Hacker News Reader

Comment by testfoobar | Hacker News Reader

I miss humor and authenticity from old reddit the most. E.g. the classic: "I also choose this guy's dead wife." or the AMA with the vacuum repair guy.

These days just about any popular thread that I wander into, I see wide swaths of "deleted" comments. I'm sure they were deleted for many good and valid reasons.

IMHO, reddit's aggressive moderation suppresses spontaneous comments and is off putting to lurkers. The wittiest comments are likely spontaneous. And lurkers are not likely to engage in a discussion if they feel it may be off topic.

So we miss out on spontaneous humor and the random insights of brilliant people.

All of this makes reddit a sadder experience.

View on HN

Speaking of AMAs. I feel like these "Scheduled AMAs" broke the spirit of reddit very early on. I am referring to celebrity appearances where an account is created for the purpose of a two hour celebrity "appearance". I've always felt like if they aren't sticking around answering the long tail of questions then they shouldn't be doing an AMA. So I just don't participate.

I remember one of the things that attracted me to reddit back in the day was a lady who had been some character at Disney doing an IAMA. That was the beauty of IAMA with everyday people.

Then they changed the subreddit rules and only accept "Notable" people for IAMAs and r/casualiama was born. In the 10 years I've been at Reddit it has changed a lot, including some "niche" communities that I was at, as Reddit becomes more popular all it's subreddits degrade into Meme collections.

I miss /r/Reddit.com.

There are still some good ones around. Brandon Sanderson replied to my question 4 months after his AMA started.

I've tried posting a few times but it just doesn't work. Absolutely everything is censored or sent to auto moderation immediately. And I'm not posting anything remotely controversial. E.g. one time I moved to a new place and wondered about banking in that location. Nope, can't post that. Even worse, messages look like they're posted when they're actually not visible. It's dishonest. They're orchestrating the conversation based on what they want you to see.

They also don't allow you to find posts that are beyond the last 1000 or so for that subreddit. Everything beyond that point gets memory holed. They've recreated the retention problem that usenet.

If you want to find older posts you have to use a search engine.

That old reddit was also a haven for near child porn and other sorts of immoral or illicit content. Reddit needed strong moderation to become a functioning business and probably for the good of society as a whole. Maybe their current approach to moderation is overzealous, but let's not look at "old reddit" through rose-colored glasses.

Hahahahahha. Reddit was a haven for literal child porn and is still today a haven for "jailbait" content. God I hope the "waiting"/"grooming" subs that were for lewding over pics of under-18s got banned.

Reddit might have cleaned their act up a bit but it still a gross wild west.

...no.

Nope. Reddit has never developed/deployed the tools to clean anything up... today (literally) it's virtually guaranteed that someone on the site is trading child porn, someone else is arranging the sale of illegal narcotics, and someone else is selling sex work in a location it's not legal.

On an unrelated note, isn't spivak a gender?

There's a huge difference between banning jailbait and banning the Donald.

I have come to the conclusion that there is no real way to discuss The Donald in a politically neutral way so I think it is best left out of the conversation for the moment. There are plenty of less politically charged examples of Reddit's moderation or the lack thereof.

The subreddit was originally quarantined for threatening the lives of Oregon officials, no?

No, the antifa posters who coordinate violent attacks on Oregon officials thrive on reddit to this day.

I'd argue that it's not Reddit's aggressive moderation, but that Reddit is now so popular that the racist, illegal, fickle beast that can no longer stay on topic. If they weren't so aggressive, they'd have a much bigger problem of everyone thinking they're a cesspool of hatred.

Your phrasing could be a lot better but I think your main point holds some truth. Just like the conspiracy equation that models the difficulty of keeping a secret in terms of the number of people involved the same principal applies to online communities that have a significant number of hateful members but try to fly under the radar. It gets harder and harder for the community to moderate their members that /unjerk and then it snowballs once the seal is broken.

Reddit was great for a long time even when it was one of the largest most popular sites on the internet. Then it became a political platform for the US democrats.

Kinda sorta. Reddit is an odd place on the internet. It's on average really really conservative but full people who distance themselves from the political identity of "conservative" or "Republican."

Reddit is where you go if you begrudgingly vote Democrat but think that liberals and progressives have gone too far.

I do wonder what the political landscape is going to look like in the next decade if/when Republicans realize that there's huge huge swaths of young and young-ish people they could easily convert if they just dropped all the gods & guns & murica branding and gave up on social issues.

/r/politics is extremely US "normie Democrat voter" (which does not align with the actual party, it's different and sometimes worse) but the popular financial subs like WSB/investing certainly aren't.

This is just a passing trend though, 10 years ago everyone on the internet was libertarian. Which is how you knew the internet wasn't real. Nobody's actually a libertarian in real life.

> Nobody's actually a libertarian in real life.

I'm going to assume what you mean is that nobody lives entirely by Libertarian ideals. While that may be true, it's true of every other political category as well, so I guess nobody is anything under that logic.

Almost nobody claims to be a libertarian or gets elected by the party. Justin Amash and Ron Paul are maybe the only famous politicians.

On the internet there's that political compass site that tells people they're libertarians, but it was made by libertarians so I think it's a recruiting tool.

But it's also true that people don't practice it in real life. Drug legalization, yes, that's going somewhere if slowly, but the right wing libertarians still tend to be NIMBY in local politics.

I don't know where you get these ideas. I was participating both online and offline in Libertarian communities.

Is the point of libertarianism to participate in a community? (Maybe it is.)

They haven't, like, done anything though. Not many politicians elected, no drugs legalized, noone freed from prison, state control over people generally not reduced. I have heard of a few attempts to start libertarian cities that failed because you can't get a Walmart when your taxes are too low to construct a sewer line.

Reddit is heavily moderated, curated, and gamed for advertiser friendliness. If you consider the popular reddit subs to be a "cesspool" the issue might be on your end due to lack of exposure. Just about anywhere else on the internet is worse.

No that's not it.

Practically nothing makes it to the front page organically these days. It's all orchestrated.

I miss the free-for-all reddit where anything used to go.

I also miss when the youth of the time weren't so in favor of heavy-handed censorship. The current zeitgeist puts the CCP to shame.

Exactly this. The comment sections of all but obscure interest subs have been complete garbage for years. The only interesting content is if you sort by controversial but most don't even know about that.

Are we on the same Reddit? All of the comments in popular subs are off-topic rehashed jokes. It's a struggle to find on-topic discussion in anything but the smallest subs.

Discussion is almost useless in most reddits unless you know most people are using the old.reddit.com url. All of the reddits I used to follow have essentially died since the change a few years ago. It is very sad.

I agree. I probably see that "I also choose this guy's dead wife"-style comment dozens of times.

Admittedly, I think I see those more on obviously humor subreddits (r/jokes) or smaller subreddits. I'm actually happy that places like r/science delete comments that are simply effortless jokes.

I would LOVE to find a Reddit alternative, that is more in the vein of that early days spirit.

Unfortunately, it seems like the only options out there are either:

1) Reddit clones, that attract people who are angry about the worst subreddits getting banned at one point or another. Pretty much nothing but non-witty hate speech, and meta discussion about how much Reddit sucks.

2) Random phpBB bulletin boards, that are too small to have the critical mass of early Reddit. Of course, today's Reddit is WAY too big, and suffers from the "Eternal September" problem. A smaller, lesser-known alternative would be great. But it has to be large ENOUGH, or else it's not much different from a private Slack or Discord.

I was on StumbleUpon and then Digg and then reddit. Looking for a new home just like you.

Me too. I found reddit when somebody posted a link to it on Digg when Digg was getting bad. Reddit has gotten bad IMO a few times, but I haven't found a better alternative. Every time it does, I adjust my usage (using old., carefully curating my subs) and it's been ok.

Today I'm out looking for alternatives again, which brings me to HN. There's something magical about early reddit, but I don't think it's unique, I think it existed on usenet and bulleting boards and other stuff before my time, I think it will exist again, but if it exists right now, it's a carefully guarded secret that I haven't stumbled upon yet.

Slashdot, to digg, to reddit, and now... nothing.

I hope a new one emerges.

The Grandpa Wiggly (PawPaw) debacle, and many other events from ancient-reddit-history, disagrees with your claim of "authenticity of old reddit". I think the allure of audience has always driven fakers though, but definitely not to the extent corporate-ness has currently taken reddit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com