Ask HN: Reddit died, nothing took its place. What will happen when HN dies? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Reddit died, nothing took its place. What will happen when HN dies?

25 pointssph65 comments

Reading the post from the Atlantic about the Internet becoming so large even viral things happen only in its corners and never reach most users (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38697227), I was wondering what will happen to this place once it is on its last legs.

Reddit, once the frontpage of the Internet, has shot itself in the foot and feels more and more a hollow place, after a long decline from its brilliant heydays. Nothing has replaced it for me as there is nothing that feels like it nowadays. We are too spread out.

The day HN dies, we will be even more spread out. We will probably never find a decent replacement for it. And for many of us, this is the last bastion of pre-recommendation algorithm social spaces. Where it still feels somewhat human in its sprawl. Even if it's far too early to say, where will we hang out?

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Personally, I feel like nothing happened to Reddit. Communities that I visit are pretty much what they were before Reddit changed its API policies.

However, there's a subreddit for reddit alternatives (r/RedditAlternative) if you're curious :)) Lemmy and lobsters are the dominant ones in my mind.

For HNews? Probably https://diff.blog/ would be one of the alternatives. I must say, if reddit goes dark today, I'd be sad, but if hnews goes dark today (and forever), I'd be pretty devastated.

Content mostly didn't change, but the value of Reddit tanked, I often encounter links to Reddit that are now deleted, and I'm also nowadays deleting my old (2 weeks) comments and posts.

Feels like content did change to me. Hard to place but almost like some key contributors left and avg IQ dropped a couple points as a result

It probably heavily depends on the sub. No real changes for those I care about.

> I'm also nowadays deleting my old (2 weeks) comments and posts

But why?

Because I don’t want to support the long-term value of an antagonistic provider.

That's a fundamentally misguided attitude.

Removing your posts only annoys and inconveniences actual people by breaking threads, convos and destroying the context. It does zilch to Reddit as a corporation.

No need to be an ass towards fellow users, it's not their fault Reddit now rubs you the wrong way. Either don't post at all or leave it be.

Alas, I’ll have to disagree with you.

By annoying regular users you tank the value of the hostile corporation.

It's the same flawed logic used to justify that sanctions on the people of a country would cause a regime change from within but that rarely works.

It would only work if there would be another alternative for those users to go to. Currently there hasn't been a popular move from reddit to somewhere else. So no, you're just annoying users but without harming reddit.

Deleting content does more than zilch. Searching Reddit via Google having become less reliable made the press some time ago.

>Because I don’t want to support the long-term value of an antagonistic provider.

Such a terrible take. You're not hurting Reddit's bottom line with this, you're hurting the users looking for answers.

Great time to start using different sources

Great idea. Where are you posting the advice you deleted now, so I can go there?

> I'm also nowadays deleting my old (2 weeks) comments and posts.

Won't this just exacerbate the "I often encounter links to Reddit that are now deleted" problem?

Agreed. There are what feels like a ton of [deleted] posts and comments now.

Same, not seeing any change, and according to analytics sites and Google Trends, Reddit's popularity has only been on the rise.

One change I've noticed, and this has nothing to do with API changes, is that Redditors now take comments at face-value, even when they're farcically sarcastic.

Unless you tag the comment (e.g. /s), people's default is to assume they're typing back and forth with literally history's greatest monster. And their goal is to proudly and publicly expose this monster for internet points.

The weird thing is they really do get internet points for being oblivious to flippant sarcasm.

I wonder if this is an "Eternal September" problem, or if mass internet culture has permanently shifted.

The numerical value of "people on reddit" didn't changes, however the active posters and creative people started migrating to other networks(e.g. Lemmy). The larger subs(100k+) quality has declined from 2022, you can see lots of clickbait and facebook-like sensationalization/drama,even in serious subreddits content becoming more shallow. Its not like Digg pissing off everyone, mobile posters are perfectly content with consuming reddit but content creators have declined in numbers. See https://subredditstats.com/ (Comments per day, Posts per day)

> Probably https://diff.blog/ would be one of the alternatives.

Requires a GitHub account to post. Why are site owners like this?

Plenty of excellent Discord communities out there. Which kind of sucks, because none of it is indexed or searchable and who has the have time to be an active member on more than a few of those?

Lots of useful knowledge hidden behind walled gardens these days.

God I already resent how much discord is a thing in the present, I really hope it’s not the future. Using a chat app as a forum / social network just doesn’t work for me.

While this is true, in some sense it is also a feature and not a bug. You don't always want the whole world seeing what you're writing. While Discord doesn't offer complete privacy (unless you restrict access), it provides good-enough-privacy in the same sense that you don't have complete privacy when having a conversation in a town square, but it's private enough. A couple of people might hear what you are saying, but your conversation isn't permanently and publicly archived.

This has its disadvantages, as you point out, but it also has advantages. What I really like about Discord is the fact that people actually connect with each other. I have never meaningfully connected with anyone on Reddit. Discord enables human connection for two reasons: (1) you have a village-sized group of people, meaning you can actually keep track of individuals and your relationships with them and (2) since it is private enough, you can allow yourself to be more vulnerable.

>You don't always want the whole world seeing what you're writing.

That's why you use pseudonyms or burner accounts instead of your real name or publicly known handles.

What ruffles my feathers is how much useful knowledge I pick up browsing some channel on a topic I care about.

It's only random snippets from a moment in time, which makes me feel like there is a world of useful tips and tricks that is just lost in the stream.

In general, what you'll find there is better and far more up to date than whatever gets mentioned by the few people who bothered to make a video about it on YouTube, which is unfortunately often still more informative than people actually posting answers and tips on public fora.

> since it is private enough, you can allow yourself to be more vulnerable.

There are plenty of tools available that can archive everything ever posted in a server. It takes one mad user to collect everything and leak it to the public.

Not sure why discord got so popular in VC land given that it’s user base may in fact be even more toxic than 4chans.

How? Discord is a platform, none of the servers I'm in are even slightly toxic.

Go join the largest political server on discord and smell the roses.

4chan has a whole lot of non-toxic work safe boards on it too. You won't see much racism on /po/ (paper-craft and origami)

> ‘Problematic pockets’: How Discord became a home for extremists

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/12/12/...

https://archive.is/BxHWj#selection-367.0-373.64

It's majority shareholder is Tencent - arguably it's far more popular with the CCP crowd than with VC money.

On a related note I am very sure that Discord is indeed indexed by the Chinese government, just not for us to see.

I don’t know why this always surprises people, Discord was more closer to real time chat than a forum. What real time chats have ever been indexed? IRC wasn’t (without a bot, which most channels never really bothered to do), Zulip isn’t, Matrix, Slack isn’t and neither was Gitter.

Just like with IRC if you want your chat to be indexed you would need to set that up yourself, but that may break their terms of service.

Every relevant IRC was indexed. Especially channels for specific projects always were indexed, usually more than once.

Now every 'fancy' product has a discord where the same questions get asked every day again and again and the community isn't helpful anymore because it gets tiring.

I can't use Discord because it's a cross between drinking from a firehose and feeling like I missed something "important" (i.e. interesting/relevant/callbacks) at all times.

I think HN's saving grace is its limited feature set and design.

I build a UI layer on top of the HN API to attract a more general audience. But it's only a "reader", you can't sign in and start posting. I'd be happy to keep it that way.

My suspicion is that the current interface design and feature set of HN only attracts a certain kind of audience. The moment that changes, I think then we'll start to see a decrease in quality, which to me is the death bell of a social network. On the flip-side, if HN doesn't adapt, will it eventually observe a decrease in traffic as the visual appeal fails to land on newer generations of people?

These days, whenever I visit a Reddit post with a decent question being asked, and see the first handful of comments are joke responses with upvotes and badges, I just leave.

It died in the same way FB did. Much of it is reputational damage. People will stop investing into it, including large corporations. It gets removed from brand and PR strategy and such. Consultants who utilize it will seem out of date. Or they'll be grouped into the bunch who deal with WordPress and PHP - it's the sewage equivalent, those who do the dirty work that the white collars won't.

Paradoxically, that makes it better. Facebook groups are just thriving now, like mushrooms after the rain. The old days of FB had people making meme groups so they could rebrand it into a fashion group and sell it off to be merged into an established fashion brand. Reddit just has plenty of people who would make jokes at your expense or ignore a post to be the first to make a joke and harvest lots of upvotes.

It becomes more 4chan and less well, reddit, people are just more genuine.

Without the people gaming these platforms, they're usually a much better place to visit. I don't visit reddit anymore though, but I might when the dust settles in a few years.

A reddit-like death may be a good thing for HN. Maybe people will stop campaigning against crypto, AI, frameworks, whatever they're feeling insecure about, and just rationally discuss their interests knowing that nobody important is reading.

Why do you think that being spread out is an issue? Niche forums like HN were exactly how the internet worked before mass social media arrived and ruined everything. Going back to this old format is exactly what we should be doing in my opinion.

I find that Kurzgesagt's video on social media touches this subject very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0&t=602s&pp=ygUYa3...

Argh, I wish you hadn't linked the video directly to the timestamp of the ad. Here's the 'right' link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0

i've seen that happen time and time again in my decades on the net; I have faith that good discourse will find a new place again once it has left here..

but it hasn't left yet, so let's enjoy the conversation while we have it and worry about the next clubhouse when the time comes.

it's weird because I think like others here, reddit has lost it's allure for me (after 12 years of devoted active participation). but I can't point out something specific that caused it. I knew many comments were bots and trolls before, and the ratio hasn't changed (probably) since I quit, but I definitely can't trust basically anything I read on Reddit anymore. maybe chatgpt killed it for me?

I'm glad I finally quit, but now I just check hn twice as much. at least there are less memes tho

there has definitely been a change in tone and tenor over the past few years. seen it on HN, too.

absolutely believe GPT-2+ has been used like a firehose on these sites, and it's clear that the 50 Cent Army approach also works pretty well

Reddit died? All the subs I follow are still there and carries on. Nothing really changed.

Same, and according to Google Trends, Reddit's popularity has only been climbing.

I haven't noticed any form of death on Reddit.

Facebook was also reporting growing numbers for years when in reality is was already dying

What does "dying" in this context mean then?

Could mean many things. One metric that works for me is how well ads and promos translate.

Some of my favorite subs have turned into cesspools of tribal politics.

Take /r/SimpsonsShitPosting - the injecting-tribal-US-politics-into-everything problem has been especially acute during the last few weeks, but this has been a growing problem for a couple years

Well personally I only follow heavily moderated subs and factual ones where there is basically 0 politics (/r/buildapcsales/ or /r/gamedeals for example)

shitposting subs are great for submarine / low-key propaganda because there is little filter, and because there is a specific kind of person reading and posting there.

Most of the tech subreddits I visit are still there, people still talk in them, one or two mods and well known posters may have left but they’ve also been replaced by others. The casual subreddits have mostly re-opened and people have carried on like nothing happened. I think those calling it “dead” are more wishfully thinking than anything else.

That being said, i agree the value and quality isn’t as high as it once was.

For HN, I think it may outlive us all, but in the case it doesn’t people will find a place, it may not even exist yet, lobste.rs seems like an alternative at the moment.

Telegram groups took Reddit's place but in 2023 there is no decent search across Internets any more. Telegram even has balls to be completely closed to anyone without the account.

Any index of telegram groups?

https://tgstat.ru/en but mostly in Russian.

Most answers didn't seem to really answer the question so I'll try.

If we fast forward long enough after the true demise of reddit and or HN, then I think it's pretty obvious that the outcome is that most people have moved on to a platform that does forum posting in a new and fresh way that solves some big problems users felt existed (a good example of this is the demise of Skype despite them being a top notch product but severely behind the potential).

Something else always comes along. People like to talk.

We need to decentralize. Places choke full with millions of normies is an antipattern, it's prone to monopolization and degradation.

If HN suddenly dies there will be 1000 former HN users who will create a clone in a weekend.

It’s all about ownership. Communities like this one, like metafilter or Craigslist are resilient because they’re controlled by people who have an idea about how they should work.

Just like digg before it, Reddit was dead the moment a corporation bought it with the intent of combining it with other businesses.

But as another comment mentioned - discourse finds a way over and over again. And if you want something to exist, the best part is that you can just roll up your sleeves and get to work building it.

Nah this site is way different. Gotta get my Erlang news somewhere else. It’s still fascinating to read takes like this.

Nothing contributes to the conversation quite as much as vague single sentence snark.

I think Substack private/paid communities are probably the answer here.

Lobste.rs ?

Looks great but there does not seem to be a way to get an account unless you know someone. Maybe smaller closed communities are the future. I can see the appeal of that.

Write your email address here, and an invite will come your way. (same to other HN'ers who read this)

Edit: Or find my contact info in my profile and reach out to me.

Reddit didn’t die. That you think it did is telling.

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