Agree on how the platform’s have changed.
However, I don’t think Reddit is an exception. Popular is often filled with content that is driven by the feelings of fear and hate. Not something I’d like to continually expose kids or teens to.
However, I don’t think Reddit is an exception. Popular is often filled with content that is driven by the feelings of fear and hate. Not something I’d like to continually expose kids or teens to.
That's what I've lost on Facebook. It forces me to see things its algorithm thinks I like, but more often than not, it's things that make me want to argue. I don't have that on Reddit. Long may it last.
As I found out a while ago on HN when I complained an extension I used stopped working, ?sk=h_chr still works to get a sane FB view. No sponsored shit, no algorithmic suggestions, no posts people have reacted to, just chronological posts of people & pages you follow.
I also use old reddit.
Same account, same behaviour, but the new site is really pushing "gross" stuff at me.
I go straight to subs' /new URLs.
RSS for HN and other specific sites I want updates about. old.reddit/r/.../new pages. A third party app for YouTube to just view new things from people I subscribe to.
I definitely have fight harder and harder to, browse like it's 2006, avoid the Algoslop Train, but it is possible more places than you'd think.
I had to abandon my last few hobby subreddits because there were a few chronically online people who had to control the conversation in every single post with their opinions. If anyone didn't agree, their comments would mysteriously go to -3 or below within 30 minutes of posting.
It's all little fiefdoms for chronically online people now.
If I may ask, what are the hobbies that you are talking about?
I was big on it during the reddit excursion. Eventually I figured out that because it’s so small, that many/most people read the equivalent of /r/all, where many, many posts would end up. So even your small niche community would get "genpop" users. That’s what made me return to reddit instead and delete my instance (that, and the politics of the creators infesting some major instances).
The only halfway sane community I found was beehaw.org, which defederated aggressively, but that came with being very small, and I always cared most about the discussion over the links themselves. So eventually I left that as well.
ETA: I would probably summarize it that Lemmy is (or was, been a while now) better than big subreddits, but worse for small niche communities which imo are by far the best part of reddit, and the only part I care about.
I was hopeful when I found out about it...
The trouble I think, going forward, is that no matter how good the technology of a new forum might be, everyone is primed and ready to flock to it. How could anything be good if the same 500,000 redditors that turned it into shit show up the first week? Worse, even if they don't, there are all sorts of crackpots who try to preempt by colonizing new ones early hoping that they can sway the thing once it gets big (Lemmy and the commies).
This is Eternal September.
> there are all sorts of crackpots who try to preempt by colonizing new ones early hoping that they can sway the thing once it gets big
I do wonder if software can be used to prevent this tho. I mean Hackernews came after reddit and its community doesn't have crackpots (well ahem, maybe sometimes but definitely fewer than reddit maybe)
I do think about hackernews from time to time and think about how the ethos around it is Curiosity >> everything. I mean sometimes small comments/low value comments can be rewarded but usually its the well thought out comments which get value. (Well, this explains why my comments don't get +1 haha, self roasts are fun!)
I do think that in HN this intentional change plus the fact that pg spearheaded the project personally as a personal project for the first few years set the mood around it here to be like this (which is usually civil, even in disagreements)
I think that even in HN guidelines or in some important place, there is this thing called HN is not reddit and such comparison. I find it funny right now but I think that they wrote this to specifically prevent some aspects of what you are talking about right now.
I do wonder if this can be replicated with the communities that you mention tho. It would be interesting to hear what dang comments about it maybe if dang's here about such moderation.
Also out of curiosity but when you mention shit show, do you mean the discussing turning into something (un-civil?) or lacking etiquettes as in say, the community turning into gifs posting as such or similar with low quality comments?
Or what exactly would you classify as "shit show"?
HN is a weird thing. I think it just managed the perfect storm of improbabilities. It managed to find just enough audience for it to be interesting, but didn't reach a critical mass that sees it going exponential (possibly its subject matter repels popular interest and especially youth interest). It has a one-man (or at least tiny moderation) team that (somehow) resists the urge to do anything but put the smackdown on bad actors (possibly the hard rule against political stories helps). And as the last refuge of people who hate Facebookization, it's also possible there is zero demand for it to be swipe-able and phone-centric.
But, in truth, it is also sort of fossilized, and will die once our generation (and -a-half) retires and has little time for it. So we've got 15 or 20 years more, and it will shrink as it goes, and then one day it'll just be gone. It won't even be here to memorialize its demise.
>I do wonder if this can be replicated with the communities that you mention tho.
Maybe someone is more clever than I, and can figure it out. But I've spent nearly 20 years at this point, and I've come up with squat. I think the forums that people did enjoy (for awhile) were completely organic and just can't be artificially created.
>Or what exactly would you classify as "shit show"?
It's difficult to even describe what you're missing, if you weren't there to see it for yourself. It didn't start with reddit, it didn't start with Slashdot, I'm not even sure what it did start with that's before my time. Are you even aware that many of these websites didn't even require an account to post? That was only if you wanted your name attached to some comment that was really clever. There was this sweet spot though, where it all converged. It was post-internet-boom, so some of the people who were posting had hobbies besides the internet itself... making for conversations about anything and everything. And, as a rule, people weren't jaded about it in general... people weren't expecting you to be rude or have some agenda. If they could even imagine that, then it was you were a spammer trying to sell something which was more junk than scam. There was the idea that if the software/website itself were bad, eventually it would be improved. Everything was text/typing/reading, so it was literate and not 10 second tiktok garbage. Phone-texting hadn't quite spoiled everything with text-speech. People managed to get fed up with bad design and bad behavior, there were so-called exoduses. And, from time to time, it was possible to be noticed without Russian mafia connections or Illuminati endorsements.
What we have now is quite possibly the worst possible timeline, so to speak. All of the points I've mentioned don't even quite begin to describe what's changed.
Of course 4chan isn’t a great system for meaningful discussions, the system skews conversations towards outrage and shock. But reddits short, quippy, in-group signaling post style that is encouraged by their voting system seems to be absolute worst way to interact with other people. HN also has this problem to an extent, but it’s properly modded and most people here seem to be not be living through their phones so it isn’t nearly as extreme as reddit (or twitter, I never use twitter but people seem miserable in a similar way to reddit users).
The worst part is the conspiracy theories are increasingly being confirmed in the Epstein releases which is mind blowing, eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/mlt7v/a_big_congrat... into https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29884486 and https://thepostmillennial.com/former-reddit-ceo-says-she-kne...
I've been aggressively downvoted before for pointing out facts that people don't want to be true. (And these were not even political discussions!) I don't even bother with putting my opinions online at any rate, both because they don't actually matter to anyone but me, and because I don't get any joy out of defending them against internet randos.
Edit: It depends on the size of the sub as well. I'm a member of a few subs that I can stand because the moderators are good at moderating, and there are enough regular users coming through to counter a small number of very active cranks.
That is true here too. And Twitter is the least transparent, with people regularly reporting that posts critical of musk or trump have reduced reach compared to their other posts.
Ah, no, the HN commentorship is quite highly biased toward a particular demographic and set of political beliefs, which is a thing that needs to be acknowledged. "Considering both sides" is not something I've ever seen as common practice in any organic online community I've been a part of, full stop.
HN's redeeming quality over much of the rest of the web is that low-effort hot-takes and aggressive content are actively discouraged by the mods and community. (These are things that other communities devolve towards, because they tend to drive engagement faster and easier than quality.)
I don't know whether this is true, but I've seen exactly the same "complaint" from both sides of the USA political spectrum (USA politics are overrepresented for obvious reasons).
I've once talked to a person connected to someone at Reddit Inc, and they indirectly confirmed this (in retrospect it was very obvious).
I was an early Reddit user. It felt like there was a distinct shift when the site went from programming and news topics to being meme-heavy. Then again recently when they started recommending niche subreddits into everyone's feeds so that even the small subreddits couldn't count on being islands of quality.
Now it's just a doomerism factory. The young Redditors I've known feel like they've had their hope about the future hollowed out and crushed. They open the site and consuming a stream of content telling them that everything is awful and will continue to be awful, and anyone who disagrees is shouted down and downvoted. It's a real crabs-in-a-bucket website now.
Yeah there definitely was a change in reddit, probably more than once. It changed indeed. To the worse, too.
In some of the hobby subreddits where I had good discussions in the past it's now just one big echo chamber of people parroting the same information around, whether it's true or not. If you want to participate you either need to toe the line of the accepted brands/methods/techniques or keep your mouth shut. Most of us just get tired and give up