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Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
221–230 of 388 posts
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#222My ideal reddit alternative is spending less time on my computer and more time on in-person interactions. We can look for and/or build Reddit substitutes, but just my 2c, this is a fine prompt to question not just the instantiation but the concept itself.
I agree with everything you say, except this being the right prompt to talk about that. It's not really answering the question OP is asking.
by "this" i meant all the kerfuffle around Reddit's API rates
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#223I see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities. Each community has its own set of reasons for hosting itself on reddit vs other locations. Therefore I would predict that in the absence of reddit, not every community would move to the same place. I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for mo…
But the magic of reddit is that I can browse all my communities in one place.
Playstation, Audi, Cooking, Tennis. It's super convenient to have a single account for all of this.
Before I used reddit, I had an account at an Audi forum, a different account at a tennis forum etc.. Reddit is so much better. I'd rather some 'bluesky'-like competitor vs every community going their own way.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#224How about we take this opportunity to go back to the old internet to a time where real free speech ruled. Remember how reddit started off, where ANYTHING went no matter what (as long as it was legal)? Do people have the courage for that anymore? I certainly do, and I'd love to hear from those who disagree in complete free speech for the next Reddit.
It's important, but so is community building. Most communities function best when there's some degree of moderation. For example, people would prefer that the speech in their bird watching community is limited and trolls are kept out. Putting up with abrasive behavior in your community isn't brave, it's just masochistic. It is true that some communities on Reddit weren't possible because they were not permitted to al…
You can make the community building tools so much more powerful too!
If people want to make a bird community and ban all pro-hawk posters, that's perfectly fine. The issue's are around the secrecy in administration.
How about adding the following:
- Removing shadowbans - Allow users to see all deleted comments if they opt in - Allow users to see all banned accounts/reasons they got banned.
Imagine a page for each subreddit which includes a list of banned/removed comments. It would be quite telling on the moderation if that list was mostly non-spam disagreements.
How about including an internet "Bill of Rights" for free speech, illogical arguments, etc to try and help guide the flow of discussion, similar to how /pol/ has this in their rules - https://i.4cdn.org/pol/1493993226750.jpg
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere. It's incredibly frustrating to discover a potential new hobby, check out the subreddit, and go to the top posts all time, only to find pages on pages of low-effort crossposted memes that are often barely relatable. I…
I was a long time reddit user (I created my first account in 2007), and I eventually left for this reason. I moderated a cycling community (r/mtb) that grew to about a quarter million subscribers and I had a really difficult time keeping the low effort content at bay. When communities grow to a certain size they lose their niche audience, and lowest common denominator posts bubble to the top and drown out quality con…
I was an OG r/mtb subscriber and loved the content for years. I noticed more and more low-quality content slide in around 2017-2019 and I stopped frequenting it. It was one of my favorite subs back in the day. By the time COVID hit, that sub was a dumpster fire of low-quality posts it became a complete waste to even visit, I felt dumber after visiting it each time.
It isn't just the quality of the posts that degraded though. r/MTB for example hasn't gotten as spammy as most other subs. But the quality of the community has gone to shit, and thats almost worse because that was the main value it originally had. There really good gear discussions and technique help is gone. Most posts get 1-4 comments, almost all of which are "where this at?" or "what bike u hav?" that there is no community anymore. No discussions, which to me was the real value of the sub.
There is one subreddit that I don't feel comfortable mentioning because it covers a deeply personal and sensitive topic. But I joined that community back when it had 5k subs (it now has 300k). That community saved my life in many ways and provided therapy and healing by discussing a sensitive topic and help with recovery for people who were going through a similar traumatic life experience that I was going through at the time. It was an invaluable support group. Many of us knew eachother (by anonymous usernames of course), and helped eachother cope through very tough life experiences.I even participated in a few IRL Meetups. People would write research and high-quality content on there that rivaled academic content available at the time, several actually went on to do PhD research in this previously-unresearched niche. It was such an exciting time and such a healing and powerful community.
That community is 300k people now and a complete disaster. Way too many posts, most of which are off-topic. The remainder of the posts are non-constructive rants (which were previously banned). To make matters worse, there was a period of time where the community became unsafe and a mod from an opposing group had become a mod of our support group and was doxxing people in a way that ruined a few people's lives (I was luckily mostly no longer an active participant by this time, and mostly just lurking and providing occasional guidance). The community is now very rage-filled and is nothing like the quality support group/community that I was able to participate in.
Reddit is all about the communities. But it has become so commercialized and mainstream now that it has lost its original value. I don't want to scroll through a feed of memes and low quality shit posts or reposts. I want discussions and q+a forums with people who are passionate about topics, hobbies, life experiences, and shared interests. I want real discussions, not another algorithm-driven social media network spamming garbage at my eyes.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#226My ideal reddit alternative is spending less time on my computer and more time on in-person interactions. We can look for and/or build Reddit substitutes, but just my 2c, this is a fine prompt to question not just the instantiation but the concept itself.
You can't have in-person conversations when the community is supporting someone with a rare disease. However, many conversations don't fit into this class, and some would be better happening in-person. All of these things are true, so you still need Reddit alternatives.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#227The killer feature of Reddit (or any other silo) is that you don't have to maintain it. Even when your interest change and hobby x no longer interests you, the content you put there stays there. I've seen so many small community websites come and go, fall into disarray, succumb to spam and eventually close down. Maintaining pages long term is hard.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
poking around lemmy the other day: I don't like the UI, to much white space, one of my main issues with reddit Going through the code and issues, i have suspicions its a bit over engineered in the wrong ways and will have trouble continuing to scale, like they are already seeing. it doesnt matter your using hip rust frameworks or w/e if you cant write sql queries or architect the app to run fast... I dont get the fed…
This exact situation is why federation is valuable. It allows us to separate the "shape" of tool that we want from the people who run it. Reddit is a useful concept: a series of communities with voting and hierarchical discussion. It also provides aggregation (ability to see a feed of all your communities) and discoverability. Individual forums get you some way, but don't solve the aggregation thing (which is a prima…
Sans voting (and that has its own set of problems that it brings with it), that generally describes what Usenet was in days of old.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#229There’s always ChatGPT. Have it generate a perfect community for you!
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#230What do you use Reddit for? The answer is going to be subject-matter dependent. For me, Discord has already replaced 95% of my Reddit use -- and not because I'm anti-Reddit, but just because community activity has migrated to Discord naturally. The remainder of my Reddit use is mostly "a search engine sent me there."
Yeah, but that last bit is so valuable. How often have I answered a technical question by adding "Reddit" to the search query. Having discussion indexable raises the value of any community.