Curious what people have left reddit use now?
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 hard, especially on days when other hobbies or tasks feel un-startable.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?"
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.