city subreddits but otherwise I subscribed as-is to everything on that page. I think I only have unsubbed to a couple of them manually after, mostly because of excessive political posts by people who clearly don’t live in the area (Israel and Palestine subreddits come to mind)

You get some great content from doing it. Specifically Denmark and Sweden have amazing content in Danish and Swedish respectively that you wouldn’t ever see otherwise. Plus the former Yugoslavia countries and Eastern Europe and basically a lot of Europe generically has some sweet content you would not normally see if you weren’t subbed to their subreddits. Right click to google translate helps a lot. There are some truly dank European memes out there.

One of the other things I noticed that was really cool is that I now am tuned in to state politics outside of my home state in US. You really start to see the major issues other states have when you are subbed to their home subreddit.

Reddit is basically one giant forum. Old fashioned discussion boards and message fora will still be around.

>I still don't like that people get into their own bubbles and do little to bridge the gaps between political and ideological differences

I have never found any sites/forums/bbs that didn't eventually devolve into a echo chamber given enough time.

People like to repeat the same opinion as others and those who don't like these opinions tend to be the first to leave for other pastures.

The biggest problem with reddit is that subreddits tend to get turned into little personal domains, ruled by a supreme dictator for life, turning the community experience sour for anyone who doesn't toe the party line.

When it's gone, the "old internet" will be gone

There are still some of us that are trying to keep the old internet alive.

(Shameless plug: https://beta.getaether.net)

All I see is big "Download" links everywhere, that just go to a JS alert popup saying it's not out yet.

It looks interesting but with no way to preview the current communities or content before downloading, I'm hesitant to go through downloading, installing, and signing up to a new service, only to find out it's another Voat.

I’m trying to build something I like, beyond anything - so I’d rather have it not be Voat.

Hey rolleiflex, I would like to sign up for the newsletter, per the popup, but I cannot see how to.

Could you direct me to that page?

One of the cool thing, basically THE cool thing about the old internet was the exposure to a giant wide world with all different kinds of people and interests from all walks of life. It skewed technical, because you had to be technical to figure out how to work it. But once people got over an initial barrier it was cool, and it's not like there was anywhere else they could go if they wanted to reach whatever community they were into.

One of the problems with attempts to keep the "old internet" alive is that they still skew technical (because most of the people who are nostalgic for it are comfortable enough with those technical things), but now regular Joes have other options. They're not going to bother learning the technical stuff if everything else is set up to make it brainless and easy.

Moreover, since you HAVE to be technically inclined to build such a thing, the initial word of mouth and distribution winds up being constrained to the technical crowds. This makes the communities one-note and boring, so people just don't feel very compelled to stay.

Why would the technical bubble of the old internet be so interesting and diverse, but the technical bubble if today is so "one-note"?

The suggestion is that the old internet wasn't a pure technical bubble: although the barrier to entry made it more technical than average, it was still fairly diverse because the alternative to passing that barrier was staying off the internet entirely. Now, getting online is easy, and there are millions of alternatives to the techy corners of the internet. So nobody who isn't specifically interested in that stuff has any motivation to join in.

OTOH, today's "technical bubble" isn't really pure technical either - technology went from being nerds-only to full mainstream popularity, and there's plenty of both technologists with other side interests, and people from other walks of life with technology as their side interest.

I feel like you can have good UX and still preserve aspects of the freedom of expression, interest-based discussion, two-way dialogue, and the feeling of community and openness that the 90s internet had. But I agree that you do have to have these platforms compete with the giants and that's harder to do these days.

Well, it might not be "normie compatible", but there still is 4chan, which is a lot "old internet". I can understand that people do not like it and why it is that way though. But the point is: There are still sites out there which are like the old internet. They are obviously just not mainstream. They never were really (except reddit maybe). You just gotta find your little niche place and maybe look around every now and then, but they still exist.

Edit: No, i don't talk about /pol/. No one likes the right-wing /pol/-scum. That's not 4chan.

And Usenet still exists.

/pol/ may be the most salient and influential political forum on the internet (a recent study showed /pol/ produces the most reposted content seen elsewhere online). To describe it as “right wing” is like saying YouTube comments are right wing. It’s unmoderated, not right wing, there’s a big difference (see /r/the_donald if you want right wing). That said, these days it’s full of shills shilling shills. I prefer to hang out on the other, more apolitical and better moderated 4chan forums like g, tv, and o.

Addendum: to say /pol/ isn’t 4chan is both true and false but it’s kind of weird and unfortunate you felt obligated to apologize for using 4chan because /pol/ exists. Just because /pol/ tolerates witches doesn’t mean 4chan’s a witch site for witches populated entirely by witches.

the_donald is mostly shitposting. If you want an example of right wing you'd be better off with https://www.reddit.com/r/conservative.

I feel like that happened to some extent when the SomethingAwful forums lost their dominance.

Every platform has its Eternal September.

Some of the first comments on Reddit were complaints about the site going downhill in almost exactly the same terms people use today: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/17913/reddit_no...

Nostalgia is powerful! The key has always been to unsubscribe all the “front page” (once “default”) subreddits.

That's true. But also every platform eventually gets bad and dies... probably?

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