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Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#71
post #51

Reddit scrubs the identity out of many communities/topics. I have found much deeper and meaningful discussion on focused forums. For almost any topic with any significant interest there is a non Reddit forum or community that is deeper and more customized. Not always, but usually. Just support those communities and forums. Example, mtgsalvation is by far better to visit for meaningful MTG deck building and discussion…

Yep, you need to do your own aggregations, now a place to hold all my forum links and note/save them (similar to bookmarks but way more robust) would be pretty nice. I've been forcing myself off Reddit and to search out specific forums and sites. It's an old (I meant odd) mix out there, some have obviously been using phpBB for years, some are brand new with lots of mechanics, and some are tied into other sites that h…

Agree Reddit is pretty bad for “technical” information that doesn’t change much over time (or that changes minute-to-minut). It is basically an unfiltered stream of consciousness.

Because of this, I like to think of Reddit as a deeper version of Twitter. It’s a fine source for discovery and can work ok for discussion, but the good content is usually elsewhere and there may be a lot of context you’re missing depending on who you follow (or what subreddits you read).

There is a lot of overlap between subreddits too; and while the sidebar content is often out of date, in many communities it serves as a repository of community knowledge to answer common questions, etc. This works well for communities already structured like this (the LGBTQ community on Reddit is a great example).

But yeah, I worry that the redesign is seriously screwing with the core DNA of the site and turning it into yet another MySpace-like content graveyard.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#72
post #70
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 throu…

>no account verification required I keep hearing this but I made an account recently with no email verification. Recently as in one week ago. I put in a no email address actually. YOu can go sign up right now, leave the email field empty and hit next, you can do the whole sign-up process without an email.

Oh I know you can still do this; but the UX is deceptive about it. And one day they may just force the field to be “required”.

Anonymous posting is the core feature of Reddit, so if they kill that the site is dead. It’s also Reddit’s biggest problem with advertisers on two fronts: it prevents them from linking out to external DMPs for most users and it makes it easy to post content that is offensive to advertisers.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#73

Reddit scrubs the identity out of many communities/topics. I have found much deeper and meaningful discussion on focused forums. For almost any topic with any significant interest there is a non Reddit forum or community that is deeper and more customized. Not always, but usually. Just support those communities and forums. Example, mtgsalvation is by far better to visit for meaningful MTG deck building and discussion…

> Reddit scrubs the identity out of many communities/topics.

In my experience Reddit moderators do this, not Reddit.

For some reason heavy handed moderation is now the norm across every medium-large sized subreddit. I don't know if it's a cultural thing, there's some top-down pressure, or the nature of the kinds of people who become (and stay) mods.

But I'm finding it more and more the case where mods feel the need to heavily regulate conversations/posting preemptively based on arbitrary personal worldview on what is 'good' content for the subreddit, instead of coming in to help when there's actual problems and situations where downvoting simply isn't enough.

Facebook and Twitter went down this road hard too, but at least they weren't doing it via "community leadership" but instead via the predictable slippery slope of centralized content controls.

Who knows maybe I'm spoiled by HN or naively expect large scaled up organizations/systems to stay as functional as they were when they were smaller. But I don't think it's always a lost cause, many big organizations have maintained high quality - given proper management and push-back against the negative forces which cripple large companies (such as becoming extremely risk adverse).

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#75
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Voat infested with the_donald refugees?

voat is also where all /r/fatpeoplehate posts went when reddit banned it

Yup it's basically reddit for the alt-right and banned subs... not exactly the place most people want to be

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#78
It has quite a reputation from back in the day, but I find Something Awful to have a very high level of dialogue, probably because you have to pay a small fee for membership, and they aren't afraid to probate/ban people.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#80

Usenet. It's a shame it's been mostly abandoned. In so many ways it was reddit long before reddit even existed, and was superior to it in so many ways.

Isn't that mostly a result of UI/UX problems? IRC has fostered a good community of tooling. But the content side of Usenet seems to have been completely ignored, outside of file sharing.
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