Flashback to Digg.com... I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... it was the single most significant stroke of luck a fledgling Reddit could have possibly hoped for.
They of course know (at the time of the mass Digg exodus Reddit specifically changed their alien icon to welcome Digg refugees), but the difference is that they are betting on the fact that right now there is no immediately obvious alternative, like Reddit was to Digg a decade ago.
I think they're right. Lemmy/Kbin exist, but they're not ready for it. They're in a worse (less mature) place than Mastodon was with Twitter, and even that was rough.
With no alternative i think Reddit will be fine in this storm. I see many posts on Kbin/Lemmy discussing Reddit addiction, how they can leave it, etc, and those are niche people. The majority of Reddit users i suspect won't even know anything is wrong in a week. I suspect at worst Reddit will start suffering from lack of mods, but that's a solvable problem. Especially with IPO coming, they've got incentive to solve it in a way that they control with an iron fist.
Regardless this event, similar to Twitter with Mastodon, has brought a large number of "new normals" to Kbin, Lemmy, etc. I myself am looking far closer at ActivityPub, working on my own implementation that iterops with the existing ecosystem.
I actually think this will be quite good for the "fediverse". If not from massive direct usage, it will highlight scaling woes with the protocol, etc. Hopefully the next time this happens the Fediverse can be in a more mature position to leave CEOs like Spez feeling less invincible.
This requires explanation. If they staff the moderation in-house, costs will rise significantly and there is no chance they can ever profit. The people with the time, expertise and patience necessary to mod will know of alternatives. Mods are niche niche.
But the bigger issue that you allude to for reddit here is that they aren't pulling off the band-aid in one go. Once the apps die, they still need to kill old reddit and RES, they still need to end NSFW. Each time they do this the federated clones will be stronger, and each time more and more will jump ship.
Interestingly, I've found Lemmy to be surprisingly engaging and active after just a day of Reddit Migration. Sure, there's still a lot of "Reddit sucks" posts, but certainly not all, or even close to the majority.
I was on Mastodon for the Great Twitter Migration of Nov. 2022, and yeah... it was pretty hard to watch. Never have used Twitter, but I saw a lot of Twits struggling with Mastodon. I don't think the migration went well. The Twitter experience didn't translate.
Reddit, I think is a more traditional forum. And that does translate well. There are hundreds of threads with hundreds of comments on Lemmy, and it's really the same experience as Reddit. Reddit users find Lemmy familiar in a way that Twitter users did not find on Mastodon.
Agreed, and i should clarify that i didn't mean it was inactive or w/e, i just think it's less mature of a tech stack, less active as a whole, etc than Mastodon was in it's time of need. That difference i think has a meaningful impact on how quickly new instances can spin up, tooling available, UX of users, native mobile apps, etc.
The shiny things that keep "normal users" around.
Which isn't to say that it is plagued with problems or anything. I just think we have to remember that Federation and a FOSS development model alone will bring a large pile of challenges and confusion to the average user. As you said, we saw it with Mastodon. That friction is survivable if framed right, but any additional friction will be meaningful for normal users. Just my opinion of course, not making any factual statements here.
> the difference is that they are betting on the fact that right now there is no immediately obvious alternative, like Reddit was to Digg a decade ago.
Discord.
I know, I know—it's built for real-time chat, it's harder to search, etc etc... but a lot of subreddits already have associated Discord servers. I could see a lot of communities naturally migrating there. Maybe as a temporary stop-gap, maybe permanently.
Younger people in particular seems to use Discord for things I would think belong on a forum.
Discord won't make it. I find reddit useful because for any particular query I want a mostly user-based answer for I can google term + reddit. Discord jsut doesn't have the same discourse because it's designed for quick back-and-forth chats, not more in-depth self-supporting commentary.
It just doesn't fulfill the same purpose. IME, I ignore discords from most subreddits because they do basically nothing for me unless it's a topic i'm extremely interested and engaged in.
if discord were smart they'd create some sort of built in wiki system or news aggregating and multi group search to essentially merge discord with Reddit like services..
Another thing they're betting on is that most users could care less about this, if they're even aware of it. Some very popular subreddits are going dark, and I'd bet as many users get angry at the mods of those subreddits than get mad at the C-suite of Reddit. In any case, most will just come back later after this is all done.
Don't agree with that. While people may have been unaware, the news is literally plastered all over reddit at the moment - it's impossible to miss. Most people may not care about it that much, but the "zeitgeist" if you will of general anger at reddit management permeating nearly every subreddit is impossible to miss. Just one example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/145jqcl/the_vote_is...
Because we don’t want the site to be completely overwhelmed and turned into Reddit 2.0. Currently, invites are turned off, but are likely to be turned back on in the next week or so. Normally, they are pretty easy to get (asking for one in the r/tildes invite thread).
I've seen a few Tildes threads that I want to interact with, but I can't because I don't have an account
At first glance it looks like a nice place. Most other alternatives seem to turn into a right-wing hell-hole quite fast. So I understand the need to let new people slowly trickle in.
Hey! Sorry to drop in like this, but could you spare one invite for me too please? The community looks interesting and I'd also like to participate in some discussions but I haven't had any luck finding an invite (I missed the last reddit thread by a few hours)
Can drop it to vildravn@gmail.com, don't think HN has DMs.
Hi, been a read-only lurker on Tildes posts for sometime now & liked it. Would be much interested in an invite. If you still have invites left, please shoot me one on mailto<username> @ gmail dot com (bWFpbHRvdGh1cnV2QGdtYWlsLmNvbQ==)
Voat didn't win shit. This is one of my favorite quotes from Slate Star Codex:
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
Voat immediately turned into a cesspool of overt racism, anti-Semitism, and harassment. If you think there is a place on the mainstream Internet these days where people can gleefully host "FatPeopleHate"-like forums and not capsize and sink, good luck.
Not sure what the relation between YC and Reddit is these days, but wouldn't HN be in the prime position to take over? I feel all that is needed is to add sub-hn's. Reddit got Digg's business because Digg gambled away all of it's good will. That was a long time ago, Reddit since been going down the same path.
Point is, all these companies are trying to monetize, generate profits, like they somehow responsible for the value the users are creating. All they're doing is hosting bunch of python scripts.
Swallow your pride reddit, you're nothing but a message board and you don't own a single word your users type.
Start small, add things that would naturally fit here. /hn/apple, /hn/crypto, /hn/gpt. Don't need images and video, it's fine as is I think. Probaly not going to happen right? This is the only place that has the momentum to pull it off though.
> You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest group, like soccer and German politics.
People forget that reddit was popular and succeeded during the digg migration because it was pro free speech and minimally moderated. It was one of the reasons people migrated to reddit instead of here.
The first 10 years of reddit, the community and the company prided themselves on being a "free speech platform." It was explicitly stated on the reddit website.
The selling point of reddit back in the day was that it was not censored like HN! It's amazing how censorship created a pro-censorship mentality in just a few short years.
I don't feel like HN is censored. Does anyone think HN is censored? dang steps in mostly with technical edits or to break up a particularly nasty fight once in a while, can this really be called censorship? of course, you can take a karma hit from other people, but reddit always had that as well.
I'm not sure this qualifies as censorship. There are a bunch of posts and comments that get flagged and unfairly downvoted for no apparent good reason, yes. It might depend on the mood of the users with voting power on that day, and that's unfair, yes. But from what I've seen there is no central agenda to systematically filter out topics or people. Subjectively, I find HN to be much less judgemental than Twitter (musk or not) and other places.
That's a completely fair point. But I suppose that regardless of whether it technically qualifies as censorship, it's people removing content that bothers them, and the end result can still be the same.
It's heavily censored but that's fine as it exists to serve a niche business community. And HN never claimed to be a free speech platform like reddit did.
> dang steps in mostly with technical edits or to break up a particularly nasty fight once in a while
He does that for sure, but he also censors heavily to meet the corporate, social, etc agenda.
When the admins and power mods of reddit decided censor more, HN is one of the censorship models they looked to - the psychological tricks, front running, shadow banning, etc.
Reddit is heavily moderated too, but there you can get into an argument, and it depends on the subreddit.
Here the tone policing is far, far stricter. Also the homepage is incredibly tightly controlled, politically and pro-YC. I've seen many articles on YC companies or associated people changed, removed, etc despite being highly relevant.
Titles are changed to suit the mods tastes here. There was a good recent example where a very negative article on OpenAI skyrocketed the the top of the homepage, fastest rising post ever with a few hundred upvotes within like an hour - first the title was completely neutered, then the post was removed entirely.
The difference is that here I've been able to see many opinions expressed and given a fair shake which would've resulted in a ban on most of Reddit. The title moderation also helps with keeping them neutral and/or informative (biased titles set the tone of the conversation).
The tone policing is far stricter, but the actual content policing is a lot less absurd. The result is that controversial topics and opinions don't result in as much of a toxic cesspool of name calling. On top of all that, here you can enable the display of deleted and flagged comments.
I think that thinking of HN as anything close to being free speech though is a really wrong take. Sure it’s less leftist biased which is nice, but for example the title changes aren’t just to reduce controversy, they consistently favor the in-group. If you believed the HN homepage and comment section as anything close to the zeitgeist you’d be doing yourself a disservice.
It's more free-speech than Reddit along the political spectrum, but less free-speech than Reddit along other spectrums. We're not allowed to insult each other on this site, for example, and posts that are specifically about politics are not allowed. Even Reddit has subs for different political groups.
Wut? People migrated to reddit, because it was one of the few similarly featured platforms at the time. HN was (and still is more or less) a niche forum revolving around startups and SV. reddit was literally the only centralized place on the net that was positioned to handle the posts, discussion and users.
Two completely different platforms that were never in competition with each other. I think you dont know what youre talking about.
They shut down a sub called “jailbait”, I’d say the vast majority of people are ok with that type of “censorship”. And if being against that disgusting trash makes me “pro-censorship”, fine.
That wasn't the case back then, there was a very strong "if it's legal, it's allowed" sentiment on reddit. It was only after it started getting attention in mainstream media that it was banned.
Yes, exactly, that sentiment isn’t mainstream. It goes against dominant social values and norms.
The dominant view in society is stuff like ”jailbait” shouldn’t be tolerated. The reason it’s not outright illegal is in a non-prurient context a yearbook photo may just be a photo. It’s when you post it to a forum for gutter creeps that the qualitative nature changes.
> They shut down a sub called “jailbait”, I’d say the vast majority of people are ok with that type of “censorship”.
The point of free speech is to protect against "the vast majority of people". The vast majority of people are against lgbt, atheism, etc. Do you think such content should be banned as well? What if the vast majority of people want huckleberry finn banned? The vast majority of people was once against women's rights, civil rights, freeing the slaves, etc. Rights exist to guard against the mob.
> And if being against that disgusting trash makes me “pro-censorship”, fine.
That's fine. You can be pro-censorship. It's a valid opinion to hold. And certainly there is a lot of trash online. What I despise are people who are pro-censorship and yet claim to be for free speech.
Also, my point isn't whether I agree or disagree with the content on reddit. My point was there was a time when reddit prided itself on being a free speech platform. As long as it was legal, it was allowed. That changed. Not because the "vast majority" wanted it but because a select group of elites wanted to install a censorship regime on reddit. Reddit was never a democracy. And censorship came to reddit because the business and media elites demanded it.
The number of people who are actually free speech maximalists has got to be tiny. I really like the way it is done in the US: the government isn’t allowed to censor you, but I don’t have to let you stay in my house if you start insulting my family or going on racist rants. This seems like the perfect balance to me.
> The number of people who are actually free speech maximalists has got to be tiny.
This is a very common strawman that I see. Sure, not a lot of people are in favor of literally infinite amounts of free speech.
But nobody claimed that. Instead, people are claiming that there can be a wide range in support for free speech, and even if someone is OK with banning death threads and CSAM, that such a person could still be very much on the pro free speech side.
So yes, someone can be more in favor of free speech than you are, because they do not want legal speech to be banned on major platforms, even if you can nitpick their position and find some extreme outlyier hypothetical where they are not 1 million percent in favor of everything.
The neat thing is that Reddit is community moderated. Each community is allowed to set their own standards, but they also need to clean up their own spam. So, /r/science doesn't allow any jokes at all while /r/Antiwork bans anything that's pro-corporation.
But several times, mostly when the controversy got too hot, the admins have killed subreddits, like /r/The_Donald, /r/incels, and /r/FatPeopleHate.
Yes. Subs had moderators and they got rid of spam, but that was about it. The mods themselves were heavily pro free speech just like the founders and corporate. Back then, reddit was predominatly american and we all adopted the free speech as an ideal. Then as reddit gained a larger foreign following, they slowly chipped away at free speech. It's pretty much what happened to social media and the internet in general.
The prononents of internet censorship are canadians, brits, europeans, middle easterners, indians, chinese, etc. After all, the only place "hate speech" is protected is in the US. If you think about it, you have to protect "hate speech" if you are to have free speech. You can't have free speech without "hate speech". The idea of censoring "hate speech" is an alien concept in america. It was imported from abroad.
I'm somewhat hopeful this gets the far left activist class to move to their own echo chamber like the Trump peeps did. Wish Reddit would go back to the let the upvotes handle it days. Would be nice to be able to sort by controversial again and see some reasonable takes.
Not sure what the relation between YC and Reddit is these days, but wouldn't HN be in the prime position to take over? I feel all that is needed is to add sub-hn's.
Then where would all the hn users go? I'm still mad I couldn't get a lobster.rs account 10 years ago, so I'm not going there. And I most definitely don't want to use a website that the average person has heard of.
I think lobsters might be better, it's very much like HN, but I think it being open source and looking at the code it wouldn't be too hard to have sub groups.
No need to worry, any mention of HN is being mostly censored in all the "Reddit blackout" propoganda Discords now there's actual real discussion happening here about how the strike is stupid and just a vocal minority of mods taking the users for a ride and they can't downvoted those comments into non existence.
Having the code is fine but they do have infrastructure and the architecture of it which is necessary to run the site. That part someone else will need to figure out again over time and optimize.
I think its important to remember that digg was changing the way content was generated and promoted to users. They kneecapped the entire democratic principles of the site, and reddit, a site entirely based on democratic promotion, was waiting in the wings.
Reddit on the other hand is changing how content is accessed on their site, but not changing the visibility or generation of that content. And if 3rd party apps are very important to those users, it's hard to find an alternative to plug in to.
I remember the whimsical memes and comics made by the refugees. It was a different air; optimism that safer shores were ahead. This is more like confusion in the vacuum of space.
I don’t think Reddit being replaced is as much of a given as everyone seems to think. People might simply get tired of the concept altogether. Nobody needs a vote based link aggregator thingy in their lives, and there is no shortage of social media in sight.
The hobby and craftsmanship forums are a lot less link farming. You can take or leave politics and current events I suppose, but something like discord or slack can’t sustain a conversation over hours or days. It gets flooded out by other conversations in four to twelve hours and then poof it’s gone.
And there’s also the “better moderation than YouTube comments” aspects. Whatever Reddit is or can be, it’s lot as toxic as YouTube. And better organized.
I think we want something more cooperative. Not Reddit centralization, not full fediverse. For some reason I’m thinking of the local farmer’s market, where sometimes the vendor has to run to the bathroom, and their neighbor keeps an eye on things, possibly even processing sales.
The thing with coops though is you need a way to tell if people are contributing fairly, and a process to deal with it, and I have no idea what that looks like. I don’t know if that’s because it could never work, or we still fully expect other things to work so no one has tried.
Can reddit sustain a conversation over days? Except on the most inactive subreddits, nothing stays on the front page for more than about a day. The result is that the only people continuing the conversation are people responding from their inboxes, getting into back-and-forth arguments sometimes 50-100 replies deep.
That's actually one of the things that I dislike most about the site, and the reason I've stopped using it: there's no institutional memory. Subreddits can have two stickied posts. One of them is usually some sort of daily discussion thread and the other is some sort of announcement. Anything that isn't stickied will fall off eventually even if it would stay active otherwise. On traditional forums, replying to a post bumped it to the top. Most posts would be recent, but not all. Posts died when people stopped replying to them. And you could have as many stickies as you liked. Most forums had threads that were dozens or hundreds of pages long. For example, MTG the Source has a 399 page thread about the Merfolk legacy deck which was started in 2008. The most recent reply was on the 26th of March this year - it's still active. You just don't get that sort of thing on Reddit. So you get people asking really basic questions forever.
I think Reddit can be great for beginners to a hobby or a topic. It tends to cater to them relatively well. You can get lots of upvotes on your "Hey I made my first [X]" post, and the culture encourages people to hold the hands of people with basic questions. On traditional forums, the culture was usually "RTFM noob, read the sticky". Less kind? Yes. More productive? Yes. People get burnt out answering basic questions repeatedly pretty quickly. Subreddits have to invent all these new ways of maintaining information (subreddit wikis, sticky threads with links to other threads and external links, off-site information linked from the sidebar, etc).
I think Reddit has the same problem just over a longer timescale. Discord can't maintain a conversation for much more than an hour. Reddit can't maintain a conversation for much more than a day. On both, people try to work around it by having special channels or posts that have links to external resources, etc. But what those communities should actually use is phpBB.
If that were the case people would have left long ago, Reddit has plenty of downsides.
Personally I know of no other place where I can get discussions on such a wide range of topics (AskHistorians, biking, my local neighbourhood) presented to me in a simple format. I hope there will be but I’m not holding my breath.
There's a whole lot of inertia opposing people either replacing or discontinuing using reddit. Alternate subreddits gaining prominence is much more likely. Your average redditor has no clue what an API is or why some users and mods care about them. Generally, people need to have significant positive or negative incentives to change a years-long daily habit, and using r/radXYZ instead of r/XYZ will be a negligible change for most. I think reddit has a greater likelihood of strangling themselves by hobbling the overall UX with monetization efforts but their user base is entrenched enough that they could take it pretty far with the "boiling a frog" approach. Who knows, maybe what they've done so far combined with the blackouts will be enough to push people away, but I doubt it.
I feel for them. Figuring out how to make a giant free service profitable isn't easy. It's too bad the tactics they've used seem to be so off-putting.
> I feel for them. Figuring out how to make a giant free service profitable isn't easy. It's too bad the tactics they've used seem to be so off-putting.
I don't. Reddit could be profitable of they wanted to. They make a ton of money through Reddit Gold and ads. The reason they are not is because they have hired way too many devs and other staff, presumably because they plan to do an IPO so founders.and execs can become rich and investors make a profit.
>Nobody needs a vote based link aggregator thingy in their lives
A link based aggregator, you are correct. There's more of them out there than TODO app tutorials. What I do find hard to separate from is the communities that have constant ongoing daily conversations. Cooking, AskCulinary, all the science subreddits, some indie video game ones. Having one non-discord like hub for a community is great, and I do miss checking in on my daily AskCulinary questions and helping newbies out.
Really all I want from it is just a forum with the ability to upvote threads (rather than replies bumping them up) and the ability for anyone to be able to create their own sub-forum, but to heck if I can find something in that category that replaces reddit.
Many communities are not simple link aggregators. Eg. I was active in the ergo mech keyboard subreddit and there it is mostly people showing their latest keyboard creations, sharing PCB gerbers, case STLs, and helping each other debugging issues with their keyboards.
There are a lot of niche subreddits like that. And it would be a big loss to those communities if Reddit isn't replaced.
The main lemmy instance is under heavy load and its admins definitely have their own political slant, and if you're not comfortable with that (most aren't) it's best to find a different one or make your own instance.
> its admins definitely have their own political slant, and if you're not comfortable with that (most aren't) it's best to find a different one or make your own instance.
From casual use alone this isn't clear to me can you explain?
The admins of the main instance have displayed a distinctly pro-authoritarian and anti-US stance. The pejorative for this ideology is "tankie" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie ).
Searching for that pejorative and Lemmy will find discussions about it with links (though not links to Lemmy itself since those sites are poorly indexed by Google).
This came most recently to visibility with the comments on an NPR article posted to Lemmy about China tightening access to Tiananmen square and Hong Kong detentions in /c/worldnews a week ago.
> I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out...
People have been saying this for 10+ years. No reddit alternative has proven to be viable. So the people at reddit know that "mass migration" is an empty threat. Where will you go instead? That's right. No where. Rather than quickly bleeding out like digg, reddit has simply achieved a stable stagnant equilibrium. It doesn't grow, it doesn't shrink. It just stagnates and rots.
The easiest tell is that nobody in the comments is posting alternatives. I remember during the digg migration, people unhappy with digg would post on digg telling everyone to try reddit.
A CRUD app with a UX so bad people feel the need to use third-party clients isn’t exactly a moat. Half the people here could scaffold a Reddit clone in a week or less.
The moat is that it has users, not that it’s impossible to clone.
Though developers vastly underestimate the difficulty in cloning something as well. As someone who thought it would be trivial to clone phpbb, it’s a lot of work to reach just feature parity. Your clone isn’t even going to have users to motivate you beyond the first 0.1% of the work.
Yes, it's basically just a scaffold, but something like this could be iterated on. The challenges are around infrastructure and funding to function at scale.
I would personally rather see something that improves on the problems Reddit solves, but tries something completely new. Cloning a product is so uninteresting.
Yes and no, the tech of a forum is not interesting, but fostering a healthy community that generates value is an eternally novel problem as every success has been the result of good timing more than anything else.
This is different. Maybe you are referring to the Voat thing a few years ago when people were mad about the "fatpeoplehate" subreddits being banned. As it turns out, only a vocal minority opposed that move and left Reddit.
This is Reddit-wide, with several mainstream subreddits with millions of users going private, i.e. inaccessible.
> The easiest tell is that nobody in the comments is posting alternatives. I remember during the digg migration, people unhappy with digg would post on digg telling everyone to try reddit.
You're reading different comments than I am. There's loads of Lemmy discussion in my corners. A few trolls shilling rDrama, too.
