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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

There's a problem with the fundamental underlying argument here, which rests on the notion that all the value of Reddit actually comes from the moderators and the users posting content. The problem is, if Reddit itself has no value, why does every other option suck?

During the blackout I made an honest to god attempt to use other things. I tried Lemmy. I tried Discord. I tried Mastodon. I hated them all. It's definitely partly just critical mass - the communities just aren't there - but it's not only that. Nobody has managed to replicate the classic / old Reddit UI/UX either. I hate all the new UIs. I don't know what's so hard about it. It's a list of links with some upvote / downvote buttons.

I'll be more ready to believe there's no value in Reddit when I see that somebody has actually successfully cloned it and made a place for these communities to go to that's anything like as good as what Reddit offers.

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Reddit Inc doesn't even believe in the UX you're talking about, old.reddit won't be around forever and the API move is killing off alternative apps.

Discord is a fundamentally different platform to Reddit so I am not surprised it didn't compare.

What reddit has is a network effect and good enough technology, given their tech is already available as open source clones ready to be deployed, their only edge is their network effect. Kill off the community and all you are left with is some easily reproducible code and a server bill.

> if Reddit itself has no value, why does every other option suck?

Becuase its a money losing model. Nobody is competing because in Reddit's 18 years of operation its yet to get even remotely close to turning a profit.

The alternatives that have popped up (Lemmy for example) arent even close to being at the same level from a software point of view.

Maybe it could have be profitable if Reddit didn't feel the need the add useless features. Poorly done video and chat, NFTs, etc.

Not the mention overhiring the past 3 years.

Reddit could have been a lean text based forum, it doesn't need to host images and video.

Hosting images and videos has a powerful lockin effect. For example I look to repost things from Reddit and then realise I can't because Reddit is hosting the video. It's additional work to go find the original source and post that.

Every other option doesn't suck.

I went to Reddit during the Digg exodous and remember scoffing at Reddit's terrible UI. I stuck with it because that's where the content was. Then I got used to it and still browse old.reddit.com to this day. What makes a UI suck or not is highly subjective and moreso based on familiarity.

When this started, I jokingly told my friend, "F it. I'll make my own reddit." Over the course of the evening (and just tinkering around some more the next day), I tossed this together: https://github.com/RemmyLee/effit/

Again, it was more of a joke than anything, but it quickly made me realize that the core of reddit is pretty easy to quickly toss together. If anyone wants to take that mess of code and do anything with it, by all means, feel free to.

Reddit is effectively just a text-only forum (image and video uploads are fairly recent features, and the latter has never even worked properly) with subthreads and a voting system.

Text forums have effectively been solved ever since NNTP was invented. All HTTP forums are pretty much just centralized recreations of various components of Usenet. With modern databases, load balancing, and infrastructure management, the cost of building, hosting, and maintaining a web forum is effectively negligible.

The only real selling point of Reddit is having all of your forums in one place, with the ability to easily and instantly create your own forum if you want to. Everything else on Reddit is just a random collection of social media features bolted on to appease investors/advertisers/stakeholders, and the vast majority of Reddit users (or at least the ones I interact with) never touch any of them.

The only thing keeping people on Reddit are network effects. Which, admittedly, is a lot, given that’s what’s allowed Facebook to weather its seven quintillion controversies with minimal damage, but a well-designed successor with enough server capacity (this is very important, crashing under the initial migration load has been what sunk a number of previous high-profile “Reddit killers”) could easily take Reddit’s place.

> All HTTP forums are pretty much just centralized recreations of various components of Usenet

The VAXbb clone I wrote in 1999 would beg to differ. :)

> Text forums have effectively been solved ever since NNTP was invented.

The unsolved problem is moderation. Reddit mods are partly protesting because the official app's moderation features suck. And Lemmy just had some defederation drama because their moderation tools can't handle the spam bots.

Powerful moderation tools will be the killer feature of Reddit's killer.

> Text forums have effectively been solved ever since NNTP was invented.

Yes, and you should use that. I even have NNTP service with newsgroups for my own projects but they are not used much, so far. I would hope that other people can easily set up their own forum (like you say is possible with Reddit), possibly with any number of remote services which have NNTP access as well as HTTP perhaps, and if you set up an account then you can set it up and it can also be federated. ActivityPub and other HTML-based forums are not very good I think, and NNTP is much better in my opinion (although bridging can be implemented if it is desirable, some things might not work very well in all protocols e.g. ActivityPub only works with Unicode). (There is one change to the protocol which I think should be useful, which is to allow 63-bit article numbers instead of 31-bit article numbers. My own server and client software implements this feature.)

I've been using Lemmy, and while there are a couple of places to improve (around how interacting with communities on other instances works, and how you end up looking at your own instance's view so you can interact) my only issue is the critical mass. There are some decent communities on gaming for instance, but I can't do the thing I can on Reddit where I know there's going to be a good community on every hobby I have an every game I play and I can just join if I want.

Someone should just convert the Teddit UI into a Lemmy theme.

https://github.com/teddit-net/teddit

Lemmy is the closest thing to Reddit. The community is small now, but it's growing exponentially due to this Reddit protest and migration. I'm looking forward to see its future. It's a bit confusing at first for new joiners though. But when you get it (it works like email), it's truly brilliant. Luckily I moved to Lemmy to see a whole new paradigm that excites me about the Internet again.

But for Discord, it's good when you need to interact with someone, but otherwise it's overwhelming with chat flows. And it's also a blackhole of information.

Hackernews and kbin.social have mobile websites that actually work well. Much better than Reddit.

I‘m more afraid about the backend side of things, apparently those decentralized services are not at all ready to scale to a lot of users.

Thanks for mentioning kbin - I tried that and it's better than everything else UI-wise. Not quite as good as old Reddit but good enough! Now just to solve the problem that it's a ghost town for the communities I'm interested in.

Give Mastodon a threaded view and technically it's the same as reddit, but federated? Usenet, but not just for nerds.

That’s basically just Lemmy/kbin. Those two services can even interconnect with Mastodon thanks to ActivityPub.

As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, moving text around on the Internet has been a solved problem ever since NNTP. And that was 1986!

The only problem is that there’s not a lot of money in it, which is why having the ability to federate a bunch of smaller services together is such a good solution (at least on a technical level).

if reddit itself had no communities would that UI/UX even matter? you didn't learn it because it was good, you learned it because you had to to use the site lol

kbin has dedicated up/downvote buttons and counts, just like good old.reddit

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