Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

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I think most 'Reddit alternative' options that people are trying to show off are missing what made Reddit great. I've always described Reddit to new users as 'a community of communities', because that's what it is.

Tagging posts with hashtags or topics or labels or whatever misses what actually made reddit great, which is the sense of community in (mostly?) smaller subreddits, and the ability for specific subreddits to have their own rules, moderators, and general sense of what that place was for and why people would want to be there.

Nicely put.

At its best and its worst, reddit reminds me of a more impersonal version &TOTSE's forums from the web of the 90s and early 00s: a community of communities, where you might see familiar faces from one spot to the next, but they were largely their own little worlds with their own norms, regulars, moderation, etc.

It was infamous at the time for the Bad Ideas forum where things like explosives and shoplifting techniques were discussed, but it also hosted flourishing communities dedicated to books, literary criticism, movies, politics, etc. Many people were quite content never sticking their heads out of the nicer places into the more 'interesting' areas, and it remained markedly welcoming and collegial throughout most of its existence.

It and reddit also had the benefit of easier discoverability: it's trivial to move around and discover new, related communities, which IMHO was also the charm of IRC and something rather missing from Discord and the like.

> I've always described Reddit to new users as 'a community of communities', because that's what it is.

Which is an interesting point to make because that's exactly the experience I'm finding with Mastodon, having joined a community-specific instance (metalhead.club) which gives me that feeling of being in a community, but having some access to users from other communities via following interesting people. That last thing is the key difference with Mastodon - discovery is different. There's no algorithm pushing things into your feed - you need to be much more active in your own content discovery.

What I find strange is that I don’t want to be part of only a single community. Yeah I know I can follow others, but to me it’s still somehow stranger than e.g. reddit’s model.

Yes. I agree there’s more friction if you’re active in multiple communities.

Lurking can sort of be achieved through judicious use of following tags.

Why couldn't this be accomplished through tags? For example instead of going to the /r/digitalnomad subreddit, you can view the digital nomad tag (https://zsync.xyz/t/digitalnomad)

I agree that there's still value in private subreddit style communities, but I believe that that could co-exist with tags.

Ultimately it's a tradeoff. Without tagging you have to figure out which subreddits to post in, potentially cross-posting in tons of different subreddits, fragmenting discussion. With tagging you only need to post once, but a single tag feels less like a "community". I guess personally I never really felt any real sense of community from any subreddits (unlike the old phpBB forums), so the sacrifice made sense to me to keep discussion in one place. But this would only work well if the site can actually foster balanced, intelligent discussion and debate across the spectrum (otherwise just becomes the PC hivemind dump that is the mainstream subreddits like /r/politics), which Reddit has proven incapable of over the last decade - ending up fostering extreme communities like /r/TheDonald as a backlash to the PC hivemind + censorship in the rest of the site.

I think you are looking at it from a technical point of view, and not a "product" point of view.

Adding a tag to something doesn't communicate that you are posting it in a community, nor does it communicate that community's rules, etiquette, morals and values. When a user "tags" something it just means adding a label to it. "Posting" in a community communicates something very different.

> I guess personally I never really felt any real sense of community from any subreddits

Honestly that staggers me. Maybe you’re spending too much time on giant subreddits rather than in smaller communities? Your experience with Reddit appears to have omitted the parts that make Reddit great.

> Maybe you’re spending too much time on giant subreddits

I think this is definitely the case for a lot of people who use reddit. My advice to everyone I've recommended Reddit to is:

1. Sign up for an account 2. Unsubscribe from every subreddit you're subscribed to by default 3. Join smaller communities like <list of subreddits that I think they might be interested in>

Take gaming as a topic for example; /r/gaming has over thirty million subscribers, which is insane. There's no way that space can be welcoming or foster a sense of community.

Instead, look for something more specific, like /r/NintendoSwitch, /r/PS5, /r/BaseBuildingGames, and so on. You can also look for more cross-topical subreddits, like /r/GirlGamers, /r/AccessibleGaming, /r/Gaymers or /r/LGBTgaming, and so on.

This is the distinction that so many of these Reddit clones miss; I'm not just looking to get a feed of links, I want to get to know and recognize people, learn others' perspectives, and get a real sense of what these people are like. I want to be able to bring up things like the trans and antisemitism concerns around Hogwarts Legacy without being drowned out by (or targeted for harassment by) transphobes and nazis.

As a datapoint, Wykop [1], a polish "equivalent" of Reddit (or perhaps Digg, as `Wykop` is also a play on words for _digging things out_) uses tags in its "mikroblog" section [2]. It's nowhere like Reddit and the experience is completely different — for worse. I agree with other posters that product-wise, a service with tags is nothing like Reddit, and it builds a completely different community and steers discussions in a different way. I think the biggest difference is that tags feel _small_, and services like Instagram encourage using lots of tags for _reach_. But this behavior does not build smaller communities IMO, which is IMO Reddit's biggest appeal

[1] https://wykop.pl/ [2] https://wykop.pl/mikroblog

> potentially cross-posting in tons of different subreddits, fragmenting discussion

Isn't this kind of the point - different communities will have different discussions if the same content gets posted.

Sure, but hashtags aren't communities.

If I'm talking about a base-building game that's on Humble Bundle, should I discuss it in #BaseBuildingGames, #Gaming, #PCGaming, #HumbleBundle? Where are people going to see and contribute to the discussion the most?

If I'm posting about Hogwarts Legacy's antisemitism, do I post it in #Gaming and #AntiSemitism? Aren't the antisemites and trolls who enjoy gaming going to see my post and go brigade #AntiSemitism?

For a long time, subreddits were not considered "communities". Redditors were one community and they used subreddits as sub forums. Communities were created through increased moderation which identified, grouped and isolated users. When communities were created, "Redditor" as a common shared identity was destroyed.

What happened was that around Trump running for office, and with an increase in users overall, certain subreddits (most of them not political btw) became more active and for want of a better word more "problematic" than others. The reddit admins, active mods and other vocal internet users wanted this content removed. To do this they added "quarantine" in an effort to restrict the activity of identified subreddits, and called these subreddits "communities" for the first time. Visiting a subreddit was labelled as joining a community.

By isolating subreddits they further isolated the users of reddit from each other, but they increased the group identity and feel of individual subreddits. Subreddit mods were very happy with this and other concerned users were happy with the politicisation via group creation of reddit.

A group identity becomes stronger the more one defines it in opposition with other groups.

The assertion that "subreddits are communities" evolved from the whole Trump debacle is inaccurate and makes no sense.

A lot of the subreddits that I've been in for a while have always been their own communities with their own topics and guidelines. Smaller subreddits, like /r/NintendoSwitch, /r/AccessibleGaming, /r/DND, and so on didn't become their own communities and their own moderation guidelines because of Trump, they became that way because they wanted a focused space to discuss a slice of their own topics and interests.

That description fits discord remarkably well as well, albeit discords format is more live-chat focused.

They did however lately introduce a channel format that functions more like a forum.

It was that now it's yet another content mill slowly being filled with Conde Nast clickbait and garbage articles.

This is it. People are trying to create subreddits; not reddit itself.

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