Here, lobste.rs, mailing lists, and 4chan
The other alternatives don't seem very viable
Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
281–290 of 388 posts
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#282Right now there is a vacuum, and who knows how that void will be filled, especially for niche and local communities.
At the moment, I'm shuffling my time in between these
* Tildes (tildes.net)
* Lemmy (join-lemmy.org)
* kbin (kbin.pub)
Another place I like for community stuff is Discord. Yeah it's an instant-messaging platform and its target demographic is mostly gamers, but you can likely find one related to your city, and they added a "forum" option where you can easily participate. But it's proprietary, so you never know when they'll pull the rug like Reddit did.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Personally I don't see a significant portion of the Reddit user base leaving over this. Basically every major and minor city in the USA has its own subreddit. How many of those users are really going to leave and switch back to Facebook groups?
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#28490% of the time there's a forum for the subject that's a better option anyway. For example, the College Football /r/cfb area is periodically entertaining but the Rivals.com network is significantly better for the same thing anyway. I found that blocking Reddit as part of the parental controls on my home network was beneficial anyway, considering just how much stuff falls under the umbrella of availability on that sit…
And really beyond rivals.com, your team-specific forum is even better. I was a frequent poster on shaggybevo before it became surlyhorns, and still hang around there. Though there are some absolutely unhinged posters on them (you get that with most smaller forums I've found).
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#285Reddit is just one place I read content. The other is https://lobste.rs/ I am always looking for interesting technical content to read. I want to learn. I would like to read your technical blog! If you don't have a blog, then you could try what I do, I promise it's minimal effort and easy to maintain and host and it costs nothing financial (except time you use to write) Go to GitHub, create a repository and tick the…
It appears that you need a invitation code to lobste.rs?
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#286I 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.
New Reddit needs to have a better way to sort this content out. Maybe extra arrows for funny/not funny?
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll save a bunch of people some trouble. This is a politically-"leftist" site (top current thread is "How did you get into anarchism", along with something about ACAB). It's not really a general purpose Reddit alternative. So, if that's your thing, check it out. If it's not, probably not a good fit and the "better approach" to moderation probably won't go in your favor.
> This is a politically-"leftist" site (top current thread is "How did you get into anarchism", along with something about ACAB) tbh how is this different than most subs? this is a feature, not a bug...it keeps these people out of the real world and glued to their keyboards where their blast radius is limited to their own echo chamber
> tbh how is this different than most subs?
I tend to avoid politics online -- even if I agree with them. They're rarely useful and I'm just not interested, in a lot of cases.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#288Not 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…
I think something that would incentivize those longer-form interactions would be to remove the upvote/downvote system and replace it with something similar to what SA had back in the day, where you could label posts with "Insightful", "Funny", "Off-topic" and the like. I find that too many people will only say things that they know will get them karma, which leads to that hivemind that everyone hates. Having a system where you can put a numerical value on someone's "importance" to the site will only lead to users minmaxxing their responses.
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#289There is no a one for all alternative to Reddit. There are few promising tech as Lemmy or Kbin because they work with ActivityPub as Mastodon. What I have seen many don't like the free speech nature of ActivityPub and run away if they see a tech with an instance not of their liking.
But Reddit tipping point started because most of 3rd party clients are closing as Apollo, none of current alternatives have a good client as Reddit clients.
There are few centralized alternatives you can look up as Tildes, Lobsters and stacker news (focused on Bitcoin and Nostr).
Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
#290My 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've spent 6 years trying to find a proper reddit alternative and coincidentally 6 years in my local area trying to find ANY local friend group for interests I have. I have better luck online. Heck, I had better luck in mobile game guilds. And the pandemic honestly made things even worse, worse in a way that has longer term effects than I ever predicted. I can have a whole multi-post rant about the fall of social hub…
I feel for you man. I live in Brooklyn where I can meet all the weirdos I want (though the fact that we're so spread out makes having a 'community' hard sometimes). So I get why Reddit and its ilk would seem like the best available option. But if at all possible, I think moving to where your people are is going to scratch the itch more holistically.
This person has been thinking hard about this: https://twitter.com/Prigoose, https://prigoose.substack.com/