The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos | Hacker News Reader

The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

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217 pointsko3us465 comments

As someone who was involved with many internet communities long before reddit, it sounds like the author is just experiencing the eternal September[0].

Pretty much since the day I found out about reddit in... 2008-ish?, everyone in the online communities I knew thought it was filled with awful pseudointellectual teenagers and college students, that the upvote/downvote system was horrible and encouraged people to post low-effort content, the moderators were overzealous and clueless, and in general there was no sense of community due to the size of the site + lack of individual identifiers beyond usernames, like avatars and signatures from a typical internet forum of the day. Basically, reddit is just as bad today as it was a decade ago.

But I'm sure for people who had their first internet-social experiences on reddit, they remember it a lot more fondly.

I will concede that objectively speaking, "new Reddit" is an abject failure (and the fact that old.reddit.com continues to exist is a testament to the such) and that it's much more heavily astroturfed by major corporations now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Reddit is hijacking content by requiring it to be hosted on it's own CDN... It's one of the main reasons why they put up walls. Many reddit users are actively involved in content and credit theft as well, but no one knows about how deep it runs. In a world where creators are going unviewed from IG to TikTok, there is literally an underground repost network that literally steals and reposts content to claim credit and monetize the lifted content on reddit and other sources through various means. This is also why Reddit rarely lets posters link to original content sources like YouTube, IG, and TikTok on major subs any more.

Millions of creators on sites like YouTube and others never get credited or viewed even though their stolen content goes viral on bootleg accounts. It's a huge problem. Even replies and posts from other sites are hijacked for the same purposes now.

It laid the ground work for content theft going on everywhere now...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a4geZL2xmM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaEJWlAbXLk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcE8ZVG_tmo

> Reddit is hijacking content by requiring it to be hosted on it's own CDN..

does it require it or provide it as an option?

as far as I know you can submit image URLs just fine. gyfcat and imgur videos are regularly on r/all.

hosting multimedia content provides a better experience. does it have downsides? yes. just with google's AMP.

a bit offtopic, but tiktok creators' fund is already shortshelling creators. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAZapFzpP64

and this endless reposting of viral content ... well, it's ongoing since we have viral content. is it great? of course not, but it's not like the reddit CDN somehow changed anything with regards to this problem.

youtube has contentID ... "creators" are free to organize and advocate for reddit/IG/tiktok to introduce it (or lobby US/EU/China to mandate it or whatever)

You mean 9gag surely. I thought they were the ones that stole everyone else's content, or are we just having the same conversation that we were having 15 years ago.

Content theft on the internet is as old as the internet.

It's not the same discussion. a lot more sites pay content creators now. There are many people that work hard on their content. Many sites are engaged in fostering hijacked content, and they quietly do nothing about it because it makes them a lot of untraceable money, a LOT more money than 9gag ever made off of stolen memes... Perhaps it should be called Content Laundering?

Reddit has even gone as far as to prohibit posting of OC by creators themselves by banning their posts and accounts when they post their own work, calling it "self promotion", while other accounts violate the rule with obvious immunity. They also ban subreddits after they are cultivated and curated too, many times for no good reason. I understand that spam needs to be controlled, but how moderation occurs on Reddit, it's totally not conducted in a normal nor reasonable manner at all.

Yeah, at least twice now a content creator friend of mine went viral (think tens of millions of views) without getting much of the traffic herself; the thieving accounts/networks captured almost all of the benefits. Having those taken down have proven to be almost impossible. It’s disgusting.

Edit: In addition, just recently she managed to ward off a blatant thief and finally drive traffic from another hit to herself. But the income lost to the thief in the first few days? Forget about it.

Agreed, also the fact that rehosted content often never points back to the source creator, which potentially robs OC creators of real followers and potential business leads that could likely support them through these harsh times, literally to line pockets of people that had nothing to do with the content creation process at all.

r/funny (mainly) is a symbiote to 9gag.

The other major subs are also filled with shallow/unsubstantial content

But if you keep out of those it is usually ok

And before 9gag, there was ebaumsworld

>This is also why Reddit rarely lets posters link to original content sources like YouTube, IG, and TikTok on major subs any more.

A lot of content creators spam Reddit to get clicks and eyeballs (obviously). Some subreddits have nearly become 100% YouTube threads. As a result some subs/admins have started to craft tighter requirements for the links posted to bring some sort of balance back to the content.

this almost killed /r/indianfood. we had to clamp down very sharply on posts that were just links to youtube videos, even if those videos were technically on topic for the sub, not out of any desire for petty power tripping, but because the page had literally become a wasteland of youtube spam crowding out other content. since then things have gotten a lot better, and we even get a drive by comment every now and then thanking us for sticking to the rule.

I’m confused. Reddit user steals content from Tiktok. They upload it to Reddit’s CDN. How does the Reddit user get paid for this?

That's funny. I remember when nobody knew what TikTok was, and TikTok-watermarked videos were all over Reddit's front page. It was a great marketing spot for them.

Highly upvoted accounts are more valuable and can be sold

(Theoretically only, just opinion, not fact of course by any means) Mods could potentially get paid by building popularity of their sub through reposting popular content that gets upvoted. They then could charge other users and sponsors for prime placement and promotion within their subs all arranged possibly offline. Reddit normally collects money off the activity through the ad revenue generated by page views and ad loading, and through sales of ads purchased by platform users... It may not seem like a lot of money until you really understand how much traffic the site gets, and how much mods and corporate on reddit can control and even script what kinds of content makes it to the top/front of pages.

Also there's always old payment methods where crypto/NFT/digital payment services or even a bag of cash can be used under the table, though nobody can or would want to prove that of course, and of course it's not presented as fact because I have no stake whatsoever in reddit nor desire to see it made less skewed like it used to be in the past.... I've already given up on it myself, long ago when they banned me for no reason and took my sub.

Look carefully at each video you watch on any platform from now on for what products, slogans, and logos are placed in them, and the links/comments that are posted in the comments. There is advertising going on in the majority of reddit posts for something, even if most people don't know it. A lot of the time, even the music used in content is often being subtly imprinted across multiple sites so that it becomes an ear worm as a low-key psychological marketing tactic.

Many major companies are putting out completely engineered "low budget" home videos as ads, they're no longer marking paid ad posts as sponsored, and companies are regularly hiring the most popular and trusted creators to inject subtle advertising cues into otherwise organic looking viral videos. I'm pretty sure that most of what we see on social platforms with paid advertising options now is either staged/funded/enlisted/sponsored production, bot driven content, or low key psychological marketing. This does not include HN based on what I've observed, because they don't sell ad-based post boosting (as far as I know).

OC creators struggle often in futility to break past algorithm ratios just to be seen by small audiences if they don't have massive sums of money to pay for advertising for each post they make on each platform. Getting to the front page without the right funding may be damn near impossible by now, fair enough though, there are a lot of other users competing against you that have copied your style, branding, and/or content, so "F" it, maybe we're all doomed/

Reddit only bans links when the Reddit post is mockery/harassment of the original content/creator, as an anti-doxxing measure. Otherwise linking to source is common and encouraged.

There is no way to verify content that is hosted on reddit's CDN, anyone could make any claim about OC at any time. The only way IDs happen is in comments, and that comes long after the damage is already done. Reddit used to allow external links, but now only a few subs do it (None of the default subs allow external links) because it's common practice on the site. Regardless of linking to the OC, it's still hijacking views from the original creators and undermining content creators. Reddit does not pay original content creators for their views... If Reddit had to pay OC creators for views fairly, they'd likely not be as popular nor profitable as they are now.

I think because youtube can earn creators significant money, it becomes the a primary source of spam on reddit and profitable youtubers can flood everything out with voting rings.

And that is the stuff behind subs blocking youtube and the strict self-promotion rules.

It's true that people have been complaining about "eternal september" since at least 2010 when I joined. However IMO reddit really has declined in discussion quality for the most part since then, asides from banning some of the worst subreddits. To say that 2022 reddit is the same as 2010 reddit is preposterous.

The main thing right now is bots. Endless copying & reposting of submissions, and even wholesale copy/pasting comment replies. The reddit staff have to know about this as it's been going on for a while, but seemingly don't care.

I also joined in 2010-ish, and although the big subreddits have been declining forever, some of the niche ones have improved massively because of the increased number of users. To me, reddit is two parallel user experiences - interesting discussion in niche subreddits matching my interests, and mindless doom scrolling through the big, astro turfed generic subreddits. There used to be more overlap between the two, but the days of interesting comment threads in the default subreddits are definitely gone now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

You're looking at it all wrong. Kind of through the lens of an narcissist. Not nearly as many people have had the opportunity to even become "full" intellectuals. The irony here is that while the world burns, the easiest solution is raising that bar for them by challenging them and leading them into better paradigms, through interaction and debate or even arguments.

Without your presence amongst the people on that platform, and with the condemnation and final-judgement people like yourself dole out... how could you expect them to ever be any better or things to improve over the course of a decade?

Team values have all but disappeared. That is the real issue at hand.

We need to be finding leverage and educating them on how to think critically, while providing them with support and encouragement of lifestyles which improve their intellectual abilities. Not put them down and shut them out.

You may disagree - you may believe that there needs to be a culling like a lot of the entitled wealthy class, but that's just naive weak thinking from a group of individuals who couldn't build or run something themselves if their life depended on it. They're essentially nothing more than spoiled children living in a bubble. They have no foresight.

I agree with this in principle, but in reality the flood of new people, influence/manipulation by organisations (political and market) and encouragement of features that reward low quality content (emotes, monetisation, etc) mean the site doesn't actually promote the environment you suggest should exist.

Old fashioned forums are still far and away the best 'system' for this, they're just not 'popular' enough any more, particularly with Facebook providing groups within their massive walls.

The solution seems to be a Goldilocks zone between popularity and death, too popular and it devolves, too unpopular and it dies. HN manages to keep itself tucked neatly into that zone I think.

And keeping a purpose. Going for 'broadest possible audience' is always a spiral to trash.

HN still keeps to its 'niche' well enough, much as forums have their usual genres that allow for clear moderation and purpose/values.

So what you're saying is because the site rewards low quality or even fake posts, you give up?

You're not making any sense at all and it seems like you've just completely shifted subjects to the algorithm and what makes it to the top.

I wonder - are you under the impression that you have to have a big following or be at the top to influence people? In that case, you should think about how you view top posts and reddit and realize that your target audience isn't bots or necessarily clandestine orgs, but people who could be considered low hanging fruit or "on the fence".

In fact it is best if you are a nobody. It's how you choose to use your words and how good you are at cutting through all the conjecture and b.s. logical fallacies. It's quite effective and doesn't require hardly any effort.

Your attitude, no offense, stinks it would seem. You basically skipped over everything I said, haven't appeared to consider any of the points I made and then switched subjects.

Are you debating here in good faith? Because it really doesn't seem that way at all based on your entire response.

No one has educated anyone sitting in the middle of a circus full of novelty, over stimulation, distractions and interruptions.

Yes "Education" requires patient teachers, but it also requires a very specific environment without all of the above. You don't have to look to social media platforms for it cause that's not where education happens.

Free education services is a niche not anyone interested in or good at. Its normal to expect interesting people to be (not to be educated by me) online with current internet penetration

No one is going to become an intellectual by browsing Reddit, the opposite in fact.

I've been on Reddit since 2008 myself and was an avid user of forums etc for years before that.

When I started on Reddit there was already an element of things having changed, a move away from niche technology discussion towards lowest common denominator stuff and discussion by meme.

In general this was fine as you could just move to smaller subreddits, and the bigger pages had fun cultures that permeated the others and gave it all a sense of unity and shared interest even when you were in your bubble.

The difficult change I've seen in the past few years is the rising number of hate and harassment subs, and Reddit tolerating them. If you scroll through the top of /r/BanFemaleHateSubs or /r/AgainstDegenerateSubs you'll see how bad things have become and how unsafe the general environment is.

It's not that discussion has become worse in an Eternal September way, it's that discussion has become openly threatening, with innocent women having their pictures and social media links shared for strangers to discuss rape and murder fantasy, and this gets 10s of 1000s of subscribers and Reddit routinely ignores reports about it.

> The difficult change I've seen in the past few years is the rising number of hate and harassment subs, and Reddit tolerating them. If you scroll through the top of /r/BanFemaleHateSubs or /r/AgainstDegenerateSubs you'll see how bad things have become and how unsafe the general environment is.

The r/BanThisandThat subreddits are little more than morality police. Many of those posts will take statements out of context or regard any "cis-het" sexual fantasies as threatening to women.

> It's not that discussion has become worse in an Eternal September way, it's that discussion has become openly threatening, with innocent women having their pictures and social media links shared for strangers to discuss rape and murder fantasy, and this gets 10s of 1000s of subscribers and Reddit routinely ignores reports about it.

Firstly, social media accounts aren't secret. Anyone who publishes to a Twitter or FB account cannot claim a retroactive right to privacy. The other contention I have is that Reddit should not punish a written expression of thought merely because it's unpalatable to a certain section of its userbase. Pandering to a moral minority sets up a precedent for the most loudest performing "victims"-of-the-day to decide what everyone else is allowed to say, hear, or think.

Have you looked at the subs they're talking about? They're sharing collections of zip folders of girls openly advertised as as young as 13, they're stalking women via social media sending descriptions of their potential rape to their family, they're robbing women's houses and sharing their stolen belongings, they're flashing, groping and ejaculating on women in public and filming it for upvotes.

Call it morality police if you want but it's targeted sexual violence against minors and women who don't consent. I guess your morality and mine don't align. If I'm in the "morality minority" on this one then that's very sad and I would encourage yourself and other members of "morality majority" to reflect on how women are treated in your society.

Out of interest, would you mind sharing your Facebook or Instagram profile here, so that someone could share you pictures on a subreddit for rape and murder fantasy about you, linking back to the account? It's only fantasy right, would be a shame of the morality police ruined the fun.

I think the point that GP is making is not that every subreddit that a group of people complain about is nothing to be concerned or worried about; rather, that people who inhabit subs dedicated to banning other subs operate within a moral framework which on the whole is dubious at the edges. For example, clamoring to ban consensual non-consent (CNC, a form of kink) subreddits because they perceive it as "normalizing" certain behaviors, or banning content of fictional characters, or banning support groups where various "degenerate" people frequent. These are edge cases which do not fit into the generalization of "jailbait"/"stealthing"/"creepshot" subreddits, which are non-consensual by nature. It's disingenuous to suppose that a subreddit for roleplaying BDSM/risque fantasies between members falls under the same moral realm of regulation as subreddits that post links to childrens' social media accounts to gather risque photos.

I'm all for illegal and non-consensual content subreddits to be banned. That's not all the mentioned "Ban This and That" subs are asking for, so I won't accept their moral opinions beyond the issues of non-consenting and illegal materials. They are prescribing a sexual morality, one which I, and I think many reasonable people, disagree with or at least have qualms with. If you don't believe me, r/BFHS seems to be a hotspot for anti-kink and anti-porn activists who suggest that women with kinks need to "heal"[0]. If that's not moralizing, I'm not sure what is.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/BanFemaleHateSubs/comments/unaa88/c...

If the purpose of the sub is to get other users to visit these 'bad' sub aren't they doing harm be acting as a place to discover these types of subs

Those subreddits are the only ones doing anything. Reddit is driven by user participation, including users objecting to and reporting behavior.

Like how r/tumblrinaction got banned recently, the members of the sub didn't report themselves for racism and transphobia.

Reddit always had an element of \dchan in it ever since user subs were created. Coontown (and the preceding slur subreddit), FPH etc.

In my view this is just a symptom of the wider populace gaining access to internet forums and the cultural shift mass internet usage brought. As in, there have always been darker corners of the internet, just that the people who frequented them had to have some level of nerdiness/geekiness and {nerds}∩{violent racists} is smaller than {whole population}∩{violent racists}.

There always having been elements of racism and violent misogyny doesn't preclude there being either a quantitative or qualitative shift in how much Reddit as a whole is steered by such ideas.

Back in 2010 there would be discussions about places like /r/jailbait, about the tradeoffs between free speech and public safety etc. Now there are subreddits openly sharing child pornography with links to the social media accounts of the children and their families, and Reddit auto responds that these things don't violate their usage policies when reported.

I started using reddit in 2009 and can agree that the quality was always lacking. The posts that made it to the top were the ones that were the lowest effort to consume which quickly get repetitive and boring.

The comments were often equally low effort with memes and weak jokes rising to the top. This was especially infuriating in places like /r/askreddit where the only chance of seeing replies that weren't clear fabrications or jokes was to specifically ask for serious replies.

There were really only 2 ways for a subreddit to be good. It either had to be small and relatively close-knit or it had to have rules against low effort content and solid moderation enforcing those rules. But since communities will naturally grow as people find them and because people hate when moderators remove their posts, Reddit ended up exactly where it was destined to.

I agree. I think it's fundamentally a flaw of the voting system: the idea that previous users should be able to anonymously and indirectly influence the visibility of a message or post to future users.

I think part of the problem is that reddit seems to really aggressively push for subreddit growth. This artificially creates an "eternal september" almost everywhere. I'm not really sure why they are pushing this so hard, if it's to show investors how fast reddit is growing or something?

But bottom line is that perhaps the single most disruptive event an online community can experience is a large sustained influx of new members. It just will not be the same before and after.

> This artificially creates an "eternal september" almost everywhere.

This is also why the 'powermods' are so damaging: without proper, attentive moderation an influx of new users invariably leads to a decline in quality.

Half the subreddits in /r/all are so homogeneous that it's impossible to tell if a post was in /r/muderedbywords, /r/nextfuckinglevel, /r/damnthatsinteresting, /r/unexpected, etc.

And that's not to mention all the bots...

> lack of individual identifiers beyond usernames, like avatars and signatures from a typical internet forum of the day.

I wonder if this is done on purpose, to nudge people into thinking of individual users not as people but as voices of a "hivemind".

Even today, usernames are de-emphasized in the UI in contrast to names of threads or subreddits. That's most prominent on the front-page ("r/all") where posts don't show the usernames at all, only the names of subreddits - producing the odd impression that the subreddits are authoring the posts and not individual users within the subreddit.

HN's UI is sort of similar on the first half: Users are de-emphasized here as well, but there are no subreddits to emphasize instead. Though I think it would be interesting if someone made an alternative frontend for HN that presented threads in the style of an old web forum, with user identities shown prominently

I think it works frightenly well sometimes. Ask yourself:

- How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year?

- How many people do you know on HN?

Some redditors use Reddit Enhancement Suite.

> - How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year?

- None that I remember, thank goodness. One man's conversations are another man's flame wars.

> - How many people do you know on HN?

- At the very least, knowing HN users' affiliations and posting tendencies is key to quickly blocking unwanted ideological noise, whether it concerns international politics or programming languages.

> - At the very least, knowing HN users' affiliations and posting tendencies is key to quickly blocking unwanted ideological noise, whether it concerns international politics or programming languages

This is IMO the approach that makes the most sense. Let users ignore other users, rather than enforcing bans/shadowbans on the whole userbase.

While I personally would rather not block anyone, I think everyone should have the ability to police the content they see, but in most cases not what other people see.

Yep, I actively have to fight both services to get the most value from the service, much more similar to how Twitter does it. I find having both views is a good idea, I'm not sure why these services tend to focus on only one view.

On HN when I like a users comment I will go through their post history, and if enough of their comments are of good quality, I add their comments to my RSS reader through hnrss. Reddit does this slightly better, where you can add users to your 'friend's list' and then they give you an option to see the latest comments from all of your friends. Both ways do context of the comment poorly.

The other thing I do on Reddit is have thousands of sub-reddits filtered out through RES. Basically anything bigger than a million subscribers is useless, and often even 100k is to much.

Thank you for introducing this concept of the "Eternal September" - it has a real archetypal power to it, reminds me of Northrop Frye's genre-seasons: comedy with spring, romance with summer, tragedy with autumn, satire with winter.

It’s important to realize that it’s not a stage of development, it’sa failure state. Specifically it occurs when the number of new members joining exceeds the capacity of the current members to educate them in the norms of the site’s culture. This results in the total destruction of the previous culture.

Do you feel anyone has improved upon what Reddit is doing? Or have you only found satisfaction in specific communities on specific sites?

Are there non traditional communities like Tildetown that you enjoy?

I have in fact. I have discovered a forum that used to be quite popular back in the day and very chaotic. It literally spawned 4chan at the time, but in the meantime it kept going, many left and grew out of it and the remaining posters are now in their 30s and I've had some of the best and some of the most inane discussions of the past few years in there, with topics for most of my interest, gaming, mental health, programming, stairs. Surprisingly there's a lot of people with newer accounts. Parts of it are still a bit of a cesspool, but it's what the Internet we love to reminisce was also about, instead of the sanitised corporate web we're dealing with today.

It's been an arduous process but I've managed to replace Reddit with a few forums, HN included, that are still alive to this day.

And I've completely banned myself from Reddit. It's hard given how much information is stored on that site.

tiktok provides better “communities” with more organic content. it know it sounds weird but you can get into areas of tiktok very similar to a subreddit. the lack of centralization like public karma, mods, sticky posts, etc actually helps

TikTok recommendation algo is creepy but strange enough it's community is much more kinder and less angry than Reddit. If you give it a day or two train and get past the dancing videos its excellent (unless dancing videos are your thing of course).

It's quite possibly not the algo anymore running TikTok ...

It's likely now all just a random assortment of content from whoever pays the most for ad promotions on their posts, without violating community standards and policy, and occasional celeb posts here and there... of course.

The algo likely only does light duty when something bad on the platform makes the news... They have to make sure paid ads run as promised, and a lot of people buy ads, there is likely no more space for unpaid algo picks, as the Internet now runs 24/7 worldwide with over 8 billion potential customers.

That's surprising to hear. I would've thought that'd be the last place I would look for community, but maybe I'll take a look

Hmmm, tell me more about these better communities without centralization, moderation, or even votes.

Sounds like the ideal opaque platform to brainwash people with "organic", shallow and easy to watch content.

The perfect backdoor for an open society.

The real tragedy is the shear volume of effort that made reddit the valuable resource it once was... Anyone starting a better version of that would need to wait ages before it gets populated with data, and they'd be extremely lucky if the same quality of minds contributed serious posts to it without totally and quickly devolving it into a bed of memes and clickbait now that everyone has been trained that these types of efforts really don't serve nor reward them.

Truly a missed field goal... Someone responsible should be spoken to rather harshly about this dereliction of duty, and the db should be at least reverted back to it's 2010 state. heh. :/

It depends on the specific subreddit. It makes some sense that the largest subs would succumb to eternal September, but there are plenty of small niche subs that haven't.

I agree though that just about all changes made to the reddit website itself have been for the worse. Perhaps the story of digg.com will play out again?

The author is actually complaining about a lot of half conspiracy theories around reddit.

They don't even touch on the Eternal September of reddit. Every thread is full of the most mundane observations possible, lazy puns, entirely expected The Office references and sayings which have been said literally thousands of times before -- followed up by someone going "this is the most perfect comment" all of which is wildly upvoted.

It feels like it is being botted by a simplistic lazy circle jerking ML text generation algorithm. Maybe it is. But it is definitely drowning in https://xkcd.com/1053/.

Ha - was literally typing "The eternal September turned into the eternal 2016." and read your post as I did so...

It's a fundamental problem with democracy + taste: we can only agree on cute cats, even if every individual has diverse actually cool interests.

An Subreddits can only help you towards alternative mainstream until they grow too big.

the author is experiencing the corporate hijacking and poor moderation of a website. this is not Eternal September.

the success of this comment is a far better illustration of Eternal September

I have a different take: The main problem with reddit is in how badly it's bungled its several different redesigns over the last few years, and how it's slowly ruined its users' experience in misguided attempts to drive mobile traffic to its app.

Right now, here's the process for browsing a subreddit on mobile without the (ads and tracking loaded) reddit app:

1. Navigate to subreddit. Find out which of two (non-NSFW) or three (NSFW) "experiences" reddit decides to give me on mobile.

2. Depending on experience, jump through hoops including random "get the app!" prompts, failures to load content, failures to load nested comments, and outright refusal to display all the content in a thread unless I install the app.

3. If on an NSFW subreddit, and on about 50% of "unapproved" non-NSFW subreddits: Be blocked from viewing any additional content by an unremovable prompt. (Often, content loads in before the prompt, so you enjoy about 30 seconds of looking at your content before it's blocked.)

4. Give up, and go to old.reddit.com, which is ugly and not designed for mobile, but at least works okay.

Desktop isn't much better, but I have long had browser extensions installed that redirect everything to old.reddit.com on most of my browsers, so it becomes less of an issue.

If reddit took away my ability to use old.reddit.com, I'd probably stop browsing the site within weeks.

> Give up, and go to old.reddit.com, which is ugly and not designed for mobile, but at least works okay.

Wait, are you kidding? I thought you were talking about using it on desktop. New reddit is literally unusable on mobile. This is what it looks like for me (https://imgur.com/a/pa07d2c). New reddit isn’t just unusable, it is literally nonfunctional. I can only imagine it’s been deliberately destroyed to drive people away from the web over to the app. They do something similar with links. All links from new reddit have their underscores "escaped" with \. Basically they corrupt the URL. If you’re on old reddit, you get these bad links and have to fix them yourself, but new reddit does it for you, of course.

Yep I quit after I couldn't browse some video game sub in the browser because it was marked "NSFW". Having to manually go in and change the subdomain is doable, but gets obnoxious over and over again especially as I hate mobile text editing.

This is one problem I personally haven't had, but I completely believe you that it's happening given all the other nonsense.

I switched to using a self-hosted libreddit[1] instance for these same reasons.

It's a death knell when someone creates an alternative frontend for your website because the usability is so bad. Libreddit did just that for Reddit. It fixes/removes all the bullshit that Reddit introduced in the last 10 years.

[1] https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit

Along with libreddit I use nitter for twitter. (Because twitter doesnät work at all with JS disabled and gives log in popups if it is enabled)

> 4. Give up, and go to old.reddit.com, which is ugly and not designed for mobile, but at least works okay.

I use i.reddit.com for this. (Thank goodness it still works.)

Oh wow, i.reddit.com. I had forgotten about that one.

It's pretty buggy and unmaintained, when you scroll down entries past #20 start repeating.

Just use Infinity[0][1].

Fully FOSS, private, and all ads removed.

[0]: https://f-droid.org/packages/ml.docilealligator.infinityforr...

[1]: https://github.com/Docile-Alligator/Infinity-For-Reddit

stopped using reddit after they introduced new design. My browser struggles scrolling it smoothly (in most compressed mode). Too complex DOM they put there. Lack of programming skills.

The tech aspect is problematic but to me it shows they don't understand what made reddit special. It's was that borked website that made people have nice convos and spaces(if you don't look at r/donald etc). The programming/UX was almost irrelevant, it was the social spirit behind that made it interesting.

It’s especially ironic given that Reddit owed much of its early popularity to the Digg exodus after a similarly myopic redesign. Nothing changes.

oh I forgot that part. It might a long chain of second system effect..

who's the new reddit ? :)

If you use iPhone, then use Apollo. If you use Android, then Sync. The official apps have always been dire.

Note that the API doesn't provide third party clients with access to newer features like polls, chat or the new inbuilt subreddit reaction emoji. So I think that's a precursor to reddit limiting then further in the medium term

good

I find https://github.com/Docile-Alligator/Infinity-For-Reddit good on Android too

I find Boost for Reddit way better than Sync (used both), but in the end it's about personal preference, there are 1-2 other decent clients, though Boost and Sync are probably ahead of competition.

Just use a third-party app like RIF, and you'll get a fast, minimalist, customizable interface plus privacy.

> Right now, here's the process for browsing a subreddit on mobile without the (ads and tracking loaded) reddit app:

1. Use rif is fun for Reddit (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....), or other third-party apps.

If I may self-promote, my mobile Safari extension StopTheMadness can stop the NSFW and "get the app" popups on Reddit. It can also automatically redirect to old.reddit.com.

https://apps.apple.com/app/stopthemadness-mobile/id158308293...

https://i.reddit.com/ is the good one for mobile.

I didn't even realize this still functioned. Thanks.

I use the app Joey on Android, works great. I still use old.reddit.com on desktop, and probably always will.

Infinity is good and on F-Droid unlike other mentioned options

Boost is excellent too

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenmayay...

Apollo on iOS.

redditp.com is my usual go to... No comments or likes, just the content... You can alter the url to show subs only (e.g. redditp.com/r/#) and it works without a log-in, provided v.reddit doesn't go unresponsive (which happens a lot no matter what).

People complaining about Reddit remind me of that quote from Bjarne Stroustrup about computer languages: “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” A lot of people use Reddit. I've been on since nearly the beginning and seen it go through various phases. They started getting serious about moderation after Gamergate and they're still serious about it since they want to attract advertisers. The edgier content has gone to 4chan /pol/ but even that site has moderators called janitors. I really don't know where the extreme stuff has gone and I really don't care because I'm glad I don't see it anymore.

The smartest thing reddit has done was learn from Digg.

They've done a FUCKLOAD of dumb stuff. A truly phenomenal amount. Some of the issues stem from just growing and having your crowd change and EVERY marketing company out there working to control your content, but they have very impressively managed to make a baffling number of stupid decisions.

But, you can opt out. It's dumb that you need to, it's dumb that they don't understand what they have, and that they're making what's currently failing (yet another facebook), and yet there's still a large variety of ways to make it not totally fucking awful.

You can still just go to the subreddits you tolerate and ignore the rest, you can still browse in old mode, and you can block most of the ads and nonsense pretty trivially. It was very very smart of them to leave in that option, which while the most obvious fucking thing in the world to a person, is a near miracle for a company.

Not forcing the new design (and a couple of other anti user practices) is one of the best decisions they ever made, and if you've EVER worked in a company rolling out a redesign that's supposed to up engagement and revenue, you have got to understand just how fucking rare anything like that is.

I do wonder when it'll all go to shit finally, and I wonder what will take it's place (i've looked for the reddit of digg for reddit, and haven't seen much potential), but right now every day they don't force the redesign is a damn near miracle in a company of that size.

the day the get rid of old.reddit.com I'll be gone looking for something more to my liking. The retro reddit is the best reddit.

I first started using reddit in around 2015, so I never experienced the old reddit design when it was default. I tried old.reddit.com the other day, but I found it almost unbearable. not being used to it, I found it ugly and messy and overloaded with text.

it loads twice as fast, though, and doesn't prioritise images over information, so I see the upside, but I do think a lot of the commentary here is nostalgia and just what people are used to

> doesn't prioritise images over information

This is, to me, the clincher. Is old reddit perfect? God no (i sometimes block certain elements to clean it up), but the information density is vastly better.

I read/scan quickly and don't care much about images. I can very quickly see if there's anything of interest on the page i'm on, and then move on to something else, or queue up a few comment threads to read through in other tabs. If there's an image, it's usually trivial to quickly zoom in to look at it rather than even bothering to load it again (hit or miss depending on quality).

It's obviously not perfect, but I don't think it's just nostalgia. I legit desire something fundamentally different that what new reddit is trying to offer. I'm looking for a website i wouldn't mind quickly browsing from the terminal using keyboard hotkeys, not something that I swipe forever on my phone with. Even on the phone though I prefer old reddit (was best on firefox for mobile with blockers but i'm back on apple so i need to look into my options.)

Someone like me just wants more text based/information dense screens that can be quickly navigated and then drilled into if i desire more information/content.

I find your comment so funny, and it is right in a lot of regards.

A very long time ago I was an avid slashdot reader (I had a 5 digit account long lost). I briefly went to Digh fir bit, and remember very early on visiting this "reddit" thing that was the new nerd thing.

I remember loading the page, browsing a bit and moving on because of the ugly unusable UI that it had (not even sure if it has subs at that time).

Fast forward all these years later, and I'm active on reddit but exclusively use the old.reddit version. The new one feels overloaded with stuff and my brain cant handle it.

As you very well say, it's mostly a matter of our brains getting used to it. Now I go to slashdot And their comments system seems so broken. When at the time it was pretty good.

The one thing I miss is the ability to quickly post as AnonymousCoward, instead of the throwaway account bullshit

The redesign was in 2018 so I'm not sure about that timeline

I finally switched to a 3rd party app (Apollo) and _gee_ is it nice to use reddit without an actively hostile UI.

My critique of Reddit isn’t so much about moderation per se, as it is about one-sided moderation. The ban of anything that opposes “the message”.

It started around 2015/16 and it was very clearly visible in all subs.

They have only banned extreme political ideologies with vaguely violent leanings, and have done so for both sides of the spectrum

Yeah, that’s a lie.

Try having what used to be the standard opinion about a certain topic less than 10 years ago and expect to be banned. Not just by moderators but by admins.

Give an example - you can do that here.

If you won't write it out directly here, then its not surprising it's banned there.

I tried searching for "Hunter Biden" on Reddit after reading about him in the news before the election. Nothing returned. Not a single post about this person, like he didn't exist at all. After the election, results started to appear. I'm not even American, just someone who wanted to look at comments about the news. I don't think "both sides" is an accurate statement of what's happening.

> I tried searching for "Hunter Biden" on Reddit

To be fair, Reddit's search is completely broken. The only way you can get decent results is using Google...

The problem with Reddit is that they banned unilaterally the right wing.

Didn't they just ban tumblrinaction, which was just right-wingers making fun of tumblr users? It was a bit distasteful, sure, but violent and extremist? I don't think so

I have not noticed this. What is "the message"?

Generally anything that does not fit the ideologies of a typical reddit mod, and yes they will have certain belief systems, as most people do not have the time or desire to be moderating even for a few hours a day for no monetary rewards, which the average reddit mod sort of needs to have.

This is why reddit leans heavily socialist/communist/anti-capitalist (moderated by people who believe moderating for free is more important than a real job).

Its a rabbit hole to dive into, but once you dig deeper you realize just how much political manipulation is occurring, not just in reddit mind you.

Its tearing apart society.

I think you are conflating normal people having normal opinions with some kind of conspiracy that simply doesn't exist.

If that were true, any human activity done without monetary reward would be dominated by socialists/communist.

I strongly agree with your comparison, I think it's apt. There's just no way to have a tolerably pleasant public-facing community online without some kind of moderation, and people have been railing about moderators in said communities for as long as those communities have existed.

That doesn't mean moderation is an easy job, or that it shouldn't be done judiciously or consistently, but it can't be abandoned.

My first reaction when I heard Elon Musk was buying Twitter was "have he and his team figured out the moderation problem?" followed by "he probably hasn't given it much thought because if he did he would realize he doesn't need that headache on his way to Mars."

I imagine he’s just going to introduce a simple yet “radical” solution like allowing people to pay a small fee for verified status and adding the option to filter out all non-validated accounts. That should kill off a large number of the bots and sock puppet accounts.

That'll be more effective at creating a poor people exclusion zone than stopping adtroturfing/sock puppets/spam.

I suspect "he probably hasn't given it much thought" sums up most of Elon Musk's recent decision-making.

> I really don't know where the extreme stuff has gone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8chan

and I don't visit it either because I am too old but who would want to fight qanon would probably need to. I salute them.

Besides 8chan there was Voat (and other Reddit clones). Some of the larger subreddits like /r/drama,/r/the_donald, and /r/fatpeoplehate splintered off to their own websites.

And are gone, thedonald.win became america.win and it no longer exists.

These things do not last. /r/changemyview tried it too, their website is also gone.

I hate how many online communities have centralized themselves around reddit and discord. I'm involved a lot of communities and fandoms where everybody congregates on those two platforms, and those two platforms alone. Things were a lot better in the 00s when these sorts of communities existed primarily on webforums.

That said, I'm not sure how many of the problems are problems with reddit itself vs how many of the problems would still exist on other platforms even if reddit didn't. Forum moderators have always had a reputation for being napoleonic idiots who abuse their power for extremely petty purposes. The problem of corporations and wealthy celebrities buying out moderators and admins to push their narratives and silence criticisms of their products[1] could easily have happened on webforums.

There's an unfortunate drive towards centralization in online communities these days that we'd all be better without. I personally think fediverse is the best solution to this as it centralizes communities without centralizing the actual platform, but I'm not so confident it will succeed when it's up against well-funded and well-established platforms like facebook, reddit, etc.

[1] i don't have any real proof there's a monetary interest involved, but I'm perma-banned from /r/startrek for saying that the creators behind "Star Trek: Picard" and "Star Trek Discovery" probably aren't even fans of Star Trek based on the shows' many discontinuities with their predecessors, and it makes me wonder if the mods are on paramount's payroll or something. This should not be a controversial statement after how terrible the most recent season of Picard was.

One thing I noticed the other day on Reddit is some subreddits will now ban you by proxy. On my main account I subscribe to alot of subs. While I won't say which one, there was a controversial sub I left a comment on, the comment was benign, I think I was explaining some tech concept. Almost immediately though I got banned from ~20 subreddits, the wording was basically: "we see that you have participated in this sub, take down your comment or else you're banned here".

It really put a bad taste in my mouth, basically the mods saying: "you're only welcome here if you also agree with our political theory on stuff over there".

It was kotakuinaction, no?

Why does it matter what specific subreddit was? Are you trying to cast aspersions on his character? Why?

I think centralization is just a byproduct of the ease of setting up a community on such sites/apps. I lurk in a few subreddits these days, but I almost never feel the pull to chime in or contribute because it kind of feels like my contribution just goes out into a vast universe, and I just think 'why bother?'. I feel like the days of personalized forums truly felt like a little tight community in the very wide web.

> I lurk in a few subreddits these days, but I almost never feel the pull to chime in or contribute because it kind of feels like my contribution just goes out into a vast universe, and I just think 'why bother?'

Definitely resonates with me as mostly a life-long lurker. HN is on a very, very short list of online communities I actually post on and engage with. Never got into reddit, left social media long ago.

I mean sooo many things are centralizing around Discord now which is just as bad—except its worse since it can't be indexed by search engines.

I appreciate that most big-enough programming language communities offer a Discourse which is self-hosted and you can choose to subscribe and reply in many manners.

Discord is madness, just the captcha process not working repeatedly reminds me that I can be severed at any time from everything I post there. I stopped logging on when TFA became arbitrary on there, I already get far too many spam calls. At least the slack channels I check on don't require it, but I'm done with walled gardens.. I just chose to cultivate my own site as the primary source of my content, no more social platform dependency, and I can just create burner accounts if need be.

> I stopped logging on when TFA became arbitrary on there

Did they do this for everybody or only certain people? In my experience Discord is one of the few apps that doesn't constantly make me dig up my phone or help train some dumb AI image recognition every time I use it.

Discord is the worst offenders of apps that make me TFA and answer captchas every time I have the misfortune of needing to use it.

I'm permabanned from Reddit, as in all my accounts (yes, I let it get so bad I had multiple accounts) and any new accounts (yep... tried making more) are banned based on previous logins and IPs (they're actually pretty thorough with it).

Some mods are power tripping, but also the value of a user is now near-zero. As long as you don't piss off too many, your subreddit will be fine. Especially for popular keywords - it's like owning "startrek.com", people will find it.

Subreddit owners can't actually make money in most traditional ways (so yeah, they may be paid behind the scenes), and there's a strong anti-monetization culture among Redditors, which is hilarious given that it's a for profit company that makes money off everyone's content. They still see it as an underdog online community. Newsflash, Facebook users also think they're enlightened on an exclusive platform/group.

Setting up a forum has never been easier - even security wise. Yet even that is too hard for people, so centralization is what we get. Hell, it's too much of a pain even for companies (for different reasons) - I still can't believe they shut down NotebookReview Forums - I was a long time active contributor. Surely no one in their right mind does that? Surely the decent Google traffic is worth something? Apparently not! Now I look suspiciously at TechPowerUp and Level1techs Forums...

I hope Reddit's asinine Facebook inspired user acquisition strategies will lead to its downfall, but I don't know... too many people have/make accounts. Hell, people make Facebook/Instagram and even Pinterest accounts, so clearly gating works. Maybe once they decide to disallow indexing by search engines? But then again Facebook is doing fine...

Discord is even worse - contributing unique information publicly (apparently that's what users believe, that it's "public"!) on chat platforms? I don't even know why people started doing that.

Honestly, I'm not sure if anyone is really interested in advice from someone who somehow managed to get permabanned on reddit.

Maybe one day when a bank permabans you after you've put years of money into it, and then they just reclaim all of your credits, and the reason they give you is only that "you promoted your business in a sub and that's not allowed on this tiny part of reddit" and that is against "Rule #12" on a random subreddit that didn't even publish the rule... You probably still won't understand the ideal of how people regularly get chewed up and spit out by the massive social platform machine with no rights to appeal.

Or perhaps you work as a Reddit mod and can't feel empathy for normal users any more... meh...

That's going to be a huge problem going forward. The whole parler thing from last year has me afraid because it showed how corporate america can collude together to remove you from society if you piss them off. In this specific case it happened to a bunch of assholes who probably deserved it, but in general this is extremely dangerous because of how much power is vested in private entities that have no public accountability.

I'm personally of the opinion that, with respect to net neutrality, "service provider" should be interpreted as liberally as possible so that CDNs, hosts and SaaS platforms are subject to it instead of just companies that provide layer-3 internet access. And maybe the law should even be expanded so that it applies to financial institutions.

What’s the logic behind comparing an online discussion board with random user-moderated subreddits to a financial institution?

I’ve been using Reddit since 2010 without issues, behaving poorly enough to get permabanned (which is different than being banned from a subreddit) is serious. There’s a story being left out here.

You just don't get all your accounts permabanned from Reddit by not following "Rule #12" in one subreddit.

You can post pretty disturbing shit and still not even get your NSFW account blocked, nevermind having all your accounts permbanned by IP.

Yes, being permabanned on some Internet discussion forum is the single defining characteristic of a human being! Off to the Gulag with him and shame him whenever he speaks up! /s

You don't just get permabanned with extreme prejudice. The author is leaving out a huuuuge chunk of the story.

Frankly, I’d be more interested in the advice they offered, but then again I am not afraid of reading controversial non-PC opinions and have the intellectual and emotional capability to discern right from wrong.

It's not advice, I'm just barfing thoughts out in the void like everyone else.

After more than a decade talking online, I finally realized that it's all pointless. It's not a fact, it's just my opinion.

I loved it since it was full of people who shared the same interests. I like that I helped people and they were happy. But ultimately, for me, it was a waste of time.

I now have a blog that I won't share anywhere, it's full of rants and posts on niche technical stuff and the few people who find it seem to like it. Comments are disabled and the only way to contact me is via email. A couple of people actually contacted me lol

I'll tell you how I got permabanned. First account was banned because I shared my experience with the German healthcare system on r/germany and r/europe. I absolutely despise it to this day. I'm forced to pay insurance just to get discriminated against and get zero help. I concluded that mandatory insurance means a stable stream of income for people who have zero desire to help anyone. So I ranted about it online, since I could not do anything real. Two comments triggered a lot of people because it got the account suspended, then banned. That was rather weird.

Second account was banned because I ranted about suicide, particularly how I hate myself for failing a couple of attempts and being a coward because of that. It did not sit well with the depression subreddits, and probably Reddit itself since it's a heavy topic and a turn off for advertisers.

So, uh, yeah, third account. I posted about suicide again... in retrospect it's pretty cringe and I know complaining that much is pointless, but at the time I was pretty fucked up. Luckily, the account was suspended fast and then I received the permanent ban message.

So, that's what it takes, getting 2-3 accounts banned. I mean, yeah, what sane person has multiple accounts in the first place? :D

I made several new accounts just to have them banned almost instantly (Jesus, it's an actual addiction). So I gave up on it, thankfully.

I'm not saying the ban was unjustified, and I'm not mad at Reddit. Just my opinion, what I wrote wasn't worthy of a permaban, but yeah for those reading it I seemed like an asshole who loves to complain.

I used to write a lot of well thought out comments and posts, it's just that after years of it I got tired and jaded, my writing went to shit and I started shitposting and then complaining too much. No one wants that kind of customer. Yet I still participated. It's an addiction, there's no other explanation.

I cannot buy into a wholesale generalization that mods are power tripping people who deserve our contempt because they are lonely.

There’s all kinds of motivations for being a mod. I rarely find a sub where mods aren’t dealing with far more BS than they are putting out.

If I don’t agree with how mods handle a channel, I leave.

I think it’s important that we question the usefulness of blaming society for the lack of quality in “default” content. Yes, you’re funneled into these channels. Yes, Reddit is seeking to get people to consume them. Yes, the interest of advertisers override all others. Yes, Reddit constantly inserts unwanted subs into my feed.

Yet Reddit is still a place I can curate to the subs that align with my interests & values. it’s not dead yet.

I don’t expect any social media platform to give me the defaults I want. I’ve accepted that I can take responsibility for the content I consume.

What I’d like is to build tools that enable people to more easily filter for that content. I believe we need stronger filtering tools, not weaker.

This is where I do wholeheartedly agree with author - the loss of Aaron and RSS feeds was the end of the cyberpunk movement in the browser based web.

I don’t know if web3 genuinely offers a second chance, but I do know that I will continue to want the ability to learn from thoughtful people of all walks of life. That requires the ability to filter out everything else. At this point, I’d rather select keywords to filter than to surface & happily pay for the privilege.

I’m so tired of being spoon fed the empty calories of outrage.

You are automatically banned from some subs if you comment/post in other blacklisted, "rival" communities. Let this sink in.

I was banned in a very popular sub (crazyfuckingvideos) with a million subscribers because I also subscribed to banpitbulls.

You can’t post any pro Israel news on /r/politics.

Their definitely needs to be stronger guidelines in place for mods, especially as they become sizable.

> You can’t post any pro Israel news on /r/politics.

Seems sensible to me when anti-Israel news is pretty much banned everywhere else.

How is that sensible? What makes israel different from any other nation such that they ought to be immune from all criticism?

I'm not sure if you misread. I think it's absurd how Israel seems to be immune to criticism in the media.

And yet that can also be valid - the /r/teen sub, which is meant as a safe place for teenagers to talk, bans people who've posted in creepy subs - do you disagree with that?

That’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is, for every creepy person caught by that, how many are there who are smart enough to make a new account?

The premise of creating via raw moderator power, a safe space for teenagers on an anonymous internet forum that encourages throwaway accounts is ridiculous.

I imagine the calculus involved would say it’s far better to create a safe space for teenagers and rid would be creeps than allow entry for non-teenagers in a space not even meant for them.

It would be like getting mad that a school prom doesn’t allow any adults inside. I’m sure there are good adults , but I doubt the intention of random adults and would rather have a whitelist of what adults are allowed.

No it's exactly the right question to ask, and you're not offering a rebuttal: you're simply making an asinine point about effectiveness.

The only real answer is that teenagers have no place on the public Internet, let alone a forum dedicated to them

I’d encourage you to consider than one of the public goods Reddit provides is to homeless teams & vulnerable people escaping abusive family.

Given the incredible breadth of services available to those individuals & yet the very real evidence that it continues to be a significant societal challenges, it’s worth considering the role a supportive community of random strangers play.

Post in /r/lockdownskepticism or pretty much any of the subs questioning the covid19 narrative and the same thing happens. Like 50 subs.

Getting banned from the covid-19 subs is also frighteningly easy as well. Any question about vaccine effectiveness or questioning “face coverings” and you’ll either get buried, comment removed, or banned outright.

Very few communities do that, and you generally aren't missing out getting banned from them anyway.

Default subs are doing this. It's one thing if a small sub does strange things, but if a massive sub that explicitly recommend by Reddit acts like this (for years now!), it sends a pretty clear message.

Small nitpick: default subreddits no longer exist. The admins killed the notion after one of the blackouts.

Thanks for the correction. I'm not subscribed to any of those (everyone knows the best content is in the smaller subs right?) so completely missed that!

You immediately get a dozen ban notifications if you post in KotakuInaction.

Or TumblrInAction or PoliticalCompassMemes.

Regardless of the content of your responses/posts, you get banned.

Sounds like you haven't met any reddit mods. And no, web3 offers nothing except the ability to try and control your digital currency and make money off you.

I agree. The Reddit mods I've dealt with were nasty people.

I think the tiny amount of power goes to people's heads. Power-tripping moderators of small subreddits are a dime a dozen.

The larger problem is that most subreddits are moderated by a handful of people, whose interest is expressly _moderating_. They don't care about the community. How could they, they have so many? And the power absolutely goes to their head.

It's really because most mods and tech leaders are the types of people that want to play everything like a video game and have everyone else just watch them play as a spectator...

We praise exec wisdom and foresight a lot, but in reality, the people who come in an sit for years in exec positions when no new innovation happens are just reacting to profit indicators and protecting the company for as long as they serve, while leaving a bunch of headaches for the next guy who comes in.

This is the age of "don't rock the userbase" boat in tech. It's only companies that disrupt the entire social media landscape as we know it that wins next, but given time, they too will screw it all up...

All of it repeatedly just reaffirming the true genius of MySpace Tom.

> This is where I do wholeheartedly agree with author - the loss of Aaron and RSS feeds was the end of the cyberpunk movement in the browser based web.

Aside from not calling it a "cyberpunk movement", the people who work on such tech are still around. See: Mastodon, Pleroma.

fair - I don’t mean to define his work or vision, just my own sense of admiration for seeking to establish a source of knowledge not fully co-opted by institutions.

> What started as a bastion of independent thought, Reddit has slowly devolved into a den of groupthink, censorship, and corporate greed.

This is revisionist romanticism. Reddit is just a collection of forums like the many hundreds of thousands that came before it, and continue to exist alongside it. Reddit is also so incredibly massive that making sweeping statements about its quality or composition is meaningless, what one consumes on reddit is really more a reflection of the individual rather than the site itself.

I agree with you kind of. But it was a loose collection of forums initially and still is if you look at it that way. The Reddit admins forced the idea of communities as a reason to start banning. You can see this over time. Subreddits were not called "communities" until the admins started banning subs. It's classic group dynamics.

You can't ban a group that isn't a group. So the site grouped loose collections of people into what they called communities. And it became self fulfilling as groups define themselves by what they are not as well as what they are.

> The Reddit admins forced the idea of communities as a reason to start banning.

The admins also started actively policing subreddits, and shuffling uncooperative mod teams.

Perhaps Reddit was never a bastion of 'independent thought', but in the beginning (after subreddits came into being) there was an understanding that communities were independent.

But eventually they started getting bad press (e.g. /r/jailbait) and the 'jannies' started refusing to work for free (e.g. blackouts), so they decided to quash anyone causing them grief.

I'm curious what reddit even aspires to be at its greatest.

Most of the popular subreddit's comment sections have top rated comments being something totally predictable and sarcastic.

Right now the top post on r/news is [1]

Contrasted to the equivalent story on hackernews: [2]

There isn't anything remotely thought provoking in the top rated comments on reddit as there is on hackernews.

It seems to me this isn't due to censorship or corporate influence, but purely due to the fact that the reddit post has 100x more upvotes (and therefore more viewership) than the hackernews equivalent.

In the pockets of reddit that have a small but active community, I think it's easier to argue that the original essence and charm of reddit is still very much alive.

I'm skeptical that even without all the corrupting factors mentioned in this article, that reddit would ever be a place for the masses to engage healthy discourse and speech

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/vjpfbh/supreme_court_...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31862258

Funny that you say that.

I found the comments on that hacker news thread predictably awful, like all even slightly political discussion on hnews.

People trying to one up each other with edgy comments on why the ruling is actually a good thing and how smart they are.

A display of privilege and of a real lack of empathy

Hacker news is one of the worst communities on the internet but the headlines are better than most aggregating sites. Though I see more and more postings that also came across my Google news feed so HN is losing a lot of its utility for me.

But it's a good place to see where the wind is blowing in terms of the ongoing radicalization of white men.

You are all over this thread being racist and sexist. Not everyone here is white, or men, nor are all the people in the US.

You keep crying about white men and fascists while being a complete dick. You even called someone with a good point an FSB employee. Half your comments are flamebait.

If you hate it so very much why are you here, much less participating?

Your comment is made almost entirely of personal attacks. Please refrain from making such comments.

HN is a debate club, Reddit is a bar. Neither is "better"; it's just a different type of socializing/communicating.

And there are also subs which disallow snarky "fuck this country"-kind of takes.

It's honestly astonishing to see how poorly the leadership team at Reddit has been executing. People shit on Twitter (Zuck called Twitter "a clown car that fell into a gold mine") but Reddit is so much worse.

The fact that Reddit didn't have a decent mobile app until a few years ago is unbelievable. Indie-developers were shipping a better reddit mobile apps than the company.

Why would they need their own app when they have good APIs and enough people to create perfectly good third-party apps for them?

The only reason I can see is monetization, with your own app you can control the user engagement better.

I specifically don't use their app because I explicitly don't want all the fluff features they've added over the years. That's also why I still use old.reddit.com.

It's incredibly important for so many reasons. Just as a reminder, users have been shifting from desktop to mobile so the world is now mobile-first. Facebook had a bet-the-company shift in the early 2010s from desktop to mobile and the Instagram app is a huge part of why Meta is valuable today.

Reddit makes money through ads. Charging for API access and expecting third-party app developers to build an entire ad platform is not possible. The tech is incredibly difficult to build and then you have to actually get advertisers to use the platform (btw - this is something that Reddit is still failing at versus Facebook/Google/Twitter).

Something like 50% of Reddit's traffic is from mobile users. If Reddit wants to add new features for these users, it's impossible to do so if all the users are using third-party apps.

Bunch of other reasons that I can enumerate in a bit.

APIs are fundamentally at odds with an ad-based revenue model.

If you let third-party apps provide a UX for your data, the app developer will naturally try to make the bext experience they can for users. The first step to doing that is to ditch all the ads. Now you're paying all the cost to host and serve the data, but the third-party app is killing your income.

Also ads. Specifically more data to better target ads.

I bought Apollo (iOS, highly recommend) out of sheer spite for Reddit pushing their own shitty mobile version through dark patterns and shitty design.

Reddit is much better than Twitter in terms of social UX and worse in terms of app UX

In a decade this essay will still be available on some web archive, but the author will be fully grown, and the zeitgeist that shaped his adolescence, which is already dying, will be as transparently foolish as is, to contemporary sensibilities, a 1970's punk rocker shouting 'The Beatles suck!'

It is true Reddit is a pile of garbage, but it was a worse pile of garbage when its community was posting kiddie porn and creating 'N-chain' comment threads.

While those were both issues. There was a lot more quality text discussion on the site during that era.

I've been active on Reddit for 14 years. The quality of discussion has been more or less unchanged overall, but you must choose your subreddits in order for that to be true.

All of the major subreddits have gotten watered down because that's what happens when 29 million users (r/pics) are voting on comments. Communities change fundamentally when they scale up. The answer is to seek out smaller communities.

The smartest thing the Reddit admins every did was to create subreddits. At the time, everyone on Reddit criticized them for it. Users wanted to be able to have a single link get posted to multiple subreddits with a single discussion, so that subreddits would behave like tags. But the admins said that, no, the whole point was to create separate distinct communities that could flourish on their own and they were absolutely right.

> they were absolutely right

They were right only because their goal was to increase the number of users to the largest extent possible.

> everyone on Reddit criticized them for it

... and they were also right, because at the time reddit was a community for mostly tech news, similarly to what HN represents now. Creating the subreddits led to the tech part of the community to be splintered and then get more and more watered down as time went by. It's sad.

Most of my favorite subreddits these days are not tech related, so I stand by my claim that Reddit is better for having distinct communities.

I agree, but sadly besides all the cool communities out there there's an order of magnitude more of them that are a stain and a strain on reasonable discussion.

As a user of reddit I would like to isolate myself from these people as much as possible, which is now somewhat possible by blacklisting subbredits. But sadly the people themselves are vastly over represented in the wider community and having to suffer through chains of memes and hot takes, vitriol and all around non good faith discourse is making me go less and less into the comments of interesting posts because I don't really want to subject myself to all that negativity.

In my opinion, the overall effect is negative, despite the existence of diamonds in the rough communities here and there.

PS. I am saying these things as a long time reddit user and as a dev that tries to build an alternative link aggregator and discussion platform for communities to move to. :D

The opposite is true. In absolute terms there is far more quality text discussion on reddit today than at any other time.

There is still a humongous amount of good discussion there. Perhaps the problem is you need to remove some bad subreddits? Some of those have definitely gotten worse, but there are plenty of good ones to find.

I used reddit for the first time in 2020 and only because a researcher friend told me to ask a question about implementation details of a paper I read. It gave me a good answer and to my surprise had some relatively famous names in the research field in the subreddit.

That said, it also seemed to me like it's (maybe intentionally?) designed to promote bad faith communication[0]. Combine that with the Eternal September phenomenon it seems like an place of inevitable decay; whatever subreddit there is struggling against entropy.

I think I saw an add about "Reddit: the Frontpage of Internet" but I think a more apt catch phrase would be "doormat"; all the rude, dirty people stomp all over it to get to the internet house. The mattress is mud ridden and smells.

And the design of it is like a room without any windows with a broken AC making it humid, mold ridden and hot. And it was made right next to a Highschool and gives free entrance vouchers to the students. Some subreddits might try to carve out a space in the room, keeping it clean and everything but when most people coming in is bad faith and the room is so hopelessly inhospitable, it's just a matter of time.

[0] https://consilienceproject.org/endgames-of-bad-communication...

I thought this was a clever joke at first that parodied how reddit forces their app on mobile users in various insidious ways... but it turns out Medium does the same.

You want to know why the web is so bad? Because it's slowly become acceptable to treat your users with complete contempt by interrupting and "nudging" them into being surveillance cattle.

Reddit is not so simple to pin down. On the one hand all the 'bad stuff'. On the other, a huge selection of really interesting niche subs where you can find intelligent, valuable and even expert information and guidance. The big subs are not everything that is Reddit. The real treasure is found in the specialist places which very few people know about, staffed by enthusiast hobbyist mods and devoured by equally passionate readers.

Before reddit, these sorts of forums were hosted on their own websites. I think having a forum on reddit these days is a major liability. I wonder if these forums would benefit from being hosted in a more de-centralized and durable manner.

Unfortunately, forums seem to be a dying medium. The few communities that still exist tend to use things like Discourse (which I dispise); funny to think that people used to pay hundreds of dollars for VBulletin and XenForo licenses.

A worrying trend is new communities using, or existing communities migrating to, Discord.

My issue with reddit is the polar opposite. It's not moderated remotely aggressively enough!

Any interesting subreddit immediately falls to the lowest common denominator without aggressive moderation. /r/askhistorians is a good example of the level of moderation a subreddit needs to remain sane as it grows.

People like to complain about gatekeeping, but societies build gates for a reason. I would like a forum that actively encourages gatekeeping and bans users who consistently post low quality comments.

I didn’t even know about some of the things that the author went over in this article, but it’s undeniable that power-mad mods have ruined anything I ever enjoyed about Reddit over the past ten years. And that there seem to no longer be many interesting voices or fair debate on the site. I found myself logging in less and less over the past four years and when I do, I recognize it less and less also. It just isn’t Reddit at all these days, no matter what logo is on it

The universal problem with all large anthrocentric networks - real life, digital, political, socioeconomic, the planet's climate - is it's exponentially easier to break things than build them.

Bullshit travels twice around the world before the truth gets its boots on.

It does not have a side, or an agenda, or rarely even a purpose beyond the exercise of control over others. It's trolling, period.

So as soon as you decide you wamt to optimize for growth over exclusivity, you are DOA because shortly (in startup time) your platform will become 99.99999% bullshit.

You don't need a deeper look into why Reddit or any large site that optimizes for growth descends into chaos.

Reddit works fine for me. In R/W mode I use only /r/diypedals and /r/guitarpedals and for daily dose of doom and gloom in R/O mode I use /r/news and /r/worldnews. I access it only via RSS reader and it navigates me directly to compact version which loads instantly and works well on mobile.

I'd stay away from the latter two, like not even read it. I made a terrible life changing mistake by reading too much of these subreddits.

It's user generated content, mostly by people who hate their lives, hate society and hate others, aided by the traditional media they link to.

By the time I saw that reality is different and so much better than the doom I got on Reddit, it was too late.

> I made a terrible life changing mistake by reading too much of these subreddits.

I don't understand. How could you make a life-changing mistake by reading the news?

I acted on them. I fell for it just like people who fall for (other) conspiracies. None of us are immune.

So, during Brexit times, I read (and wrote) a lot of r/europe, r/ukpolitics, r/brexit. Which at the time were cesspools of doom, every little thing was a catastrophe, and I believed it. I started thinking "I need to get out", that was on my mind fucking 24/7.

Then I lost my job partly because of Brexit (drop in exports to EU, company decided to lay off a bunch of people), at which point I was convinced the UK was going to shit and I was gonna get locked in, kicked out or some weird shit.

So, yeah, I left the UK without bothering to apply for pre-settled status, just abandoned everything. Those Reddit subs played a major part in it - I've thought about it a lot and it's a reasonable conclusion.

The reality is that the UK is the best country in Europe if you speak English and like your freedoms. It has not gone to shit, and it's unlikely that it will. I know poor Brits love to complain, but they're just not seeing the opportunities. It was by far the easiest country to settle and make a lot of money in. And the food is great - people who say otherwise are either snobs who only talk about restaurants, trolling or have never stepped into an ASDA lol

Anyway, don't be a dumbass like me. Just do yourself a favour and don't read r/politics, /r/news, worldnews, national subreddits, and just most general subreddits. If you see a lot of doom and gloom, abandon it.

I don't know if it is the same person, but there was a quite disheartening story posted by a person who due to internally misunderstood depression transitioned at the suggestion of people on reddit, regretted it, then later went dark and everyone assumes took their life.

> ...a person who due to internally misunderstood depression transitioned at the suggestion of people on reddit,

Sadly somewhat common. And you can talk about it almost nowhere, due to "transphobia"

Yeah something like that came to my mind as well. Even if that is the case it seems a little odd to blame the news subreddit specifically and not their own poor decision-making. It's like if someone who panic sold during the covid scare blaming the news.

Getting in on the global 24/7 news cycle is bad for your mental health[0]. You don't gain anything positive from knowing about the latest $bad_thing the hour it happens.

[0] https://time.com/5125894/is-reading-news-bad-for-you/

People who hate their lives? I’m sorry I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ll find all sort of people on Reddit, but certainly not mostly people hating their lives, society and others. You must have spent too much time on the worst subreddits.

You’re the one hating here. I wonder what your "reality" is like.

I fully agree with jotm based on my more than a decade on Reddit.[1] I firmly believe that the average mod of /r/politics, /r/worldnews, etc., and authors of the posts that make it to the top (or, more accurately, are allowed to), is a 19-year old who a) hates himself and b) is desperate to prove himself as smarter than his parents.

[1] Unfortunately, there is no better alternative.

Reddit is largely garbage. Some bits of it are alright, but it has definitely gone downhill since Swartz passed.

At this point the only good forums I am aware of are this one and Bogleheads, apart from a few still-decent parts of reddit that aren't completely astroturfed by corporations or packed full of lower-level midwits (i.e. any subreddit with a subscriber count close to or over 500k).

Anyone else know of good places to read online?

I’ve been trying [Lemmy](https://join-lemmy.org) for a while - it’s an open source, federated alternative to Reddit (and uses an interface similar to old.reddit.com). The main instance has a pretty heavy left bias, and like all less well known social media platforms, it suffers from a lack of content and engagement. But these are issues that can be tackled over time with more users joining the platform.

I disagree with what the article says.

If you follow no news or politics related subreddits, its a wholesome and friendly place (mostly) like it always was.

The mistake is thinking news and politics make good talking topics on the internet, on massive platforms like that. Headlines are the only thing people read, theres no genuine discussion, just people screaming as loud as they can, hoping their opinion ends up being the loudest.

> If you follow no news or politics related subreddits, its a wholesome and friendly place (mostly) like it always was.

It's a shame that you have to go out of your way to make it a decent experience.

It's been a while since I've created a new account. Do you still need to manually unsubscribe from 50+ subreddits?

I believe in the beginning it persuades you to subscribe to "recommended" ones, but I remember theres a way to make an account that follows nothing, its not difficult but not the default either

I think there are 2 major problems at play.

First, I have no idea what Reddit the company has been doing since basically every addition to the site in over a decade has been garbage and has made the site worse to use. The site is basically unusable without the old.reddit.com style, their media hosting is worse than imgur or any of the other alternatives, their app and mobile experience is worse than any number of free alternatives, and besides that I don't know what else the have done except gamify posts with their awards system.

The second problem is how communities on Reddit and the internet as a whole are structured, incentivized and evolve. So many of these communities are unable to check themselves (which generally requires very good moderation), and with incentive structures like upvotes and awards, posting is gamified where people post things they think others will approve of and will reward, which causes communities to become monocultures as everyone else just leaves, is downvoted into oblivion or just banned from the subreddit. These communities basically become filled with people who have the same opinions and circlejerk about them in ways that affirm their opinions and disparage ones that oppose them, causing them to slowly become detached from reality. It creates a community of people who basically become unable to discuss things with people who don't share the same opinions, which then carries over to interactions outside of those monocultures. Lots of these people just dont have the ability to even talk to others with differing viewpoints now.

The best communities and best conversations I have had online have been those that offer a lot of off topic discussions within interest based communities. Support group/ identity based communities need very strong moderation because they are much more susceptible to "radicalization" if that is the correct term.

Im going to play devils advocate, when you look at the subreddits banned there are those that are banned for unknown and petty reasons (Tumblrinaction), however at the same time extremely radical or racist subreddits are also included (alt right ones, some extreme left and coontown fat people hate).

And if we judge reddit with 4chan the "free" speech platform, you will notice that 4chan is plagued with extremism and anti-social views, which in some ways is because they don't censor and is 100% anonymous to each user.

Personally some censorship is good to not allow the patients running the asylum, but also make sure you don't overreach.

> Shortly after, the FBI began monitoring Aaron Swartz and he was arrested for downloading academic journals from MIT in an attempt to make them freely available online.

AFAICT Swartz never said or wrote why he attempted to download all of JSTOR. Even close friends like Lawrence Lessig only speculated as to what he may have been wanting to do with that data.

But I suppose this kind of lazy writing and lack of standards is what passes for news these days at the New York Times' router that could have conceivably forwarded the packets for this medium.com article.

Why do you think he attempted to download all of JSTOR?

Reddit is still one of the best place to find relevant and accurate information, compared to say Facebook, Twitter or some random website. Depends on the subreddit of course, but at least healthy communities can be created and moderated. Of course you’ll also find terrible and toxic communities and users, like The_Donald, which has fortunately been banned. Why is the author only focusing on bad aspects?

What’s the purpose of this article? It doesn’t bring anything constructive, it’s just trying to make it look bad, and discourage people from going there.

It doesn’t say what should be done to improve, what healthier site we should visit instead. It’s only negative.

"No matter what you believe in, wisdom isn’t achieved living inside a bubble of utopian ideals."

Oh yeah ideals are bad, surely, wisdom is better. I wonder what kind of "wisdom" he has in mind… He won’t tell us either. Sounds like this article has an agenda, which involves convincing people that Reddit and ideals are bad.

Reddit is doomed, and will go down into chaos because of ideals, values, mods and corporations. Hmmm that sounds familiar. Replace "Reddit" with anything and that’s your usual anti-system "wisdom". It didn’t bring me any new information.

It looks like Reddit is generally too pro-western values for the tastes of the author… And he had to tell the world about it.

Sounds like you clearly have an agenda, which comes down to "it's okay to ban anything I don't agree with". And that's exactly what the article is talking about.

If someone doesn’t like a forum’s moderation policies, they’re free to find a different forum. This has been true since BBSes. It’s been true since the days of newspapers. It’s been true since the days of people speechifying in taverns.

Moderation is needed to keep online discussions bearable, that’s nothing new. Are you new to the internet? Or are you a free speech "absolutist"?

If you think moderation is bad, let me remind you that you are here on a forum with moderation, and I’m glad it’s the case. By your standards, this forum must be as bad as Reddit, and must have an agenda.

A big issue on reddit is 'powermods' and how if your sub gets popular enough the admins will install their own mods. Everything ends up feeling incredibly similar.

It might not be possible to create a public forum in a way that it stays thoughtful and interesting even when it becomes popular.

The first problem is that thoughtful and interesting content rarely attracts many readers.

The second is that if many readers show up, the discussion quality is going down. So there would need to be strong centralized censorship to downvote the low quality posts and prevent accounts that play the populism game to gain traction.

Almost half the population is below average in whatever way you wish to judge them and the bar for entry for most applications is as simple as clicking a button in an app store.

For those of us, needing a VPN from time to time, this platform is unusable. From a decision they took to suspend my oldest over 11.5k karma acct, when I started travel, thus use of diff VPN exit points in Europe, through to almost 20 other accounts I attempted to create, since, whenever I used one with and without VPN within the span of a few hours, I get the dreaded suspension reaction.

Anyone who remembers BBSs would not be surprised by a site that turns in to small fiefdoms but would rather be surprised by a site that is not.

I’ve had an idea for a while on how I would fix or reimplement Reddit. Someone please feel free to steal and implement these ideas, I’ll join!

The basic problem with Reddit (and all eternal Septembers) is that new users change the culture that made the site interesting in the first place. The reddiquette and the HN rules might have been followed strictly at first, but they fall to the wayside due to a lack of enforcement. Moderation does not scale.

My proposed solution is to assign weights to users such that bad actors cannot come in and exert influence on the site, through a modified ELO-like ranking system. You as the founder set a base set of rules that you know you can follow, like never downvoting substantive comments that you disagree with, and then you just use the site with care to not get sloppy with the rules. Your ELO (and those in your special known-good-actor clique) is held high, at least until you reach a critical mass of users where it becomes unnecessary.

The kicker is this: every vote by another user on the site is now a “match” against all users on the site that have a higher ELO that have voted on it, and you treat their vote as a draw if they vote the same, or a loss if they downvote.

Powerusers aren’t actually the problem, so long as you have the right powerusers. The problem is that powerusers are able to sell their account and exert influence for profit (ie: astroturfing). But with you as the baseline ideal user, and with your interests always being the longevity of the site, the possibility of corruption goes down.

The other change I would make to Reddit is to have a predefined Usenet-like hierarchy with community-provided tags for niche topics that would otherwise fall through the cracks. Opinion-oriented communities (/r/bluepolitics, /r/redpolitics) facilitate one-sided boring conversations.

The subreddits are horrible. There is one called “RealTesla” that only allows stories negative towards Tesla. Nothing good, only negative. I was banned for posting an article that wasn’t negative enough.

That's actually hilarious. That sort of flippant moderation is rife throughout Reddit the wrong username or wrong wording - anything and they'll ban just for fun.

Its not just awful mods, its awful paid admins. It was a step in the right direction to ban hate speech. The people they hired have decided that being mean to racists is “hate speech”, while ignoring actual hate speech and letting racist spaces thrive. This is not what people meant when they asked reddit to do something about hate speech.

That's another reason, indeed. I get that moderation is hard, but the way reddit handles it is awful. There are so many, potentially conflicting interests among reddit stakeholders, but the admins seem to be single-minded and narrow-minded. Recently, they closed "tumblr in action", which now has moved to another site, a reddit clone called saidit.net. However, don't even try to visit that site: it is a truly pestilent rat nest. The net effect is that the echo chamber becomes stronger for all sides. Great outcome for no reason at all. Well, there is a reason: reddit wants free moderators. Paying would lower their dreamt IPO value.

I don't get the popularity of the "mobile first" paradigm. I get it as a cost saving measure, but when you try and make UX fit mobile and desktop both will be worse off.

> bastion of independent thought was never a thing, nor is it possible for reddit-type platforms.

The mechanics of voting and karma organize content as groupthink, and the divisions of subreddits structure grouphink by type of content with mods that enforce their vision of the type. There is very little you can do for independent thought in this content if mods aren't actively trying for that (and they never did). What you get is content decided by the average person interested in some field, with added selections of moderation. This can be good for a few things but thought or indepth conversations aren't one of those.

My 15y old Gold account just got banned after posting a crypto-critical Wall Street Journal link. Go figure.

Reddit is mostly crypto-critical so unless you posted something paywalled or in the wrong sub, this is unlikely to be the root cause.

WSJ is paywalled isn't it? Like as in no one can read the article.

Outside of a few subreddits and many smaller ones, quality discussion on reddit at large scale never really existed (or at least not since i joined in 2012) because the type of content that was/is upvoted most heavily is quick, low-thought, quippy and usually low-quality.

I think Reddit is fantastic. So much interesting and useful content. It’s amazing to me that it isn’t full of spam if you think about how much of that there is on the internet these days so personally I think the mods are doing a really good job.

There are good subreddits indeed. I like the ability to split content thematically into subreddits. Unlike HN, this allows me to better focus on what interests me, and what I'm not interested in, I don't even get to see. On HN, instead, there's just one big pot, and what interests me often doesn't even make it to the front page, or only for a few minutes. Also on hckrnews.com I only see stuff that already has a minimum number of points. So I often go to the RSS feed; there I often find the more interesting posts than on the front page.

Way to bury the lead:

> I only recently found out that Ghislaine Maxwell, wife to Jeffery Epstein, ran one of the most powerful Reddit accounts on the website. In fact, it was the eighth-most popular account by karma on Reddit.

Spooky X-Files music.

Long before Reddit, there were dial-up BBSes in the 1980's. You don't know what petty online brownshirting is if you had not not experienced that --- and every little of it was corporate in any shape or form.

As far as I know, outside of egregious violations, most subreddits have their own internal rules.

Different communities seem to go through various periods of success, and my experience has been that it's just as often the fault of a lack of moderation as it is from moderation itself, but MOST often, it's the scale of the community.

Once a community reaches a certain size, moderation is just impossible for the handful of volunteers who do it.

Either way, the article strikes me less as "reddit is declining!" as it is "oh man, things changed and I don't like it."

Reddit critiques in this thread sound more like anger directed at their moderation because the commenters here have apparently been banned, shadow-banned, removed for transgender "jokes" etc.

Looking at the comments that got them banned would be illuminating. I've seen my fair share of people just being straight up assholes. Sorry buddy, be civil, or go somewhere else.

I'm sure Aaron was thinking of ridiculing fat people, fascism, revenge porn, jailbait or your right to hate the gays when he said he was concerned about corporate tyranny.

On the other hand it's full of Americans touting their free speech is true like no other country on earth and blah blah, so I guess, free speech except for those you disagree with

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

There’s nothing in there about Reddit making moderation policies

You're conflating 1A with free speech. Free speech is the principle that inspires 1A but it's a larger concept and the same reasoning applies to things like reddit. This whole "don't let you political opponents speak or coordinate because you happen to have the power to stop them" is the weapon of a tyrant, one of these days a real tyrant will seize the reins of these platforms and show us all how they're really used.

Parent comment is about “Americans touting their free speech.” First Amendment is obviously what that refers to.

The Internet doesn’t have a limit on the number of web sites. You want to say something, get a $2/month shared hosting plan and post HTML, or lease fiber and run your own server farm, or do any number of things in between.

Reddit remains completely a in-the-right-place-right-time thing when Digg fumbled and there was a mass exodus saving the almost-closed Reddit. That's it. It is/was nothing special. It has been riding the wave ever since (and also why I see no reason to give people like Alexis Ohanian any praise or credibility when he's out there talking about all kinds of nonsense, but I digress).

Ultimately these days it suffers from massive mainstream adoption and use, and all of the moderation and scale problems that come with that(including the much griped about design problems and struggles to both monetize and maintain usability). But under it all it's still just a large collection of forums of all sizes, with some intermixing, but also a lot of non-mixing. If you participate in a handful of niche interest subreddits, and this is all logged into the site (where you can permanently set the old look as your UI complainers!), you will never see all the crap that's happening on the oversized main subs and it's great. Just a place for basic forum-like functionality and interest sharing.

There are still pockets of sanity here and there, if you know where to look, but otherwise it has become a huge propaganda machine. /r/worldnews is now basically a continuation of whatever Washington DC holds as true when it comes to US foreign policy, the same goes for /politics (when it comes to US domestic politics) and most of the subs related to the current war in Ukraine.

Care to point out the subs in the last category? Between NCD / UWVR / UkrainianConflict the message I've got was vastly pro-UA.

Ukraine is a puppet of the US! Russia is only defending itself right?

If you think close to 7 million refugees and 20 to 25% of the territory lost for good is a good outcome for Ukraine then, yeah, you're right. Ukraine wouldn't have had those 7 million refugees and 20 to 25% of its territory lost if it had not been led to believe accession into the Western sphere of influence was possible. It is not. That policy was carried out, in part, by Western media entities.

Don't forget the death toll. Gonna be hard to rebuild the country when tens or hundreds of thousands of your working age men are no more.

> Reddit is tailored for a better corporate experience, not a better user experience.

Yeah, advertisers want "brand safety" and having the most neutral and inoffensive topics possible (and nothing controversial) is what enables that. Censorship arises organically on the advertiser-based web, which many users of this site have had a hand in creating.

places need limits. they really really do. They do in real life, they do in online. Should someone be able to go to a bar and shout insults at the owner. depending on where the bar is this will end with you in an alley. Why should a private company allow things that affects their bottom line?

Why should anyone contribute their time, content, thoughts, and often money into a company's platform when the company doesn't care about anything but protecting it's bottom line, and then severing you from and taking control of your already spent time, content, thoughts, and often money?

The other big problem is that Reddit hides the fact that it takes every step possible to limit users in order to protect it's bottom line... That's textbook bad business.

I think reddit died for me when they more than doubled the price of premium membership (previously called 'gold'). It's just not worth it anymore.

I always used to love how open it was. Don't communities were toxic sure but there were lots of fringey subreddits with people really enjoying themselves. For example exhibitionism. Conde Nast are trying to clamp down on this a lot to make it more mainstream palatable. IMO this is when such platforms start to decline though I have to admit reddit has so far lasted longer than I expected (especially when considering predecessors like Digg)

I personally hate Reddit, but I think it's misleading to talk about their "fall". Arent they thriving or even excelling by the metrics they (and most other non-users) care about?

Pretty sure they are just pumping their metrics ahead of a future IPO. The current shareholders will all disappear and the new ones can slowly pick up the pieces in a few years.

Forget running a sustainable business with your customers at the heart of it, the new way is going just fine.

Insults != Harassment but they detract from the conversation.

https://www.derailingfordummies.com/

idk I follow only gaming subs and they all seem all right to me. The players just share guides, fan arts, news etc. Sure every sub has some asshole mods but generally it's still not as bad as front page subs (/r/news, /r/politics/ etc.) where basically there is only one message accepted

It's just another boring scroll hole for 1 minute content bites, like the rest of the internet is becoming.

It's more of a place to share useless time filler to be scrolled on a phone, and a place to have mostly useless fights(As a time filler).

Nobody really likes it enough to call it entertainment, it's just a pacifier.

I don't frequently visit Reddit, but I think in the last year or two it has become more prone to mono-think and feels a bit like high school.

I hope it changes direction and becomes a better public forum. We need more of those kinds of environments.

For business/finance related social news there's a UGC section on https://biztoc.com — Small but less toxic.

The instant downvoting is a dead giveaway to what they're about. It's going to be interesting to see what rises from the "web 3.0".

> It's going to be interesting to see what rises from the "web 3.0".

The semantic web? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

if going by what the writer wrote about the length of Aron Swartz incarceration is true, then that's way too much (35-year sentence). I mean he didn't kill someone even though what he did might be illegal. I just feel they just wanted to eliminate him. it's also totally unfair that he was erased from the history of reddit without good recognition for his work and contribution.

Reddit isn’t dead until there is a viable alternative.

You can’t have an exodus without a destination

There are plenty of other forums. The other day William Osman just told all his followers to come here because it's "like Reddit used to be" for example.

Any other forums you’d recommend?

Topical forums run by enthusiasts are always good. 4chan is underrated in some ways even; there's a lot of garbage but the best is better than anywhere. I think in general you should avoid sites that have any kind of voting. "Bump order" brings controversial ideas to the top which means they're probably original.

IRC channels are still great too, I learned a lot lurking in places like #linux on freenode.

chaos? Or authoritarianism? Two opposites on the spectrum? Some might argue that the elites are becoming more authoritarian as time goes on, and as they seek to quash all criticism of their regime...an old story...

Does anyone have a good Reddit alternative, that's kindof a niche like HN?

The good alternative to Reddit is still Reddit. Reddit isn't "a community" any more than the web or a state is. It's a huge collection of distinct ones. If you don't like the subreddits you're on, find others.

Check out Lemmy https://join-lemmy.org/

lobste.rs ?

I'm now getting flagged for anything I comment that goes against the groupthink. HN is worse than reddit at this point.

The issues are so much worse than what is being described in this post. Reddit-appointed moderators are used as a protective layer for all of the company's shady, anti-social and sometimes straight up illegal behaviors. The perfect example of this is RPAN, their recently defunct streaming function, where a dozen subreddits were created by the company and populated with moderators, who then spent two years brazenly lying on behalf of the admins at every opportunity and constantly gaslighting the entire community.

They lied to advertisers by inflating viewership numbers 35x higher than reality. They sold their top broadcast mechanism to these advertisers, but repeatedly told the viewers that what they were witnessing was community-created content. The "algorithm" had a built-in caste system which was manually manipulated and curated by admins, while they directed mods to convince the community they don't even have the ability to manipulate the rankings. They even allowed the sexual proposition of minors to take place on a daily basis, while both mods and admins were fully aware of it -- never mind the reports, they were sometimes in the chat while it was happening. They permanently banned anyone who discussed any of these issues, without hesitation.

And this list is just the tip of the iceberg of Reddit's Black Mirror-esque methodologies. The moderators are extremely loyal to the admins, because there are significant perks involved, not least of which being that moderators have notably become a hiring pool. It's no coincidence that the mods who are the most willing to lie are the same people finding employment within the company.

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