Protest note about user privacy changes by Reddit
reddit.com
reddit.com
I primarily browse on mobile, in a private window, without an account. For this, i am faced with constant banners and pop-ups to try and get me into the mobile app, which i'm told is "the best way to experience reddit". (It's not.)
Being logged in is an annoyance as it gives me a blank landing page that's an extra click away from the main "popular" page.
"New reddit" has brought some nice UI improvements, but their design team is choosing some absolutely miserable paths in the name of data collection.
Can't even expand most comment threads on mobile these days without logging in. Worse than most news sites.
For example cutting off the comment section under an article after just a few comments and forcing 'related' articles into your feed is a terrible user experience. Its designed only to keep you on the site and click more for more ad revenue.
Their responsive mobile design is for the most part, pretty good. It's a huge upgrade from the past when there was absolutely no mobile optimization. :)
Agreed on that though, there's so so many dark patterns that have come along with it.
The latest bummer for me was seeing usernames disappear from the landing page on mobile. Who cares about users anyways, not like they've ever contributed anything to the site…
It’s not. They went in trying to make a mobile first experience, and somehow made it worse than a desktop first experience browsed on mobile. Base reddit works fine on mobile. The redesign is absolutely trash, bloated, slow and ugly.
I preferred it then, especially when browsing from my mobile device! It used to be very easy to get the zoom I wanted just by tapping on my ipod touch. Now, it's both wasteful of space and cluttered with a bunch of things I don't want. It's become harder and harder to skim the feed.
I know this has been around for at least 5 years. https://www.reddit.com/.compact
I use Redirector extension for Firefox with a rule to always send me to the old version of reddit when following a link:
Redirect:
https://www.reddit.com/*
to:
https://old.reddit.com/$1
Example:
https://www.reddit.com/bob → https://old.reddit.com/bobIf I search for something and the result is a reddit post I'll turn on the vpn, view the result, and close it. The site is run by shills, advertisers, bad actors, agitators, and toxic people.
I'm working on 20-things.com, my alternative to reddit, still in the making. I use it as a personal public bookmarking service, posting things I find interesting/worth sharing. This does not scale well since large userbase have large operating costs, so my plan is rather simple: keep it small and closed, periodically opening it up for new users as others leave.
But how will it make money? It won't, and that's ok.
Would you ever consider making this open-source? It would be a great addition to the Awesome-Selfhosted list. [1]
[1] https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
I plan to publish the source code with step by step instructions on how to build and host your own instance. Publishing the source will require some cleanup/preparation, I'll get to it as soon as possible. I never really thought that someone would even want to look at the source xD
It's nothing fancy, really, and every library used is noted on the about page[1], as well as third party services such as the one used to transmit SMS for account verification.
You can scale a single sqlite db to millions of users without too much trouble. The "large operating costs" meme primarily arose due to the atrociously large costs big cloud providers will make you pay for moderate traffic. It's not helped by the cargo cult of scalability, which strongly pushes you to use something shardable when in all but the most extraordinary cases the dumbest solution will keep working long beyond what's expected.
Seems reddit is dead. Not dead in the sense that it has no users, but that the original user base has been alienated from it and has been supplanted by a profitable horde of "normies". Does anyone disagree?
If Reddit ever gets rid of the old.reddit design then I'm out of there for good.
You don't get upvotes for asking interesting questions, or providing a niche/novel viewpoint. You get upvotes for answering leading questions with utter conviction, (whether you are correct or not) and generating emotional responses, usually outrage (whether deserved or not).
I am very disillusioned with Reddit at this stage.
Also I think dang (and whoever else) is a good mod, which makes a lot of difference.
There's also a recency bias, I've been on Reddit for 8 years and HN for ~3. Maybe my disillusionment has yet to come.
Now I'm not trying to disavow HN, it's a really cool place and there are a lot of knowledgable people here with lifetimes of experience in complex subjects but there are also a lot of technical topics where the discourse is clearly inferior to reddit, twitter or even discord.
people don't understand how much of what they read on reddit is actively managed by people who want the message controlled. This is the same for any popular social media site with twitter being the top of the heap
just be glad that HN isn't that important to where the issue becomes observable (we get enough indirect political tripe as it is with submissions)
Even if HN were bigger, it wouldn't be worth the attention of PACs and other activists IMO, the HN crowd is not their voter base. For Republicans the tech crowd is too diverse and immigration-friendly, for Democrats... I'd bet a case of beer that many/most of the US people here vote Democrat anyway since the actions of most Republicans run completely against the needs of tech people.
I'd argue upvote systems in general dominate the world of tech discussion to the degree that some of these reddit mechanisms end up driving aspects of the industry.
Your point about people who "know how to post" is very interesting, as on Reddit I've noticed there's a certain style, or phrasing, of comment that tends to get upvoted more, which leads to a lot of comments having similar style and rhetoric in my experience.
>I'd argue upvote systems in general dominate the world of tech discussion to the degree that some of these reddit mechanisms end up driving aspects of the industry.
Oh yeah definitely, at this point there's no social media giant without an upvote system. Would a strictly chronological forum, like the forums of old, be better though? I don't know.
I think a reputation-based system (in the sense of real reputations, not virtual points) could work. I think it's happening in some places. People like Jon Blow, George Hotz & Handmade Hero smoke the competition when they stream on Twitch, and their currency is respect.
The best part of respect-based attention is people who know their shit are able to speak against the zeitgeist, without putting in much effort. That's the biiiig problem I have with upvote systems. It's not so much that they encourage groupthink, it's that they don't present reputation. Every post has to stand on its own merits, which is nice in theory, but in practice it means very experienced (and thus busy) people can't just state their opinion, they have to make an argument, so they end up not interacting full stop.
Agreed. I've been experimenting lately with ordering all threads by "old" by default and using CSS rules to hide comment points. It can make things much more interesting, as all you see are people talking in chronological order, and screw the fake point popularity contest. My next step might be hiding the age of each comment (or obfuscating it when <1 day), so I stop overfocusing on recent comments and stop thinking "I would like to reply to this, but the comment is 17 hours old so nevermind..."
Some subreddits hide the vote count for X amount of minutes, which I also like. It doesn't stop the algorithm but it helps prevent dogpiling on popular comments.
Generally that means focusing on the OP. If the OP is some short burp of a statement, the OP isn't there for conversation so the entire thread is a waste of time. Then secondly you can wait a day or so for the up/down locusts to have passed on. OPs who were genuinely interested in discussion will reply a few days later.
I miss slashdot's moderation system that was more nuanced: you could classify comments into a few buckets. Unfortunately reddit is so heavily gamed by people who want karma for profit that moderation and meta-moderation would be gamed as well. Not to mention people who troll simply to troll or advance a viewpoint or political agenda. I generally stay out of the main subreddits because there's just no point in interacting with people there any more.
There is some value in niche subreddits (which I won't mention here) but once they become "too" popular it draws the wrong sort of attention and they too lose utility.
Edit: Oh yeah, if someone would like to invite me to lobste.rs, please e-mail me at my username @ yahoo.
There's plenty of clones that work perfectly fine, comments like this come across as Stockholm syndrome. If a sub made a half-assed collective decision to move it would be simple to do so. If all the mods left for greener pastures it would become a wasteland within weeks.
Lobsters, Tildes, Ruqqus, etc.
Even in specialty subreddits, folks take upvotes for legitimacy. When questions are repeated over time, answers are regurgitated paraphrasing of what has upvoted in the past. You end up with this vicious cycle of hivemind thinking that is difficult to introduce new or alternative viewpoints to - because people don't upvote what they don't already believe to be true.
Facebook also was cooler when my mom wasn't on it. ;-)
As for the Ron Paul mania, there were definitely pro-Obama posts as well. And I definitely don't prefer the current censorship enforced hegemony.
Fnord.
Why the gatekeeping? What’s the point?
to keep the noise ratio at a bearable level? I'm not against gatekeeping but the way it is done needs to be transparent and those at the gate must have the right experience/background otherwise it's just grandstanding by mods and high-karma accounts that have no qualification other than having been there first (and perhaps louder than others).
I'm just there for the distractions and cat pictures.
By better conversations, it's somewhat hard to quantify but I think if you were to use a tool to analyse the reading level of an aggregate of posts on digg compared that to reddit, the reading level for reddit would have been higher.
By lack of memes, memes weren't really as we think of them today. Digg was however filled with people posting ascii art in the comments because that was oh so hilarious /s. A common one was this, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pedobear, which I think is enough said. That behavior used to be downvoted into oblivion on reddit.
Reddit isn't quite as bad as digg was, I'd say, but only because you can filter out a lot of the nonsense by curating what subreddits you're on.
I've been looking for alternatives but it's not promising. The pattern so far has been for reddit to ban toxic subreddits, which then causes a flood of people into these nascent sites. Because they're small communities the culture of the toxic refugees quickly overwhelms the sites, which have tended to be built on the principles of free speech and anti censorship.
Voat and Ruqqus are both good examples of this. I was an early member of both. They start out with a good group of people, and then devolved into far right extremist insanity. You can pick a random thread on either one of these sites and chances are good that someone will be complaining about black or jewish people in not so nice terms. It doesn't even matter what the topic is, that's what you're likely to find.
I used to think that anti moderation was a good stance to have, but I don't think you can get such a site off the ground today without using a heavy hand. If you don't, you're going to sink into a well of toxicity which is impossible to escape from. Smart people are attracted to smart people, toxic people are attracted to toxic people.
So I'm still on reddit. Like another commenter said though, if old.reddit.com stops working I think I'm done.
However, it's tough going, against the relentless reddit meme-spam and nitpickers who only care about being right instead of discussing ideas. I have now quit all other forms of social media except HN, and is a truly sad state of affairs that a large part of a generation has isolated itself from discussing and developing ideas, as they are sucked in by the addictive and shallow nature of social media.
Thanks for nothing, big tech.
8 years of basically no engagement from me (maybe 30 karma points) I call someone out and bam I'm getting downvoted to kingdom come but at the same time being gilded with silver. It just didn't make sense.
HN has so far been nothing but amazing conversations and it will hopefully stay like this. Big Tech played the PR game and won, PR is what makes a unicorn startup not so much the startup's product these days.
That tells me that there's both sides reading it, just one is larger. Isn't the goal to preventing an echo chamber having both sides expressing themselves?
Unfortunately I cannot find it but ultimately it was not a debate, it was a classic teen response 'yeah but what have you done about it?!!?'. No value add and definitely nothing worth replying with.
Once we can manage our emotions and misinterpretation of text then we can start debating in a healthy fashion.
This I completely agree with. I've have many hobbies in my early years that were considered weird of just not in line with what my friends liked. Having a chat to learn more and dig deeper was amazing to do.
But there's debating and then there's just flat out teenager responses. I honestly don't mind having a debate or conversation but the lack of insight and knowledge only provides you with lacklustre meme attacks.
I think this post is a good summary of what new reddit has become. Both the content and the comments within.
It's probably very profitable for an ad driven site but it kills the community.
There used to be this idea that no matter what subreddit you were in, ultimately everyone was a redditor and had shared identity at some basic level - often self-deprecating sense of apart-ness from the mainstream. This community gave rise to the platform-wide schemes like the Christmas presents.
I rarely see the word redditor any more. To me that suggests that the shared identity is dead and if that's how you define a community, then Reddit is dead too. (Anecdotally I even saw a comment from someone saying that it's a stupid word in response to another comment just recently.)
Here's the poor man's version looking at worldwide Google Trends, from Reddit's launch to today. It's hard to read too much into it, but clearly interest in redditor has in no way kept pace with interest in reddit. And interest in redditor appears to be at a low point in late 2017 - the end of the sense of community? Major investment and value growth happened around this time, with staff numbers doubling and a major push on advertising. It took 10 years to recover the interest level high (2011-2021), during that same time there was an enormous growth of users.
- redditor - https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=2005-06-23%2...
- redditor vs reddit - https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=2005-06-23%2...
That said, you are wrong to suggest that we wish Reddit was dead. We just want it to be the same as or better than it was 10 years ago. You may be too new to understand.
HN on the other hand suffers from having just "one subreddit" and it became quite bad over the past years.
The simple fact that redditors like to be called redditors and call others "normies" is a big part of why reddit is a cesspool.
Often the text based articles end where they should start (this is a general problem that also touches the press), so you learn nothing. Then you see the same 10-20 repetitive factoid comments. (BTW. what a pity there is no more the "reddit frame")
With the inflow of simps reddit is becoming incredibly anti intelectual: ask for sources? Get downvoted. Write long paragraph of gibberish? Get upvoted.
Many people lament that /r/funny is not funny (I think it never was), /r/news is full of paid shills... but problem is that the site now caters to the lowest common denominator. Pictures everywhere. Compare /r/unitedkingdom (which banned pictures) with /r/Ireland (which didnt). And yes, I am aware that each community had own mods who generally are quite random people. But the New redesign is there to puść more pictures.
Askreddit mods did not want to receive reports so they straight out banned opening comment boxes in their subreddit. This leads to uninspiritng questions and constant repetition.
There are still some communities like /r/truereddit or /r/longreads (plus some niche heavily moderated subreďdits) but most mainstream is incredibly dull.
Sometimes I look on digg - and even this corpse of a website seems to have more interesting stuff than reddit.
Also new reddit just sucks. Once they disable i.reddit / old.reddit the site will become even worse: they don't want intelligent users who can have some sort of a discussion. They want as many users as possible. Because websites should grow like tumors...
Tbh, I mostly wonder now where to go when hacker news dies. The process seems to start too.
> By continuing, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy.
Can’t even read the protest without subjecting myself to what is supposedly being protested.
Probably good for reddit though. Now instead of people following the sources they stick around on reddit hoping to see it again.
Try using the old interface instead of the shitty new one.
https://teddit.net/r/europe/comments/ls7ft8/protest_note_abo...
https://libredd.it/r/europe/comments/ls7ft8/protest_note_abo...
Stop using it.
And report a GDPR violation.
Sounds good on paper, rarely enforced as strongly as the layperson believes. Occasionally used to make an example of a huge company that can afford the slap on the wrist.
Just think about it. Would companies break the regulations as wantonly as they do if the risk and stakes were truly as high as we like to imagine?
Smaller practice tend to be less stringent in following it, but big institution tend to be scared or getting hot with a violation .
Reddit used to be all about free speech and grass root movements but now its all about chineese money and mainstream opinions. Most subs are controlled by the same users and any controversial opinion will get you banned.
They even implemented thought crimes, that is upvoting the wrong thing can give you a ban. Reddit has become a really shitty website with spam ads for their mobile app.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
[citation needed]
> When we expanded our quarantine policy, we created an appeals process for sanctioned communities. One of the goals was to “force subscribers to reconsider their behavior and incentivize moderators to make changes.” While the policy attempted to hold moderators more accountable for enforcing healthier rules and norms, it didn’t address the role that each member plays in the health of their community.
> Today, we’re making an update to address this gap: Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities.
Quarantined communities are already basically on probation for flagrantly violating policies. This does not apply globally.