I think overall I'm just less enthusiastic about the internet; everytime I come back from a week or two of backpacking without internet connection I realize how overstimulated with inane bullshit we all are.
Aggressive curation of subreddits did help, but I fear the decent subreddits are slowly dying out. The modern iteration of site (It's more of an app these days) appears to attract the wrong type of users for the healthy conversations that I enjoy.
I am surprised how long reddit lasted, but I get the feeling it might not hold on to me for much longer.
You as a person decide you want to create a space with a combination of reddit-like features, maybe video, etc. Only people you invite can discover it (or you can allow them to invite people) It could work for neighborhood groups (similar to nextdoor but with a limited crowd that you like/trust), school groups, family, or specific interests -- although specific interests are the idea's weakest selling point since it lacks easy discoverability.
Yeah, there are forums, discord, etc. etc., but I thought it could potentially be interesting. And yeah, people would abuse it (i.e., share pirated and illegal content), so maybe not really viable.
- Headphones and audio equipment: https://www.head-fi.org/forums/
- A/V equipment: https://www.avsforum.com/forums/
- Computers and Tech: https://hardforum.com/
- Music: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/
- General Entertainment and Discussion: https://forums.somethingawful.com/
RIP Notebookreview.net forums, IMDB forums, AbsolutePunk forums, Craigslist message board (still live, but mostly abandoned)
Agreed, the site feels like a ghost town these days whenever I lurk there.
This is true of all social media platforms. People who have all day to post/reply and figure out how to game the system will always dominate the discussion. This is also why online propaganda works so well, it is literally their day job. People who have a life will always be at a major disadvantage. In some ways Reddit is worse off because those people also become moderators. The only thing that saves it is the ability for users to flee a subreddit if the moderator becomes a tyrant and start a parallel subreddit with hopefully more sane moderation.
The default subreddits are mostly a writeoff at this point. Terminally online people latched on to them and are never letting go. Or they were useless from the start like AITA.
Went to reddit and was not unhappy there for many years, but, aside from some targeted subreddits (/r/beagle!) I rarely spend any time on reddit anymore. The new reddit changes just feel user-hostile and they are aggressively pushing users away from old.reddit.com, it feels like a matter of time before they announce that they are killing old reddit.
Perhaps we are getting old but I also find happiness is inversely proportional to my time spent on social media.
Some of that is a function of age I am sure. When you are young, sites like reddit and digg hold promises of some new and interesting unknown unknown. As you get older, the amount of unknown unknowns fall off a cliff and you are just left with the known knowns and known unknowns... occasionally you are once again interested in the known unknowns, but you certainly didn't need a website to remind you they existed. The novelty is gone.
After a few hours of catching up tho, that’s when my internet usage devolves to reading pointless faff and refreshing my timelines in a loop.
Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time.
It’s amusing to see the usual HN flex with smug superiority but both Reddit and 4chan even to this today demolish HN in every (good and bad) criteria. Moderation here has stifled honest discussion in favor of safe-harbor, bullshit talking points.
But it’s all for lulz.
It was even stupider than that. Digg didn't even have a real, working promotion system. It was literally one guy who personally curated the big stories. Google almost bought them but looked under the hood and immediately bailed. The upvotes were all smoke and mirrors.
Have you ever been to such websites as Instagram or TikTok?
It was a significant shift in social media and internet history, regardless of what some fringe subreddits had.
Nobody here is defending Reddit’s choice to use a poor front page algorithm that allowed for surfacing obscene, fringe or even illegal content over a decade ago.
There weren't any NSFW ones on that list, and it sure didn't include the controversial ones you guys are pointing to. Maybe if you went to /all; but that's definitely not the frontpage/homepage, and even then you'd have to specifically enable NSFW for those to show up.
By the time the frontpage started including popular subs, those subs had long since been expunged from the website.