Permission now required to take subreddits private | Hacker News Reader

Permission now required to take subreddits private

old.reddit.com

57 pointsfocusedone35 comments

I predict old reddit is going to go away soon.

I hope so. Old Reddit is how my internet addiction thrives, if it goes away I might be rid of this electronic demon for good.

Still, old-vs-standard is a fascinating example of how someone can pour millions into a new interface which is--accidentally or possibly deliberately--shit.

Especially when you're arriving through a search engine and the discussion you wanted to find is is buried somewhere in a thousand "load more comments" prompts that occasionally all reset because of an unexpected page transition.

P.S.: Actually, doesn't that tie back into the Reddit spokesperson's "communities should honor the expectations they set"? If I search for a particular term and some Reddit comments come up, I expect to actually see that term when I click through, rather than have the corporation pull some bait and switch with the content.

I predict reddit is going to go away soon.

Why? Not only have the masses remained since last year, they showed how docile they are and how much further mistreatment they'll tolerate.

I have mostly left. You can tell that the website is not at all the same since the protests. There are measurably fewer contributors and the quality of the content and discussions suffered. The bots have taken over. The front page is unbearable.

Perhaps it still scratches an itch when you have a few minutes to kill, but it only survives because nothing else really replaces it. This can’t go on forever.

Curious what people have left reddit use now?

Left reddit during the API fiasco. HN replaced only part of reddit's niches for me. I tried using Lemmy for the other parts but it seems its federation model just gave more power to exactly the kind of moderators that made me dislike Reddit in the first place.

Same. Left then. And then when the AI training drama came along I found a script that edited all my posts then emptied them then deleted them.

I was amazed how many people on HN get very pissy when hearing about that, and act almost as if you have an obligation to keep that content up (much like Stack when they started limiting people’s ability to delete their own posts…)

It's been tricky, but for the most part I've tried to stop needing the validation of saying something clever or helpful and seeing a number go up in validation.

It's been hard, especially on days when other hobbies or tasks feel un-startable.

P.S. I would also obsessively return to things and tweak them because they didn't sound just right, or because I noticed an error such as two "validation" clauses, which I partially blame on trying to edit text on a phone. In this respect, the 2-hour edit window of HN is both a blessing and a curse.

https://old.lemmy.world/ works

I didn't know about the old subdomain. That's so much better than the standard lemmy ui.

it's a 3rd party extension https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym that some instances have enabled. i do wish this was integrated into lemmy though

4chan and I'm not ashamed of it. Even though it is anonymous you really feel a sense of community. Approach it as a creative writing exercise or as being part of a hive-mind and you'll find enjoyment in it.

The amount of authentic and inspired posts is incredible. And yes it has it's ugly parts, they don't get a lot of traction though. I guess that part of its unattractiveness is deliberate. No advertisers want to touch it and that is probably why it survived for so long.

HN scratches that itch pretty well for me. It is also more useful and less toxic.

It was summer. I just went outside. It helped me on my quest to make my computer a quiet tool instead of a dopamine casino. When I am on the train I read HN, articles queued in Instapaper, RSS feeds and books. I am part of the great logging off.

Books, podcasts, HN, the Fediverse. Occasionally Tildes.net.

Reddit at best was marginally useful for content discovery. There are many alternatives now.

Discussion quality had nearly always been abysmal, except on the very smallest subs. I've commented on this on HN many times: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>.

As David Weinberger noted, "conversation doesn't scale": <https://dweinberger.medium.com/the-social-web-before-social-...>.

"Wisdom of crowds" is proving to have been hugely overly-optimistic.

High-quality information tends to associate more with expertise, whether the result of long study or on-the-ground first-hand knowledge. Neither are prevalent in large-scale discussions.

Reddit's own gamification, trivialisation, AI-dragon-feeding, cozying up to Google, and exclusion of other search engines (I use DDG, recent Reddit content is largely absent AFAICT), are all highly negative developments.

It may well be that Reddit as conceived cannot survive without taking this route. But in that case, it should be permitted to die. This is a worse fate.

As an alternative perspective: I'm still using reddit, but it's a very curated list of subreddits and once I stop seeing new content from that small list I end up going elsewhere.

The subreddits I keep in my list are a mix of niche interests (such as a specific video game or geographic region), professional groups (I still enjoy r/sysadmin even though I haven't been one for years), and a couple of news/politics/economics for larger stories.

Ad blockers and RES are the only reason I still use Reddit as much as I do. If they even do away with old.reddit or make it so RES doesn't work I'll scale back my usage even more.

> High-quality information tends to associate more with expertise, whether the result of long study or on-the-ground first-hand knowledge. Neither are prevalent in large-scale discussions.

I don't necessarily need high quality information. I mostly just aim for somewhat civil discussion. That's not easily scalable, but I geel its at least viable. Scott's old forums had a great guideline for "civility": https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-...

The problem currently on Reddit is that you're not getting even civil discussion. Just drive-byes, tired memes, regurgitated idiocy, trolls, spam, disinfo, and the like. Most particularly on the larger subs, but even on most of the smaller ones I'd once found at least occasionally rewarding.

The sour taste from both that and the site's inevitable migration to something I wish to have nothing to do with kills whatever faint interest I might have in seeking information there.

Maybe this is just another instance of trivialisation of a mass medium, as happened with print, radio, television, cable, and much of the rest of the Internet already. But then, I didn't wallow in that filth either.

Good Internet discussion sites come and go. Cesspits accumulate.

Ever since they banned most search engines from indexing them I basically never end up on Reddit - all the search results are old and not relevant to any current search I might have.

Nothing.

I hard quit Reddit the day they killed RiF (along all 3rd party clients), never to come back.

It was surprisingly easy to do so.

A combination of Lemmy, Bluesky, and most importantly, being generally less online than before. I'll no longer rely on a site enough to be seriously bothered if I need to leave because it turns as hostile as Twitter and Reddit did last year.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities for finding lemmy communities :)

Discourse. A hosted instance at $50/month with the FOSS discount. Not everyone moved but it's far more pleasant.

You could skim r/redditalternatives and see what site gets regularly repeated.

ironic, isn't it?

But lately a lot of that sub shifted towards a lighterform of r/watchredditdie or r/subredditdrama.

Also a bit funny that I searched by /top/year and the 2nd post was "Can we just admit already that there isn't a good reddit alternative?"

a mix of HN and Tildes. Still a few niche stuff I can only find on Reddit, but I haven't had an account for years at this point.

Have my eyes on a few other sites, but they aren't really active enough to be considered anything other than a prototype as of now.

I have realized, since chatGPT became a thing I think I use reddit even less now. Before I would append it to searches. I still do, but GPT is close to enough for me.

Good. Going private is a ridiculous nuke button for mods to have at their fingertips. Years of history becomes lost once a subreddit goes private. It's not even useful as a protest, since the admins will just undo it the moment your protest gains traction.

Hopefully, next they change the "unmoderated subreddit" punishment from going private to restricted submissions and locking comments.

I feel Reddit blocking search engines that don't pay and killing off archives and third party clients is a far more worrying long-term threat to information accessibility than the moderator blackouts that were protesting the former (unless there's more recent context I'm missing due to having moved off reddit).

Outside of protests, there are plenty of legitmate reasons to go private. The biggest reason being extreme brigades (including content against site rules that can get the sub banned), and a lack of resources to moderate in real time. That's partially why for years mods have relied so much more on "locking" posts. Which IMO is even worse and punishes all participants over what is often a few threads that should be locked individually.

If mods responded half as fast to that as they do when privating big subreddits, I'd have less sympathy for this change.

>Hopefully, next they change the "unmoderated subreddit" punishment from going private to restricted submissions and locking comments.

stuff like potential illegal content is exactly why going private/removing the sub is the punishment instead of restricting submission.

It was one of the only tools that heavily-raided subs had to deal with raids of hate-speech/illegal content.

Basically every LGBTQ+ subreddit, for example.

For what it's worth, we've stopped moderating our subreddit for the month of October.

Reddit fundamentally cannot figure out the role of moderators - we're either robber barons, or we're useless, or we're actively out to sabotage the company.

What we certainly are is unpaid volunteers, so we're kind of done. The reporting feature will allow users to remove posts and comments that blatantly break the rules; let someone else volunteer for awhile.

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