I've been on Reddit for over 15 years and yeah, it feels quite different than it did early on. I can't really stand browsing r/all or r/popular at all.
I miss the days of having 255 friends on AIM, trout slaps on well-populated mIRC channels, and never-ending threads on niche Ultimate Bulletin Board forums.
It's because the age gap, the average redditor is way too young. In a discussion the other day an user sent me to "get bullied at school"... I am in my 40s.
Yeah me too. Another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43409370) expresses a similar dismay at the lack of really engaged discussion.
I have a theory that this phenomenon is largely the result of smartphones and the concomitant constant connection to the internet. Paradoxically, being always connected has made it harder to connect.
It used to be that in order to participate in a real-time conversation, you had to be sitting at your computer. You were ready to chat. You would chat with other people who were also at their computers ready to chat. When you were done you would put up your away message and re-enter the real world.
If you wanted to post on a bulletin board or some other non-real-time forum, again you had to be at your computer. You would post what you wanted to post. When you left and came back later you would check to see if anyone replied and you'd be excited to read their comments. (LiveJournal is the thing that sticks in my mind for this; it was big when I was in college.)
Now, instead of being either online, ready to engage, or offline, engaging in person, people are always half and half. Also, smartphones have driven the proliferation of "notifications", which then have been abused by apps to the point where people are constantly deluged with so many notifications that they can't distinguish the ones they might actually care about. (I've had glimpses of this when I use someone else's tablet or phone for some reason.) Since everyone is assumed to be always reachable, there's no perceived need to say "bye" or indicate when you are temporarily not paying attention to a sync interaction, so those interactions come in unpredictable spurts. And since everyone can always check everything from their phone, responses in async interactions are often dashed off haphazardly. So we get a sort of worst-of-both-worlds mix of sync and async.
Reddit can be okay if you choose the right niche subreddits -- stay away from the main page subreddits. Among the niche subreddits, I find location-based subreddits and subreddits for podcasts to be good sources for unique communities.
Reddit used to be great, but these days, it's mostly rage bait and state actors astroturfing all of the popular subreddits.
I really wanna do some goofy chatting and socialize online in real time, but I must be doing it wrong because it seems like nobody's there. I also tried IRC (went in for the first time in 20 years?!), same story there. Probably I am the problem, but any suggestions?
great money to be made getting the HN tech bro demographic on to something.
I check out Lemmy maybe once or twice a month.
I’ve removed some and added some. Anytime I come across an interesting blog post (here, Lemmy, Masto) I add the blog’s feed to my RSS reader. If the long-term content doesn’t match my taste I remove it unceremoniously.
Post the list. It could be a good starting point for people new to RSS.
double edged sword of platform adoption -- no one is there so you dont go, but if you don't go no one is there.
I found the discord channels somewhat by chance. When you’re into specific things and ask a lot of questions, inevitably you’ll wind up meeting similar people.
As for Bluesky, I was just too burned out on Twitter and was willing to give something else a shot. My feed was initially a bunch of mycological photography, birding photography, far more moderate and constructive politics, and some lists of people in tech that I seeded my following list with. It was so much easier to read and engage with, and the transition was very natural. I’m glad I made the change.
Bluesky has led to discovering a few substacks that I enjoy a lot too. I definitely wouldn’t have found them on Twitter.
I mostly read RSS feeds and hang out on Mastodon. I don't really chat anywhere anymore, not since I left the last IRC channel years ago. I occasionally miss it, but haven't found anything that comes close enough.
If you're not part of a sub-culture, and a narrow one at that, then Reddit content is pretty much your run of the mill click bait. Just like with Facebook, I think that the good Reddit content is either in private or really niche sub-reddits. Things like AskReddit, Politics, AITA or any of the subreddits linked at the top of site, they are all pretty Facebook like content, just spewing out much faster.
Can I offer a perspective you can add to the interpretations?
Apart from the staggeringly low "effort" you will find in it, and behaviours that in proper societies will have the offender's skull broken, it is (was?) a place you surely would visit were you for some reason interested in groups like "the budding party of those convinced of some personally held stance and visiting the premises to just shout that their guts are right, to woo the likeminded and boo the onlookers".
Being that "ideological hooliganism with the pre-Popperian tint of 'To the man with a hammer everything looks like a nail'" bestial, of a widespread bestiality, that would be "mainstream".
(Of course being it made of chambers there can - and will - be exceptions, but that is the environment which allowed that general culture on which to possibly build exceptions.)
Maybe an instance? That website is divided in sections, each with its own population, and you will easily find many of the form "Those who believe that the moon should be rebuilt with cheese can come here to support each other in this blind persuasion, chanting hooligan choirs (intellectual arguments will be out of place here) against the rest (the "profligates", the "heretic" etc.), so the community can feel strong".
So, you will find hooligans vocally expressing their persuasions (not defending it - just shouting it), proposing world views that would instead require some intellectual defense (hence the mention of Popper), and interpreting phenomena according to the dogma of that world view, painting the world accordingly ("to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail").
I do not know what you could not understand, so I can only rephrase the other post.
> worrysome
Good, in general - people today are so relaxed! So relaxed they abuse their freedom. If you visited the site in question, you would find an abundance of participants that out of their "relaxation" will abuse you, protected by the distance of the web page. If the abusers went directly to some group of people in person, physically in front of the abused, what would follow would either be restrained violence and the Social effort, expressed in verbal and non verbal communication, to put the offender back in the framework of proper behaviour, or finally that actual violence that was once called "teaching a lesson".
Edit: addendum: the moderation you can find in that place is of the form "Sorry to hear that an apparent minor is taunting you, would you like us to hide its posts?". Normal, correct reply: "No, I want you to correct the brat and teach it manners, as duly in a supposed community".
But note that the user asked for explanations in both posts, so a concise formula like "online disinhibition effect" probably leaves questions instead of answering them.
And in fact, it is not «just» disinhibition: it is the intent to promote "guts" as opposed to "brains".
--
"The president has said that the moon moves the seas, what a belch, roar, roar, rise!" // "Actually it does." // "Down with the defender of the president!"
"The president has just saved a child falling from a skyscraper, pouring out love and the wrath of his enemies, should not we feel elated!" // "Are you sure that happened?" // "Down with the opposer of the president!"
That is a sample of what you may find there. If you were a humorist without ideas, maybe...
The most likely people to respond on a thread like this are those spending the most time on HN, and thus least likely to be spending it elsewhere. The user sharing time between 5 communities might not even see the thread.
Intelligent content: r/slatestarcodex, r/EzraKlein, r/ReproducibilityCrisis, r/wikipedia, programming language subreddits, occasionally r/interestingasfuck.
Group chats reign supreme once you are in good ones.
0. Meatspace.
1. IRC, mostly on rizon and a bit on libera.
2. Imageboards that don't require accounts.
3. General web, via some shell scripts I've written that give me pseudorandom content from various aggregators.
4. HN
5. Discord, but it I try to avoid as much as possible for ideological reasons.
6. Public unix system micro-blogs/gopher-holes.
What I’m trying to do is understand the world a bit better and encourage civil discussion.
I’m building this without relying on the internet behemoths.
Constructive criticism welcome.
Other sites include 404Media, Wired, The Newyorker, BBC News.
Real life (and associated group chats) for social interaction. Board game group, local motorcycling group, some other friends.
Mastodon never catched on for me
The rest is local news or sports
Their Bluesky is weirdly entertaining to subscribe to. https://bsky.app/profile/scratchnews.io
For sorting the full throttle new Hacker News content, when browsing time is limited, I'm a big fan of https://hckrnews.com
*the registration process requires you to put a key into your public profile, to make sure it's your account. This key can be removed once signup is completed. There is no need of an email and i do not collect any data whatsoever.
ssh new@sdf.org
Have fun!
I think a lot of the time, I find more value in the comments and discussion than the actual article
Tildes, Lobste.rs and Lemmy for generic content
Mastodon and BlueSky for more personal things.