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Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

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Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#491

Post by Iv »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #300
ratfaced-guy wrote: post #294

What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).

There already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called websites and anyone can start one and run it as they please. What Reddit and similar sites bring to the table is a single pool of authenticated users. Once a user is logged into Reddit, posting on different subreddits is frictionless. Even with oauth and the like, it is hard to replicate that with a distributed set of sites.

Accepting Github's, Reddit's and Google's Oauth allows you to have frictionless registration as well on any website.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#493

Post by bentcorner »

zzleeper wrote: post #449
TaupeRanger wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I very often find myself adding "Reddit" to the end of search queries on Google now, because I know that the results will be people discussing the topic I'm interested in, rather than an obscure Wikipedia entry or blog spam.

I just added a search engine to chrome that searches on Google with the site:reddit com term. Add a simple shortcut to the search bar for that engine like "@", and now I just type "@ best baby teether" and get actual people discussing actual pros and cons of baby teethers (or anything else)

For duckduckgo users, !r does this too

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#494

Post by friendlybus »

dunnevens wrote: post #344
zionic wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I only started browsing reddit after advertisers forced them to purge the most toxic users/content from the site. Reddit, as a site, is built around you having to subscribe to things to see it on your front page. Are you saying that opinions you disagree with (toxic) merely existing invisibly prevents you from using a platform? Because if that's not the case you were never forced to interact with those subs unless…

The toxic elements didn't exist invisibly. They bled out regularly into unrelated subreddits. For example, the fat phobia of /r/FatPeopleHate seemed ever present for a time. Popped up in many different places. And then after the sub was banned and many of its users banned, that particular form of insults & speech mostly vanished. It was a huge quality of life improvement for the site overall. There have been similar…

New hate groups and power sub's pop up with the same toxicity but on a different theme. The psycho redpill has been replaced with a version for women.

Reddit doesn't want a 'better' site it just cycles the garbage to fit the trends.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#495

Post by 4bpp »

dunnevens wrote: post #323
ratfaced-guy wrote: post #294

What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).

I'm a little surprised no one's tried reviving newsgroups for discussions. Decentralized, not privacy-invading, can be rendered by a large variety of front-ends. Somewhat censorship resistant. There would be a huge potential spam problem, but that can be controlled by filters and moderators. Maybe Usenet would be more of a headache than it's worth, but it seems perfect for what you're describing.

I assume that it suffers from the same problems that make me usually give up when I find that a FOSS project's only venue for support and bug reports is a mailing list: search and discovery is less than optimal, conversations just randomly die and as an outsider you get the UX of shouting at a wall (usually nobody will respond, and you will never figure out if this is because your message was filtered, the mailing list is dead or slow-moving or everybody there just saw your message, quietly shook their head and moved on; sometimes someone randomly responds to you 3 years later after you have long moved on, which you only randomly find out when googling your name another two years after that).

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#497

Post by scottmcf »

wozniacki wrote: post #464
simias wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit doesn't really avoid anything as far as I can tell. A lot of the content in the big subreddits is more or less well concealed "organic advertising". The upvote system is also basically useless on reddit these days, the site is way too big to enforce any kind of etiquette and people gladly upvote empty one-line quips while they'll bury anybody expressing any form of vaguely dissenting opinion. It's frankly toxi…

The upvote system is also basically useless on reddit these days, the site is way too big to enforce any kind of etiquette and people gladly upvote empty one-line quips while they'll bury anybody expressing any form of vaguely dissenting opinion. It's frankly toxic. This. I don't know what the rest of the people praising reddit's redesign are talking about. My experience has been that its so heavily sanitized that un…

I enjoy Reddit for small communities, with content matter expert moderators, etc. The default subs are effectively useless other than entertainment.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#498

Post by chrisdhoover »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #443
ZainRiz wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. What Reddit brings to the table is: 1. Easy sharing: Subreddits, which are an easy location to share interesting information about a common topic. Creating your own website is an order of magnitude harder, especially if you want to allow anyone on the internet to post to it 2. Discoverability: You can easily discover subreddits information related to your interests. Reddit's ability to aggregate the vario…

Kickass moderation by committed individuals who are also experts in the field. See AskHistorians, Science, ModeratePolitics etc. This combined with huge communities results in incredible conversations.

And the obverse is r/sanfrancisco with moderation that has turned the sub into a sunset travel pic slide show punctuated by golden gate bridge pictures. What a wasted opportunity for something interesting. And it is leaking into r/bayarea ruining it as well.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#500

Post by phs318u »

dunnevens wrote: post #323
ratfaced-guy wrote: post #294

What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs. Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content. I actually find Reddit to be a better source of information and knowledge than Google at this point, mostly because Google has been inundated with paid blog-spam. It's a bit harder to get away with that in Reddit (for the time being, and for whatever reason).

I'm a little surprised no one's tried reviving newsgroups for discussions. Decentralized, not privacy-invading, can be rendered by a large variety of front-ends. Somewhat censorship resistant. There would be a huge potential spam problem, but that can be controlled by filters and moderators. Maybe Usenet would be more of a headache than it's worth, but it seems perfect for what you're describing.

If someone resurrected Compuserve, I’d pay. Again. The signal to noise ratio was insane. Having to part with real money tends to focus the mind and the tongue.
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