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Comment by headcanon | Hacker News Reader

I won't go so far as to say that this is Reddit's death-knell since they've been through a lot of controversies before, and I'm sure their business will do just fine in the future, but its clear to me at this point the direction they want to take the site is continually diverging from what I want it to be.

To be honest, I'm a bit thankful that they are finally doing this. Shutting down Apollo is making me realize I'm the frog in boiling water as they try to turn it into TikTok. With this move, they turned up the temperature a bit too fast, and this is my queue to jump out.

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This post screams classic Friday afternoon news dump to me. But at this point, it doesn't really matter. I'm beginning to grow very tired of Reddit. When I signed up almost 9 years ago, it felt like a community where I was surrounded by others who were genuinely curious, helpful, and smarter than me. Now it feels like a slightly better Facebook, even if you exclude the constantly interjected political comments. The HN community feels to me today what Reddit felt like 9 years ago.

I genuinely don’t know where I’d head next if HN shut down or otherwise jumped the shark. FB was never a viable option for me, Twitter got Musked, and Reddit never held much appeal. Guess I’d have to learn how to Mastodon.

Mastodon isn't a replacement for forums. People mostly toot past each other; threads don't happen that much. When threads get big they are hard to follow; there is no easily discernible tree structure.

Back to Slashdot?

Digg sits up in its grave and looks around.

Let's go back to usenet :)

Mastodon.

Many old redditors are jumping to https://tildes.net it feels like old reddit, don't know which direction it would go. It is invite only.

Anyone know where to get an invite? Sounds like something I'd quite like to participate in.

https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes#how-can-i-get-invo...

Would love an invite too! Looks like a great community

This looks very promising. I'm surprised this is my first time hearing of it.

They're setting up for the forthcoming IPO.

I guess it's a classic move out of the IPO playbook at this point to gain content and users via third party clients and then turn around and eliminate them by killing their API access entirely and/or making it prohibitively expensive.

Seems like a weird move by someone who's been at Reddit since the beginning and presumably understands its users well to me though.

We'll see how it works out for them...

I don't pay a lot of attention to things like revenue and the amount of active users, but I think that by those metrics Huffman has been a pretty successful CEO. It looks like he regrets selling Reddit so cheap the first time, and has had growth as his main objective since returning as CEO. I guess taking in a lot of venture capital pretty much forced him to do that as well. New Reddit and the official apps has brought in a lot of new users, while changing what the site is. I don't think they value their old users particularly high, there's probably not a lot of them compared to the whole user base, and getting rid of them is a calculated move.

I think you're right on the mark. Reddit doesn't want the old users who used it like an internet forum. Reddit wants to be another Instagram, TikTok, etc. As a business it's the "right" choice and the only way to make their investors money.

It's a shame we're losing the biggest internet forum, but it's been on this trajectory for a long time anyway.

> It's a shame we're losing the biggest internet forum, but it's been on this trajectory for a long time anyway.

But that's what so great about reddit compared to the other big social media platforms: hard delineation by interest groups (subreddits).

Instagram, and any others (AFAIK) do not have anything like this feature. It's all just a jumbled mess of user-to-user connections.

I wouldn't say we're "losing the biggest internet forum" there. They can still make reddit more mainstream without old communities having to change much, right?

Not really - the official clients constantly push content in which I (for one) have no interest, in the name of “engagement”.

I won’t stand for it, and have just stopped using Reddit - mostly passively, but occasionally posting. Without a user-respective native client that follows system conventions and does not push garbage, the service is just not worth using.

> Not really - the official clients constantly push content in which I (for one) have no interest, in the name of “engagement”.

Where are you getting that on reddit? I don't think I've ever seen content that's not normal posts in my subreddits. [Maybe it's been there the whole time but ad blocked away or something so I'm just never seeing it?]

I don't use r/popular, r/news, r/all, etc much if they're doing something different there.

If you don't follow a lot of subreddits, then they regularly pester you to follow some, or a stupid live stream of something or the other, or other similar stuff designed to increase "engagement".

I hate engagement.

Isn't explicit subreddit-level engagement and information organization incredibly valuable for targeting/monetization?

imo, it like they're disorganizing the site to undermine and eventually cut out independent moderators, to avoid the business risk that is actively playing out.

>It's a shame we're losing the biggest internet forum

I'm looking forward to that. back in the day it was "normal" to have topic related forums/communities. walled-garden-groups on social media and centralized solutions like reddit killed those, because they were easier to set up and manage. but the community was no longer really owned by someone from that community.

> ... has had growth as his main objective since returning as CEO. I guess taking in a lot of venture capital pretty much forced him to do that as well.

Venture capital is a hell of a drug.

Tumblr didn't go down because of the controversies , and there were many. It went down because it was hostile to pornography

the key wasnt the pornography, but the kinds of people who post what tubmlr CATGORIZED as pornography. everything from queer communities, sex education, and people who post a variety of things only SOME of which was nsfw. by alienating those people who were the core of the community that existed there, they drove out the community forming elements that existed on the site in the first place.

I still find it hard to believe that they only banned "female presenting" nipples. If a man posted his nipple on the site it was fine, at least after appealing the moderation decision, but if I woman did it? Banned.

cue: a prompt or timed call to action queue: an ordered collection of people/things waiting their turn

s/queue/cue/

This was my queue as well, now I am here. I'm excited to spend far less time on Reddit.

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