Reddit AskHistorians ceases participation indefinitely | Hacker News Reader

Reddit AskHistorians ceases participation indefinitely

old.reddit.com

65 pointsantman16 comments

I don’t think Reddit has the strong position it thinks it has. Ultimately, Reddit is a waste of time for many people. Sure, there are helpful aspects of the product, but ultimately engagement is mainly driven by smartphone addiction and peoples’ impulsive nature to consume content. The helpful aspects of Reddit are being increasingly served by Discord communities. If Reddit is going to be so user-hostile, why not switch to a more user-friendly platform? Is that not how Reddit gained popularity over Digg?

As a side note from someone who has developed nascent products: a user is a precious thing. Having even a single individual spend their time using your product should be considered an honor. Nothing good comes from disrespecting that.

My suspicion is, reddit leadership wants to cash in even more on the smartphone addiction - hence the ongoing tiktokification through r/all and the heavy push to control the UX (first by promoting the app, now by locking out 3rd-party clients).

From the UI changes and priorities I've seen so far, I wouldn't be surprised if the endgame is to just have a tiktok-like stream with a mix of cat pictures, cyclically repeated rage-inducer questions from r/askreddit, r/amitheasshole or r/relationship_advice, mixed with some tabloid news and shitposts/memes.

Never mind the quality of the content as long as you have eyeballs.

For that you don't need any actual communities either.

Out of curiosity. How is Discord a more helpful platform? I find it odd since it’s a more synchronous medium. Also, finding stuff from the past or adding thoughts to an older thread “for posterity” is a lot harder. So why do you think has it gotten so popular for these use cases?

This was an unparalleled resource of quality succinct analysis and conversations.

I get the need to be profitable, but damn we are going to lose a lot of resources. The value is almost always in the comments. From this to askreddit in general, to geopolitics and so many others.

This is especially true here on HN, I find the comments to be of amazing value.

Yes, there’s no real need to be profitable to the point of killing the golden goose.

Only institutionalized greed and an absurd belief in infinite growth.

I guarantee by next week most subs will be open again, forcibly or otherwise.

I don't think anyone has a reasonable belief otherwise. Part of the point is to make reddit take that drastic of an action against its own users by removing mods and forcing subreddits to reopen.

The average user won't think about it as a drastic action at all because they will neither know nor care about the blackouts and subsequent re-openings.

They will even the subs become a cesspool of spam and low effort content

No, of course Reddit will recruit mods before they forcibly retake the subs and demod the current mods.

I don’t use Reddit, but I did occasionally read Ask Historian threads when they were linked from other places on the internet:

Good luck trying to find the actual historians that made the subreddit worth visiting (many often mods themselves, I presume) once said mods are demoted and policies are changed.

The AskHistorians mods themselves have said that there's no alternative. One way or another, they will be back. As for the rest of the subs that do not need subject matter experts, like r/funny, their demodding will not matter.

I wouldn't be surprised too much if Reddit (or others) would begin pumping GPT conversations onto dead subs like this one to make it look real.

It seems likely this will happen more and more.

If you want to jump ship, I made an extension that deletes your Reddit posts and comments: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...

Let me know if you end up trying it. I'm still working on it.

The other two I've seen mentioned frequently are:

- https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit

- https://redact.dev/services/reddit

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