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Comment by AdamN | Hacker News Reader

Haven't logged into reddit in weeks - how is it these days?

Me and a few other moderators of some medium sized subs that we manage are leaving and a few others have been demoralized into doing nothing. We're having trouble finding new mods and the ones who are filling applications are either racists or power mods. The subs are operating in a restricted manner in part as a form of extended protest but in reality mostly because there's no longer enough manpower to run them in an effective manner. When the subs are finally forced to open fully the remaining mods will need to either make moderating their full time job or they will be crushed by a neverending queue of spam and hate and by people asking how to fix their mouse in a software forum.

Interacting with other mod teams we've learned that this mod scarcity is apparently universal.

None of this matters to reddit because in all honesty they would probably be happier and more profitable by converting the website into a read only feed of memes and kittens.

ironically, they would probably be better off creating a chatGPT moderator for each sub, it'd need to probably be programmatically unique to the sub.

The irony being chatGPT wouldn't exist without Reddit data and supposedly the cause of the API updates, even this Sam Altman is on the board of Reddit.

I'd like to build a DAO with a centralized hub which basically models taxonomies for things like channels or tags etc as well as being a central source of truth for usernames and authentications. It'd be fully open source and could be splintered if there's some conflict in the community. For instance racists can get bent and start their own centralized server and be defederated from the core.

What would be funny is if a meme started that Reddit is now hiring moderators, payment is fame and glory. Nazis, Bigots, Hypocrites, Cult leaders welcome, apply within. You know it'd happen. Reddit is about to become voat or worse 4chan 2.0 electric boogaloo.

For people who care about sports and celebrities, it's gotten better. Those people will tell you they haven't noticed a thing, and they're glad the whiny mods are getting kicked.

For people who care about anything else, the quality has dropped off a cliff.

A lot of the cool people have left. Many more will be leaving today once Apollo and RIF are finally murdered. I don't think they'll be coming back very often.

I rarely set out to go to Reddit (in the sense of “my task is to read Reddit”), but I pretty frequently land on Reddit from search results.

I think the Reddit utility was substantially reduced for that use case (too often landing on a closed subreddit) and that damage could last far beyond when this protest ends/is ended.

I sure won’t be adding “reddit” to the end of my search queries for a while!

This is how I've been boycotting Reddit myself; I'll click native google hits, but I won't visit the homepage/any subreddits directly. HN's filled that need somewhat.

If I have to, I change the link from www.reddit.com/r/stuffgoeshere to www.reveddit.com/r/stuffgoeshere

It's what I used as a undelete viewer, with power tripping mods and admins. I'm guessing it'll quit working tomorrow.

I'm not boycotting Reddit, but years ago I had to un-train my fingers from unconsciously going to Reddit, because the value had gotten so low (or, on the front page overrun by manipulators years ago, it had negative value).

The following Ublock Origin rules aren't perfect, but they mostly blocked the Reddit main page, which was what muscle memory would go to. While permitting search hits, links from HN, etc.

    ||old.reddit.com^

    @@https://old.reddit.com/comments/*
    @@https://old.reddit.com/domain/*
    @@https://old.reddit.com/over18?*
    @@https://old.reddit.com/r/*
    @@https://old.reddit.com/search?*
    @@https://old.reddit.com/subreddits/search?*
    @@https://old.reddit.com/u/*
    @@https://old.reddit.com/user/*

    @@http://old.reddit.com/r/*
    @@http://old.reddit.com/u/*

    ||www.reddit.com^

    @@https://www.reddit.com/comments/*
    @@https://www.reddit.com/domain/*
    @@https://www.reddit.com/gallery/*
    @@https://www.reddit.com/over18?*
    @@https://www.reddit.com/poll/*
    @@https://www.reddit.com/r/*
    @@https://www.reddit.com/search?*
    @@https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/search?*
    @@https://www.reddit.com/u/*
    @@https://www.reddit.com/user/*
    @@https://www.reddit.com/video/*

    @@http://www.reddit.com/r/*
    @@http://www.reddit.com/u/*

In addition to using these UBO rules, I also deleted my bookmarks to subreddits.

I ended up on Reddit from a search result last night and it was slooooooooow. I’m not sure if that’s the new normal but was surprised at how bad the user experience had gotten.

I looked at it recently out of curiosity, and my home page felt basically similar to always, but slower (the content was slower to come, not the site).

It also made me notice that I haven't seen content from any valuable sub in a while, and the entire home was cheap jokes.

I don't use reddit a ton over the last few years and I'm only subbed to a handful of smaller subreddits (biggest is a bit over a million I think) and I haven't noticed a difference.

Seems fine for me.

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