Hacker News Reader

Comment by karmakurtisaani | Hacker News Reader

After reddit prevented browsing old.reddit.com without signing in, I got a lot more active on lemmy. There's some amount of old internet feeling there, you don't get exhausted by the amount of material and it's not overrun by corporations. So far it's been nice.

View on HN

What killed Reddit wasn't just its corporate chase for profit. It was also the fact that the general public's default internet device shifted to the smartphone and its limited keyboard and screen, no longer the computer. That led to comments largely being reduced to 140-character quips, no longer substantial discussion.

I am skeptical any non-corporate replacement like Lemmy can bring the old internet feeling back, because even on those alternative platforms, you just won't get many people using computers again.

It also was because it became a target to influence and manipulate people both by every day scammers and marketers as well as nation state level actors.

Sure, but that didn't hit a lot of small hobby subreddits until recently. But the discussion culture there had already declined starting a decade ago, and it was ordinary subreddit denizens and their phones to blame, not bots or geopolitical intrigues.

all it takes for a sub to be good is a blanket ban on activism. if there is no "NO POLITICS" in the rules, or the rule isn't enforced, then every sub -- no matter how small -- will inevitably be subjected to public opinion campaigns.

Many of the subs related to travel and unpopular arts and music historically had almost no political posts. Yet they started to decline years ago, already before Covid, due to increasing image posts and decreasing long-form text.

Reddit ended up gamifying for engagement/rage-bait instead of natural, authentic discussion.

Every platform with votes does that. Including HN. A community's feeling is largely determined by its sorting algorithm, and voting selects for engagement/ragebait. Chronological is more balanced, but you have to prevent spam because it also doesn't punish spam. You could make it difficult to get an account, but we're all used to moderators abusing the power now, so that leads to self censorship. You could retry the Something Awful way where you let people have unlimited accounts but they have to pay $10 each time, heh.

The other main way would be manual curation. That basically makes a non-interactive website.

Just a hunch, but I think Aaron Swartz would be disappointed.

(Then you bring up Aaron Swartz and Obama's DOJ on reddit and it's massive downvotes calling you a MAGA nazi blah blah blah.)

I follow reddit through RSS, at least that still works but probably that would be the final nail in the coffin for me. There are some really good subs out there and there is no replacements of those on the open internet. Maybe on Discord but I don't really like to use to that for anything else besides voice chat.

Which subs?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com