Hacker News Reader

Comment by mathieuh | Hacker News Reader

This sounds ridiculous even to me, but it’s a strange feeling to see the death of Reddit. It’s the only quasi-social network I’ve used for a decade, and there are many communities that I feel at home in.

It’s almost like grief, or feeling untethered somehow.

View on HN

Honestly I'm taking this as an excuse to quit Reddit completely.

It eats around 60 to 90 minutes of my days, which realistically means I spend 10% of the time I'm awake on Reddit.

I've already eliminated all the other socials and that has been very good for me, my mental health, my productivity, now it's time to move from Reddit too.

Besides, the user experience on the website has been nothing but degrading for years, so they making this quite simple for me to do.

> I've already eliminated all the other socials and that has been very good for me

You do understand that you are posting this to hacker news right?

HN isn't in the business of collecting my data, distracting me as much as possible and showing me ads.

My HN usage is quite low and acceptable as I often find work-related content.

Hacker News is a news aggregator.

Yet here we are in the comments.

Hacker News is a Reddit clone that PG wrote because subreddits didn’t exist yet and he wanted to write an application in Arc.

Hacker News is what I refer to as The last bastion of the "Old Internet".

Like back when the internet was a thing that people actually had to put effort into participating in so the average quality of content and engagement was consistently high more often than it was low.

Back when you actually had forums dedicated to single areas of interest, run by people who were interested in that thing "just coz".

I feel like Hacker News is literally the last little glint of light in a sea of seething darkness... it makes me nostalgic for the internet we had and lost.

Almost all that is good on the internet these days are holdovers from the Web 1.0 era. Everything else seems to crumble under commercial interests and withers in sea of ads and IPOs.

Ironic that it’s funded and maintained by one of the main organisations responsible for what you’re talking about.

It makes me wonder how Neopets is doing these days.

I spend most of my time on historicbridges.org it's very old internet!

Projectilepoints.net too!

Reddit is better than other social media because it doesnt ask for phone number, and HN is better yet because it doesnt even ask for email.

Reddit asks for email but it's not required. They use dark patterns to make it seem like it's required though.

good to know)

Same here. Time to go back to reading books and talking to people.

>Time to go back to reading books and talking to people.

Bold strategy. How is it going so far?

Yeah, this seems like a good thing really, to break the addiction. It's easy to get caught up in doom-scrolling.

It's definitely surreal.

Will apathy help Reddit to succeed? Will users and communities end this protest and go back to business as usual?

Will Reddit buckle under pressure and go back on the API changes?

Is this the beginning of the end?

Or will Reddit drastically change because of this and it will be unrecognisable in the years to come?

It's an interesting time.

> Will users and communities end this protest and go back to business as usual?

Maybe. It's hard to get back to business as usual when your usual client just stops working. We'll see how people adapt. I'm not sure I want to install the official reddit app.

Switching apps may as well switch sites too.. I've already got Jerboa installed, trying to see if content picks up there enough for it to remain interesting. Definitely some growing pains right now.

> I'm not sure I want to install the official reddit app.

You probably don't as most requests that app makes, are tracking requests. And they clutter the app so much, it's basically unusable with all the ads and broken video players.

To add to this, the app downloads a significant chunk of data because of its inefficiencies. Not ideal for tight budget data plans.

> Will Reddit buckle under pressure and go back on the API changes?

If they do, it won't be for several months and only if there's a drop in traffic that looks to be permanent. The protest itself won't change anything.

A change in the API certainly makes sense (OpenAI showed the value of the reddit's comment data, and I think spez is pissed that OpenAI is not only profitable, in a large part due to the availability of reddit's comment data, but because OpenAI is run by another reddit co-founder). And maybe that's the plan all along...

There's an idea that users will hate any change you preset. If you give users minimal-change, they'll hate it and revolt. If you give users drastic-change, they'll hate it and revolt. So give them drastic-change, weather the revolt, then walk back to moderate-change and by-in-large they'll accept it.

I think a large part of my grief of Reddit is the vast amount of knowledge and usefulness that's there. I use it as a hub of information far more than I use it as social media, and yes a lot of that may still be accessible (especially with archive) but the creation of that content dies today.

Yes! I've been leech blocking Reddit the past couple of days and I intend to keep doing so until I've broken the habit of absent mindly typing "Reddit" into a new tab whenever I have brief downtime waiting for something.

But in the mean time I find that search results for things point to Reddit at least as often as stack exchange.

> This sounds ridiculous even to me, but it’s a strange feeling to see the death of Reddit.

The reports of Reddit's death are greatly exaggerated.

I imagine everything will go back to the status quo as soon as this protest is over. The mods have no real leverage, and a temporary outage like this isn't going to suddenly make a bunch of people switch to some other site.

The mods have all the leverage. They’re literally volunteer workers, they can quit their duties with no real downsides.

>I imagine everything will go back to the status quo as soon as this protest is over. The mods have no real leverage, and a temporary outage like this isn't going to suddenly make a bunch of people switch to some other site.

I don't think reddit will be dead by the end of the year or anything quite like that. But we know from past studies (using that API, heh) that a very tiny percentage of site visitors post content. I think it was something like 10% of visitors are logged in, 1% of visitors comment regularly, and 0.01% post content. But something like 90% of the content is from only 1% of the users who post content, so the 0.01% isn't even that important, it's the 0.0001% who drive the site. And there's a lot of cross over between these power users who post all the content and the moderators of the largest subreddits.

So what will happen when the power users quit the platform? It's not just that lots of communities will go unmoderated and shutdown (if their mods don't shut them down first), but a lot of the content will dry up.

Now, vacuums fill and naturally any void left by the power users leaving will be filled by others who start posting, but that could very well be the beginning of the end. We saw this with Digg. There were several mass exoduses from digg to reddit and other sites that caused the quality of digg content to get worse and worse for the 3 or 4 years before Digg v4 put the final nail in the coffin. Had Digg kept old.digg running along side digg v4 it might have continued to suck for many more years, but Digg's influence on internet culture was decidedly in decline before Digg v4.

And that I think is what we'll see with reddit. Many communities will collapse, content will reduce in quality, and the slow attrician will begin. It won't disappear in a year or 3, but it won't be nearly as important in a couple of years as it is today. Remember when "slashdotted" was a term?

The big questions is "where will the users go?" When digg was fucking up, there was already reddit. Can fediverse link aggregators (lemmy, kbin.social, etc) really serve as a replacement? I'm not convinced. I've read there's efforts to make a link aggregator using BlueSky's AT protocol, but that's not yet here.

Read what I posted earlier [1]. tl;dr - everyone knows 2 days isn't enough time for a protest to work unless decision makers are really on the fence.

What it does is to set the terms of the argument. Think 2 days is manageable? How about 30? Or 180. I wonder how good that would feel as you try to close your IPO? That is the threat - that it doesn't ever come back unless it's on better terms and it risks the real golden egg of management - the IPO.

I theorized the best way for management to fight back is to engineer a way for them to claim the threat isn't real (ie, the outages today). We'll see how it impacts the metrics and whether engagement falls off a cliff.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36288240

I don’t think anyone is claiming it’s the death of Reddit. They are going dark for 2 days, then it will be business as usual.

Meh, I wouldn't be so quick to judge. I'm a mod of a several-million-subscriber subreddit (one that's likely highly popular among HN subscribers). When we asked our community if they wanted to join the protest, the answer was a very resounding "yes, but 2 days aren't going to cut it"...

So we're still debating when/IF we're going to return after going dark. To add, all the mods are tired and don't have enough time to dedicate to the subreddit as it is (with mod-tools working, which won't be the case after the API changes). Only time will tell, but we're most likely only reactivating our subreddit once reddit signals clear willingness to ease on their squeeze. By which time a lot of damage (in terms of subscribers moving on) will be done. Also, some of the mods have said they won't come back after this, as this was the final drop in the bucket and they'll delete their account today.

So all in all, there is some hope that this does serious damage to reddit (at this point, they're clearly seen as the enemy by a lot of us). Talking to mods at other very large subreddits, we're not the only ones thinking along these lines.

same here. r/sneerclub (18.5k) wouldn't have joined without overwhelming community support. Only question is whether to come back in two days. Also I think everyone on the sub knows very well it's a complete waste of time lol

Thank you dgerard, you are doing (acausal robot) god's work.

If you don't stay on Reddit where will you go? I'm eager to join communities that are moving to something less user hostile than Reddit. Bonus for anything OSS or federated.

That's not really decided yet. Without going into too much detail, a lot of our moderators are not as engaged as they once were: Eternal September has washed out many of our core contributers long ago, and the subreddit's focus has shifted over the years. Mostly to topics that (IMO) most mods don't care too much about (self-promotion, "beginner friendly content" instead of expert discussion, fluff...). So in my view, most of the subreddit is in strong decline and is just not "the place it used to be". With several million subscribers, I feel like it's very hard to foster a real sense of community. And once you hit a certain popularity, the amount of newcomers will always be larger than the "core", and good content erodes from there. I guess that's true of a lot of reddit, though. We could've tried harder to prevent this (or guide our community), but at the time we felt that "hands off" was a better moderation approach, and now it's likely impossible to change that course.

Anyways, IMO most of the really interesting discussion on the topic happens on twitter already. My best guess is that instead of finding a new home for the subreddit, we'll eventually just either give control to some other body (or reddit takes it from us) or we'll just set the subreddit to public again and let it go its way without being very involved (Most of the current mods weren't really involved anymore anyways). I'd love to find a new place devoted to this topic (twitter definitely sucks for long form discussion), but I haven't found such a place, and don't have the time/energy to set one up myself.

Its /r/machinelearning isn't it?

It will be business as usual until the change of the APIs. Numerous moderation tools use these APIs and with Reddit shutting them down, many subs will be completely overrun with spam.

/u/spez mentioned in the shitshow that was his AMA, that there would be moderation tools provided by Reddit, but nothing in that direction has ever been shown.

So yes, maybe until the end of June it will be as usual, but afterward many parts of the platform will be unusable with the amount of spam and missing moderation.

I remember the Reddit side quoting some very low number on third-party moderation tool use… something like 8% of moderators using third party tools.

Maybe that effect is overstated.

I would assume that a small percentage of mods are doing the vast majority of actual moderating. So the interesting statistic would be the percentage of mod actions performed via third-party tools.

This is a bit similar to Stack Overflow claiming only 11% of mods are participating in the strike there. What they didn't say is that it includes almost all of the active Stack Overflow mods and some community-run anti-spam and moderation tools. So the coverage of actual mod activity is far larger than that number might make you think (and the number is of course outdated as well).

I tracked down the original statistic. CEO u/spez wrote:

> About 3% of mod actions come from third-party apps, and we’ve reached out to communities who moderate almost exclusively using these apps to ensure we address their needs.

At this point I wouldn’t trust anything he says also, we’ve heard them say that time and time again with no real/good changes so I have no clue why we’d expect it now.

It’s similar to how the API is limited compared to what the official app can do and lacks many basic features (streaming or callbacks) that are needed to avoid polling it. They’ve said before that if they started charging there would be improvements to the API. Where are they? Are developers supposed to take them on faith/trust? I’m pretty sure Reddit has burned what little of that they have left.

> About 3% of mod actions come from third-party apps, and we’ve reached out to communities who moderate almost exclusively using these apps to ensure we address their needs.

I wouldn't be shocked if that's because third party bots are counted in there, and in terms of sheer scale of spam etc that is 80+ of mod actions.

Huffman has a very good reason to use figures in a misleading way to downplay the impact here.

And how many of these 8% are in the top XX millions user subreddit, how many of the 92% are moderators of the infinite list of < 200 users subreddit ?

Reddit is highly addicting but usually brings me little joy. Most of the time when I'm just browsing the front page I don't laugh or learn anything particularly useful.

But in a web full of bots and SEO blogspam, it's refreshing to have a place that is predominantly filled with content and comments by real people. Sure, it has tons of low effort posts and comments, but it's one of the few places on the Internet where you can ask a question about nearly any topic and get tons of answers from real people, and due to its voting system, in certain subreddits about specific enough topics, quality answers rise to the top.

As a tool, Reddit is indispensable due to how bad SEO spam has gotten. If I want an answer written by a human who probably has no financial incentive to lie, adding site:reddit.com to my searches is by far the quickest way to do so. For certain topics, it's not just the quickest, but the only way certain information can be found.

If Reddit dies or (more likely) becomes useless due to poor moderation, it's not hard to imagine us entering a new chapter of the Information Age. Many local newspapers no longer exist, and many magazines covering more niche topics have also shut down. People gladly share their experiences and discoveries on Reddit because they know many people will see it (easier to get motivated to write long posts if you know someone will read them.) Will people be willing to put that effort into writing on their own blogs? Many won't, as no one will even know it exists (before you could share your blog on Reddit!) Even if someone still goes through the effort of writing quality content on a blog or self-hosted site, again, it will be very difficult for anyone to find it due to SEO spam.

This is such a stupid situation they've put themselves in. I get that they want to show ads, but I don't think ads not being shown is why people use 3rd party apps. On desktop, I'd rather use old.reddit.com with ads than new Reddit without ads: new Reddit is buggier, slower and shows less content. And they trivially could have added the features mods wanted that are offered by the 3rd party apps. No one would use 3rd party apps if the official one wasn't so slow, buggy and lacking.

I understand the advantages of not having so much of the Internet's content all on one site, but I'm just not convinced the average user is going to switch to decentralized/federated/peer-to-peer social networks. People may stop using Twitter, but most of those former users aren't going to start using Mastodon. Likewise, people may stop using Reddit, but I don't think they're going to start using Lemmy or any of the other alternatives. As far as random forums go, discoverability is going to be an incredibly difficult, and in any case it's far easier for a user with little technical knowledge to start a subreddit vs starting and maintaining a forum.

I dread to think how much of my life I've wasted on Reddit. But for all its faults, I think it has added a lot of value, and I think the Internet would be a worse place without it.

> but I'm just not convinced the average user is going to switch to decentralized/federated/peer-to-peer social networks.

This is probably true. We could still be using USENET, or at least something built on netnews, but we aren't. I don't know what it would realistically take to get traction into a durably federated system again.

> discoverability is going to be an incredibly difficult

I'm not sure, how are you doing discovery now (and what sort of content are you looking to discover)? I don't really sub to subreddits, so much as I just end up at posts through google searches. That should still function fine. For example, as an owner of a Honda Shadow motorcycle, I didn't have any trouble finding hondashadow.net --- most good quality google results regarding those machines come from there. And given the quality of the content, I eventually decided it would be a good idea to join up. I imagine without reddit/discord/<insert similar here>, this type of situation would be common.

On the other hand, if you're looking for a feed aggregator to passively discover interesting new posts, that might be harder. RSS, if built into common forum software, could be leveraged here...

If what you're looking for is a master list of communities to browse/join, USENET had a not unreasonable structure, mostly. But we're back to the federated problem.

> and in any case it's far easier for a user with little technical knowledge to start a subreddit vs starting and maintaining a forum.

This is a sticking point =(

> SEO spam

Add to that the developing situation regarding AI generated soup, and... well, I'm not sure how things will settle, but it definitely throws a wrench into any dreams of paradise.

If subreddits that went dark come back in few days no-one will remember this. If they go dark for a long time that is another story.

"untethered" is right for me.

I'm backing the effort by not even landing on reddit. And it's odd. I have found reddit to be helpful over the (now many) years.

I'm coming to the conclusion that capitalism destroys social media for me by causing the business to make it unpalatable to me. Oh well. I'm sure I'll survive without it.

"enshittification", per Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

an instance of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall

Ha! Great link.

I legitimately think it's possible that a properly managed "for the profit of the investors" social media company will always follow this path.

It's why I think the right future for social media is non-profit. None of this is amazing technology anymore. This would also have the benefit that it would take the question of "how do we avoid doing harm while still making profit off the table." Could write a statement of values and intent that legitimately puts well being of users and society ahead of everything else. (Which no for-profit with externally raised capital is able to do today.)

I gave up on Reddit during the corona years when pleading with people to not create a QR-code underclass got me banned, permanently, from my national subreddit.

This isn't some major subreddit run by the same mod cabal either.

Reddit moderation is a poisoned chalice. It attracts the worst kind of people and pushes out the best.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com