So Long, Twitter and Reddit | Hacker News Reader

So Long, Twitter and Reddit

andrewkelley.me

254 pointsearthboundkid157 comments

> Discord has been decent for a while. I suspect enshittification will commence soon, so we should be on the lookout for an alternative over the next five years.

Discord's fine for what it is, but it's also a fundamentally different thing than social media or forums or a support-site. Projects that try to funnel everything onto Discord are (a) losing anyone who thinks joining an 800 person chatroom doesn't sound fun, and (b) always seem to wind up being very irritable at people who join and immediately ask all 800 people their common question, despite Discord being extremely poorly searchable.

back to the irc

Discord is not a social platform. It's a chatroom for gamers, to share memes and voice chat while they play <game-of-the-month>. It's not a base for documentation. It's not a platform for your next product (other than a bot..) launch. It's poorly designed for searching, for knowledge, for connecting. It's 2020s version of ICQ.

I never understood how so many people - seemingly everyone - all came to the conclusion that Discord is all these things that it clearly isn’t.

Simple--because user authentication and management sucks ass.

So, everyone is willing to put up with a wildly incorrect feature set simply to have someone else deal with lost passwords, spam, fraud, etc.

Okta, Keycloak, Auth0, Kinde, FusionAuth, Firebase, Cognito, Clerk - User auth does suck ass and it’s been solved time and time and time again. Don’t be lazy.

In what way do those solve "have someone else deal with lost passwords, spam, fraud, etc."?

The technical authentication is the easy part. It's dealing with the humans that is the hard part.

Okta is a SaaS offering that does that. Maybe not fraud. What is fraud in this context? Spam? Check. Lost passwords? Check. Let someone else deal with auth? Check.

All of those are either services or software you can host yourself that provide auth and user management, OTPs, 2FA, email recovery, forgotten passwords, single-sign on, and more.

> Spam? Check

In what way? verification emails don't count. And for many servers where spam and troll accounts is a problem, custom bots and new member screening features deal with this - since they don't want to spend every waking moment staring at the server and banning people who join and immediately cause issues.

Okta recently partnered with a few folks to tackle this. They published a thing [1] in April. Fraudulent registrations and bots are being screened using Shape which was acquired by F5 [2]. I'm not saying this problem has been solved, but it's an area of active concentration. For most folks, the offerings are more than adequate. For the top saas or platforms, you'll probably always have this issue as you're a lucrative target.

[1] https://sec.okta.com/shareddetections

[2] https://www.f5.com/cloud/products/bot-defense

And yet, the new generation is (mis)using it for collaboration purposes, without realizing everything they're losing in the process.

When you want your friends to try your app but you end up with a whole support system inside discord, that’s how it happens. You’re hanging with your friends playing games, you show them that side project you’ve been working on, they all love it and it grows into a shit show of channels, rules, bots, response emoji’s to indicate intent, merging with other servers, with a whole new set of rules, channels, bots, mods.

It’s unprofessional. AI tools that rely on Discord as their delivery, unprofessional. Possibly even down right illegal. Not the act of using a bot, but what service they offer through that bot.

Part of the reason Discord falls short as a social platform is that each community is siloed off from the rest. There is no continuity bridging the overarching platform and userbase. I feel like for a social platform to work, the platform itself should be a community and the users should be able to carve out their own slice within that.

I've been working on a platform that blends social features from Discord with the discoverability of Reddit. What we're building is intentionally not just another Reddit or Discord clone. We're trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts/chat messages.

https://sociables.com/

What if I specifically like the fact that the communities are siloed on Discord?

I don't want people from other circles accidentally ending up on my community just because they were bored and were browsing. I don't want my Discord server ending up on the results of some global search either.

I find it utterly insufferable. I, a very technically capable person, really struggle with using Discord. I can’t help but feel that people that misuse Discord in this way are doing it from a place from extreme ignorance and hubris. It is so blatantly not intended or appropriate for what a bunch of people use it for. The only thing it has going for it is that the person setting up the community knows how to use it. It is utterly inscrutable from the perspective of an outsider, trying to look past all the stuff that is at the very least using gamer jargon, if not functionally built explicitly for gamers in a way that is not useful for others.

REALLY cynically, I think that Discord has a feature set that the admin / moderator / power user functionality of Discord gets a particular sort of controlling “community manager” very excited. They can have their bots and username colours and whatever else set up just the way they like them, usually in a way that people don’t really care about. A means of a power-seeker to tinker around with community dynamics in a way that is far from having an in-person analogue.

So long as you have the nitro.

I’m with you and I think it’s entirely ignorance and hubris. To be fair to discord, I think they know this. They know their product market fit, they know their audience. Their customers are those community managers that like shiny things and surveillance powers. The fault is entirely on those community managers thinking their customers would like it too.

> So long as you have the nitro.

What do you mean? Nitro doesn't offer much besides using cross-server emojis and custom profiles.

Do you run a community on Discord? Nitro levels enable more community features.

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-S...

I miss IRC, man... a Discord guild is a poor man's IRC server... a Matrix homeserver is a rich man's IRC server...

a Discord guild is a poor man's IRC server..

that natively supports emojis, stickers, embeds, non-ip-leaking voice chat, screenshare with audio, rich permissions, avatars, attachments

oh, and chat history. Because everyone loves needing an irc bouncer to be able to assimilate the context of the active conversation when they log in.

Exactly. Back in 2012 or so I wrote a web chat system that had all that (minus the screenshare & voice chat) and it was quite a challenge supporting all the permutations of links, images, emoji's, bbcode, etc. It's a pos in today's standards but back before slack it was "on the right track". Slack pretty much came out of nowhere and killed the effort though. To your point about a bouncer, I think a lot of folks are nostalgic and forget what a shitty system IRC was. Net-splits, bouncers, no filters or mod tools other than kick. No embedded media unless your client did magic. It was some folks' first foray into online community so naturally they want that feeling back.

I'm glad to see this pushback against centralized monopolies. The open-web needs more openness.

It’s it interesting how many meaningful conversations we’ve all had on IRC, lacking all those essential features you mention?

IRC is dead in any meaningful way, though. It's a decent technology that's lost to services with all those essential features. We also used to have great conversations while riding bikes with our friends when we were kids. Does that mean employers would be served to hold all of their meetings on bikes?

irc has 2 killer features: 1) it takes some effort to get and stay on. web chatters leave pretty fast. 2) people leave for digital prisons.

the freenode exodus was great, there was no discussion, nothing to explain.

> IRC is dead in any meaningful way

False. IRC is still alive and kicking.

> IRC is dead in any meaningful way

It's interesting how many meaningful conversations I've had over email too, the medium doesn't matter, but it doesn't mean the features aren't useful.

I don't miss IRC. I use it :)

To be fair to the people running Discord, they've been trying to simplify and change it. But the existing user-base that knows the platform always pushes back against changes - such as loading screen tips being un-gamerified and the general design of promotional material going from being a gaming chat platform[0] to a general purpose chat thing[1]

0: https://rr.judge.sh/Chickadee/43748a/chrome_DXEAHYhlJF.png

1: https://discord.com/

> To be fair to the people running Discord, they've been trying to simplify and change it.

Instead of focusing on worthless stickers and Nitro upgrades, how about they allow users to rebind keys for most, if not all, shortcuts on the desktop client.

Read your comment but believe me when I say I don't get a single reason why you do not like Discord.

As a very technically able person, can you get into more detail on what is "utterly insufferable"? I hopped the boat in 2016 so I am probably blinded by using it from pretty much the start.

Back in the wii home brew days, I used to hang around in their irc channels. Those channels were a main way for people to get help with what we would now call "jailbreaking" their wii. Sure some sites and forums existed with instructions, but if you ran into a weird edge case or just misunderstood what some kid wrote on a forum you'd be stuck till you found how to get on irc and asked in those channels. During the peak of that scene's activity, once you get in there you would have top notch support from several volunteers handholding you though every step of the way. The actual people who wrote the tools you were having problems with would help you out. Sometimes they'd give you a debug version comoiled just for you. Often, your bug would get fixed and a new point release made while you wait. The people writing guides would camp out in there and take note of the most common questions their guides cause and go fix them to head off problems early.

To me, forums felt like a place information went to die. Your answer would be on page 5 of a 30 page rambling thread but you wouldn't ever know because you wouldn't read that far. Read page one and maybe two, then jump to the end to see if it's solved and instead they are on another topic entirely.

IRC meanwhile was always 100% relevant and timely.

You really hit the nail on the head. I'm technically capable but discord really gives me the vibes of corp slack channels where I don't care to participate in, because they're not paying me to.

I still can't seem to get how this is a real social media outlet.

You can’t seem to get it because of that bias. GenY and GenZ haven’t had that experience (yet) so to them, it’s the bees knees, or lit, or slay, or whatever they are using to express their approval.

IRC…? ICQ was mostly 1:1 conversations.

ICQ had rooms as well

Exactly my use case. I admin a community of around 20 people that chat together about games and to pass the day at work sometimes. We post stupid stuff or interesting things to read. Some days pass by with zero messages, some are frenzied. We get in voice channels and chat and game together.

I am a guest in other similarly sized circles' discord servers and this way I keep in touch with different groups.

For this use case, Discord is gold. And I happily pay for Nitro. For anything else like searching a wiki, it sucks, but it is not its use case.

> I admin a community of around 20 people that chat together about games and to pass the day at work sometimes.

This sounds cozy. Can I join?

Common internet fact: people can and will use the most popular platform for features it was actively not designed for. Hence, dozens long twitter rants that should have been a blog, imageboards being used for news, and closed off chatrooms being used to more or less house arcane knowledge, some documented and some not.

Not much you can do there.

One way that Discord is similar to Reddit (and, imo, a reason for it's relative success) is that it operates on the same authorization model. A single pseudonymous account gets you access to many disparate communities. In either case, once you have an account the activation energy needed to join that subreddit/server is very low.

I manage a Discord server for a few friends, topics are gaming related (DCS World primarily, but also Star Citizen and iRacing) - could easily be other hobbies.

I have structured the channels to support the learning journey that DCS is.

I absolutely love it, so incredibly useful. It's very easy to share resources, pictures - anything. The voice chat is also superb, just hop into a fixed hangout channel that anyone can join. I'll often just go into one early in the night, so that my friends (all over the world) can see me and hop on if they want.

I have joined server vendor specific discord servers, as well as racing league ones. The fact that they are invitation based is perfect.

Furthermore the scan on screen QR code with phone to sign in on desktop merits special mention, another massive usability win.

I specifically love how siloed it is or can be. Sure there is a lot of fluff they're putting in (game stuff in the message editor etc) which I just ignore; I can only hope they never change this core design and turn it into way more than it is now.

(Have been using it heavily since 2020, but started before then - fwiw. It absolutely helped me get through some of the strictest lock downs in the western world. Oh and I'm in my fifties, been on computers since the Vic20. I pay for Premium, and also for my early teenage son who uses it with his friends).

Glad I wasn't the only one uncomfortable with Discord, especially in the vicinity of that point (a). To me, Discord feels tainted with weird masculism or toxic kind of gamerism that isn't my kind.

How does a chat platform have any sort of nonsense like that? You're projecting or joining shit servers. It's a technology. It's neutral.

We use Discord at my company. It was a compromise between us graybeards wanting email + issue tracker only and the new people wanting... Discord.

> the new people wanting... Discord.

Had they never heard of Slack?

Doesn't slack have most of the same problems?

The problem as I see it, as a heavy Discord user as well as a mod and admin for some moderately large communities, isn't that Discord isn't searchable - it's just the people are generally too lazy to do so. Often (and by often, I mean _daily_) I see people join a server, skip past the FAQ channel, and ask the same question the person above them asked. Said user would have had their answer had they:

- read the FAQ

- used the search

- scrolled up just a little bit

I don't disagree that the walled garden of Discord could use search improvements, but the users themselves bear much of the responsibility for the perceived distaste of the tool and I have yet to see a solution that isn't perceived as "mean" when people are directed, even gently, to try the aforementioned methods for seeking an answer.

The entire 3D printing community has switched to discord there is no more forum, blogs or something else; even reddit was not able to compete with discord, and that was before the blackout in June. Since then, a lot of 3D printing subreddits are closed or only accessible in archive mode. So what does it means in practice?

I have 30 different discord servers on the 3D printing topic (across the others i use for gaming or friends), each with 50+ different channels, not counting subchannels. For the Voron 3D Printing, i have the official Discord + 4 other fans discords including 3 in my local language. You cannot read everything, as chats are mixing high quality information but also random chats not usefull.

Some discords are only available if you pay a montly fee on Patreon Some discords are completely empty but make a "news announcement" some times to times that is not published elsewhere that is why i keep them in my list You have to manually pickup the notification otherwise some servers are constantly spamming.

Of course you cannot search across all discords at the same time and discord is picky with typos so if you search "pizze" across the pizza-discordverse you will get nothing specifically for each precise component reference, you have to search the servers 1 by 1, this is really painfull Discord is trying to create their version of reddit threads but that is shitty and not usefull in practice

It was a fantastic platform back to the covid period but now it's becoming very complex and not usable; the main pain point is that (as instagram) is it not indexed on any search engine.

I often think about social media like this: I’m a quiet cafe and empty restaurant kind of guy. I hike trails and go to the gym at early hours because the vibe is right.

Social media is like the mall, or a stadium. Some people like going there, and do so often. They’re excited to see Taylor Swift with 80K other people. They go to the mall early on a weekday for a sneaker drop. I don’t get it but c’est la vie. That’s their life.

I don’t rant about the 80K people in the stadium for the big show. I’m sad there aren’t more quiet cafes. I spend time in countries where quiet cafes are more the norm. Maybe I’ll move there some day.

I’m also reminded by my parents who talk about the old country, or how grand it was to buy a house in LA in the 60s for $14K. Things change, eras end, we miss what was or what could have been. Tech stacks change, platforms and social spaces petrify, and our kids won’t care about any of these tomorrow.

I don’t have Twitter or Reddit accounts. And so it is.

Guess we have opposite problems. Most places around me are quiet and I want something inbetwee a library and a night club. Just a semi-social place to make friends.

Sadly the internet polarizes that as well. Sometimes Discord is the only place for smaller kinds of media. otherwise you have ghost towns of forums where maybe you get one response back when talking about a certain work. Usually none

> Discord has been decent for a while. I suspect enshittification will commence soon

Discord was enshittified years ago. It's just that nothing really changed recently, unlike Twitter/Reddit, so it's not making the news.

You've got a platform that's completely inaccessible without an account. Acquiring an account often requires handing over a mobile number. And Discord can then ban you arbitrarily, despite never posting a single message (the one saving grace is that you can email them about it, and they'll often restore the brand new account, if you don't mind the weeks worth of waiting).

And that doesn't cover the five minute rigamarole of logging in (enter user/pass, fill in captcha, get told that this is an unrecognised IP/device, wait for email to arrive, open Discord email, click on link*, click Authorize, fill in user/pass again, solve captcha) - why do I have to do this just to view content?

* Bonus: the link has like a ~5 minute expiry, so you can't just go and do something else during the process, or you'll have to start over from the beginning

Goodness knows you can validly critise discord for any number of reasons but the time taken to log in on an untrusted device isn't really one that resonates with me. I have done this recently and the process took all of 5 seconds.

Here's the process if you have a phone and want to do it fast:

1. Click login on discord on the untrusted device. It shows a qr code next to the credentials box.

2. Log in on phone (which for me is just a faceid check).

3. Scan qr code. Now you're logged in on the untrusted device.

No captcha, no username/password typing on the untrusted device, no second factor even (because your phone is logged in using 2FA so you're using that trust) and definitely no email verification.

Good to know. I refuse to let a bunch of things touch my phone (Discord doesn't exactly have a stellar privacy record), so have never tried, but for those that don't care so much about privacy, it sounds reasonable.

But hopefully you can at least understand how unnecessarily convoluted Discord makes the process if you don't have or want to use a phone.

So if you choose not to do the thing that is designed to make the process simple then the process is exactly the same as it is for me on just about any other site/system when I log in on an untrusted device. I don't really see it as unnecessarily convoluted, but even if it was, you inflicted that on yourself did you not?

I care a lot about privacy and for me personally, logging in to discord on my own phone in order to log in on seamlessly on an untrusted device seems less bad than logging in to some arbitrary system using my actual creds. The latter combines any threat from discord with threats from password sniffing either while I'm getting creds to the device or on the device itself.

> the process is exactly the same as it is for me on just about any other site/system when I log in on an untrusted device

This is not my experience. Logging into Reddit/Twitter/Hacker News etc is nowhere near that level of convoluted.

> you inflicted that on yourself did you not?

That's like stating that an assault victim is inflicting damage on themselves by choosing not to comply with their assailant. Okay, perhaps not the best analogy, but hopefully you get the point.

But no, I don't want to login at all. However Discord decided that I must, if I want to access info, and Discord imposed this procedure onto me, unless I comply with their (what I consider to be unreasonable) dance.

I don't buy your analogy as being at all equivalent. You literally had two choices, chose the hard option and then complained that it was hard.

I totally understand making a tradeoff if you think that it preserves privacy (which I don't agree with as I explained above) but I don't think it's reasonable to do that and then complain about it.

> but I don't think it's reasonable to do that and then complain about it.

"Entry into this establishment requires an exorbitant 20 minute procedure, or you can bypass that by showing nudie pics of yourself."

Me: why do I have to go through this 20 minute procedure?

You: you don't. I understand that not everyone is comfortable with showing nudie pics, but I don't think it's reasonable to complain about the alternative.

Sorry, hard disagree with you, but I see that you're set on your opinion, and I'm set on mine, so let's just leave it at that.

They chose the option that did not imply sharing too much information with discord. The fact that it's hard is mainly because it's not discord's preferred option. So no, it's a perfectly valid choice to make and discord is being a pita. Setting up time-based 2FA is simple. Setting up network (!! email !!) based 2FA is stupid and cumbersome.

That assumes you have it on your phone.

Has anyone figured out a way to remove the phone number attached to an account?

Does the official instructions not work? https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4413460214807-...

Never attached a number so can't test myself.

No. Discord defaults to using only a phone number for verification.

> Acquiring an account often requires handing over a mobile number.

depends on the server. I've only ran into telephone verifications on one server. But I've made 3 accounts with no more issue than HN or Reddit.

>And that doesn't cover the five minute rigamarole of logging in

I'm not sure I've ever been captcha'd on Discord. Is this a recent thing?

I think if Discord thinks your IP is suspicious, they'll force you to enter in a mobile number when registering an account (this is obviously before joining any server).

I'm guessing the captcha is the same - your device/IP is probably considered 'safe' by Discord.

I agree with the writer. When Apollo got shut down, my usage of Reddit died with it. The occasional skim on BuildaPCsales aside, it’s utility has rapidly approached zero for me, and the old subs that I used to browse have taken a noticeable dive in quality to the point where it’s not worth my time to read them.

The same with twitter. I tried twitter for 2-3 months. I found the quality of almost the entire user base to approach quality reminiscent of Markov chains. I amassed a handful of followers. 95% of whom were bots. With the change to X, I think it’s about time to wrap it up.

Funnily enough, the en-shitification of both has brought me back to my original love: reading. I’ve finally started working my way through the backlog that’s been building for several years now, and my life has been immensely improved over the results that would have been gained over spending that time browsing Reddit.

Same here. some 600k+ Karma and like 13 years on the platform and I completely quit when Baconreader broke.

I added /r/gamedeals and /r/gamebundles and the Fortnite ststus bot to my RSS reader and that's all I follow at all now.

My first account was probably 10 years ago. This was back when r/bodybuilding and WSB were still good.

I had pretty much stopped using Reddit a few months before the news broke just because the overall quality was so low outside of a few niche fintech subs. When the announcement popped up on Apollo I sent the dev a nice tip as a thank you for his work on top of the Apollo premium (?) I had already purchased a few years back, then I uninstalled it and never looked back.

Doesn’t help that trying to use Reddit in mobile safari is such a painful experience. I still haven’t figured out how to do a subreddit search, and at this point I don’t really care to.

> I have a Mastodon account, but I don't love it, for the same reasons I didn't like Twitter. In addition, I think that way of consuming content is generally like watching mainstream TV or listening to radio with ads. You're letting a bunch of people who aren't really that important to you, or qualified to do the job, be the content curators for you.

Isn't that the opposite of Mastodon? The _default_ Mastodon home feed is only people you explicitly follow and posts they re-share (and it's easy to hide re-posts if desired). There is no suggested content.

It's basically as close as social media can get to an RSS feed.

The people you follow are the mentioned content curators.

Except you choose them yourself.

Yes, but choosing people makes your feed more cluttered than choosing topics.

Hashtags are also there.

Don't follow people. Follow hashtags.

You can also follow hashtags which for me is much more interesting than following people.

Yes, I'm following dozens of hashtags and only 3 people. This gives me a very high ratio of interesting content to uninteresting content.

OP doesn't like mastodon for the same reasons [they] didn't like Twitter. That would be mostly:

- "It's not really possible to use Twitter without at least a little bit of doomscrolling"

- "I think that the core concept of a "tweet" is fundamentally unhealthy, because by design it promotes angry and extreme content."

- "Most users don't understand that by "dunking" on someone, they are actually promoting the content."

This is basically a critic of fast-paced short interaction based on an infinite timeline. The comment about TV afterwards may seem weird but for me it makes sense. The whole concept of having everything in a single bucket is very TV-like. I don't believe user behavior will be very different on mastodon than twitter: people will follow some very productive accounts and their feed will be dominated by these.

>You're letting a bunch of people who aren't really that important to you, or qualified to do the job, be the content curators for you.

isn't that most social media? If you want traditional news, you subscribe to a news site. if you want experts you need to be in those respective communities. Expecting journalists or domain experts to freely share quality information on an informal platform isn't impossible, but shouldn't be expected. pseudoanonymous discussion shouldn't be your primary source for most "real" content and issues.

Lemmy has been surprisingly good as a Reddit replacement given the relative user counts.

With 3rd party apps like Sync already migrated, you'd almost not even know you weren't just on Reddit.

Lemmy experience is quite satisfying. Took a moment to get used to the fediverse especially with multiple duplicate communities. Yet find myself doomscrolling much less and being more satisfied than Reddit. Still a small community though…

> Yet find myself doomscrolling much less and being more satisfied than Reddit. Still a small community though…

I think these two things are tightly related. When a platform gets too big, the content trends towards the lowest common denominator, which tends to be content that appeals to our primal fears, anger, and hatred. Lemmy is small enough that the community is still drawn together by something healthier.

> Still a small community though

Lack of content has been my biggest issue with lemmy by far. There's just not enough content right now (once the many topics I have blocked because of zero interest are removed) to sustain my mindless scrolling habit. I frequently find myself at the bottom of the barrel.

I keep hoping that this results in me just wasting less time on the phone/computer, but my addiction is overpowering.

I cannot understand why anyone would want to deal with fediverse anything. I don't want thirty places with five to twenty people that post the same few things. I want one with hundreds or thousands or more. If I want a cozy social area I'd just as soon start a group text chat. It's just the worst of every experience.

OT1H, I hear you and agree it is frustrating and very bad UX. OTOH, there is no rug-pull outcome because the board of anything decided to rug-pull API access to AcitvityPub endpoints

That said, I think ActivityPub has only solved the distributed posting identity problem, and has not yet solved the "lemmy.ml shuts down" problem, in that such a thing will not take my ActivityPub identity with it, but will take a lot of the high subscriber communities with it, forcing them to relocate yet again

>I cannot understand why anyone would want to deal with fediverse anything.

for reassurance and redundancy. People going rouge or sites being compromised by greed or other issues are inevitable. But if one server goes down (literally or figuratively), you got 29 other servers to lean on, and it makes adding a new 30th easier.

>I want one with hundreds or thousands or more

that's still possible. Meta's new "Threads" may in fact be that. But the issue of how the internet is converging towards a few select corporations is an issue not exclusive to the fediverse. Having any kind of new forum in the 2020's overcome the networking effect is a massive feat.

"You're letting a bunch of people who aren't really that important to you, or qualified to do the job, be the content curators for you." This hits

Doomscrolling hits some sort of dopamine receptor for some sort of evolutionary reason. But I know now, in 2023, that whatever components in my brain that are being manipulated, the reason has nothing to do with my survival. And for me really it's that feeling of manipulation I resent most. Often the manipulation is indirect which is arguably the more insidious aspect. The people we follow may not be trying to consciously manipulate us but some content they saw was -- and probably for a reason completely misaligned with whatever we like to think our values are.

Personally, I love the value of Reddit.

How I see it is that it's a single account which allows me access to an infinite number of communities for me to ask questions about.

Interested in fishing? Ask about it in the fishing subreddit. Interested in Chinese Medicine? Ask about it in the Chinese Medicine subreddit.

I absolutely love it. It's like interactive Google.

That was the case before many of the moderators of those communities left in protest of Reddit's API changes. Whether that will stay the case remains to be seen.

I'm not sure how the moderators are relevant. The communities still exist. The moderator isn't the community itself.

Moderators shape the community. Whether or not that shape sticks after they leave depends a lot on the community and what rules they keep/enforce.

for example, r/fishing bans memes. What if mod A leaves and mod B allows memes? Experience says that memes proceed to take over r/fishing anf the community tone changes. Sure, r/fishing "exists", but does it exist for the reasons you subscribed?

You can even use HN as a whole here. How much do you think the tone of HN would change if Dang dissapeared tomorrow?

That's the issue that was understated during these protests. Moderation is thankless work and even without drama it can burn one out.

Moderators enforce quality thresholds and keep trolls out that makes those communities possible.

They used lots of custom bots to do this. Many, such as bots that detected abuse from users, used Pushshift, an API and front-end for crawling through archived Reddit posts. (Reddit's API limits you to 1000 posts/thread and has rate limits on the number of posts you can search through.)

Apollo and other apps aside, a large chunk of the protests from moderators were because of how the API would render their moderation bots completely useless and Reddit's inability to provide better alternatives.

Most vocal amongst them was the moderation team of /r/AskHistorians, an extremely well-curated sub that heavily used bots to enforce their very high submission and participation standards.

I don't know why people just can't use plain old forums. I've got a lot help from KVR (a forum for music making) since I started learning DAW. It works fine.

If authentication is a problem then just let users login with their discord/twitter/reddit accounts?

Is it the lacking of "one-click setup" forum services?

They did, Discourse is basically just a plain old forum -- with a somewhat newer coat of paint.

> Is it the lacking of "one-click setup" forum services?

I'm a bit biased (since I run a tiny managed service provider) -- would you create a forum if it had one click setup?

Services like Discourse and NodeBB do offer this kind of service, so it seems like the option is there.

> would you create a forum if it had one click setup?

The only reason I'd be hesitate to create a forum is that I think people (not me) might actually prefer Discord and I'm doing a disservice for them. So it's like Catch 22.

Ah I could see that -- I personally think that forums and Discord are actually different mediums, for different purposes.

Slack/Discord/Mattermost/Matrix is great for frenetic conversation and water cooler chat, but it just feels like history and long term knowledge doesn't get built easily there. It's like the difference between old school forums and IRC -- people generally didn't expect much from ephemeral conversation on IRC.

The one exception might be Zulip -- their threaded chat model is actually a blend and is very effective at creating enough mass around a single conversation (i.e. a thread) and making it trackable. That said, I still think forums are a different beast.

I have been in forums my whole life and discord is far from them, discord is just a chat akin to irc. Forums and IRC worked together very well, when I was moderating a huge gaming community we had several IRC channels for those who wanted live participation.

It's impossible to follow a discussion in discord because when you arrive it may be over and they are talking about something else, that doesn't happen in a forum you can just post and add your take. And managing knowledge is easier in a forum, I can still find my 15 year old replies, or access all the news I created back when I was a mod.

I fully agree with you (and IMO it's just as bad with Slack which people love to use in corporate contexts), see my comment here[0].

I think you may have misread my earlier comment, it says "Discourse" (as in the forum software[1]), not Discord.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37245220

[1]: https://discourse.org

Yeah I did misread it.

Discourse != Discord. He said Discourse.

Discourse: https://www.discourse.org/ <- a modern-looking old school forum thing

Discord: https://discord.com/ <- a modern-looking chat thing

My bad.

Note to self: wake up before replying.

>They did, Discourse is basically just a plain old forum -- with a somewhat newer coat of paint.

Compared to traditional forum systems such as vbulletin or ipboard, discourse is a pain in the ass to use.

I find discourse difficult and confusing to use. Everything seems mixed up together, so it’s never clear what the topic is supposed to be, and scrolling is a nightmare. I actually kinda like pagination as it means I can know where a post basically is even if I didn’t save it, with discourse, if I don’t glance at the date and “write” it to memory there is no way to easily find an old reply without just continually scrolling and hoping I don’t miss it.

People can use forums, and do. But in a lot of cases the community is already established somewhere and if you want to join the community, you go there. And good luck getting any sizable community to switch platforms.

I don't know, why didn't people use Google+ instead of Facebook? or Mixer instead of Twitch? or even Linux instead of Windows?

They all have the same issue of a Network effect[1] to overcome. Sure, I can whip up or take over a dead forum today and dictate the direction, but I will likely struggle to get a dozen users in a month, let alone a dozen comments. Meanwhile, there are probably 12 new sign ups for reddit as I type this message.

There's dozens of reasons why this is hard to overcome, but to put it bluntly: people don't leave if they are comfortable with what they got. if Reddit works for someone, why search out for some forum that doesn't show up on search to find maybe 12 comments abut something, when reddit has hundreds of posts to read? Users are metaphorically lazy, and the biggest sites feed into that.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2022/10/1...

It's not really possible to use Twitter without at least a little bit of doomscrolling, and that activity took a toll on me emotionally.

Doomscrolling or doomsurfing is the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of negative news online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling

I don't think I do this -- at least not anymore. Tweets are short. If you don't want to click into the horrifying article linked or whatever, you don't have to.

You may not be able to use the platform formerly known as Twitter without scrolling through a fair number of Tweets with negative framing, but it's a bit like seeing a bunch of negative titles and you can just go "Well, not my cup of tea. Not going down that rabbit hole."

It's maybe something I did when I didn't feel well and couldn't focus or whatever. It's low-hanging fruit when I have no energy nor attention span. But even with that, I've gotten better over time at recognizing when I feel awful and I'm inclined to do stupid stuff online and instead of wallowing in the mire, I try to play games that are "my speed" for such times, "productively piddle," or watch music videos.

I try really hard to not just wallow in my bad mood and let it grow into something more in my mind than "Well, Doreen is sick and tired today and everything sounds bad because of it."

>Nuance and subtlety is impossible to distinguish from dog whistling. Most users don't understand that by "dunking" on someone, they are actually promoting the content. In summary, it gave me a darker feeling about the world in general, and in exchange, did not offer much to enrich my life. [...] And finally, I have more nuanced conversations with my wife and friends about politics and other hot topics, without worrying that I'm going to come off as dog whistling or naysaying.

It sounds like the problem with social media for OP is between the ears rather than on the screen.

> Discord has been decent for a while. I suspect enshittification will commence soon, so we should be on the lookout for an alternative over the next five years.

For folks who want to move their communities to a publicly accessible Matrix server, I'm building Shpong [0]. Heavy WIP obviously.

The trend of moving to closed-off spaces is bad for the open web. I'm hoping we're able to reverse it, despite everyone wanting to close things down due to AI panic.

[0] https://shpong.com/shpong

This looks amazing! I'm somebody who quite enjoyed the Discord interface, although I don't use it much. I'm glad you're building something like this, it'll definitely scratch the need for an open alternative to Discord.

I completely agree about the trend of closed-off spaces being terrible. I'm heartened by the number of open-source and open platforms that have picked up the mantle.

This looks like a really cool project. Is it open source?

Yes it is.

https://github.com/commune-os/commune-server/

> start hunting for high quality blogs I like this site for that: https://ooh.directory/

The more problematic thing is that Reddit took a read-only group, assigned a random, completely unknown new moderator, and re-opened it.

The maw must be fed.

Really happy to see this. We all moved to these centralized platforms because they were convenient and benign. But we could all go back to smaller independent forums if we really wanted to. And if you run a project that people want to find, there is virtually no downside to self hosting a forum for the community.

I'm on Twitter off/on for 10 years. I still don't get it' value proposition.

Anything less than face-to-face socializing is a degraded social experience.

Arguing over healthier forms of social media is like arguing over the healthiest fast food chain. It's just not good for you.

Why?

Think about what you get out of face to face socializing. It's not just verbal communication. You get facial expressions, body language, their style, their image, their smell, you can touch them. I can pass you snacks, a beer, give you a hug hello and goodbye. You're in the room together. You're sharing an experience.

No other form of communication enhances, adds too, or improves on these things - with the possible exception of VRChat.

Voice chat and message chat offer a fraction of the full experience. Not to mention dealing with unreliable and sketchy brokers and middle men. You can talk, but there are rules, sometimes subscriptions, or other strings attached. Also they get to spy on you and sell your private information at will. Social media is lesser still. A feed about your life so acquaintances and strangers alike can casually browse your life history at will. They'll know about you, but never really know you. They'll only know what you show them.

You see, it's not just about the richness of information or experience for its own sake. Ask yourself why we socialize? What's the goal? It's to develop a connection. But there's a difference between good and great connections. How strong of a relationship can one develop when the "handshake" is limited, restricted, and fundamentally flawed?

It's a different kind of communication but I don't think there's a qualitative difference between them. They are just different, with their unique set of benefits and disadvantages. Online communication might be asynchronous for example (which allows more frequent communication) and better suited to share pieces of digital content like pictures/videos/links which might not be important for you but for younger people it is. They can still meet each other offline of course (it would suck to go to a digital concert or whatever, nobody does that) but there's a shared cultural context that is digital and online communication is what enables this. I think it's close-minded to dismiss that.

Also developing a deep connection or whatever is rarely the "goal" of casual socializing (which is what online communication is for). But it also helps keeping your "real" friendships strong by enabling frequent and convenient communication even when life doesn't allow meeting frequently.

> and better suited to share pieces of digital content like pictures/videos/links which might not be important for you but for younger people it is

Again, it's better in person. Let's watch it together, not defer it hours, days, or ghost it entirely. Otherwise my text group is reduced to an algorithmic content feed. Optional, impersonal.

> but there's a shared cultural context that is digital and online communication is what enables this.

Culture exists in the real world and is imported online. Nothing about online is necessary to have a shared context.

> Also developing a deep connection or whatever is rarely the "goal" of casual socializing

Yeah, if all you're aiming for is casual, then social media is great. Just like fast food is great for a casual diet.

> But it also helps keeping your "real" friendships strong by enabling frequent and convenient communication even when life doesn't allow meeting frequently.

The point being that you do have to eventually meet again in person, as a relationship that moves entirely online is really no relationship at all.

I'll let me friends who moved all over the states know that I cannot continue this degrading social experience. They should find time to regularly fly here and be with me.

> They should find time to regularly fly here and be with me.

This but unironically

well, when face to face socializing is breaking down, you gotta do what you can to cope. I can learn how to cook healthier food, I can't force people to want to go out for lunch or whatnot.

It's true. A lot of people live in social poverty through no fault of their own. We all experienced it during covid.

But ideally we can find people that want to make the effort to go out every now and then.

If anyone here happens to be interested in a Zig community on Lemmy, let me know. My instance [0] still has plenty of room to grow, and it's slowly becoming the alternative place for emacs and lisp.

[0]: https://communick.news

Andrew Kelly wrote:

> ... the same reasons I didn't like Twitter. ... You're letting a bunch of people who aren't really that important to you, or qualified to do the job, be the content curators for you.

Exactly. I'll own and operate my own personal recommender algorithm, thank you very much.

> I'm going to look into setting up an RSS reader for myself and start hunting for high quality blogs.

The Correct Answer™

I've never understood Twitter. How do I follow convos? What are people talking about? Why can't I find anything? And most annoyingly, obvious links (hrefs) don't work, forcing click thrus. (Engagement FTW!)

And WTF am I seeing the same frikking content over and over and over?!

I'm finally using 𝕏 (neé Twitter) just this year. Because for the first time, I was super motivated to follow a handful of geeks (wrt climate crisis and electrifying everything) that don't post updates elsewhere. (For now. With Musk imploding 𝕏, THANK THE GODS, everyone's on the lookout for the next disco.)

I now get how and why 𝕏 blows. It's an outrage machine, not a forum host. Those two use cases are mutually exclusive.

Imagine a personalized HN landing page where I only saw unread updates from the people I follow. And for entries/topics that I'm "watching".

Also imagine the ability to filter OC (outbound links). The stuff I never want to read.

Lastly, imagine dupes (reposts) somehow get deduped. Like a forum for "continuing conversation", vs a whole new entry. People could repost (retweet) as much as they want and HN smartly aggregates them.

And a great search.

Now imagine the client for those forum features. Either web or app.

Track my personal history. Which OC and people and topics do I most view, watch, bookmark, and like? Not just for internet karma, but also to complete my personal feedback loop.

If my personal RSS reader and podcatcher simply logged my own viewing habits locally, I'd be in heaven.

Render my activity on a timeline and I'd hit nirvana. (There's probably some other useful visualizations too.)

The funny thing about Twitter users is how in real life you can tell who is addicted to Twitter from the way they talk. Every conversation is a Mexican standoff with the Twitter addict as they try to bait you into exposing your Silo against their Silo. Its infuriating to deal with this type of addict because the rest of society is just trying to coexist while the Twitter addict is trying to root out imaginary threats to the Silo.

Silo? Not familiar with the term. Googling I found "Silo Mentality" (="resists sharing information and resources with other people or departments within the organisation.") but I don't see exactly how that applies here

Perhaps echochamber is likely what they meant?

I meant silo. Its not an echo chamber that they can disconnect from its a purposefully built online collection of thoughts and principles that they guard and collect to the point that its the driving force of their life.

People do that without the help of social media.

That comment made sense to me when I replaced “silo” with “filter bubble.”

… which reveals my silo.

I see this opinion commonly espoused on HN, yet I know a number of people who are heavy Twitter users and not a single one acts like this.

Most of them aren’t even engaged in politics at all. They mostly just care about sports and celebrity culture. They’re some of the most “normal” people I know.

I think the problem with online forums such as Reddit or Lemmy is still just the plain old content filteration. The first thing, when opening a Lemmy server, I see is a HC political memes about free-speech... aka. yet another dopamine well. We have pretty good a LLMs, it shouldn't be hard to categorise these posts and apply some filters. I would smash the button "filter out non-nuanced political posts" so hard...

You can just unfollow people that engage in extreme language on Twitter, you won’t run out of people

The problem is that Musk changed the Following algorithm to reward engagement.

So you will inevitably get people who are more extreme and controversial.

And since they will soon disable blocking you won't be able to avoid them.

“Mute” works for me to avoid annoying users, including Musk hinself.

and funnily it seems it's them that run out of people rather than you.

"Those Large Language Models are hungry!" XD

own your platform.

use things like rss to follow feeds / blogs etc.

but us humans being stupid we wanna take the easy way out and be surprised by the results.

if people had stuck to blogs, rss we wouldn't be having so much polarization going on.

now its so toxic that if someone has a different politically opinion to you - then they must've been not so smart in other areas as well.

I hate reddit's up/down voting.

Then sort by New or Old instead of by Best or Top.

rss is back

It never went anywhere.

time is a flat circle - RSS feeds come back bb, I missed you

They never went away. (I'm pretty qualified to say)

Use twitter and reddit to promote your blog.

As Andrew mentions in the post, even having a Twitter account was a source of stress. It's about more than just promoting his content.

It's a feeling I can sympathize with. In 2009 I deleted my Facebook account (or "deactivated" it, the only option at the time), and even though I wasn't using it much by then, it felt like a needless weight was suddenly lifted.

Haha, you think reddit values OC? They love to say they do, but then you get caught in spam filters, reported for "self promotion" (because how dare you use a proper blogging site over reddit's markdown self post), and overall called a shill because you don't revolve your life around reddit before daring to share something you thought the community would resonate in.

It can be done, but it just shows another hypocritical angle of that community.

>Once Loris was the sole moderator, he decided to change the subreddit to read-only mode. However, this was thwarted today when a troll (check their comment history) performed a hostile takeover in broad daylight and reopened the sub.

I would say you are the troll for closing a programming language sub for ideological reasons.

This isn’t an airport.No need to announce your departure.

This isn’t an airport. No need to announce your departure.

This isn't Reddit.

The only alternative is to delete your social media accounts rather than replacing one social network with another.

Migrating to another social network does not solve the problem that Andrew is talking about.

It just prolongs the outrage and the addiction present in all social networks no matter their algorithm or users. Its exactly like suggesting to quit alcohol addiction by drinking a different brand of alcohol.

So the solution is to delete all your social media accounts and never look back.

You're posting on a social network right now.

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