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Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#271

Post by abhijat »

heyoni wrote: post #92
hughesjj wrote: post #7

I've seen Lemmy paraded around, it ha promise but you gotta diy your community. My biggest concern with the fediverse is trust. Trust takes a while to establish. Looking back, man usenet's format was kinda similar to reddit wasn't it? Usenet with voting. Idk about y'all but this is actually kinda super fun. I'd love to reintroduce some modernized takes on old school platforms. The internet was more fun before everyth…

/r/rust just initiated a soft fork of Lemmy so it should be getting some traction and development.

Do you perhaps know why they aren't contributing to the upstream?

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#272

Post by deafpolygon »

nerdponx wrote: post #181
kybernetikos wrote: post #12

Reddit does two things really: 1. Link Discovery 2. Discussion There are a few options for Link Discovery. I have a bunch of fora and sites hooked up to an rss reader (the old reader, since google shutdown reader) which does pretty well (although I'd like it to do a bit more). The link discovery thing is like the equivalent of having channels on your TV. You can stream any program (website) of a huge number but a cha…

I know Reddit search isn't great, but the ability to search at all is useful. Compared to e.g. Discord where threading is weak at best and searching is borderline useless because it's a chatroom, not a forum. Reddit is a low-effort replacement for traditional forums, solving several problems of traditional forums: 1. One account for all communities. Nobody wants to make 100 accounts, whereas it's really easy to just…

Importantly, reddit allows the creation of microforums. Not everyone has the time, energy or ability to build out a full site with a complete forum to make it worth everyone's while. I see Facebook & Discord taking Reddit's piece of the pie in the short term.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#273

Post by mminer237 »

I set up my own Lemmy server for now. (https://civilloquy.com/)

I'm not sure I see a ton of the benefits to federation, but it kind of lets a lot of services which would otherwise compete get a more substantial user base off the get-go. There still are no services with a user base to provide a comparable experience to reddit, but it has to start somewhere.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#274

Post by lom »

deebosong wrote: post #123
dabluecaboose wrote: post #94

Earlier 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…

This isn't always the case, but I found that if I'm looking for a serious discussion, I gotta find the sub within the subreddit. For movies, there are a few that communicate they are about serious film discussion. But between the 2 or 3 subs on serious film talk, I found truefilm to be more in-depth than not. Even for cycling, there are about 8 subs that I'm on, and one out of the bunch is strictly focused on serious…

> Even for cycling, there are about 8 subs that I'm on, and one out of the bunch is strictly focused on serious fitness & performance discussions, whereas the rest are sort of free-for-alls loosely based on the subreddit's sub-genre.

Would you mind sharing?

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#275

Post by kraftman »

JSavageOne wrote: post #126
kraftman wrote: post #61

Not entirely related but a few years ago I started a side project with the aim of teaching myself a few new tools, and solving some of the biggest issues I had with reddit. [1] Since then, reddit has addressed a lot of these themselves (crossposting, submitting text and link together) but in quite a bolted-on way. I would love to see a site that rather than just being a reddit clone, takes all of the lessons learnt f…

I totally agree on the general superiority of tags vs. subreddits, and did the same for my Reddit/HN alternative https://zsync.xyz . I can see the case for private communities/forums, but I think tags make more sense for most use cases. My main complaint with Reddit since the early ~2010s has been the crap post/comment quality. In 2008/9 when I first joined, the comment quality was very high. Then memes, puns, one-li…

Something I toyed with for comment quality was having a way to only show comments by people subscribed to the subreddit your viewing, to avoid brigading from other parts of the site, and sorting comments based on reactions, to be able to filter out 'funny' replies from insightful: https://github.com/kraftman/TenTags.io/blob/bc6f3046dda4815b...

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#276

Post by johnnyanmac »

redmerchant2 wrote: post #39
tensor wrote: post #26

I would love to see an alternative that really focuses on moderation. Perhaps something that has three flavours of subs. 1. Public: these would be democratically run forums. The users would actually be able to vote for moderators, and perhaps even rules around them. This would be ideal for things like r/[country] or r/[city]. 2. Private: these would be traditional forums run by the people who found them. It should al…

Democratically voted mods will never work for any moderately sized forum. The problem is the forums would be brigaded by terminally online “interest groups.” See how the alt right infiltrates gaming groups. The reasonable voices are outnumbered and taken over.

Yeah, that's the big issue. There's no incentive to want to be a public unpaid moderator, except arguably bad ones. Someone wanting to run for power creates and runs some of the worst communities out there.

For better or worse, the best moderating schemes on a moderately large group is via a paid position. At least there a mod has a "boss" that you can hope to appeal to should they abuse their power. May not always work but it's more security than hoping an admin pays attention to a subreddit's drama.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#278

Post by mynameisash »

dabluecaboose wrote: post #94
sharperguy wrote: post #44

I 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…

>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…

This has frustrated me incredibly in a few different subreddits I frequented. There was some really welcoming, high-quality content, but then there were also terrible, low-calorie memes. The people that enjoy the memes definitely seemed to scoff at any criticism.

The easiest solution seems to be to allow filtering of content based on tags. In most cases, the memes were tagged as such. Had I been able to simply say, "Don't show content with the `meme` tag," I probably would have spent a good deal more time on reddit, browsing and contributing.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#279

Post by TheCaptain4815 »

russdill wrote: post #253
TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sub…

So you'd like to make communities more free by regulating them more?

Nothing in there would be regulating them, just more transparency so users can see who gets banned and whether or not they want to view deleted comments.

I'd probably turn off deleted comments in a r/games subreddit but would 100% have them on for a political subreddit for example.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#280

Post by WirelessGigabit »

jimrob4 wrote: post #231
jhallenworld wrote: post #57

For technical discussion groups: USENET. Either moderated newsgroups or even unmoderated ones for obscure enough topics. Spam is the issue, but not much spam on USENET these days. Also, the ham radio guys like groups.io, which is where yahoo groups migrated to. There are a lot of groups there on specific things, like Yeasu FT-857D transceiver. Groups.io has per-group file storage, which is handy for this. Anyway on U…

I was a big Usenet nerd, then switched to Reddit in the late aughts. Went back today and it was a ghostland, at least the stuff I used to frequent. Guess I need to look better, ha.

I've only used Usenet in the past as a method of getting files, and later browsed it with Google.

How do you browse it, how do you post to it, how is spam prevented?

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