Reddit is Fun will shut down on June 30th in response to Reddit API changes

Still curious how Twitter was a pass, but Tumblr/maybe Reddit are no go. Maybe the way ads are being shows when there’s NSFW content?

https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/?x=18239&y=12514&z=46...

Map is generated by clustering subreddits based on users who comment across subreddits, so I don't think you can infer much from the colored area. That's just background for each group of the graph.

r/all, frontpage, only following niche subreddits, only following your city's subreddit, only nsfw content, only gaming subreddits, only memes pages, only gardening etc.

If you have an idea how to monetize a reddit clone ... go for it.

This is one of the big problems with running stuff in Silicon Valley. You have to pay so much f'ing money in terms of salary/rent/etc, even a business like Reddit that would be wildly successful by almost any standard anywhere else in the world is actually a money-loser apparently.

I understand that Reddit was founded by some big brains like Aaron Swartz (RIP) and that scaling it is not trivial, but also it is not exactly cutting edge rocket science either. It's... a threaded discussion forum, lmao.

They're kinda tricky to scale, because each logged-in user sees a customized view of every single thread. Which certainly defeats a lot of the most trivial caching strategies.

But on the other hand they lend themselves pretty well to horizontal scaling via partitions/sharding/etc because the vast majority of your transactions will involve a single post or a single subreddit.

They added realtime chat stuff, and that's trickier I guess, but also TBH they could drop that feature entirely and I don't know who'd really care.

No hard feelings, but I feel your reply was a bit unnecessary? Did you read my comment and think I felt that a Discord server was actually... separate from Discord, the company?

I wrote my post on HN, for an audience of people who understand that stuff already.

What I meant is, for most purposes, a Discord server "feels independent enough" for most people. Yes, your data lives on Discord's servers and they could yank the plug at any moment. You don't actually own anything. Again, I wrote my post with the assumption that HN readers are knowledgeable about such things.

That's the fundamental problem with corporate-owned mediums. It is impossible for them to exist long term without being ruined by commercialization because that corporate owner must make a juicy profit sooner or later or else shut it down.

The only viable long term model is decentralization where nobody owns it, so nobody needs to profit from it and the operating costs are shared.

Email (1970s) and Usenet (early 80s) survive in perpetuity because of this (I know most people have forgotten about Usenet but it's still around). It's important to take these lessons to heart. Reinventing yet another proprietary platform with a single corporate owner just to see it inevitably die off when profits must be squeezed is exhausting and a treadmill we should get off of.

I've thought a bit about intentional communities --- communes, utopian towns, and the like. The thought occurred some years back that amongst the most successful intentional communities are college towns. These are, hands down, some of the best places to live, and certainly on a per-population basis, in the US and Canada, based on a wide range of measures (though housing costs tend to be higher than surrounding areas).

There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite small towns to be found around the world, though the US might be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or college. Some public, some private (though virtually all benefit by public financing of research or student aid / loans).

These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns, even for relatively small schools.

As to what makes these tick ... I don't have any solid evidence, but I've a few theories:

- Many of these schools were either formed or saw a sharp growth following the Sputnik scare and emphasis on higher education in the 1950s. See particularly California's Master Plan for Higher Education: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Hig...>, or the UK's "Green Book": <https://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/greenbook1941/...>

- There are a number of associated populations for the institutions, with widely varying residency periods. Students pass through in 2-8 years typically (net of transfers, drop outs, extended undergraduate programmes, a/k/a "five year" and "six year" plans, and graduate / professional programmes). Faculty tend to remain much longer, often much of their professional career (40+ years). Alumni may settle in the region (though most do not). And there is the "town" (vs. "gown") component, which may be sympathetic, adversarial, or a mix of both --- residents of the community who are not directly affiliated with the university. (Instances of town-gown conflict, including actual armed battle and shooting wars, date back to mediaeval times, e.g. the St. Scholastica Day riot of 10 Feb 1355.)

- The school itself has a central organising principle and mission, which many other intentional communities lack.

- The school has associations with other institutions, organisations, and agencies, some of higher learning, many not, and tends to form strong relationships with government, business, cultural, and religious sectors.

- Since the 19th century, official government recognition of the significance of both higher education and research has resulted in an increasing degree of official sanction and financial support, initially the German Humboldtian model, technical schools (e.g., M.I.T., founded in 1861 in large part to support the U.S. Navy's newfound interest in steam propulsion), land grant universities (organised in the US under national acts of 1862 & 1890), and the modern research university (largely spawned by the Manhattan Project and Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) and formation of the US National Science Foundation, and widely emulated in other countries). In the UK there is a distinction made between the Ancient Universities (Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin), the Red Brick Universities, chartered in the 19th century, the Plate Glass Universities, chartered between 1963 & 1992, and ... whatever comes after. See: <https://www.ukuni.net/articles/types-uk-universities>.

Note that universities themselves don't necessarily make money directly (through tuition), though some are extraordinarily wealthy (e.g., Harvard (~$50 billion), Yale (~$40 billion), Stanford (~$38 billion), Princeton (~$35 billion), see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...>). Those funds tend to come from grants (both government and privately-funded research), alumni donations, and increasingly technology licensing. In the case of Stanford, real estate is a massive contributor. Schools often also benefit from tax breaks and other legislative relief and exemptions.

So, you say, that's really interesting, dred, but how do you translate that to online communities, especially those for which locality and location are not central elements, as they are for brick-and-mortar institutions?

I don't know, though ... I've been pondering just that for a decade or so.

The insight does suggest a few solution-shaped objects and/or characteristics, however:

- A key failing of venerable fora is that the membership often becomes exceedingly stale. Not only do new members fail to arrive, but the more interesting and dynamic members of the old guard often leave as both the noise floor rises and the clue ceiling drops. Reward for participation simply decreases. Universities subvert this by pumping fresh students through. I suspect HN's YC affiliation and fresh founder classes in part aids HN in this regard.

- A forum is almost certainly not a freestanding enterprise but an adjunct to another institution or set of institutions. Again, HN serves, but does not profit, YC.

- Universities are mission rather than profit driven, and both teaching and research are a key element of that mission. This ... plays poorly with the notion of a VC-funded online community start-up. Ezra Klein in a podcast on media earlier this year noted that a key challenge in organising new ventures is that the profit motive and VC / investor interests tend to conflict strongly with journalism's prerogatives.[1]

- Several of the most successful previous online communities formed either directly through or closely affiliated with educational institutions. The Internet itself, email, and Usenet directly, Facebook originated on the campus (and with the student body) of the most selective-admission university in the world, and I'd argue that Slashdot's early tech-centric membership was at least strongly academic-adjacent.

- Universities are focused not only on the present moment, that is, streams, but on accumulated wisdom and knowledge. Here, HN is less a model than, say, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, in which something of a community forms through the editor community which creates (and fights over) the informational resources being created. Wikipedia doesn't quite have a social network, though various discussion pages and sections approach this.

- On the "small" bit, there's both a selective-admissions and graduation element that academia shows. That is, you don't just let anybody in, and, after they've "completed the course", they're graduated and moved on, with the exception, again, of faculty and staff. Just how that translates to an online community I'm not entirely sure.

- Another element of the "small" bit is that universities are organised: into colleges (that is, interest areas), departments (specific faculty), courses (specific topics of study or interest) and sections, that is, specific groups or meetings of students for lecture and/or discussion. Individual class size is a key dynamic, and much of the experience of the past 75 years or so shows the challenges of scaling lectures and the profoundly different characteristics of a small seminar (say, 5--15 students), a modest upper-division class (25--30), and moderate-to-large lectures (50 -- 1,000 or more students). Strong interactivity is sharply curtailed above about 15 students, and the options for interactivity above about 50--100 are near nil. Choosing how groups are organised, who's permitted in, and what size limits exist, as well as communications between various divisions (sections, courses, departments, colleges, universities) all come into play, as I see it.

And then there's politics. One of the notorious elements of universities is how various divisions rival amongst one another, gatekeep, define what is in (or out) of a specific discipline's remit, resist challenging new concepts, and form cliques and fads ... just like any human domain, only more so. I have a nagging suspicion that online communities might in fact have similar tendencies, and that these would also have to be subverted somewhat to avoid pathological development.

There are a whole slew of other factors --- techical capabilities, UI/UX, online abuse, legal issues, privacy and identity, spam, propaganda, surveillance, censorship, etc. So many dumb ways to die.

________________________________

Notes:

1. "How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...> Which is to say: unless you're planning a pure-play advertising monetisation model, which is to say, the Sidam Touch (advertising turns everything to shit), you won't get funding.

Who on earth is their audience? I feel like as kids in the early aughts we already perceived Ebaum's as a sort of second fiddle reposter site to the primary sources we found dumb internet stuff. It's crazy to me they're still running all this time later.

More power to 'em, honestly.

Mandatory: https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/ebaumsworld

I can't believe the actual animation of this isn't on youtube.

And yeah, phpBB has improved. One site I've been on for a good 15+ years is running on it and it's got some decent features.

You have to first pick a server to join, then join that server. Once in, you're typically presented with local server content only. To see federated content, you have to select "All". Same story with looking at communities. Local first, All by selection only.

You then have problems with the style of Federation. If I create a community one Lemmy instance called tech then you create the tech community on another, we now have two tech communities separate from each other. Given your default community view is local, this presents a problem. You've already got a lemmy.ml technology community along with a beehaw.org technology community. It can quickly spiral into a mess of unintentional duplication.