Don't contribute anything relevant in web forums (2020)
karl-voit.at
karl-voit.at
- But Reddit has an API, and lots of third-party clients!
- But you can just use https://old.reddit.com or https://i.reddit.com instead!
The problem is that the user-hostile trends of current Reddit (e.g. locking the user out and prompting them to install an app) make it apparent that most of these workarounds and such are going to be made invalid in, say, the next 5 years. Even if they do survive, they will be mothballed and largely inaccessible to someone who is starting to use Reddit today. As it IPOs, these user-hostile patterns driven by people who focus on next quarter's returns to the exclusion of all else are only going to increase.
So I agree with Karl's conclusion here – don't contribute anything relevant to forums that aren't decentralized to start off with.
What do I suggest as an alternative?
This is just my personal opinion, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. It's 2022, and we have much better techniques to apply to spam filtering. I will take the tradeoff of the occasional spammy email for having my conversations with others archived under my own control without a ton of effort (I can just use regular old OS tools like Mail, Outlook, and such instead of the more complex information management efforts built by more dedicated folks.
Yeah, and IRC is the best web chat. We kept hearing that myopic old-school-dev-centered view on things for ages. What did it result in? People now beg FOSS projects not to use Discord (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098). New generations of people, even software developers, aren't accustomed to old featureless technologies; and they consider them crappy. No, they aren't going to tinker with setting up an FTP server, they will just install Dropbox contrary to what HN users were commenting on that thread when Dropbox was announced (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224).
After all of that happening can we at least agree that email is not a good substitute for Reddit?
To your point, though. Nobody is asking you to use IRC. The "older" people are only giving a warning: don't build your house on someone else's land.
Sooner or later, the land owner will take notice of all the nice things that are built there and will find a way to extract rent and/or take it from you. It has happened before and it will keep happening until all the coming generations (i.e, the young know-it-alls who think have everything under control) learn the lesson.
IRC is "old"? Fine. Go help build a better alternative, in any small way you can. But please don't continue to build your house on someone else's land.
Today's technology market is built around rent-seeking for services that individuals take for granted while starting 'the next big thing' and then suddenly when they blow up they're charged an arm and a leg for these 'basic' services.
I would personally refine the warning to say "don't build your factory on someone else's land." because in most cases the landowner isn't concerned about houses so much as they are about groups generating revenue that they can get a cut of.
It goes beyond that. "Houses" or "factories", the rent-extraction doesn't have to be from you. Following the analogy, the reason you shouldn't build a house is that the landowner might find someone else interested in building a lucrative shopping mall in the area, and you will get evicted mercilessly.
> Go help build a better alternative
Yeah, people did that. It's called Discord.
Remember the last "better alternative" that was also very good, worked on all major platforms, also got sold to MS for multiple billions?
To go back to the OP's point and the article. If you are a neophyte who cares about nothing but the immediate convenience, sure, stick with whatever Big Tech is pushing you. But if you want longevity and stability, DO NOT BUILD YOUR HOUSE ON SOMEONE ELSE'S LAND.
2. How many of them are of a libertarian mindset? Or very politically active/vocal, otherwise?
When MSN Messenger existed, I pushed hard to get people on XMPP. "It's no problem, there are multiplatform, multiprotocol clients anyway". I had more than 200 contacts on MSN Messenger. Most or all of them, people I met in real life.
On XMPP? Maybe like... 10? Out of which perhaps only 2 I met in real life, and the rest I met on Linux forums. I was really aggressive on getting people to XMPP to the point I eventually closed my account and told people to reach me on XMPP. Nobody gave a fuck, of course they didn't. The world doesn't revolve around me.
Look, we get it. It's sad that corporations are realising they can hold users hostage for profit, but unfortunately that's the tradeoff with ease of use.
Oh, and Discord does so much more than IRC. It has voice chats "well just use Mumble", yeah but... why? Discord already has it. Or desktop sharing "use Jitsi", again, Discord already does it. Or large file sharing "roll your own FTP server", uhhh... no? Discord does it?
And a web UI if you don't want to chat online. And reliable mobile notifications. And two factor authentication. And in-game overlays.
FOSS fanatics struggle to admit commercial tools are so frickin' easy to use. I used to be like that, I understand. And then I got a job :P
I would say, think again about whether this casual drive-by insult is necessary. Is anyone in the above conversation behaving like one?
> ...struggle to admit commercial tools are so frickin' easy to use. I used to be like that, I understand.
I agree, this is the usual tone of FOSS people. "Oh, it's trivial to set up an SMTP server".
But, crucially, that is not what 'rglullis and I are saying in the conversations above. It's more something like "It's not trivial to set up an SMTP server, but maaaaybe you should think of the tradeoff of that versus learning a new chat system and losing all your conversations every 5 years. And yes, we should strive to make open solutions as seamless as Discord".
> And then I got a job :P
Again, a casual drive-by insult by implication that you should really rethink. I think most of the people on this site have jobs as well. That does not prevent us from thinking about long-term robust storage at data. In fact, it might even be directly relevant to some of our jobs.
No, that is quite easy to admit. What is hard for "FOSS fanatics" to do is to give up their freedom for convenience.
While true, we should be striving to minimise that. The internet era radically accelerated the rate at which we pick up new "external dependencies", and we should be trying to bring this rate down rather than embrace it.
Didn't Discord end up ending talks with Microsoft and staying independent? I don't think this deal ever actually went through.
Whatever you build on will be ripped out from under you and you'll be forced to evolve, just as we all have had to since the beginning of software engineering.
One thing is true as has been since the beginning - the next generation always knows better than the previous until life bites them in the ass and they learn their lessons the hard way too. As sure as the sun will set tonight and rise again tomorrow. There's little point in complaining about it. What will be, will be.
Well, you could equivalently say that the problems with IRC are just life. It's relatively easy to have data from my IRC from 15 years ago -- do you think that will be true for people who are using Discord today?
All I'm saying is, if you value your conversations and data, maybe explore the other side of that tradeoff where you don't have to keep moving from one platform to another, but keep working for 15-20 years on continuously improving an open platform; and get to keep all your data into the bargain. And it doesn't have to be IRC. It can be Matrix or Zulip or Mattermost (instead of Slack or Discord).
I mean, it is "fine" but it isn't great. The most mature client is supposed to be Element and signing up is fairly easy (although explaining if you should use matrix.org to register your account or a home server is done by linking to technical documents). Once you have signed up the client bothers you with a variety of onboarding attention grabbing blinky things that are really not relevant at that stage and only serve to confuse a new user. For example, there is a blinking dot on the + sign for creating spaces. But a new user will have not the slightest clue what they are and why they would make one.
But okay, once you are through that you are greeted by an [absolute barren client experience](https://www.creesch.com/dump/img/img_620a73fd0f540.png) which gives the impression that some things are still loading.
Once you figure out that everything is loaded you might figure that you want to explore rooms, which seems sensible enough. So you click on it [only to be greeted by what amounts to effectively the exact same thing IRC would show you](https://www.creesch.com/dump/img/img_620a745a33dad.png) when you used the `/list` command but with actually fewer options to filter through the ridiculously long list other than searching by keyword. And if a new user is really receptive, they might spot the fact [that this isn't the only list they can get overwhelmed by](https://www.creesch.com/dump/img/img_620a7545a8517.png).
Just to be sure I wasn't talking nonsense, I tried some other clients listed on matrix.org and most of them show even less and give even less options. Some of them don't even allow you to browse lists and others make it even more confusing in many areas.
Matrix has added some new features to the IRC experience but generally hasn't made it an easier experience to work with if you are starting out as a new user.
Of course, if those are not needed matrix protocol is just overly complex.
The client-to-server protocol of matrix gets complex due to the large number of features matrix has. The advantage of matrix over xmpp is that those features are mandatory.
Of course, somebody could still try to come up with a very minimal text client. I think there are plugins for some popular messaging clients.
These days, few people are hardcore enough that they want the kind of minimal interface offered by IRC.
I'm not sure matrix should offer a lot of discovery options. Just like webbrowsers don't find web pages.
I've been running a private homeserver for communication with some friends (for when we'd rather not have the data stored with discord) and while I do agree with most of your points, even my non-technical friends managed to get in relatively easily. It wasn't as simple as with discord, but certainly not too far from what people are used to these days.
A simpler protocol with better decentralization and polished client can probably be done but it's obviously a lot of work. My biggest concern with Matrix is the conflicting incentive created by having the company that does most of the development also be the one providing the most popular homeserver. They're effectively incentivized to centralize the network even more.
Matrix is a bit tricky. It is mostly there, but I wonder how many matrix rooms will survive if matrix.org would go down.
Of those, 124680 include users not on matrix.org. In other words, 50.2% of 2+ people rooms which exist on matrix.org are replicated and decentralised across other servers. Conversely, I'd expect there are tonnes of other rooms on other servers which aren't visible on matrix.org at all.
It'd be even more revealing to weight the stats by room size, as the bigger the room, the more likely it is that it'll be replicated elsewhere.
If a room only has a matrix.org name, how do new users connect to it when matrix.org is down? Maybe it is bug, but creating local aliases doesn't seem to work in element web. (Well, creating the alias seems to work, using it doesn't)
Then, how many rooms have admins that are not on matrix.org
With element android I can publish the original name to the local directory, but that fails on element web.
So it seems to be mostly a failure.
Much did, yes, and when Freenode went belly up for insane reasons, everyone active moved their channels over to "What is it? Not Freenode! What's it like? Freenode!" and life went on as normal, because it doesn't take much to host IRC, and there's not much friction to move over.
But there are also an awful lot of quiet little backwaters IRC servers, with a few dozen users or less, floating around the internet - and that's where some of the most interesting content on the internet lives. You can host them on almost nothing (I ran an IRC network in college on a couple Mac SE/30s - yes, 16MHz CPU, 12-16MB RAM), and if the link to them goes down for a few hours, well, doesn't seem to bother anyone, you just wait for your client to rejoin.
As for why people are hung up over IRC? I can't speak for others, but as a long time IRC user who still uses it:
- Native clients for everything that aren't a hot mess of Electron, because IRC predates that. I don't need a high end modern system to connect to IRC, I can connect from a terminal, from a gutless wonder, from an old [whatever] system, etc. xchat/hexchat/(is mIRC still a thing?) just don't take much memory or CPU.
- It requires almost no bandwidth to connect. If you're on a crappy connection, IRC will work just fine. Not all of us live on high bandwidth gigabit fiber.
- It's not constantly changing. It does what it does, does it well, and pretty much hasn't changed meaningfully in 20+ years. It's stable, and I don't have to worry about some company suddenly deciding they need to growth hack and adding Javascript confetti or whatever to try and excite me into doing some action more.
- Most importantly, it's filled with the sort of people who value these things. It's a good filter for technically minded people who aren't up to their necks in the latest consumer electronics nonsense. I like talking to those people, as I'm one of them.
Until the powers-at-be tried to take advantage of their position, and then everyone else just left and continue their lives peacefully on libera.chat
The point is not IRC. The point is about open standards and freedom. Use IRC, XMPP, Matrix. I don't care, as long as it not something where the landlord can come and take it away from us.
> Yeah, and IRC is the best web chat. We kept hearing that myopic old-school-dev-centered view on things for ages. What did it result in? People now beg FOSS projects not to use Discord (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098)
I...don't see how this negates my worldview exactly. Yes, Discord is cool-looking and easy to get started with; and IRC has quite a few problems since time immemorial. This does not negate the fact that Discord is a proprietary platform that can eat your data and show you the door at any second, which is precisely why people are begging FOSS projects to not use it.
> No, they aren't going to tinker with setting up an FTP server...<link to curlftps comment>
I think you might have overlooked the part of my comment where I select email precisely because it uses boring old technology that is already available as native applications. No one has to install FTP servers to use email, they simply have to use their existing email setup. Guess what you also have to use to reset your Discord password -- that's right, email.
> After all of that happening can we at least agree that email is not a good substitute for Reddit?
Overall, you appear to be replying to a comment I didn't make -- something like "Just set up an email list and an IRC server, it's real easy!". On the contrary, I don't think any of these things are easy, I recognize that Discord and other proprietary platforms have significant UX advantages. But I am suggesting we make an effort to highlight their risks as well, and focus on improving the UX of open platforms if we don't want our data to be easily locked up in walled gardens.
If you're talking about pure email-clients-to-email-clients (p2p) as an implementation of a "mailing list", then yes, no extra software or host server has to be installed. However, this type of p2p setup is not scalable for adding new contributors. (E.g., many users would not want 1000s of email addresses of people they don't know in their personal address book just to facilitate FOSS discussions or bug reports.)
Instead, the typical mailing list requires a server to host the messages for people to subscribe to. Most programmers (e.g. leaders of a FOSS project) would only have "existing email setup" like Thunderbird/MSOutlook _clients_ and therefore missing the mail _server_ architecture. This means your assumption of "already available native apps" doesn't apply.
If a FOSS project wants to use a mail server, they need to figure out which software/service to use and how to pay for hosting.
Compare the decision tree, effort, and costs for email server -vs- Discord "server":
- https://huridocs.org/2016/06/setting-up-an-email-discussion-...
... vs ...
- https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/204849977-How-...
> Guess what you also have to use to reset your Discord password -- that's right, email.
Right but an existing email account (on somebody else's mail server) -- is a different beast than an email server to host mailing lists.
I think that even when using a third-party server, like, say, Google Groups or https://lists.sr.ht/ for this, the amount of control you get over your data and conversations is much higher than something like Discord. All of the conversations on the list during your membership of it are trivially archivable and searchable using software that is probably built into your operating system.
This is not to say that the server-side component of it, i.e. setting up an email server is easy. On the contrary, I'm saying that we should work to make it so. The link you post is a good example of the contrast, and I think that a Discord-like FOSS email list solution would be a great project.
Again, your statements above emphasize the advantages of client side tools but not the tradeoffs of various server side options for the FOSS admins. You've listed the positives of your use case in multiple messages but surely you'd know that the tech audience of HN and the FOSS admins are already aware of them.
To make progress, we need to dissect the server landscape from the admins' perspective. Consider your proposals of, "Google Groups or https://lists.sr.ht/"
- lists.sr.ht : Costs money. It's not a lot but it's more than $0. (https://sourcehut.org/pricing/) This is also a small hosting business and some project may be uncomfortable basing their discussions there rather than a bigger company like Microsoft/Google/Discord/etc. The sr.ht owner likes to emphasize the infrastructure's "alpha" status which seems like a "caveat emptor" : https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/13/Backups-and-redundancy-at...
- Google Groups : $0 cost but a lot of projects are dissatisfied with GG and want to switch to more modernized[1] discussion software. (And some for ideology reasons would rather avoid using Google services.) Examples:
--- e.g. Hy Lisp project didn't like GG and eventually settled on migrating to Github Discussions: https://github.com/hylang/hy/issues/1778
(Yes, Github/Microsoft is a walled-garden but that didn't seem to be the biggest concern. Their immediate desire was to switch from GoogleGroups. And Github Discussions being free $0 probably helps.)
--- e.g. TiddlyWiki long thread about moving off of GG to something else: https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki/c/j-nm0ylA2Ac
(You don't have to read that whole thing but here's an example comment[2]. The tldr is they eventually decided on Discourse self-hosted. Now they have a new complication of how to pay for ongoing server costs at Digital Ocean for the Discourse server: https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/t/paying-for-discourse/289)
So what project leaders are trying to do is find the optimal tradeoffs on the server side :
- ideally $0 cost
- ideally zero setup and maintenance. E.g. click "+" button to create instant server in Discord rather than install phpBB or vBulletin or mailing-list software
- ideally have modern features[1]
- ideally open source if possible. Discourse is open-source but then you have to decide on SaaS hosting at $1200/yr (https://www.discourse.org/pricing) -- or pay for self-hosted costs.
- ideally avoid massive scope creep by not developing a "Discord-like FOSS email list solution" even though some users envision an ideal world where such software exists. In that spirit, I thought it was amusing that in TiddlyWiki discussion to migrate to different forum software, they toyed with the idea of extending TiddlyWiki itself (aka dogfooding TiddlyWiki) to handle the forum discussion. They abandoned that idea and just went with Discourse.
Ultimately, whenever an end user is frustrated that "FOSS project leaders don't do what I want them to do!" and wonder why they end up choosing Github Discussions or Discord ... it's the result of tradeoffs above. The hypothetical forum discussion software that makes all clients and admins happy doesn't exist.
[1] example of what some are looking for in more modern discussion tools that GoogleGroups/mailinglists don't have: https://forum.getodk.org/t/important-moving-from-google-grou...
[2] a comment excerpt : >[...] One new deal breaker for me with google groups is that now I can't reply from the browser on my phone. This is some new change that happened in recent months I guess. Yes, I can subscribe to emails and reply that way, but my gmail is already clogged enough as it is and this list is very high traffic. For forums like this I prefer to read and interact with it on the web, or else use discord/slack. [...]
https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki/c/j-nm0ylA2Ac/m/EvKqs...
Let's take a FOSS solution like Zulip, and see if it satisfies some of the constraints you arrived at:
- ideally $0 cost
Zulip is free for OSS projects: https://zulip.com/for/open-source/
- ideally zero setup and maintenance. E.g. click "+" button to create instant server in Discord rather than install phpBB or vBulletin or mailing-list software
Yep, a one-click solution is available
- ideally have modern features https://forum.getodk.org/t/important-moving-from-google-grou...
Zulip has a topic-threaded model that threads the needle between email threads and instant messaging in a way that's much better than Slack threads: https://zulip.com/help/streams-and-topics
- ideally open source if possible. Discourse is open-source but then you have to decide on SaaS hosting at $1200/yr (https://www.discourse.org/pricing) -- or pay for self-hosted costs.
Yep, is Open Source. https://github.com/zulip/
> Ultimately, whenever an end user is frustrated that "FOSS project leaders don't do what I want them to do!" and wonder why they end up choosing Github Discussions or Discord ... it's the result of tradeoffs above. The hypothetical forum discussion software that makes all clients and admins happy doesn't exist.
It's a bit hard for me to understand why Zulip is so lightly represented in these discussions – for example I saw it mentioned in the TiddlyWiki thread you linked, but the talk seems to have tailed off and mysteriously settled on Discourse. Someone seems to have the incorrect idea that Zulip requires running your own instance of it; that's not the case.
My hypothesis here is that there's a decent level of groupthink which tends to reject perfectly available FOSS solutions in favor of equivalent proprietary ones because FOSS solutions have (perhaps rightly) gained a bad reputation over the years as being difficult to use and operate. My thesis in this thread is that it's high time we began re-evaluating that, and giving FOSS tools a fair chance rather than prematurely declaring them to be bad; especially in light of data portability concerns.
I think the sad thing is that the free tools could be close to that and with careful open standard planning, it could even have for-profit companies participating. Email is one such example. Chat and screen sharing should have been another.
Why would they?
edit: "Old school people" don't "miss" convenience, they would love convenience. Instead they have standards and platforms that are sabotaged or abandoned when convenient by companied building lock-in. What we get was built by people in their spare time, or chiseled out of academic funding, and though it often sucks we should be thankful for it.
I think the chance that anything on Discord will exist in 10 years is probably about 2%. If Discord exists (25%?), they'll have blanket deleted old data multiple times by then. Not that it matters much, because finding anything old on Discord is impossible anyway.
So why is that Discord would be required to keep state?
And then the freenode story shows, even if you effectively lock up all meta data. People still think IRC is great and move to the next network.
This whole thread started because someone took at jab at "old developers", and I'm really trying to avoid a rant against Gen-Z... but man it's unbelievable how conformist this generation is.
One would expect that a site called Hacker News would have an user base that does not accept the status quo, but here we are in a thread where defending "convenience" is the rule when it should be the rare exception.
Right, so an underlying problem here is the optimization of our tools for "fun" and stimulation and little dopamine hits, instead of actual work. Remember Clippy? That's all tools now. Bright colors and blinkenlights, flashing popups, offers to "help". How can a boring utility tool like a text editor or an IRC client compete?
The trend is undeniable, but I don't think it's one that should be embraced. Let FOSS be the "serious" software.
That aside, communication tools facilitate human to human communication first and foremost. In natural person to person communication, there are many additional information channels than just the content of your speech. There is your tone of voice, body language (however overrated that might seem), gesturing, scribbling a quick diagram on a napkin, laughter, winking, and whatever else. A good communication medium will strive to let you communicate as many of these things as possible, by analogy if needed. A reaction GIF can communicate a great deal about the non-tangibles of the other person's state of mind, and help you both understand their intent better, and know them better as a person.
If you want to keep your communication serious, establish channel rules that forbid certain types of expression to change the tone of discussion, or use a client that doesn't implement such features/lets you disable them. Don't limit it at the technology or protocol level.
It’s really not a question of fun, but of flexibility and convenience. Of being able to send message and have them not look like garbage, of being able to send a file and not need to open ports on your router, of sending a graph and it actually showing up.
That’s why tools like notebooks are valued. Or even godbolt: your way is that I tell you to install gigabytes worth of compilers (half of which you might not even be able to get let alone know how to use) and provide a program listing you can’t even paste properly.
And quite rightly so. There's zero reason to use Discord when Matrix exists and has an almost identical UX.
For the sake of retaining information, an old fashioned forum is feature rich, while Discord's offerings are... animated GIFs? Emojis?
> No, they aren't going to tinker with setting up an FTP server
Their loss then.
20 year old who uses SFTP/FTP and IRC, and has never touched Dropbox + barely touched Discord checking in.
While there is some truth to what you say, it's not the full story. Even people from my generation can look around at the state of tech and see what does and doesn't make sense.
Absolutely not, I have Reddit blocked in /etc/hosts as there appears to be nothing of value there at all these days. Sorting threads by vote count is brain damaged and brain damaging. Also everyone has email and it works fairly well. Viacom can’t just come in and “buy email” so they can kick people off for having certain opinions like they did Reddit. Despite new people asking the same questions on mailing lists, new discussions are often the norm unlike Reddit where the same mediocre garbage is always pushed to the top and the same uninformed comments fill the comment sections.
Not to mention, every day the Reddit UI gets more and more awful and they seem intent on destroying the site over it.
I contend that this isn’t true.
First of all, if it was true, there would not be so many deliverability problems with email.
But, more importantly, there are solid, definitional reasons why spam filtering can never be particularly good. Is it spam if a bot copies questions from one mailing list to another one with a similar topic, in an attempt to build out a reputation? The copied “spam” emails have identical content to legitimate traffic, but there’s no human at the other end, and the seemingly-good user is eventually going to “cash in” on their reputation by posting actual spam. Similar tactics can attack Bayesian filters, and IP address-based systems are getting less useful over time as CG-NAT becomes more popular.
Personally, I think “spam filtering” as a heuristic that you tack onto an otherwise spam-vulnerable protocol has been about as good as it will ever get for the last decade [1].
Email and traditional web forums share most of the same problems, but web forums have two big advantages:
* Forums can reactively remove spam, as can USENET [2]. Mailing lists have to filter everything before fanning out. ML archives can be redacted, but anyone maintaining their own personal archive has to do any post-delivery filtering themselves.
* Forums have somewhat more operational flexibility. You won’t see Reddit/HN-style voting in mailing lists unless you customize your local tooling to support it. Normally, all a ML can do is decide whether to block it entirely or not.
The technology is not the problem here. It rarely is.
I always assumed that, if spammers were intent on exploiting mailing lists, they would sign up for the list or crawl the archives to figure out who's on it.
Most of the spam I've seen moderating a web forum seems to be aimed at search engine indexes, and not at the forum users themselves. This is why the spammer would start out by copying questions from a different website*, then start silently injecting their spam links later, after the software stops sending the spammer through the mod queue every time they include a link. They don't even want the forum users to see the link; it's entirely for Googlebot's eyes.
Obviously, this is just as applicable to mailing lists as it is to forums, as long as the mailing list has a public archive. We can assume that if mailing lists aren't receiving as much abuse as forums are, it's because the spammers don't think the ML archive has enough page rank to justify it. A lot of them even use human beings in sweatshops to solve CAPTCHAs, if you're thinking that would help.
Forums have the ability to remove all the bogus posts after someone notices the spam links. But how would you remove them from the locally-stored archives that mailing-list users maintain? I brought up USENET cancel messages for a reason: purpose-built discussion board software has needed this ability since the early 2000's at least. You can't just wish the need away by deciding that some sense of free speech is more important, and it makes no sense to advocate for it if your anti-spam strategy is actually to just remain unpopular enough to not be a target.
* or "spinning" questions with a markov text generator, which is sometimes obviously machine-generated gibberish, but sometimes just looks like the kind of gibberish a newbie who is totally lost would post
I strongly dislike the UX of email lists. I'd prefer to keep my email usage to registering accounts / resetting passwords instead of trying to shoehorn a chatroom onto the email protocol. Even if it may not be decentralized I much strongly prefer joining Discord servers due to it having a much better UX. As you said it's 2022 and I can't be bothered to deal with email.
deltachat shows that it is very well possible to do an excellent chat over smtp.
it also shows that seamless sender authentication is possible, and we can extrapolate that a forum with voting and spam removal can be done over smtp too.
That's the trap. While reddit is still pushing awful UX practices (e.g., subreddits accessible only via app), we keep visiting it via the `old.` subdomain: net outcome -> we are keeping Reddit happy. Now imagine if we all stop visiting the `old.` subdomain... then we may have a voice, a chance to say "Reddit, stop doing stupid things or you are gonna end up with zero users".
The problem is: I don't see a strong Reddit alternative. I really like the structure of nested conversations. I think it's a lot more efficient than forums and emails and chat rooms. Certain platforms like Gab are taking off, but that is more or less a Facebook clone. Getr is seeing enormous growth after Joe Rogan signed up, but that is a Twitter clone.
Honestly, just give me Reddit of 10 years ago and don't mess it up again.
Or at least that's the perception of the platform. Why should we have to mix with intolerant people just for the sake of a technologically non-hostile platform?
Edit: "We are never going to remove the slur filter completely (or add an option to that effect), because we dont want to make it easy for right-wingers to use Lemmy." (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/816)
I'm hardly right wing, but if the developers seek to suppress and remove anything they consider to be right wing, this is a hard pass from me. I am interested in discussion from a wide range of people with diverse opinions. I'm tired of echo chambers.
There are forks and instances that omit or adapt the slur filter. Maybe they will become the canonical lemmy fork in the future, maybe they won't, that's up to the contributors.
* Saidit.net
* Notabug.io
There are more on https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/oioeot/...
As much as I hate the new design (and I mean, I hate it). old.reddit is keeping a lot of people happy.
And as long as that fallback works (and it is an official fallback) it is hard to justify not using it.
And I think reddit knows the rejection to the new interface is huge amongst old users (and those who contribute the most). I hope they know that if they flip the switch they will digg their own hole.
Huh? Typically I land on reddit when maybe I google some question which has a community of people discussing the topic, say gardening or fitness for example.
How does an email list help get me a quick answer to my question that someone else asked 2 years ago (and there was a healthy discussion on it, voting, etc).
For email there's no discoverability, history, searchability for people who were not already on that thread
this has never happened to me in 5+ years of using reddit
I even have freaking 2FA but they still don't remember the device and ask me every time for the code.
Which does make things less of an evil intent and more of a "if our laziness pushes our users to where we make money, that's an unfortunate side effect".
[0] https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit#instances
[1] https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit#instances
That these will break eventually is absolutely true however so to the Fediverse we shall slowly walk towards.
If I Google my problem and put Reddit at the end I usually find my answer. Without it I’m lost in SEO blogpost hell.
Please keep posting useful things to Reddit.
> Reddit is almost the only useful site left to find actual things written by humans.
The one, most important thing (the way I see it), is never actually mentioned. I'm gonna call it: "organic advertising". I will never, consciously, take any advice I see on reddit/hn.
Last time It was obvious for me, I was browsing/procrastinating throgh r/all, and somebody, a "real human" with an actual "real" account (I checked his history) posted a drawing made by his kid. Second-most upvoted comment is blatant Crayola advert (checked that guys history, every 10-15th comment he was praising $random_top_us_brand). Rest of the thread, at least another dozen Crayola mentions, by real people, who religiously believe in Crayola...
Take a lot of top threads, there's always a swarm of seemingly "real" accounts religiously promoting most American top brands. Funnily enough, usually 1 brand per thread. Somehow fans of X never see the Y threads, and vice-versa...
I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn.
He wouldn't even directly name the product. As an example, if he were selling a particular brand of boots, he would mention how great his boots performed but not mention the brand. Naturally someone will ask for the brand as a recommendation and voilà he plugs the product in the most natural fashion. It doesn't seem like an ad because he was just directly answering another user's question. But the entire build-up to that moment was manufactured to sell the product.
Maybe there's some way to have the best of both worlds, but I don't know how.
This is especially prevalent under videos discussing financial topics.
You might, but people have been getting in stupid arguments defending largely irrelevant preferences for as long as human history has been recorded. Now, various brand-PR agents certainly do fan these flames, but there are really people who think your cheap beer preferences says important things about you and will happily spend shockingly large amounts of time telling how that is wrong. A lot of people.
If their in-group likes brand A, and the out-group likes product B or C, staggeringly wasteful displays of such preference basically define fashion.
Those "Calvin peeing on Ford logo" decals predate social media
I will. It takes such an amount of effort these days to find a product that's both: a) privacy respecting, b) of sufficiently high technical quality, c) decently priced, and d) meeting all or most of my use cases, that when I find one, I will promote it to people similar to me until I'm blue in the face. Because it might save them literal years of searching, depending on the product.
Finding a product worth recommending is an exception. Some people will promote them just based on that, without expecting any compensation.
What is Facebook buying Instagram?
What is Google buying Doubleclick?
What is Microsoft buying Activision?
These may be products of a market system but they are not conducive to a free market.
Here is a bot which summarises long text. http://autotldr.io/
I think you will find most of the content on reddit is intelligence services phishing for info, invoking a bit of cognitive dissonance and complementing people's education to bring them up to date for what is acceptable and not in a global world.
Also surprised to see no mention of the fact that reddit is also structured so "humans" can train an AI, just like Google's I'm not a robot is an AI visual recognition training program, which everyone should be familiar with, more so if you are aware of Donald Rumsfeld's Known Knowns speech because you can apply this 4 compartment test to many things in life, including police detective work.
Searching for some certain cooking methods gives me endless blog spam that's usually not even remotely related to what I'm looking for and full of stories about a fictional childhood in a country the author has never been to. Meanwhile a reddit search will have a to the point comment summing up the method in 2 lines, as well as a bunch of people arguing about it.
P.S. For cooking I've been using exclusively wikipedia for the last 3-5 years. It's actually amazing the kind of content you can find. Next time try searching "cooking method wiki" :)
For culinary history it's definitely useful, but I haven't found much generally practical info.
Now I don't remember the exact keywords I used at the time, but I ended making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_aglio_e_olio
So, one wiki article of two paragraphs gives me enough suggestions how to make 2x2x2 dishes (apparently, I just counted the variations).
Anyway, turns out I really like the simplicity of this, so I keep making this now every time I feel fancy! Add some red/white wine, and it's a restaurant grade dish. (notice you don't have to add any x sticks of butter or any kosher whatever, delicious :)
I believe the GP was looking for specific cooking advice, while the wikipedia article you link to as expected, simply describes a dish in relatively vague terms. It happens that aglio e olio is such a simple dish that you don't really need more than that simple description, but if you were looking to bake a cake or cook a boeuf bourgignon, I don't think turning to wikipedia for help would be wise.
1. Fry meat + <<whatever else usually grows in Europe, or in/around France>> (givin' it's a french dish).
2. Once done, smash some whatever red wine on top and get it into a shape that looks like food.
3. Add gradually whatever spices and herbs are known to grow in Europe at the 'correct' time during 1 and 2. (apparently nowadays it's popular to smash 3 peppers cumin coriander and some brown sugar all into one big pile and cook it, with a whole stick of butter, regardless of dish! wtf?)
0. Pan-fry separately either some onions, mushrooms or potatoes (I hate boiled potatoes, and carrots), with, again, whatever spices and herbs can grow in France. (personal preference, don't like mixing way too many stuffs together, they'll usually lose all taste)
FIN. Put both dishes together when serving per plate or table. Add another load of ground peppers and the same herbs on top while the food is still hot, for aroma.
Wikipedia still looks like a great resource for scouting recipes for me.
Except for cakes. Cakes are magic. haven't managed to get them to work properly for some reason, regardless of recipes. My best guess store cakes use some kind of cheap industrial grade oil/margarine which is not readily sold so I never managed to replicate them..
Apart from anything else, there's no WP:RS for a recipe; each authoritative chef will have their own perfectly-legitimate version.
Can train an AI to do what?
NNTP is what the D Language forums use:
While it may look like any web forum, it is a shell around NNTP. This means you can access it via any NNTP software, like Thunderbird (what I use), by pointing to news.digitalmars.com
There's a readonly version of it that consists of simple HTML pages:
https://www.digitalmars.com/NewsGroup.html
and even a mailing list you can sign up for. We've been very happy with it, been using it for 18 years. Occasionally people ask for "modern" forum software, but its restrictions are actually advantages.
I miss the days of every site having their own community. I remember when most game companies would put a landing page for each new game that came out and that was about it. Hundreds or thousands of fan sites popped up and provided a community that far outlasted the direct revenue of most games. Then gaming companies decided to create their own "communities," but they're stale, without personality, and as soon as the game isn't making money anymore, the sites languish and are eventually deleted, along with all the helpful content that has been posted by users.
I'm completely torn because you can't count on idiots like me (and all the people who have helped with my site over the decades!!) to keep things going forever.
My take on this was to make all the content "open" -- it started with all our static assets being converted from 25 years of spaghetti HTML to clean markdown and a static site generator. Anyone can clone the repo, recreate the site (including all the static content) and upload it wherever they want. The next step was to open-source the dynamic back-end. The remaining two steps are somehow regularly distributing a database dump (with personal information stripped out, of course) and then finally figuring out how to make available regular dumps of the content that doesn't fit in git or the database (like the ~10G of maps, mods, and screenshots that users have submitted). These two are still being planned.
I wish every site with anything to say had a plan for what to do when the owner is done maintaining it. Figure out a way to make the important content open and up. Internet Archive is great but they miss so much stuff, especially zip files, image files, etc.
I don't think any of this works with a profit motive, however.
I was for a long time involved in running a Civilization series fansite that also dates back to 1998. The site hasn't had much activity for a long time but the old stuff is still there. The forums, which have a lot of quality information, are fully available going back to late 2001, with some of the earlier threads also existing. Static content like user-created scenarios for the games, that's still there. Even if the links are broken (they often are), the files are on the server and recoverable. Recently I helped someone find a bunch of stuff made around the time these communities were first appearing, so late 90s.
That is quality content and it has survived online better than most content on "platforms" and certainly better than content on company-managed official forums. It's something from the early days of the Web, content made and maintained by some people who really the subject at hand, without chasing a profit.
Also, this is tangential to the article's main point, but Reddit isn't like a forum, at all. Forums were built for long-form, long-lasting discussions. A thread where multi-paragraph posts get written as a discussion plays out over multiple days, sometimes weeks, that's normal for a forum because they were built for that. And most forums had better search 20 years ago than Reddit does now because those discussions were meant to be visible for years. Reddit is the complete opposite - in somewhat active subreddits, it's about comment threads that last mere hours. Commenting on something 24 hours old isn't worth it because almost nobody will see the comment.
IMO, the best system is a combination of a reddit-like feed with up/down voting (limited to proven valuable users) and a wiki that is fed by thorough and up to date content moderation.
And yes, it sucks that so many are relying on a for profit corporate entity like reddit. What if there was a non-profit reddit clone where every sub had designated paid moderation. I would donate to pay for high quality moderation of subs that were valuable to me.
I've never liked voting systems on forums because they elevate popular content to the top, which is not necessarily the same as the best content. One of the major advantages of forums in my opinion is the opposite, that forums are a good place for niche discussions as well. Some obscure technical detail that only a few people are deeply interested in can be discussed well on a forum, better than on a platform with upvotes where it'd fail to get the critical mass of points. And of course sensible moderation is the cornerstone of any good forum.
The best system I've seen in online communities is a forum for discussion and a wiki for reference. For a while there, before most forums died but after the early wave of forums, there were quite a few communities that ran a forum together with a Mediawiki install. I still find it vastly superior even to well-maintained subreddits. Some subreddit communities have good wikis, but they're very feature-limited, and no matter how good a subreddit is the discussions suffer from the platform's focus on fast discussions and a terrible search.
Do you still have the same email address at the .net domain? I'd like to contact you again. :)
I agree, we had so many great people help over the years. It was amazing because virtually everybody had essentially root access to the site and we had no backups, no recovery plan, nothing at all in case things went south. It's quite a bit better now!
Edit: I wanted to say too, that I think for people of our generation, we understand completely that much of what goes on here will eventually be lost. Almost all the websites or forums that I participated in the 90s and early 00's are gone. And I think I prefer that to everything be recorded & saved for posterity.
Somebody has to do the hosting. Even if it s a federated platform, somebody has to care, federation just mixes up the content a bit. We should be demanding for public archives of people's information.
The problem is that aggregators dont make money from the hosting of the content but by indexing it/mixing it/recommending it. So they have no real incentive to store the content (but they do want the metadata). I think the solution is that we should all have publicly-provided storage space in the form of a free blog or email. Something very simple, could be just text/pics, that is at guaranteed not to be shutdown and is actually protected by free speech laws. Someone has to build the roads
That said, there are quite a few people in the JK community that are trying to "archive the jk universe" and they have crawled and saved the site and the forums and they do make their copies publicly available.
At first my instinct was "they copied my entire site, that's not right." But (so far) their goal is to copy/archive every JK site and I'm glad they are doing it because tons of old sites have just dropped off the face of the internet. Including the site that originally hosted the Jed (JK) editor and a bunch of other tools, many of which had the involvement of at least one of the original developers of the game. It's just cool stuff and it sucks that it gets lost.
Thank you for the effort, you gave me quite a few cherished memories.
Most of the alternatives sound like they would be much less discoverable and encourage much less interaction/discussion, which often is as interesting as the contribution itself.
I do agree that any sort of cohesive, ongoing advice is better organized in a blog or other more permanent form. I also agree that the suggestion about "fixing web-based forums" could be a good idea. And perhaps it's also worth saving your particularly good contributions in storage you own
I find it depressing to see how many sites don't follow this basic principle, that user content should, by default, be effectively dedicated to the commons. HN falls into this trap and I so I suspect it's only a matter of time before all the discussions and user generated content disappears from the web.
Here is HNs policy [0]:
"""
Commercial Use: Unless otherwise expressly authorized herein or in the Site, you agree not to display, distribute, license, perform, publish, reproduce, duplicate, copy, create derivative works from, modify, sell, resell, exploit, transfer or upload for any commercial purposes, any portion of the Site, use of the Site, or access to the Site. ...
"""
If HN ever folds, the most likely condition will be someone owns the copyright and will not put it under a libre/free license for the community to use, effectively burying it. In the meantime, HN offers a (perhaps small) treasure trove of information about technical issues, trends, data on how a community forms, communicates and interacts with each other that is explicitly barred from use by the general public without individual approval.
Though this would probably be met with a lot of resistance, HN is well within their right to sue all the "show HN" projects that use the HN data to display interesting trends, do data analysis or do other interesting projects with.
For some obscure reason it's also terribly slow on my desktop even if I'm logged in. It's a terrible experience all around. And no, I don't want to manually change the URL or install some third party add-on to fix their intentionally broken website.
android, askhistorians, biochemistry, c_programming, chemistry, compsci, design, embedded, freebsd, golang, haskell, java, javascript, linguistics, linux, math, mechanical_gifs, openbsd, physics, python, raspberry_pi, rust, statistics, sysadmin, vim, web_design ... and many more.
so not sure what you're doing to not be able to access said subreddit while being logged out.
Just contribute wherever you can.
I had a short conversation in the break room at work with a semi-acquaintance about the different types of doors on microwave ovens.
I'm not offended that those comments are not preserved forever for posterity. Nor am I offended if somebody used them to train an AI. It's just me talking.
That's 90% of Reddit.
I’m a bit confused about the API thing, considering they mainly talk about Reddit. Reddit has a vibrant third-party client ecosystem, thanks to their API. As far as I know, the API is not crippled in any way?
I also don't really think Reddit will be dropping API support any time soon. There's been no indications in that direction except for a change in the unauthenticated rate limit that was made a couple years back.
But then you end up having to make 100s of queries per thread, getting just a few comments each time.
Long threads: As you said, it’s a general issue ;)
Crippling: Maybe, but so far they haven’t.
With that said, none of it matters because the model breaks down without the userbase. You can't move to an alternative because the historians aren't there, even if the questioners are. Even if you convince a subset of them to move, churn will eventually kill it anyway. The whole thing also needs to broadly in the flow of mainstream internet culture to make it useful.
So what's the alternative?
Otherwise it is the basic argument of Distribution and Discovery problem again. And I mean a lot of Web Forums are dying anyway. Hosting cost aren't going down, forum software are any faster or efficient, requires some scale before Ads revenue picks up. And the hassle to manage the software. Part of the reason why many are moving to Discord and Slack.
The way things are going many Web Forum will be gone without any battle the blog mentioned.
ML archives last longer than specific websites, sometimes. Not always: Google is killing a lot of USENET/ML history
The closest thing it has to a modern successor is public-inbox. Demand that your forums provide a public-inbox archive.
http://public-inbox.org/README.html
It stores the entire discussion history in a git archive. You can git-clone discussions, and then git-pull just the new stuff. It applies git's brilliant "everybody has a copy of the whole repository, not just the guy running the CVS server" to discussions.
sr.ht and kernel.org use this for their mailing lists.
And because many here seem to equate forum with reddit. There are loads of independent subject specific forums out there and I use dozens of them successfully.
Hard to get more open and federated than USENET.
Don't contribute anything relevant in web forums - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24934569 - Oct 2020 (122 comments)
And so I don't care if it disappears the next day. I just need that one person to get what they need.
Worrying about the future in that situation is just going to add friction and make me more likely to not answer at all. Not everything has to be optimized to death. Sometimes it's okay to just do the easy thing.
Obviously random web forums are not the solution if you're wanting immortal, permanently searchable archived wisdom.
When Reddit dies I will find some other place to procrastinate by answering people's Illustrator questions. Every now and then a question results in me figuring out how to do a cool thing in Illustrator that I can then apply to my own work.
People were collecting knowledge in books since they were invented, then we got web and we started using that as medium to share knowledge. Books have a long lifetime, but even they are not forever. Look how web has contributed, it would never have if we didn't shared relevant stuff on someone else's website.
Don't stop sharing relevant stuff on web forums.
Remember the various messenger clients and then stuff like Trillian Pigeon etc?
The federated stuff as well as web rings, remember those?
Remember life before Google?
Organic discovery of links is often quite ideologically and teleologically relevant, in terms of the people and minds that connect.
It’s somewhat ironic that web forums such as HN are actually how we discover human filtered links.
Neither assumption is required.
If the email account in question is just for the social network, the interface can ignore other messages. If the email account is on a major host (such as google), there won't be delivery problems.
Social media sites, just like reddit often expose ideas and content to larger audiences than typically what personalized web sites can do. That leads to rampant idea theft without credibility, and to diluted and convoluted messages. Online communication and effective problem resolution (climate crisis, protests, valid discourse) is now completely hobbled because these large platforms serve profit, but also allow large interests to out-voice even scholars and trained experts.
The entire "influencer" economy is based on people coming out of instant celebrity and then developing huge "influence" and it's totally screwing up positions of power and influence in real life because they suddenly get a large voice without proper experience and merits to their achievement.
It's created a monster machine where we're suddenly doing drastically harmful things because people want to make money rather than listening to people who have a proven track record of doing good things to create positive change. We need to stop rewarding cheap mediocrity, and to stop trying to insert wise words into forums known for mis-management and reckless disregard for human good. Real world problem solving cannot be conducted along side memes and veiled corporate advertisements with convoluted money making agendas charading as thoughtful trustworthiness.
The way to take back credibility is to withdraw completely from social media, only using social sites as a pointer back to official sources for trusted news and well curated personal web sites. This way, you can own (and potentially future-proof) your words and content once again. In running your own site, you can make backups, and better address plagiarism and idea theft -- which is very rampant online right now. I have hung onto my own personal sites for over 20 years now, I never felt that social platforms were reliable enough to give up my own personal domains and sites, and every day of frustration with sites like reddit just goes to confirm that idea.
It's not an argument to reinforce academic emphasis on who to listen to, it's the move necessary to bring back accountability and originality of thought that isn't subject to 20 silly made up rules about how, when, and what you can post on reddit, and you can't quite get downvoted into oblivion by someone who wants to paraphrase you and steal your ideals as quickly (provided your posts are dated, tagged, and credited properly). Take back ownership of your words, they never gave you much to begin with for sharing on their platforms anyway.
Official sources are often the least trustworthy for news.
Official sources are often the least trustworthy for news -- Now that ideas are stolen on a rampant basis.
I'd rather write ebooks and submit them to Amazon Kindle. Earn some money and Amazon isn't going to close any time soon.
Sometimes I will save the full page screenshot from there for posterity.
It's really a beacon of light in the internet.
Author is right in the sense why are we giving up all this content to an often antagonistic third-party service.
Because it's seen and interacted with, whereas it otherwise might not be. People are vain. It's not more complicated than that.
For instance https://www.arweave.org/ is based on the concept that you prepay for 200 years of storage but storage cost is decreasing over time so it's also like a future option on advance of technology.
I guess people also know IPFS i just didn't see it get mentioned.
And also i hope everyone here who cares about this topic is donating to the Internet Archive which also a solution.
But then it would probably just turn into another reddit as well. Also, some of the features like saving threads, and a quicker way to view profile posts, and a solid native search method would do wonders.
What Do I Mean With Web-Based Forums Here?
In this article, I'm using the term "web-based forums" as an umbrella term
for closed, centralized services like Reddit, *Hacker News*, Slashdot,
Facebook, or any other web-based forum where you are able to add comments,
articles, and so forth in most cases only after creating an account.The website is designed to encourage conflict and divisive hate, millions of americans screaming hate between [ingroup] and [outgroup].
Clearly the API and old reddit will be removed soon, and the will have reached the final destination of their plans. Their psychopath tendencies are clear, and the path they are following has been clear for years.
Conclusion:
The problem of money and innovation is in 95% of startups, especially from developing countries with weak economies and IT startup sector, as I had. It is better for you to do something simple and not very technological or go to places where technology is developed like Silicon Valley or use remote accelerators.
The issues:
- no interest without money & marketing, public will not work for you
- marketing & public is evil
- language barrier
- cultural barrier
- commercial barrier (as old school, I didn't understand why r/programming moderator was banning me by low HQ and when I reported the moderator 'the ban stops tech progress', I got a second ban and can't hire someone to help me figure the issue due karma issue, lost it)
- karma in public areas (I still can't access macrumors when I had it 5 years ago, but after the interface change my account is lost)
- money, money, money again
If someone wants to participate, welcome
Programming platform https://www.reddit.com/r/acpu/
Web3 demo app https://www.reddit.com/r/Web3Wallet/
Lastly the site mentions a programming language but I didn't find a single example or any documentation. Maybe it is there somewhere but I couldn't find it after a couple minutes of searching. I am on an iPhone though, and there was at least one navigation item at the top that was cut off, maybe more?
It sounds like an interesting project so I'd love to see you get some more engagement / traction. Good luck!
Here is a little bit description https://animationcpu.herokuapp.com/
The language and api is very minimalistic but powerful you can see some of the code here
https://github.com/web3cryptowallet/Web3CryptoWallet
https://github.com/web3cryptowallet/acpu-docs
https://github.com/web3cryptowallet/acpul-boot/tree/master/a...
Thanks for your attention