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Comment by fiblye | Hacker News Reader

I joined HN right around the time I thought reddit had become a dump. Apparently that was 10 years ago.

Early reddit was a really fun place. Not sure how to explain it, but it kind of felt like one of those movie/cartoon mad science labs, but as a community. Basically everyone was an engineer, programmer, or scientist of some sort, or so it seemed. Most of the front page was science, tech, and programming news, and the remaining bit was people posting about tech gadgets and other stuff they made. It seemed pretty similar to HN, but more active and with a less market-oriented crowd just making stuff for the hell of it (which HN still gets a decent amount of).

Then people started posting pictures of cakes, political/religious discussions were everywhere, and it just felt weird. Digg was starting to decline and small waves of people started coming in, and once v4 launched and killed Digg, reddit's comment section completely changed, and the submitted content soon followed.

Now I go and see avatars and people buying gifts and gold (someone actually took an old 4chan joke and turned it into a business idea) and endless fake videos and random images. It looks like an absolute circus now.

People having been mentioning that finding niche subreddits is the answer, but in my experience, it's just a game of musical chairs. Virtually all of them get bad eventually.

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> Not sure how to explain it, but it kind of felt like one of those movie/cartoon mad science labs, but as a community.

I think this is where everyone goes off the rails a bit, and I want to explain why: Reddit can't be a community. Reddit is too big to be a community. Reddit is too diverse to be a community. Where's the community between Old-School Runescape players and Lisp programmers? There might be some tiny Venn-diagram overlap, but there's no shared goal there, no spirit of common purpose. The two worlds aren't allied, they aren't opposed, they're simply sharing a common platform useful for allowing online discussions, and they don't cross paths otherwise.

After all, what's a great white shark to a wolf?

If you expect a platform-as-a-whole to be a community, you'll be driven off one platform after the other, time and time again, until you either find one so niche it's never going to grow, or you die unsatisfied. Hell, you might not even be satisfied with the niche platform, given that it'll be a stagnant backwater utterly ignored by the rest of the Internet.

Reddit's solution is Usenet's solution: Subdivisions! Allow tons of smaller sub-platforms to proliferate, and allow them to be communities. Or not. There are some fairly community-like subreddits, and there are some clubby Usenet newsgroups.

> I think this is where everyone goes off the rails a bit, and I want to explain why: Reddit can't be a community. Reddit is too big to be a community. Reddit is too diverse to be a community.

Around 2004/5, it wasn't too big or too diverse. They didn't even have comments at first, much less subreddits. Once comments showed up , I figured "oh well -- now it's no different from slashdot." Of course I was so wrong. I enjoyed coming to the comments after reading the article and seeing lots of interesting commentary.

Right you are that subreddits span quite a spectrum. I chuckle to myself when I overhear conversations about reddit pro/con. It's clear that some people judge reddit by the default front page and they have a very different experience from mine. I've had no thumbnails as the default for probably almost as long as the user preference was available. The combined difference in content and UI between "old" reddit-no-thumbnails-my-subscriptions and new reddit-popular is night and day. It's two vastly different sites.

I can confess to being a part of the problem, though. I started the bad habit of reading the title then the comments and skipping the article. And once imgur appeared, I upvoted the onslaught of mindless memes while never taking the time to consider thoughtful articles. They are after all, the "it" that we have supposedly "redd". I'll put in a plug for /r/TrueReddit - there's often interesting content there.

Everyone's threshold will be different, but for me, a community is lost when it's impossible to avoid the fundamental attribution error.

For example: I might get into a mood. I rant, I take the least charitable reading of a situation, I move away from people. I know I'm not always like that, I just get like that sometimes, and I move on.

When someone else does it, if I don't know them, I might think "Wow. White t-shirt brown shorts is an asshole. Stay away from them." See what I did? I said they are an asshole, not that they're in an assholish mood.

(Side note: This is one reason E-Prime, an English without the verb "to be", exists.)

The cure for the fundamental attribution error is knowing the person in multiple moods. Some people, OK, are snippy little shits who will self-aggrandize and look for every opportunity to start a fight, but most people have ups and downs. Knowing a person means seeing beyond any given mood or action to the person beyond the moment-to-moment.

Make a group big enough and there's no effective way to do that. You can't keep track of 50,000 names. You can't keep track of 50,000 unique images attached to names. Everyone fades into the mass, unless they're Power User level celebrity scale, and then they're reduced to a few broad strokes in your head. All you have to relate to them is what they're doing at the moment. The fundamental attribution error is the entirety of your social context.

That means you can't give anyone the benefit of the doubt. Are they arguing in favor of an unpopular opinion? Downvote and move on. They're an asshole because right at this moment they're taking the asshole's part. The biggest voting block wins, and the space is a hive mind, since there's no way to make a good argument for an unpopular position and have it be heard, whereas bad arguments for popular positions are promoted.

> community is lost when it's impossible to avoid the fundamental attribution error.

In addition to the problem of maintaining community when the number of people increases, I also think that it’s a function of communicating in writing, rather than in person.

I vaguely recall attempts at quantifying the loss of information when communicating in writing due to the loss of tone of voice and body language. i.e. even if your words are rough, your tone of voice and body language may allow you to be better perceived.

In addition, the increased likelihood of participants writing in something other than their first language, increases the chance of misfired communication significantly.

> I vaguely recall attempts at quantifying the loss of information when communicating in writing due to the loss of tone of voice and body language. i.e. even if your words are rough, your tone of voice and body language may allow you to be better perceived.

People can make "I know" sound like anything from a death threat to an erotic tease using everything which doesn't come through in text.

> In addition, the increased likelihood of participants writing in something other than their first language, increases the chance of misfired communication significantly.

Even within a language there's plenty of room for people to misunderstand: How much swearing is necessary to avoid sounding like a stuffed shirt, and how much makes you sound like you're too ignorant to be worth reading? Which specific words are comradely and amusing, and which ones are going to derail everything the moment they appear?

If two people have a relatively slight disagreement on that, you can end up with a rather loud argument over a horrible perceived insult, on one side, and some weirdo who got extremely bothered by an adult talking like an adult, on the other.

While I agree that writing has its limitations and that a lot of non-written info is lost, I don't think the written part is the problem.

For if that were the case, YouTube would be a thriving beacon of clarity, when it clearly isn't. And as an effective counter-example of a only-written-yet-successfulish-conveying-meaning you have HN.

So no, communication by writing is not the problem.

But HN seems to be the exception, rather than the norm. Whether that's because of good moderation, or demographic, or something else, I'm not sure.

It's certainly easier to get the 'road rage' mentality when writing, than when conversing in person. As well as losing information, communicating through text makes it more difficult to relate to other people as people. It can lead to people behaving in terrible ways that they'd never do in person. Road rage does a similar thing: ordinarily nice and well-balanced people can be enraged by other road-users, but would never have such a response walking down the street. (This was captured rather brilliantly by a comic [0].)

I wasn't the only one who was surprised to see that real-names policies (such as on Facebook) fail to get people to behave themselves.

[0] https://theoatmeal.com/pl/minor_differences/cutting_off

That's a pretty cool thread.

I guess I should find friends in real life (also known as 'meatspace')

Note: that's literally what I think, I'm not trying to sound smug , neither am saying this ironically. Stupid limits of written communication, haunting me even here!

I agree about 2004/2005. Back in the early, early days of Reddit, a lot of the content wasn’t even real. I remember those days. It was remarkably different from today. The two versions aren’t really comparable in terms of user base and content. That’s just the way it goes I guess.

I do think it has become a tire fire disgrace but that doesn’t matter much.

I remember this one user... robotrecall? Something like that. She was really intelligent and her insight and opinions on things were such a joy to read. When she left, I remember thinking that was kind of the end of it for me. It coincided with a lot of other changes as well. Whenever I go and check it out it’s kind of jarring how weird it has become in comparison. None of the content really seems real on the main subreddits (like the early days but so different); the site seems like an enormous native advertisement or subversive troll playground.

I think of Reddit like New York City, it’s huge and there are many thousands of neighborhoods with plenty of heterogeneity. Almost anything you can think of can be found there if you know where to look.

Honestly Digg can not be mentioned enough times here, what Reddit did with the re-design almost feels like opt-in/wilful self-destruction. Is there a point somewhere in there that once a platform becomes a powerhouse, in terms of democratic user behaviour & numbers, that platform is in turn basically forced into auto-destruct since the risks of having a sudden functional democracy the size of a small nation state is basically too disruptive to current world order/system?

Pretty sure a community that can be disrupted by dancing avatars and a page redesign is no threat to the stability of the international community.

'Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.' Especially when founders leave.

The problem with founder culture is companies become dependent on their founders. If Aaron was still around I think Reddit would look very different.

If Aaron was still around he would have invented something better than Reddit. Probably several times.

You're right in a sense that it does not threaten the international community, but the old design acted as a deterrent against the majority of "pictures, easy browsing and quick content" users, which have since drowned the original community. Most of the people I have been asking stayed away of reddit because of the interface, which is good because it retained only the people that were interested enough in the subject to dive into text-only pages.

Maybe it's that once a platform achieves a certain size then the potential of making real money comes into view, and that starts to be the objective to optimize for. That means employing typical short-sighted stock boosting strategies such as explicitly focusing on revenue (Digg), or targeting mass appeal. Only the masses do not produce very good content, and they overwhelm the initial users in numbers by an order of magnitude. So the quality of the platform goes to shit.

Once a platform becomes big enough I'd imagine you're guaranteed a regression to the mean. Your user persona becomes "everyone" so you design for "everyone" instead of the community that made the site unique. I'd imagine this is especially true if your leadership changes out after some sort of monetary event and you start looking at your typical metrics like new users onboarded, or DAU, rather than continuing to do new things.

I'm imagining all this because I've never done it, and it must be hard to do it and certainly impossible to please this crowd anyway, but I can see how it happens.

Isn't this usually because a new VP comes in and wants to leave his mark on the product (in the same way a dog leaves his mark on a tree) and ends up ruining the platform? Google is notorious for this.

It seems inevitable that every growth-driven platform will -- like a balloon -- be grown until it bursts.

There's only so many people any interesting/unique platform can pull in, because the same features that attract some people repel others. So such platforms eventually plateau, no matter how much you push engagement.

But, given a platform that gets big enough before it plateaus, it has usually already hired on a CEO and taken on investors that now expect it to keep growing anyway. It can only do so by tossing away the things that made it unique, in order to appeal to the people it previously repelled; and hope that the people it previously attracted with that uniqueness, will stay through inertia.

> Basically everyone was an engineer, programmer, or scientist of some sort, or so it seemed.

That's how the WWW felt when it first started, then the AOL lot turned up.

Even Twitter was like that in the first 6 months or so.

Every new technology is inevitably "full of technologists" when it starts, since they are the only ones who know how to operate it. As things get easier, inevitably non-technologists take over, since they outnumber technologists by orders of magnitude.

I'm starting to see a pattern here... Maybe I should launch a social site where uneducated people are not allowed to participate? Too bad that it probably lacks the 10000x growth potential VCs are looking for :/

>> it probably lacks the 10000x growth potential VCs are looking for :/

Avoiding eternal september sounds like a killer feature to me :P

Just need to make a niche forum and that'll do alright

I think I've heard of a place like this [0]...

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com

Although hn doesn't have an exact assigned niche (it falls towards science and technology but that's not an enforced rule), it's fairly civil because the site doesn't need to make money and it's well moderated (almost to the point of authoritarianism, albeit that's not necessarily a bad thing in a website). A similar phenomona can be found in a place like r/neutralpolitics (heavily moderated to keep everyone on track, doesn't need to make money since subreddits are free).

This isn't feasible for a site the size of reddit though (they need money for servers and stuff), so federation is the only real alternative since each sub would pay (probably a provider, honestly, but they could selfhost) a little to keep their spot going. The trick is to make the federation invisible to the end user through some kind of reddit-ish frontpage site, which would be much like current reddit's frontpage but be accessing the federated subs, each with it's own moderators/janitors. This may be unfeasible, but it's the only way anything like reddit could keep free speech up. Add an easy to setup ad-network for each sub (they can opt-in to serve ads to the people accessing their sub's page, like Google ads on blogs) and it works. If a sub becomes evil just unsubscribe.

What criteria would you use? I've met a lot of stupid people with education from well-regarded institutions and a lot of sharp people with no education past K-12, if that. Formal education seems like a poor measure.

Just make it deliberately inconvenient for normal schlubs to use. CLI-only BBSes for life.

I know you are making a joke, but a barrier of entry is definitely part of the equation here. Right now, a good portion of the web development seems focused on removing friction as much as possible.

USENET, with a proper client, sat on a wonderful local maxima for usability and usefulness, and technical complexity to weed out the riff-raff. I miss those days.

Now I know why the gopher / gemini project exists.

I used to play on an adult only whitelisted minecraft server. It was setup in such a way that day-to-day gameplay was as close to pure vanilla survival as possible. Of course the adult part is really hard to enforce so the owner took a very interesting approach to it. Anyone could join the server but you would be put in spectator mode i.e. be unable to interact with anything but just tour the builds. Then you'd have to make an application that would be manually approved between 24-48h later. Just that delay was enough to weed out the impatient.

See the problem was not about the age specifically but rather childish behavior. So by realizing that we targeted the most obvious one( being impatient) and had great results.

So yea, making something deliberately harder to use might be just enough.

I vaguely recall an article years ago, can't remember where, about a newborn social media site, sort of a restricted Facebook, intended only for intelligent and gifted people, but can't find any references. It's entirely possible others have tried or are trying, but like you I hardly believe they would find any VC money.

You don’t need VC funds to do this. You need willpower and users to pay their own server and database costs.

I’ve heard the same thing about other topics ranging from Fishing, Tech, WWW, Coffeeshops (rise of Starbucks), to Skateboarding when I was a kid. Mainstream killed my niche, it used to be so much better!

Usenet too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

> Even Twitter was like that in the first 6 months or so

Also Google+, then Google noticed they accidentally built something right and proceeded to fix it.

As a recent newcomer into reddit, I feel the same way. The only thing I do differently is that I only subscribe to subs I like and live happily inside my filter bubble. I only browse through my own feed.

This confuses me.

People keep saying Reddit is blah blah.

I usually only go to Reddit to find an answer / solution / review / commentary on something specific, and via internet search always land in some subreddit or another which seems like a fairly reasonable community.

This, and if you keep the auto joined subs if you make a new account, you’re gonna have a bad time. Subreddits are very useful, I like r/opensource , r/datahoarders etc.

Gonna second this for emphasis. You gotta ditch the default subs.

If you want to see whats percolating in the high-traffic subreddits, use r/all. I find it's worthwhile to check it no more than once a week, but it's useful for checking the pulse.

I've been using Reddit for 8 years and it seems mostly the same. Mind you, I have kept the old design in place this whole time and I have subreddit CSS turned off.

I think people are committing the age old error of romanticizing the past

It changed a lot if you use the new design and create a new account (where they add you to the most popular subreddits)

I definitely romanticize the time when I didn't have annoying pop ups telling me to "Use The Reddit App!" on every single page load.

>I usually only go to Reddit to find an answer / solution / review / commentary on something specific,

How do you feel about the quality of advice Reddit gives on subjects that you are an expert in?

Because I know how I feel and that makes Reddit the absolute last place I would go for advice on something I'm unfamiliar in. I can google something and skim the top results myself.

Yeah. It’s among the worst in getting correct, canonical answers on the myriad of topics I’ve asked about. People shit on Stackoverflow here, but it’s a billion times better generally.

My most recent use was to get a feel for whether the Windows 10 Pro license Kinguin.com are selling (actual vendor is NextKeys.io).

Reddit gave me the impression they are surplus genuine OEM keys. I paid AU$45 rather than AU$339. Mind you, if I change harddrive or motherboard I have to get another license, but I'd have to do that 7.5 times before I've spent $339.

Went ahead with the purchase, activated by phone no problems. All good. Thanks Reddit.

My other recent use was to get a feel for whether the diesel heaters for motorhomes being sold on eBay for ~AU$300 are any good, versus the name brand units at ~$AU2000. Yep, all good, went ahead with the purchase, no problems, all spare parts available. Thanks Reddit.

Seems to work as intended, for my use case anyway :D

To answer your question though, I actually don't know! I'm an expert in about four fields-- anatomy & pathophysiology, nutrition, metal fabrication and laser cutting / CAM of ferrous and non-ferrous metals, 2D CAD, but haven't really thought about looking at Reddit on those topics. Maybe I should, I might have something to contribute.

Most of my subs are now constantly full of American politics, even the ones that are not about politics. As a non American that get really boring fast. As someone who avoids mainstream news like as much as possible, reddit became just another news outlet to avoid.

Indeed. There's no escape from any of it. Even The Register is starting to do it.

>The only thing I do differently is that I only subscribe to subs I like and live happily inside my filter bubble

I'm pretty sure that's how Reddit is supposed to work.

Sounds about right to me. I started using reddit about nine years ago, and I remember thinking that I had missed out on "good reddit" at the time.

Of course, it's gotten much worse still, since then.

> Virtually all of them get bad eventually.

Like pretty much everything on the internet.

Eternal September: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Given enough people or money, everything goes to shit. On and offline.

> Then people started posting pictures of cakes, political/religious discussions were everywhere, and it just felt weird.

It wasn’t just random, I noticed a major shift leading up to the 2008 election. Reddit’s decision to lock some vocally awful subreddits (/r/politics /r/atheism /uspolitics etc) made the homepage a gaggle of Obama & anti-religious rhetoric rather than anything compelling.

> Reddit’s decision to lock some vocally awful subreddits (/r/politics /r/atheism /uspolitics etc) made the homepage a gaggle of Obama & anti-religious rhetoric rather than anything compelling.

Now that's an interesting phenomenon I hadn't thought about before. There's been a lot of discussion recently about tech companies removing/blocking content they do not agree with. In most cases (racism, hate-speach, etc) this seems pretty well justified as it helps keep these people from rallying together, but I never thought about those boards being a sort of trap crop [1] for the internet, keeping the pests distracted and away from the areas the rest of us enjoy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_crop

It wasn't about agreement or disagreement. The pendulum swung HARD the other way in 2016, and /r/the_donald dominated the front page for the year leading up to the election. This is why is should be clear that Reddit makes a lot of money by manipulating the front page feed. Trump just simply outspent Clinton on Reddit.

They just binned /r/t_d entirely, and, in my opinion, that IS an agree/disagree decision. The same folks will be back with the same content under a different sub, but I doubt they spend enough to punch through again this time. I think, given their success last time around, that the price will be much higher.

Then again, what do I know? I was a pretty avid user at one time. Now I block the whole site and everything related. At this point, there's very little useful content left. It's basically just a giant portal for porn, and with 2 young boys in the house, and no way to filter it, I don't want it on my network. If they'd offer a DNS-based "safe" mode, like search engines, I'd open it back up.

The concept of a containment board dates back at least to the early days of 4chan, probably before that.

I created an account to remove /r/politics and /r/atheism from my front page. And I'm interested in both politics and skepticism.

Around 2011, every start of the semester saw a huge user increase. I guess it was a combination of reddit being popularized and everyone getting smartphones. Rapid decline from there.

I find it really interesting how a social network can shape your thoughts.

Back in the day, I was an avid SlashDot reader, I even participated in the Sony Rootkit fiasco (I got my 10 minutes of Internet fame for compiling a list https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/398332-neowins-official-s... ) .

At the end of that time, I remember briefly looking into Digg and been nauseated about it, looking into Reddit and just finding it weird (no story summaries?) and looking at HackerNews comments and thinking what a bunch of capitalists wannabe they were (I think with time the discourse in HackerNews has become more "leftist" leaning towards Open Source, freedom, and similar thoughts).

I ended up coming more and more to HackerNews as the quality of the discourse in Slashdot went down, and because the quality of the discourse here in HackerNews became better. I also got into the "startup culture" around that time, so I am sure my perceptions changed.

For some reason I also got more and more into reddit at that time, specific subreddits (mainly about my country while I was an expat, but also about US Politics which I find pretty entertaining to follow).

One thing I have been seeing in HackerNews in the last years is that the "comment effort" has decreased. You see more people writing single line comments like "or so he said" that do not really contribute anything. Although the moderation team make their best to maintain a good amount to SNR in the site, I think something like a reminder each time you are commenting with the main guidelines (be civil, strongest plausible interpretation, good-fate, etc) would help as more an more new people join.

Every social platform will decay once it has reached a critical mass.

I think this is the inevitable result of letting anyone post anything.

> Early reddit was a really fun place.

Yup. I've had a reddit account since r/politics was relatively balanced! It was fun and awesome.

And now I am seriously thinking of deleting my account altogether. It is just not worth it any longer.

I'm really hoping https://www.saidit.net/ takes off, the recent subreddit ban wave was an attack on free speech and people are recommending this alternative.

Looking at the content, it's mostly complaints about Reddit, conspiracy theories, and right wing politics. Doesn't look like a return to the Reddit that GP was reminiscing about.

I'm hopeful for https://dev.lemmy.ml/

It's very young right now, I don't think it's been live much more than a month (?), so is a bit of a ghost town. Unlike the other Reddit clones that have popped up recently (ruqqus, saidit, voat) it is not overrun with right-wing trolls (yet).

I think it's going for a distributed model, like Mastodon, where anyone can run their own instance with their own rules and whatnot.

Seems the right way to go. Decentralize. It separates the "communities" even more, just allows people to host their virtual place.

See also: Neutral vs Conservative: The Eternal Struggle https://web.archive.org/web/20200205183339/http://slatestarc...

"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong."

Voat by any other name

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