Going forward, are there any good comprehensive alternatives to reddit?
I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere.
But some others have still been the best places to get early information on certain topics. For example /r/stablediffusion had a lot of people posting their novel uses and techniques for image generation. The QR code topic which is now blowing up here was already being talked about on reddit a week ago.
It's incredibly frustrating to discover a potential new hobby, check out the subreddit, and go to the top posts all time, only to find pages on pages of low-effort crossposted memes that are often barely relatable.
It's also super frustrating being in one of those hyperfocused niche hobby subreddits and getting memes, and people treat you like some sort of wet blanket if you voice any opposition to low-effort content.
I moderated a cycling community (r/mtb) that grew to about a quarter million subscribers and I had a really difficult time keeping the low effort content at bay.
When communities grow to a certain size they lose their niche audience, and lowest common denominator posts bubble to the top and drown out quality content.
Even for cycling, there are about 8 subs that I'm on, and one out of the bunch is strictly focused on serious fitness & performance discussions, whereas the rest are sort of free-for-alls loosely based on the subreddit's sub-genre.
If there are no subs within the subs, might just gotta suck it up and scroll past the memes. Or start a discussion and find like-minded folks to branch off.
The easiest solution seems to be to allow filtering of content based on tags. In most cases, the memes were tagged as such. Had I been able to simply say, "Don't show content with the `meme` tag," I probably would have spent a good deal more time on reddit, browsing and contributing.
Something similar happened to me in the bicycle space, which turns out to have a lot of forum activity as well. Seems some of the oldguard never switched to Reddit in the first place in both communities.
One niche hobby sub I’m part of grew over 120x due to the pandemic. The mods cracked down hard but it had the side effect of suppressing quality conversations as well.
I think they found a good balance but you forget how big the sub is now until some meme slips through the cracks, and has 10x the number of upvotes compared to usual posts.
I’d say that Reddit used to be like that, but that they’ve been actively undermining that, because that’s not what they want to be any more. New Reddit (2018, I think) showed that they really don’t care about that aspect.
New Reddit forces post lists to be massive space-wasting and thumbnailed stuff. On my laptop’s screen, it tends to fit about one and a half items per screen, and is clearly oriented around doom scrolling: consuming content. When you view a post, you can see about six comments at once, mostly only top-level ones with occasional second-level ones. Actually, it seems they might have improved it recently: last time I tried it, I think you couldn’t get it to display beyond third-level, and it would only expand one level at a time, whereas now it seems to expand more at once (though it’s still way too aggressive in its collapsing) and go up to fourth-level before going deeper takes you to a single comment thread view with hopelessly bad history management that makes anything but always opening in new tabs just about completely broken. Anyway, they’ve severely hobbled the threaded comments system, because they’re optimising for massive subreddits where comments average vapid. Basically, anti-community.
By contrast, Old Reddit fit about a dozen items per screen, and required action to see an item at anything but a tiny size (70×70 or so), because it cared more about the comments thread. And it tends to fit about a dozen comments on my screen, and you can actually view nested comment threads meaningfully, and it all just works way better. Because it cared more about community.
Communities depend on a much better commenting system than New Reddit wants to let you have. HN and Old Reddit are both way better.
I’m fairly involved in r/rust. If Old Reddit ever disappears, so does my remaining use of Reddit, because I don’t think you can maintain a decent community without it.
Reddit are forsaking their link discovery and community discussion roots, and becoming just mass social media and memes, and they’re making major technical decisions which enforce this, even for the subreddits that want things the way they used to be.
Before I used reddit, I had an account at an Audi forum, a different account at a tennis forum etc.. Reddit is so much better. I'd rather some 'bluesky'-like competitor vs every community going their own way.
I feel like I've seen the opposite, generally- there was always kind of a tension between serious posts and memes, but in the past few years it seems to have become much more common to see subreddits with a counterpart strictly for memes (/r/chess and /r/anarchychess being a recently popular example).
Why should your posts on r/knitting and r/samurai be linked together in the same account? How often are people seeing the same person across Reddit communities and it ends up being helpful?
The orangered inbox and tracking of karma on Reddit provide some encouragement to use a single site for this all, but can we solve that in diffuse communities? Is karma actually a benefit to users, or should it be hidden anyways?
I don't think much thought goes into hosting on reddit or elsewhere. The people who like reddit, setup on reddit, the people who like Discord setup on Discord.
In the absence of reddit, I have no clue where many would go, there's no obvious place I would go.
- I (and/or my community) wants/doesn't mind psuedo-anonymity.
- I want a community that can quickly grow, not bound by region
- It should be easy to share links
- It should be easy to setup a longer form discussion
Discord for example would probably only satisfy 2/4 conditions.
But yes, there is no one glove fit all replacement as of now. If only because most new alternatives can't satisfy item #2 without some major money being put into advertisement.
With that said, I opened up https://communick.news on the weekend to try out Lemmy and I wouldn't mind having a few hundred of you there to help me bootstrap it.
Realistically, most Reddit users don’t want that and won’t migrate to smaller niche communities. Smaller niche communities that currently exist are way better than the Reddit versions 9/10.
I always called it a low effort forum of forums. Low effort because all you need is one account and you can wander about and annoy people in any community. But that was reddits strength - you didn't need to register and keep track of different accounts and sites.
> I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere.
The issue with focused reddits is once all the interesting shit has been posted and questions have been answered, where is the value in the community? At that point the sub has saturated and cant grow and the members are bored so memes and shitposts take over. I mean how many times can the same "n00b here - how do I dive into X" question be answered before users either ignore them, down-vote them or tell them to search the forum for similar answers already posted? Its stagnation that any community will face.
The memes and jokes have gotten so poor they just look plain stupid. A majority of the AskReddit posts are useless questions posted by kids and teens that make no value and only get posted to make the OP's look "cool". That said, it was once a good way to get news, and now with the stupid commercial push by the company it has now lost almost all of its status
The tech focused can move elsewhere, but smaller communities with not so many tech savvy users will probably stick to where it’s more convenient.
New Reddit needs to have a better way to sort this content out. Maybe extra arrows for funny/not funny?
Facebook groups had a really great interface that I thought worked well.
There are still Forums out there running phpBB.
I think the ultimately a replacement if one is found should be easy to use and easy to find information in.
1. Link Discovery 2. Discussion
There are a few options for Link Discovery. I have a bunch of fora and sites hooked up to an rss reader (the old reader, since google shutdown reader) which does pretty well (although I'd like it to do a bit more). The link discovery thing is like the equivalent of having channels on your TV. You can stream any program (website) of a huge number but a channel gives you a reason to think about a specific one right now. I've been looking at https://pinboard.in/popular/, but it doesn't support rss which is a shame.
There's really nothing to compare with reddit for discussion of the links though (and that includes scoring and karma and responses etc). And a big part of that is because of network effects. Reddit is where the discussion is happening, because it's where the people are because it's where the discussion is happening. What's really awkward here is that some of the alternatives have ended up as seeding around communities that were too toxic for mainstream reddit. That toxicity will make it harder for them to grow.
I do find myself wondering what a system that connected my rss feed reader with global comments about webpages might look like.
You see this on subreddits such as /r/IdiotsInCars and /r/Earthporn.
The former allows the user to upload videos while the latter is for images. This helps the user have a more pleasant experience because it reduces/eliminates
- popup fatigue (worldstar, local news sites, etc.), - back button hijacking (CNN, local news sites, etc.), and - walled gardens (NYT, Newyorker, WSJ, etc.).
I think reddit could encourage their users to attribute (some if not most would) by adding an optional source (sauce) link field to post forms. Might be nice to have a way the OP/mod could approve a crowd-sourced source edit.
It got to the point where I don't bother unfolding the video unless it's embedded.
Reddit is a low-effort replacement for traditional forums, solving several problems of traditional forums:
1. One account for all communities. Nobody wants to make 100 accounts, whereas it's really easy to just click "join" and start participating in a new subreddit.
2. Consistent, uniform, familiar interface with Markdown for text. The old PHPBB etc. forums all had different layouts and slightly incompatible markup. And Discourse is just weird.
3. Easy to stay "casually engaged" with the community because of the customized per-user front page and the ability to group communities together with multireddits. Whereas with individual forums, you need to get email notifications or manually check several different sites to stay connected, which is much higher-effort. Also, it's easy to passively follow a low-population subreddit in the hope that it gains more users, while you're much less likely to make a new account on a forum that seems quiet. This helps keep the appearance of a high active population in niche communities, because people are less likely to forget about the community and can easily drop in and out.
4. Easy discovery of new communities and being a name brand makes it easy to attract users: people just assume a subreddit for X exists. The alternative is that they'd have to hunt around for a forum that will probably be low-population anyway.
5. Upvoting and downvoting helps the community moderate spam and bad actors. It also creates incentives to post content, in the hope that you get upvotes. Yes, there are problems with the system, but I think "the market has spoken" to some extent on this: the individual enjoyment of voting outweighs the systemic incentive problems associated with it.
It's easy to say that Reddit is "just" the two things that you mentioned, but that to me is reductionist to the point where it obfuscates why people prefer Reddit for discussion compared to other options.
Note that Discord has many of the same advantages over its alternatives, and I think similar points are relevant for both platforms.
THIS. i have seen so many people put Discord forward the last couple weeks a reddit replacement, and have wondered what they were thinking. Its a totally different format. The two formats can compliment each other but can't replace each other. its like saying sms is replacement for email because they are both text based messaging services.
I never understood this point. Reddit provides zero discoverability.
Newsblur has this. It would probably be fine with more people. Occasionally there's something interesting, but usually there's no much of anything.
It's a cluttered user experience, though fairly configurable once you've started to find your way around. It's definitely a kitchen sink style tool, however.
EDIT: It's bottom left, sorry. I browse the web in a mirror.
But the main problem I've run into for link discovery is the voting system. If you actually want a distributed system counting votes becomes expensive fast.
I don't think replacing Reddit is just about throwing a toolbox at the problem
I don't think they necessarily have to be the same thing, but the voting for links to bring quality ones to the top, and the choosing of which site to be looking at today is very much like having a TV channel.
Lots of people find themselves watching films that are being aired on specific channels, despite the fact that they had access to that film for years on a streaming service and didn't watch it. I think of the link discovery aspect of Reddit as similar to an aggregated DJ or TV channel.
To some extent, this is what Artifact.news is doing though it's mostly mainstream news right now.
They have a neat feature that aggregates comments across different articles covering the same topic.
I think this might be pretty close to what you're looking for. It's an RSS feed reader with a platform for discussions.
Love this.
Lemmy is the best-known in that list, but Kbin and lotide both look pretty promising, too - making my decision of which to spin up as a personal instance much more challenging :)
I'd encourage anyone to at least check them out.
We can look for and/or build Reddit substitutes, but just my 2c, this is a fine prompt to question not just the instantiation but the concept itself.
I have better luck online. Heck, I had better luck in mobile game guilds. And the pandemic honestly made things even worse, worse in a way that has longer term effects than I ever predicted.
I can have a whole multi-post rant about the fall of social hubs, the futility of Meetups, and simply the difficulties of a late 20's male trying to find a friend group their age, but that's probably too tangential for a post asking about online communities.
This person has been thinking hard about this: https://twitter.com/Prigoose, https://prigoose.substack.com/
I've never been happier having stopped using it!
most of the political/activist/policy-driven discussions on reddit have no impact on the real world and lots of energy is just dissipated into typing that goes in to a db and no further
case in point...most local subs are mobilized against NIMBYs...but NIMBYs tend to voice their concerns at City Council meetings (where it matters), not on the internet...guess who wins?
reddit just takes the energy out of activism and dissipates it
To talk about media, hobbies, and maybe even to foster professional skills. I feel those were the most valuable communities.
1. Public: these would be democratically run forums. The users would actually be able to vote for moderators, and perhaps even rules around them. This would be ideal for things like r/[country] or r/[city].
2. Private: these would be traditional forums run by the people who found them. It should also be possible for the "person" who runs it to be a corporation or similar group.
3. Personal: This would be a users own "twitter" like feed.
Other things I think would be needed are:
1. The owning company be a foundation like wikipedia, run as a non-profit.
2. The data and code should be open, so that if anything happens a clone could be setup.
3. Site wide minimal content rules set by the owning foundation. There are some things that should not be allowed at all.
4. Built in trainable AI agents. Moderation is a huge task and I believe it's on the site to supply appropriate tools. By trainable agents, I mean efficiently integrated machine learning models that moderations can personally update and train per sub to help them enforce the rules.
See how the alt right infiltrates gaming groups. The reasonable voices are outnumbered and taken over.
Goes both ways (if you insist to use the traditional political compass). GCJ is a perfect example of that. I use the "terminally online" word for these people rather.
Sure GCJ and other overly leftist subs are annoying. But there is a world of difference of spamming “[video game] is secretly about trans fem boy communism” by GCJ types. Vs alt right groups talking about (real life) minorities not deserving equal rights.
Subjectively, I avoid any overly politically forced sub. However let’s not push the “both sides” argument.
But also, this could be an excellent platform to experiment and discover systems that DO work. I think it's worth trying in any case, as the status quote already "doesn't work" in an even worse way. Special interest groups grab control and there is no way at all to unseat them.
In my view, terminally online interest groups are responsible for the current protests against Reddit. Several of the smaller low traffic area-specific subs that I frequent have been taken offline (some threatening permanently).
For better or worse, the best moderating schemes on a moderately large group is via a paid position. At least there a mod has a "boss" that you can hope to appeal to should they abuse their power. May not always work but it's more security than hoping an admin pays attention to a subreddit's drama.
I always envisioned some kind of reddit where you could simply appeal moderation actions through a dedicated report system and if some mod goes above and beyond a certain threshold of reports, the community gets to vote on booting them out
So, if that's your thing, check it out. If it's not, probably not a good fit and the "better approach" to moderation probably won't go in your favor.
You can have righto subs on it, nobody is going to stop you or ban you. For example in the past they removed moderators of f/communism for excluding users pushing the libertarian flavors of it
Here's TOS
Content Policy
Content is prohibited if it is bigotry i.e.
Promotes white supremacy, queerphobia, transphobia, misogyny, classism, ableism, body shaming, antisemitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, speciesism or age discrimination.
Sexualizes minors or promotes adults having sex with minors.
Trivializes or makes light of rape.
Apologizes for police or military brutality, imperialism, eugenics, genocide.
Apologizes for violence towards children.
Is a pornographic image/video (however, nudity is permitted if it's non-pornographic).
Is wilful copyright infringement (however fair use is acceptable).
Is a "dox" i.e. personally revealing information about a person or persons including but not limited to name, identification number, address, phone number, photograph.
Advocates for arson, bombing and/or killing people.
Is instructions on how to design and/or produce explosives.
tbh how is this different than most subs?
this is a feature, not a bug...it keeps these people out of the real world and glued to their keyboards where their blast radius is limited to their own echo chamber
This is my biggest gripe about Reddit. Unlike hobbies or interests, I can't change my country of birth or (easily change) the city. So when you get banned from a geographical sub, you have no alternative. Some of the moderators have a specific bent of mind, and do not accept any other views. A typical example is /r/india which is totally under the control of radical anti-Modi mods. I got even banned from there for posting in another sub _that had been recommended to me by Reddit's algorithm_ !
Most geographical subs are extremely liberal leaning. I'm from Hungary and in /r/hungary pretty much 99% of the posts are anti-Orban. Same with /r/europe pushing the general federalist EU agenda [0]. Or just /r/politics for the US, good luck going against the MSNBC meta.
0, which ends up funny when the topic is food and suddenly everyone becomes hyper-nationalist
Younger demographic that is somewhat tech savy, is not happy with Orban? I am shocked! How could that be?
I'm not from Hungary but I have low opinion of Orban. All the Hungarians I've talked to had nothing but bad things to say about him. Is he well liked or at least tolerated in Hungary?
I've been banned from my city reddit for simply stating that crime was becoming a problem. I've been banned for supporting trans rights. I've been banned for explaining stock based compensation. For describing and linking to AI tools.
Reddit's moderation system is authoritarian and capricious.
I think it would greatly improve the site if communities using generic terms were instead replaced with disambiguation pages that linked to related communities, and that this process could be triggered automatically so that as terms become generic the communities could be remounted.
You don't get anything like this on big centralized platforms like Twitter or Facebook. If you get banned by their opaque, highly automated moderation systems, you're just out of luck unless you evade the ban. The network effects and the costs of switching off them are just far too high.
Good moderation at scale is impossible[0], and the Reddit/Discord/etc model deals with this pretty decently by leaving most decisions to individual communities.
[0]https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-t...
I'd like to have moderated comments be opt-in. The moderators can exercise their power and label something spam, hateful, or wrong or whatever, and if they do that job well most people will consent to having their perspective limited. But it should always be a choice, and people should be able to choose no censorship at all, or censorship of only the worst content.
Also, the ham radio guys like groups.io, which is where yahoo groups migrated to. There are a lot of groups there on specific things, like Yeasu FT-857D transceiver. Groups.io has per-group file storage, which is handy for this.
Anyway on USENET, you can access it via google groups, but it's a bit non-obvious. Here is an example group:
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.math
But how can you find groups? You click on "all groups and messages" on the top, then enter a search term and hit enter. Then click "outside my org". When I do this for the term "france" it shows "4635 groups outside your organization". Open the list and look for the groups that have "." separators, for example "alt.france".
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.france
The ones without the dot separators are google groups- if you post, the message does not go outside of google. I don't know if you can create a USENET newsgroup through google groups- probably not.
It's kind of crap for discovery, but OK once you have a set of groups you use often.
Edit: actually a better way for discovery is a website like this: http://www.harley.com/usenet/master-list/index.html Once you have the name of the newsgroup, just append it to the groups.google.com/g/ (also the site provides a link).
There are some NNTP servers that are not connected with the wider Usenet that I like (SDF, tildeverse), but of course they suffer from extremely small and niche membership.
How do you browse it, how do you post to it, how is spam prevented?
For USENET, I think I know the answer, but are there other consumption methods that you know of/recommend?
So anyway, on a shell ISP, you read and post news with the "trn" command- "trn" is a text-only newsreader client.
For discovery- well USENET was in the filesystem. So "comp.arch" is located in /usr/spool/news/comp/arch. So you could just "find" and "grep" to discover new groups. Also there was a newsgroups file that had the full list- I forgot the name of this.
For the web today? I know there are for-pay sites, don't know any free ones. Maybe others do. Google groups was kind of good enough if you only frequented a few groups.
You can use https://www.eternal-september.org/ with a newsreader client. See: https://www.maketecheasier.com/best-usenet-newsgroups/
I just tried it with claws-mail. Here is a quick start for Ubuntu (this feels like 1999):
apt-get install claws-mail
claws-mail
it forces you to create a mailbox, don't worry about this (you can delete it later). Once you have the main screen:
Configuration->Create Account
Name of account: USENET
Protocol NEWS (NNTP)
News server: news.eternal-september.org
Check This server requires authentication
Fill in USER ID and Password you got from email after signing up with Eternal September and close.
Now right click on mailbox USENET, select subscribe to newsgroup.Reddit itself received a massive influx of users from Digg after the unpopular Digg v4 change. For me and many others, it was just like Digg but without the bad thing. Admittedly that’s not how Reddit started - in fact, Reddit had been around for 5 years already at that point - but you could say the same thing about Mastodon, which was started in 2016(!), or Lemmy, which was started in 2019.
it makes sense if you were raised in the early 2000's forums. I don't know what framework it was, but there very much was a feel where many sites had the exact same forum UI/UX, just different theming and color. Only difference was who was hosting the site and who browsed it (which would inevitably have some overlap). So migration was almost seemless.
Reddit technically has some ancient open source part out there, but even if you remade the UI/UX, social media in the 2020's is a completely different landscape.
>If you're initial motivation is "this website is doing something bad, so we need to make a similar site that doesn't do that" then you are motivated by a negative emotion, which will only drive you so far. You'll be driven by anger which might get a bunch of new users, but that emotion will fade, and after a while what will you have left?
The theory is that
1. the site's own qualities stand out and you get enough power users to keep content flowing if you hit a certain critical mass. This is the part I have yet to see under "anger", unless you count Reddit itself after Digg.
2. the people are what make a community, so if those people stay you got a community. Of course, this doesn't take into account that some people may simply just leave social media as a whole if the experience isn't already seamless for them. So you create a power vacuum.
Also keep in mind that users =/= website creators. Faster horses and all that; the user don't generally know what they want, simply what makes them comfortable.
Personally, the biggest platform move I've made was the switch from IGN boards (objectively the top 1% of message boards at the time) to Reddit. During the switch it felt completely wrong and different, but as time passed I saw how much more Reddit offered compared to a traditional message board. I hope there's something out there that would make me feel the same with this next transition, but so far I don't see much for me yet. All I can see in the near-term is (hopefully) more productivity.
If you don't have a blog, then you could try what I do, I promise it's minimal effort and easy to maintain and host and it costs nothing financial (except time you use to write)
Go to GitHub, create a repository and tick the checkbox for including README.md.
Then go to README.md and click the Edit icion in the top right corner.
Write into this README.md file whenever you blog, creating a markdown heading with the blog post's title. You could include a date if you want.
Please do this! It's a low tech solution to content to read.
- All posts fully public and google indexed.
- Built-in realtime chat rooms instead of threaded comments on all posts, complete with presence, @mentions, markdown support (check faq)(mobile & desktop web supported currently).
- Trending based on chat activity and time decay.
- Search, notifications, follows, themes, other settings like block a user.
- Focus on simplicity, accessibility, usability.
Previous Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31160302
I'd taken some time off the project over the past several months to focus on regular work/life but still planning to release new features and push the project forward, with an upgrade to chat/presence to be released imminently and long-form posts to follow.
Have been blessed to see people from all over the globe use this silly site I built because I wanted to use it myself.
If you find it interesting please let me know how we can improve it etc.
Also if you think you could bring something to this project and have interest feel free to reach out by email.
edit: apparently AWS us-east-1 is down which brought the site down! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36315300)
If anyone else is interested I made a browser extension you can use to batch delete your Reddit posts and comments: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...
Let me know how it works for you if you try it! Still fixing bugs.
There was more discussion about this exact issue in the thread about Shreddit from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36257981
A lot of people are using Reddit's data request form to get a copy of their own content before deleting it.
Maybe somebody could set up a site where users can send in their personal backups, and they can be combined into a sort of 'shadow Reddit'.
Much better way to protest I feel like
That Kbin instance is getting slammed and trying to scale up right now - many identical /r/{subreddit} are now available at /m/{subreddit} (m for magazine) thanks to some of the prior subreddit mods I guess?
Also, what is a "tanky"?
I wonder how many extremists contributed to the reddit code base over the years.
For local things, consider instead Facebook groups and nextdoor... not that I think that those are good alternatives. There may be a slack channel or discord group too - though those fill different (but often similar) roles.
One of the issues that you'll see with this is that you'll need multiple accounts to handle the disparate sites (well, many of them have a sign on with Google or Facebook) - there's no "one stop spot for everything".
And despite claims of power hungry mods on reddit, it becomes clear why something is needed if you spend any time looking at Nextdoor and Facebook.
Saidit is a publicly funded, opensource alternative to Reddit, that uses the same old.reddit code. For anyone who doesn't like the Fediverse, Saidit seems like the best option.
I've been running a forum for 15 years. It's now horrible, outdated software, full of bugs and probably security holes. However, it works. It has an active community. It requires almost zero maintenance on my end. A cheap VPS will do the trick.
Before Reddit, people would just type in "forum" when doing a Google search. That should still do the trick. For example a Google search for, how to tie a knot "forum" brings up many forum discussions.
With Reddit, or Reddit alternatives you don't have to worry about all that.
Arguably, that is one of the things that keeps the quality of content higher.
Likewise, it is too easy to post on Reddit allowing for the easy low content/quality material to make its way there more frequently.
Quoting from A Group is its Own Worst Enemy - https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownw... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 ) - from four things to design for:
> Three, you need some barriers to participation, however small. This is one of the things that killed Usenet, because there was almost no barrier to posting, leading to both generic system failures like spam, and also specific failures, like constant misogynist attacks in any group related to feminism, or racist attacks in any group related to African- Americans. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.
> Now, the segmentation can be total—you’re in or you’re out, as with the music group I just listed. Or it can be partial—anyone can read Slashdot, anonymous cowards can post, non-anonymous cowards can post with a higher rating. But to moderate, you really have to have been around for a while. It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.
> Now, this pulls against the cardinal programming virtue of ease of use, but ease of use is the wrong goal for social software. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you’ve got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction, toward the individual, when in fact, the user of a piece of social software is the group.
i do miss threaded comments thou
There's a great list of alternatives here, https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/yttdlc/... though if you are choosing one, I'd highly encourage you to find / try one that relies on a federated or a paid model. A free model will eventually end up in the same situation we're in today.
Hosting at scale, content moderation (just the bare minimum to remain legal in various jurisdictions), plus all the internal bureaucracy that is involved in employing more than just yourself or a handful of people (complying with government regulations and paperwork for employee training, salaries, benefits) are all things that Apolloapp is not.
Getting a bunch of people to agree to not use reddit for two days (or longer) is a hell of a lot easier than getting that same number of people to agree to support Apolloapp as the New Reddit.
Link aggregators/social networks cannot generate VC expected returns without dying in the process.
This death cycle of social networks has repeated itself in silicon valley for decades.
At this point doing VC investment into social networks is like a game of hot potato. Who gets to exit first before the social network self destructs
Either way, there are other ways to both raise and make money.
I've never used it and don't know anyone that has. I read a stat yesterday that only about 5% of Reddit traffic comes from 3rd party apps (might be incorrect) so I'm curious what impact it has beyond just a client for reddit. (I'm vaguely aware of some moderation tools that Apollo has.)
Correction: I did a quick check, and around 40% went dark according to this source, so not quite the 'almost 50%' that I proclaimed: https://twitter.com/aakashg0/status/1668107416490192897
This is the loud minority fallacy. I foresee less than 1% of the community actually willing to leave reddit. Spaz knows this. They are just really noisy, but not so many people care about the third party apps.
It's an attempt at mapping subreddits to places in the fediverse.
Looking back, man usenet's format was kinda similar to reddit wasn't it? Usenet with voting.
Idk about y'all but this is actually kinda super fun. I'd love to reintroduce some modernized takes on old school platforms. The internet was more fun before everything got consolidated anyway.
I joined a Mastodon instance with 3k+ other users and made several hundred posts.. until one day when login failed. Turns out the admin lied about a lot of things (like backups) and an unpaid bill wiped the machine.
Migrations are not possible when original server is offline, so I lost many months of content.
Running an instance by myself is no fun, community is the point. I see no obvious solution but wont personally ever touch another ActivityPub based social media.
>Running an instance by myself is no fun, community is the point.
I might be missing something (in which case pardon me), but isn't one of the strengths of a federated system that you could "roll your own" just to host your account and then engage on other servers with that account?
I'm imagining it as email, and your email provider accidentally wiped your account. My perception of the federated reddit clone might be off, though.
I don't like the UI, to much white space, one of my main issues with reddit
Going through the code and issues, i have suspicions its a bit over engineered in the wrong ways and will have trouble continuing to scale, like they are already seeing. it doesnt matter your using hip rust frameworks or w/e if you cant write sql queries or architect the app to run fast...
I dont get the fediverse thing or its importance. If you think back to old forum communities, they were ad supported or corporate backed and usually attached to some kind of greater site as a feature(even this is just a ycombinator feature to begin with) If anything, connecting everyone is a bad idea.
Really we just need message boards, with modern features like tree comments, effective uis, that can be monetarily supported. they need to be part of an existing place on the internet, not just a place for the whole internet to be together. There can't be vc funding involved. Reddit being a company with internal corporate culture and profit motivations is what ruined it. without vc, their goal could be just to exist and slowly and sustainably grow, this all wouldn't have happened.
Reddit is a useful concept: a series of communities with voting and hierarchical discussion. It also provides aggregation (ability to see a feed of all your communities) and discoverability. Individual forums get you some way, but don't solve the aggregation thing (which is a primary way I use Reddit: scroll through my "Popular" feed). How about we just design some form of system that allowed people to build their own aggregated feed of a group of individually hosted forums? That would be (a) cool, and (b) we've just done federation.
Reddit has been building utility as a storehouse of decently-curated answers to questions that Google can crawl. Fediverse content can't fit that use-case if admins kick out crawlers and users are terrified of having things they post be found in the future.
Reinvent usenet with modern web technology. All posts replicate, with verifiable authenticity, and the website presentation remains up to the instance host on what it should look like.
Run a node, host an API for 3 bucks a year so that mobile clients can pull data. Run a website, host it with free accounts and spam it. Let people decide how they want to pay - wallets or eyes - but just stop hoarding the damned conversations.
I used to use Reddit pretty heavily, but I stopped when I realized outside a few small use cases it wasn't benefitting my life and was mostly a time sink. I find that HN and Twitter is enough for my "social media" needs.
I do hope we see a better alternative to Reddit though, one focused on fostering high quality. Reddit was like that in 2008-9 when I joined, but in just a few years devolved into the meme dumpster and PC hivemind. The Reddit founders and their investors (cough YC *cough) should be embarrassed. It's like raising a child prodigy with the potential to cure cancer only for that kid to grow up into some grifting alcoholic bum who just smokes weed all day and survives off of fake disability benefits.
For example during COVID, Reddit was extremely toxic and hostile to any questioning of COVID lockdown policies. You couldn't even talk about travel in travel forums without being shamed as some kind of murderer and downvote censored to oblivion, let alone questioning the justification of lockdowns, border restrictions, and vaccine mandates.
Reddit has had an extreme woke left bias for a long time such as in its main subs like /r/politics. Of course this extremity on one side breeds counter extremes on the other like /r/TheDonald. The hivemind nature of the site ultimately makes everyone more divided and worse off.
I wrote a bit about the toxicity of Reddit here https://jsavage.xyz/2022/03/13/the-downfall-of-reddit-why-re...
Beehaw https://beehaw.org/
Kbin Social https://kbin.social/
For the actually discussions or more niche content, there isn't much. There are some Reddit-specific alternatives popping up, but unless Reddit itself really dies I doubt they'll get much traction. Your other options are the other social media platforms, which have their own issues and aren't quite the same.
That does replace the literal aggregation feature, but how do you go about finding good sources for your RSS feed?
I'm genuinely asking. I mucked with RSS lightly a decade ago and dropped it largely because of reddit.
https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/
Or there would be, if reddit weren't offline
So even though I don't necessarily pull up Reddit just to read, it does provide a good archive of questions and answers or other useful explanations in search engine results and losing that old content would be tough.
* Medical-ish as in trying to find out if people with the same condition as me have had good/bad experiences with a particular OTC supplement. Certainly not looking for treatment or diagnosis via Reddit (or any online avenue) :P
Almost abandoned, full of spam, but still there: a decentralized network where anyone can run their own server, serving just to them or to someone or too anyone the groups they want. Groups are far more discoverable than Reddit subs and they work pretty well. Bonus: messages can be stored and then indexed locally as anyone might wish.
In general: using a platform owned by someone else meant no real guarantee, being part of a communitarian platform, owning the bit we are interested in, means we are Citizens peers, between peers.
If Reddit concern you try to imaging a fleet of leased connected cars, your webmail (with someone else domain name and no messages on your iron), even the "modern smart city" where anything is a service.
When you'll see https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... you'll understand why we are there in IT terms and where is the future. IT state of thing is just few years in the future respect of the rest of the society.
I'm not sure I see a ton of the benefits to federation, but it kind of lets a lot of services which would otherwise compete get a more substantial user base off the get-go. There still are no services with a user base to provide a comparable experience to reddit, but it has to start somewhere.
We've got some new ideas around dealing with cross posts: * posts can have multiple tags and be findable from any of them * all posts to the same url map to the same backend node (so you don't get as many duplicates)
I'm actually most excited about what we're trying to do with regards to the low effort content and degradation of communities aspects.
At our core we're actually a reputation/trust/"how much do I want to see things from this person" graph that has recently pivoted to being a Reddit alternative. This means that (once we get the community going and our algorithms tuned up), we should be able to offer you much more ergonomic ability to choose how much of what kind of content you want to see (people who like memes can post them, but you can choose not to see them.
We're still in alpha and don't have much of a community yet, but we're adding features fast and will be very friendly and responsive to any feature requests you have.
Using the Qbix platform you can assemble your own reddit, and then invite people to it, in a matter of hours.
It's free and open source, and runs on PHP. Any commodity host that runs Wordpress should be able to run it, but if you want you can use Node.js
It also integrates with Discourse, if you want to have a robust forum software that is also actively developed by a sister team.
PS: If you do play around and install it, you should apply to https://qbix.com/ecosystem so you can be a host. Qbix is going to eventually join the fediverse but right now it's more about being a viable decentralized replacement for Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc.
It's made by the original founders of Instagram, and they're using AI in some interesting ways, e.g. rewriting clickbait headlines. Their Reader View is nice too, though I wish I could set it as default on each page open.
Artifact is interesting, but it's an alternative to something like Google News or Apple News vs. a Reddit substitute.
The current VC investors should also consider if the existing CEO is fit for the role, given their apparant personal attacks and defamation against a third-party developer, and the public proof that these were unwarranted.
A lot of the existing alternatives skew to the left or right of the political spectrum. The ideal platform would welcome all, and not witch hunt one or the other. Tildes seems to fit that but is invite only. Squabbles also, but it's not /quite/ the same as Reddit.
Forums are the way to go for now.
What I would love to see is a hand-picked curated list of forums, a la dmoz but for social, with reviews.
I just follow a few interesting people for whatever topics I want to follow. In fact the “for you” page has been giving me decent recommendations lately.
I barely use twitter these days. The platform is falling apart. If you aren't a paying subscriber you will be deboosted, blue checkmarks are the ones that get raised to the top first. I also resent having to wade through a sea of bot garbage that aren't even real people. Just algos from Russia and other lovely places that are programmed to pop up and froth and foam if they see a keyword.
Old twitter was fun though, back when it was real people.
It’s kind of fun to see the extremes of both sides get engaged by reality.
The fact is, all community organization online being on one site is an awful idea as we see with this and other things that have happened in the past. Communities should host their own forums.
Searchability... The truth is that Google isn't a search engine, it's a content aggregator now. It doesn't even index the internet! And it blocks valid results, for reasons ranging from "its a pirate site" to "we don't want you knowing these things". This site:reddit.com thing is a workaround, because sites like reddit have taken over enthusiast run information depos on the internet. Looking at it now, it's a bad idea to have all that information in one place, no?
Since then, reddit has addressed a lot of these themselves (crossposting, submitting text and link together) but in quite a bolted-on way.
I would love to see a site that rather than just being a reddit clone, takes all of the lessons learnt from reddit over the years as a base and better enables these communities and discussions.
My main complaint with Reddit since the early ~2010s has been the crap post/comment quality. In 2008/9 when I first joined, the comment quality was very high. Then memes, puns, one-liners, and hivemind took over and ruined the site.
An ideal Reddit would be able to show you posts/comments that you're most likely to enjoy, such as via a "sort by" option tailored to you, or other sort by options like an "insightful" that actually works and doesn't just give you low effort one-liners that add nothing to your life.
High quality content in general needs to be better incentivized, and right now it's not. Anyways I have a lot of ideas around that I wrote elsewhere so will refrain from dumping then all here [1]
The challenge with developing a Reddit alternative however unfortunately is not technical, it's overcoming the chicken and egg problem where nobody cares about your site if no one else is on there.
[1] https://jsavage.xyz/2022/03/13/the-downfall-of-reddit-why-re...
Let's build our communities right this time and select something open-source, and federated so we don't end up in the same place in another 10 years.
I found that blocking Reddit as part of the parental controls on my home network was beneficial anyway, considering just how much stuff falls under the umbrella of availability on that site.
As a news aggregator it always felt untrustworthy and slanted anyway.
There's nothing I miss about having it blocked.
See for example: https://tildes.net/~tildes/15my/new_users_ask_your_questions...
Occam's Razor: If someone got banned, it's more likely that they were being an asshole than that the admin of a site that's been running peacefully and smoothly for 4-5 years is suddenly on a power trip.
My first name is 'lelanthran'.
https://tildes.net/register?code=UBZX0-DBQOR-H2W6A
https://tildes.net/register?code=IYUPP-2VZHD-EPZWM
https://tildes.net/register?code=TW3P3-YK0LZ-L7FLY
https://tildes.net/register?code=MAUNA-6IE43-OY86X
https://tildes.net/register?code=8RC2T-40G03-AFSYF
The moderators are limited in number and absolute in power, you can't make new subs (I asked for a few and was declined), and the community is more tight and discussion-oriented (which is a good thing IMO, but I never quite felt like I fit in so I don't comment often).
1. People are discouraged from being too negative about posts, but posting negative articles is fine. This led to people occasionally linking articles containing invectives about some subject they didn't like, but you're not supposed to respond to the article with invectives. It produced a natural asymmetry in the conversation and felt really passive aggressive.
2. The long post format is a noble goal, but personally I couldn't see the incentive in putting in a ton of work to craft a thoughtful, researched, and thorough post only to have it read by maybe 20 people then buried after a day. If I'm going to put that much work into a piece of writing, I'll create a blog where it will at least have some more permamence. I think in the end the long post format attracts people who enjoy the process of writing itself--which is fine--but it simply doesn't equate to higher content. A lot of the opinions in those long posts are still underbaked, and the length doesn't improve them. Tildes threads can be a grind to read while producing little information.
I as well would love an invite.
I'm also open to an invite if anyone is feeling charitable.
For me, Discord has already replaced 95% of my Reddit use -- and not because I'm anti-Reddit, but just because community activity has migrated to Discord naturally. The remainder of my Reddit use is mostly "a search engine sent me there."
They branched out to become a general reddit-like alternative with other supposedly neutral and separately moderated subs, but the other ones have far lower activity levels - see their version of /all: https://communities.win/
Google EEE'ed
For general discussion, there is no alternative, and reddit was not an option even before today. I was active on two non-tech subreddits: /r/judaism and /r/buttcoin. I am a classical liberal politically, but I am also an Orthodox Jew. I was banned across several accounts for respectfully stating Jewish beliefs in /r/Judaism and for saying that hating Jews isn't acceptable "anti-zionism" in /r/buttcoin. (I'm an anti-zionist, and my statement that hating Jews isn't ok led to a ban from the subreddit for "defending Zionist agression" or something equally absurd.)
I've seen media become more polarized in the last ten years or so. There is little left and right discussion. There are places where left is OK and anything else is fascism, which is ok to ban. On the other side, there are conspiracy theories, and anything else is lies by communist pedophiles and groomers to discredit great patriots. (I guess I'm a fascist and a communist because I believe Trump is a criminal and men can't get pregnant.) HN stays pretty clean by avoiding politics, but if you're looking for good political discussion, please make your own site. I'll help with the infrastructure, and maybe some good discussion will come of it.
Disclosure: I’m the CEO
But Reddit tipping point started because most of 3rd party clients are closing as Apollo, none of current alternatives have a good client as Reddit clients.
There are few centralized alternatives you can look up as Tildes, Lobsters and stacker news (focused on Bitcoin and Nostr).
You can monitor the invite thread on reddit here https://www.reddit.com/r/tildes/
Alternatively you can contact the administrator of tildes here: https://docs.tildes.net/contact
At the moment, I'm shuffling my time in between these
* Tildes (tildes.net)
* Lemmy (join-lemmy.org)
* kbin (kbin.pub)
Another place I like for community stuff is Discord. Yeah it's an instant-messaging platform and its target demographic is mostly gamers, but you can likely find one related to your city, and they added a "forum" option where you can easily participate. But it's proprietary, so you never know when they'll pull the rug like Reddit did.
The other alternatives don't seem very viable
Do people have the courage for that anymore? I certainly do, and I'd love to hear from those who disagree in complete free speech for the next Reddit.
For the most part, average people do not want to talk to the people who get banned from mainstream platforms. People who post images of children in bikinis described as jailbait are creepy. People who advocate political violence are scary. People who share shock content are disgusting.
Perhaps you don't make exactly those value judgments, but most people do. They will avoid your platform because it's full of people they don't want to talk to or hear from.
It is true that some communities on Reddit weren't possible because they were not permitted to allow some of the content they were allowing.
If people want to make a bird community and ban all pro-hawk posters, that's perfectly fine. The issue's are around the secrecy in administration.
How about adding the following:
- Removing shadowbans - Allow users to see all deleted comments if they opt in - Allow users to see all banned accounts/reasons they got banned.
Imagine a page for each subreddit which includes a list of banned/removed comments. It would be quite telling on the moderation if that list was mostly non-spam disagreements.
How about including an internet "Bill of Rights" for free speech, illogical arguments, etc to try and help guide the flow of discussion, similar to how /pol/ has this in their rules - https://i.4cdn.org/pol/1493993226750.jpg
"The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Another way to frame it in terms of moderation is "in order to maintain open tolerance, we must be intolerant of intolerance". Ironically it was a Reddit thread that helped me understand that tolerance is a social contract: once one side breaks it, we need not be tolerant of them any more.