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Comment by EasyTiger_ | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is an absolute shithole now. I've never seen a website fall from grace so quickly, not even Digg.

With the redesign and their further forcing of it on users with the giant text and ads all over, it’s tipping away from even tolerable now - looking for the next minimalist aggregator (HN too specific)

I use an addon to always redirect to the old.reddit.com and ublock to aggressively block divs that are for advertiser's benefit rather than mine. Along with RES, it makes for a pretty nice experience. The only real downside is that once subs get large enough they invariably turn to shit.

Theres a new Reddit alternative that's open source, Tildes.

https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes

I've been on it for a few months and would recommend it.

Never heard of this. I like the philosophy. I’ve seen users try and enforce that kind of thing on Reddit, but it often falls flat because it’s not core to the platform.

Sounds good. But how will they reach critical mass? How to avoid being popular driving it into trash like most other aggregators?

> But how will they reach critical mass?

Tildes prioritizes quality over quantity.

> How to avoid being popular driving it into trash like most other aggregators?

It's currently invite-only to limit its growth and keep its userbase from being polluted. Later, a trust system will be added for active and trusted users to help moderate it. When it gets opened to the public, it might also limit signups to prevent overwhelming floods of users taking over.

Also see https://docs.tildes.net/overall-goals.

The more any service becomes mainstream the more it trends to lowest common denominator - that’s pretty much a rule at this point. Only way to avoid is to keep moving on - I welcome examples to the contrary!

What are some of the ~ you follow?

Isn't reddit open source?

It used to be, but the open-source repository stopped being updated and was archived years ago.

although if everyone hates the new version, maybe that's what people want

It’s never the app that’s the barrier, it’s the user base.

Reddit is much like the internet in general. Certain corners, like HN or certain subreddits are great.

Clearly. I think it varies a lot by subreddit. I used to be active on quite a few subreddits, and I've witnessed their evolution as reddit becomes more mainstream. My personal opinion is that the limit seems to be about 100k subscribers on a sub before it starts becoming garbage.

r/spacex is now 300k and still quite good I think

Likewise, some science and history-based subs are doing well. I think large subs need heavy moderation to work.

I agree. But those threads just look like they've been nuked from orbit. I think that's what you have to do to keep the quality high. Any sub that isn't willing to delete everyone's comments is going to be dragged down.

I've been hearing that for 6 years now and yet still it keeps growing.

Growth and quality are unrelated (or, as the cool people here would say, orthogonal)

I think they are very much related, just not linearly. As a site grows from tiny to small its quality often rises, since the worst content gets filtered out as more good content comes up to replace it. But from then on growth mostly decreases quality as any sense of community vanishes and only content targeted at the lowest common denominator rises to the top.

Doesn’t it depend on the subreddit? My main complaint is there is less of a community feel about it than say HN, but some of the coding subreddits are quite nice but albeit a bit quiet.

MeWe has some pleasant groups too

I hear this claim all the time: which subreddits are you visiting? Because that makes a huge difference.

/r/funny may be a shitshow; /r/askhistorians probably is okay.

What has changed about Reddit in terms of quality?

The simplest way I've found to describe it is this:

The front page of reddit is now nothing but images and videos, or self posts.

I clearly remember when reddit was mostly aggregated long form text content. I won't state that that's always better, but you can't find it hardly ANYWHERE on reddit today without logging in and selecting subreddits.

I think a fundamental problem with user ranked sites is that as the population grows, the very nature of the most popular posts is that they appeal to all of that broad population. I find this often means the content is... drivel. It's that 3 second feel good item, or that 5 minute rant. It's never content that requires time to digest and might challenge your assumptions or world views.

Recently I opened the /hot feed on r/all and began blocking the subreddit of posts that were non-text.

...I think I blocked 200+ blocked subreddits my feed is still all pictures and videos. Even checking now, there are only two text posts on my r/all: r/AskReddit and r/NoStupidQuestions.

Really frustrating. Also, searching self:yes doesn't seem to work for me, I think it was deprecated?

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