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Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#301

Post by Sunspark »

tezgon wrote: post #291
Sunspark wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since Musk took over, I've been getting recommended a lot more right-wing topics and people. Maybe they were always there and just getting suppressed by the previous management, but I suspect there is a finger on the scale to try and push discourse in that direction. I barely use twitter these days. The platform is falling apart. If you aren't a paying subscriber you will be deboosted, blue checkmarks are the ones th…

It's changed so much in such a short time since the acquisition. The quality of responses that are boosted to the top are so poor that I frequently wonder just how those people get through the day. Not to mention that I constantly get notifications to subscribe to people who I've never once interacted with before. I've heard of BlueSky, do you know if it's any similar to the Twitter of the late aughts/early 2010s?

BlueSky is invite-only and it's something the previous Twitter founder is putting together. I am skeptical it will go anywhere, not just because of network effects asking everyone to switch to a new platform, but also because well, if he had all those years to fix Twitter and fiddled while Rome burned, why would his new venture be any better? Would it follow the same original path as Twitter? E.g. having an open api allowing app developers to make something for everyone, then remove it?

It also isn't a charity venture even though he is quite rich now (owns Square, etc.) It is a corporation, so it will be set up to monetize in some way. I like to think that people are getting sick of being the product for some corporation.

Pretty sure that a large # of those "people" you refer to are actually bots. If they're mostly noise and mostly tied to something political they're probably a bot. Take a look at a sampler. If they only seem to pop-up whenever Biden is mentioned or only ever talk about a single thing especially at odd times of the day..

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#302

Post by balder1991 »

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.

The tech focused can move elsewhere, but smaller communities with not so many tech savvy users will probably stick to where it’s more convenient.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#303

Post by robbyking »

jacurtis wrote: post #225
robbyking wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That community ate away at my soul. We had a good group of core users, but by my estimate about a third of all submissions were from karma farmers and new users shitposting memes and image macros. (Or people complaining that I wasn't allowing shitposting memes and image macros.)

The Digg migration was the first step towards Reddit's Eternal September, but Covid lockdown was the final nail in the coffin.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#304

Post by balder1991 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #166
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 see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities. I’d say that Reddit used to be like that, but that they’ve been actively undermining that, because that’s not what they want to be any more. New Reddit (2018, I think) showed that they really don’t care about that aspect. New Reddit forces post lists to be massive space-wasting and thumbnailed stuff. On my laptop’s screen, it tends to fit about…

Also by default suggesting stuff you’re not subscribed to.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#305

Post by trompetenaccoun »

jacurtis wrote: post #225
robbyking wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There may be other factors too, not just popularity and user numbers. It could be coincidental but over the years HN has not deteriorated in the same way as forums like reddit have. I strongly suspect it's in part to due with moderation as well. The hackernews approach is very straightforward and sensible. They only act if really necessary, otherwise users do the housekeeping themselves by flagging and downvoting anything that doesn't contribute in a useful way. Which works well.

Reddit is the complete opposite these days. Censorship (often arbitrary) and banning are out of control. In extreme cases they ban users for making a joke, I've seen that more than once. So when you check old threads and look at the usernames, you'll find quite a few of them don't exist anymore because they were banned. On top of that, each subreddit has their own moderators/dictators that quite literally simply remove anything they don't like.

My theory is that a significant portion of persistent trolling is caused by that. Users are or feel treated unfairly, they're bitter about it and then some of them come back with an alt account and disrupt the community. Then there's the animosity between some subreddits too, like you hinted at. A good portion of reddit these days is drama. Since it drives engagement one way or another, the admins are unlikely to crack down on it.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#306

Post by oehpr »

holler wrote: post #156

https://sqwok.im - All posts fully public and google indexed. - Built-in realtime chat rooms instead of threaded comments on all posts, complete with presence, @mentions, markdown support (check faq)(mobile & desktop web supported currently). - Trending based on chat activity and time decay. - Search, notifications, follows, themes, other settings like block a user. - Focus on simplicity, accessibility, usability. Pr…

Love this! Interesting direction with real potential.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#307

Post by SSLy »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #209
ollien wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard about the Lemmy dev's politics, but what's this about the Kbin devs?

There was some discussion and links about it in the “Building a Better Rust Community” post yesterday. The post is inaccessible today due the protest against reddit, but will be back tmw. https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/146qxzn/building_a_be...

https://web.archive.org/web/20230611155109/https://old.reddi...

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#308

Post by JSavageOne »

tezgon wrote: post #288
JSavageOne wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a good idea. I think upvoting can still work though particularly if the platform can use your upvotes to infer what kind of content you like and give you more of that.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit

#310

Post by wott »

ryandrake wrote: post #208
beret4breakfast wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence why 3pa like Apollo are great, it’s video/gif player is (was :’( ) the best.

Honestly, I can't believe it that here it is 2023(!!), and there still exist sites that can't figure out reliable cross-browser video playback. These sites should just give up, provide the URL to the raw video file, and let users play them back in whatever way works for them.

> Honestly, I can't believe it that here it is 2023(!!), and there still exist sites that can't figure out reliable cross-browser video playback.

Ah! I was telling myself the same thing last month (how is it possible in 2023 that things which seemed solved _years_ ago, actually still do not work?), when I was trying to watch some recording of a sport event. The site proposed several players (generally 3).

3 different computers (Linux_A, Windows_A, Windows_B).

Linux_A with browser_A: only player_A worked OK.

Windows_A with browser_B: player_A some days worked, some days didn't; player_B and player_C worked OK.

Windows_B with browser_B: player_A gave audio but no video; player_B stuttered; player_C didn't work ==> no success with this OS+browser combination

Windows_B with browser_C: only player_C worked OK;

We can note that among those combinations, we had two systems with the same OS and the same browser, and yet the behaviour was completely different.

> These sites should just give up, provide the URL to the raw video file, and let users play them back in whatever way works for them.

  In general, I agree I'd also rather _not_ have web players.

  However, in the specific case I am talking about, the videos were more or less 6 hours long, so I'd rather not download the whole high resolution stuff (and likely see the process fail), but be able to skip parts and/or watch/download a few parts in lower resolution and other ones in high resolution.
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