Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

This can be true in a lot of areas, but honestly the LGBTQ subreddits (and to an extent tumblr) are far better than most community discussion sites. I’ve made a ton of real-world friendships that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

In some marginalized communities, there is a tendency for the most marginalized people to impose their needs upon the entire group, which drives away many others. As a result, many physical LGBTQ resource centers and online forums are the fiefdoms of a few people who are easily “triggered” and create strange rules to manipulate people. These places tend to be especially unwelcoming and intimidating to people who recently discovered their identity.

Reddit’s mod system (and the fact if the mods go nuts you can easily create a new sub) actually helps protect against some of this by allowing subs to avoid excessive moderation of “marginal” content (usually discussion that brings up legitimate issues that may upset some members of the group). It’s easy for users to join anonymously, so no fear of your family finding out that you’re trying to figure out your same-sex attraction.

Users also tend to gravitate toward the subreddits with the most permissible rules, then filter out into smaller, more specialized subreddits as their interests grow. To look at a subreddit as consisting of the subreddit itself is limited; you also have to look at the other subreddits it’s users post in to get a real feel for the “community”. Reddit allows these Venn diagram relationships between spaces and communities in a similar way to how they occur in real life.

Also, Reddit has a big advantage for marginalized communities in that the site admins are relatively responsive to (and has provided moderator tools for dealing with) harassment, and Reddit is large enough it won’t wilt under a sustained DDOS like many independent LGBTQ forums periodically do.

The forums I’m talking about are really more “community support” for people dealing with tough personal problems (both through actual conversation and shitposting of memes). Because it’s very easy for users to enter and leave communities, Reddit is fantastic for a community that by its nature is a bit of a “revolving door” (as many LGBTQ subs are).

All that said, the idea of independent “forums” is all but dead at this point. Existing ones will continue to exist, but new ones don’t exactly pop up anymore. The use case has largely migrated to Discord, which is even more difficult to discover because it’s not searchable with Google.

Your option... I wouldn't call it alternative to be fair :) is against the expected feelings in this comments section. But it's very reasonable. People that visits subreddits can discuss what to do, either stay with the help of some tool or move to greener pastures.

Ctrl-F "digg", no results. LOL. rip

I used to be a big fan of Quora but there seems to be a lot of spam and deliberately provocative "political statements designed as questions" on there these days. If it hasn't jumped the shark already it's certainly going through the motions.

How long do you think the API will continue to exist? All of Reddit’s recent moves have shown me they finally realized that much of the DNA of the site (no account verification required, “questionable” speech being semi-tolerated, a dense UX that’s hard to cram ads into, portability, etc.) are what’s preventing them from monetizing. And they’re trying to monetize.

This is exactly the transformation Twitter went through. They changed the UX to make it more advertiser friendly, and when people started using alternate clients to get around it, they cut off the API.

Frankly I think the community will hate it but because it’s really hard to move millions of individual communities, Reddit likely won’t lose too many users.