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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing this about Twitter and Facebook but my experience is completely different. I believe the default experience is as you describe, but after I started following dozens of retrogaming groups, old games are all I see in both places. Even the ads became relevant and, believe it or not, interesting. I've clicked on a couple, which took me to small creators in the retrogaming and RPG areas.

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The same is true with Reddit. The default feed is absolutely awful, but the bar required to curate something individually interesting and useful is too high for most new users, given the toxicity + banality of the default.

I'm sorry but reddit is trash. Every subreddit, no matter how niche, is basically cringy phrases being repeated or photos of some "home set up" or said niche product someone bought who is looking for validation of their decision. It's so bad I blocked reddit from my search engine results.

Clearly we're using different subs. ymmv.

Provide an example of a sub that isn't like that?

Both /r/Science and /r/AskScience are very heavily moderated and verified industry experts discuss papers on it.

There's a lot of interesting discussions on r/science but like the rest of reddit it's such an echo chamber that you end up with bizarre one-sided arguments that discourage all opposing views.

Is there much space for opposing views on a forum answering science questions? Presumably the purpose is to answer from established science.

> Is there much space for opposing views on a forum answering science questions?

Perhaps more than anywhere. Science is a process of challenge and response, not a static body of knowledge.

> Presumably the purpose is to answer from established science.

"Established science", which is still subject to debate itself, isn't what link aggregators cover. They bias towarss stuff more like science news and novel study outcomes, which are nothing to do with established science except as a seed for critical discussion.

If something is "established" and has no "space for opposing views" it's the opposite of science. "Dogma", perhaps. In science, by contrast, every belief is at best contingent, subject to rejection when better evidence becomes available. That's what makes it science in the first place!

I don't see any benefit in entertaining flat-Earthers in discussion.

If you prohibit arguing about the shape of the Earth, you're banning people from explaining that EGM08 is generally more accurate than EGM96—and where it isn't. That is a significant harm. Trolls advocating obvious nonsense like flat-Earthism isn't a significant harm, because nobody over the age of 6 will be misled.

Even if you were right that debate on the shape of the earth had no benefit, forbidding it still wouldn't be science. Science is not coextensive with beneficial things.

Fully grown adults believe the Earth is flat or that we have never been space to and dismissing them as just trolls is doing the same thing you are accusing me of doing and not allowing "space for opposing views."

This is precisely what I was talking about when I said that reddit turns all communities into echo chambers.

If you assume that all opposing opinions come from flat-earthers and idiots that couldn't possibly be right about anything you will never even think about changing your opinion on anything. You'll continue to chat with other reddit yes-men and pat yourselves on the back about how you're all so right.

The upvote / downvote self-censorship system simply does not work for any serious discussions. It might be ok for sorting the snarkiest comment under an article but that's about it

You're contradicting yourself. You yourself say there is plenty of interesting discussion but what interesting discussion is there on reddit if it is just people patting themselves on the back?

There do exist paranoid schizophrenics, yes. Science generally doesn't have much trouble dealing with them, unlike, for example, institutional censorship regimes, which can transform minor personal delusions into major collective catastrophe.

I am not, in fact, denying you space for your views. I'm giving you the space for your views and explaining to you why they are incorrect.

Yeah the upvote based ranking basically means that every comment section is basically dogpile on the same points of view and every dissenting opinion is hidden... Terrible

Broadly appealing subs like that should be the last subs you cite if your goal is to provide evidince that Reddit isn't lowest common denominator trash.

Even in fairly niche subs I find that "surface level" content quality dominates and nuanced takes are frequently unpopular which is basically a recipe for anyone who knows anything to leave. I find the best subs are satire subs because having to know enough about something to be able to satirize it weeds out all the people who create and perpetuate surface level content. I assume there are some super niche subs that are similar.

/r/CreaturesGames/ - Discussion about the Creatures artificial life simulation games. I haven't seen anything particularly cringey on it.

On reddit the defaults are shit and the rest of the site bans you by default until you've karmawhored yourself past an arbitrary threshold on those defaults. Trash website.

I used to use it years back. Some subreddits were really great but they all inevitability devolved so I lost any interest in maintaining active accounts there. r/skookum had really interesting content for a while but devolved into idiots reposting the same skookum brand wrenches over and over again.

I finally quit my barren Twitter when the Musk takeover resulted in my feed being flooded with porn (including illegal content) and arabic carpet cleaning ads. I seriously doubt anyone's default Reddit front page has ever looked like that.

I keep seeing people say they've experienced this, but I've been on twitter for years (pre Musk and stayed post Musk) and I've never once seen porn on there. How does this happen by accident?

They're going to have a pretty developed and stable picture of you and what you respond to by now, especially of their view of you aligns with high- value placements already.

So they probably don't bother to audition that kind of content for you very often because they already have strategies that milk your attention, engagement, and wallet better.

When you hear other people share their experience as new or different users, keep in mind how customized all these platforms are and how idiosycratically optimized they'll already be for you as a long-time, engaged user.

Most people can't go back in time to get where you are, and don't have any sure (or worthwhile) road to get there.

In my case, my (now deleted) account (which was primarily read-only) would get several porn bot followers per day. If I didn't log in for a week, I'd have dozens of new "p#i#c#s#i#n#b#i#o" type accounts following me.

Towards the end, there would often be porn in replies of many posts on all kinds of topics, like politics, news, etc.

> several porn bot followers per day

Ah, ok, yeah, you're right, that did (and still does) happen to me. I had forgotten about that, I just ignore followers now.

I don't see any porn in my feed. Some of it is salacious, but not porn.

YouTube is nuts when not logged in as well. Those crazy clickbait thumbnails eg. Mr. Beast or whatever.

My logged-in YouTube shows me almost entirely 3blue1brown, Applied Science, and the like. Logged out it is 100% chum and garbage.

I wish the home was better showing the stuff you followed vs. having to go into subscriptions tab.

edit: there are a limited number of tiles to show but yeah

Agreed. The X ads were terrible and annoying until I flipped on that "Let X ad track you" and at least I get tolerable ads on mobile. (uBlock Origin blocks them on desktop)

The For You feed varies week by week but is generally okay. I make heavy use of lists, mute words, etc to clean things up.

X is a train wreck, but an interesting and useful one, depending on who/what you follow.

Use Firefox and you can block them on mobile as well.

Safari, with an ad blocker, does block them on mobile, as well. I should have noted I was talking about the X mobile app.

I bought a premium account on X and the ads went away.

I bought a premium Prime account on Amazon, and yet some of their shows still have embedded commercials. grrrr.

I have Premium and I still get half the ads as free.

Plus, I get constant ads to upgrade to Premium+ for ads-free.

Premium+ is probably what you have.

I use bluesky and so far have no ads and lots of great journalism and academic lists to follow. Greatly enjoying it, feels like Twitter 2012 or so.

I have Bluesky, but I don't really like it as much. The UX is much better than X, though.

On Bluesky, I pretty much follow the people I followed before they fled Twitter. However, they complain a lot about politics, Elon Musk and the US President Elect on their timelines. I could unfollow, and do in some cases, but that would pretty much leave me with nothing to read on Bluesky.

That, and the weird tech people I get the most value from still post primary on X, so I deal with it.

These are the current events, so it isn't unwarranted to see complaints.

They will likely complain about other things in the future :)

That's their right, but complaining about it isn't how I like to do things. I don't want to read it, so I don't visit Bluesky much at all.

I'm more interested in ideas on how to adapt and move forward and be resilient. To be honest, I kind of like to have my beliefs challenged as well, and X provides that.

I run a number of business X accounts which are post-only.

The very second the US election got underway all of our accounts started to heavily promote right-wing political content. Even though we specifically said when we signed up that we aren't interested in anything like that.

This happened to me on imgur, i explicitly filtered out politics but once the election got underway I started seeing it everywhere (except in imgur's case it was left-wing content). I turned off the politics filter and then turned it back on and they vanished for a time but then slowly leaked back in. If i reset the filter every week then i could keep political related content hidden for the most part.

same, people keep complaining that their twitter feeds are full of violence, porn & political bullshit but I get 0 of that

I haven't gone out of my way to restrict my timeline either, I follow ~1000 accounts I just don't follow or interact with accounts that post any of that crap.

Don't worry it will come, it takes a while but then you start getting sent outrage bait, stuff you will disagree with just to get you involved.

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