An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads? • Hacker News Board

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#151

Post by Pigo » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:23 PM UTC

basch wrote: post #109

Pigo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even my mother realizes how lame Facebook is now. It's what her generation is familiar with, so it'll take an act of Congress to get them off of it.

Facebook was always lame, it was a utilitarian communication tool. It's like calling hammers or wall calendars or trash bags lame. It's similar to the argument you here when people say "they youth arent into facebook anymore, now they use xxxx." That's nice and all, but as long as they get facebook when they graduate high school or go to college, facebook wins. It doesnt need to be hip and cool if its the network glu…

I was on Facebook back when you had to have a college email to be on it. It was were you could go to find out the name of that cute girl in class. It was also when social media was still a new concept. MySpace was a much bigger deal at the time, but Facebook was the first place where I could meet people my age nearby, organize a party, find out what was happening around campus.

I have not doubt Facebook will continue to win for a long time. But I think kids retreated from social media to avoid their parents. Everything is owned by a handful of companies now, so it doesn't really matter where they go I guess.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#152

Post by Cephalopterus » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:24 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #144

Cephalopterus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because that content can be a bit salty. AKA the fate of every site that is a collection of usergenerated content with an ad based business model. If you want to get serious about monetization then you need to actively curtail any content that is not "advertiser friendly" which in most cases means alienating your core content generators, case in point, Tumblr.

I do believe Reddit admins heavily influence the culture of the hyper-modding but at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content because it doesn't fit their view of what the subreddit should be. They really aren't legitimately user-generated subreddits anymore and there's always thi…

> at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content

While hyper active moderation and power mods pushing their agendas on Reddit is a major issue, a fair amount of moderation is key to maintaining the quality of content. r/MurderedByWords is an example when the mods bend a bit too backwards in allowing content, it delved from legitimate smackdowns to childish name calling on Twitter. The sub's a disgrace lately.

Striking that balance is important, forcing your own views of what the sub should be will antogonize people but at the same time maintaining a bare minimum is also important. Even more so for subs that regularly hit r/all and r/popular. A lot of niche subs hit r/all with a thread or two causing a massive influx of users and the rules are relaxed to accommodate the lowest common denominator. The end result of doing that is usually the older regular content creators lose interest and leave the community.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#153

Post by Kaiyou » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:27 PM UTC

kresten wrote: post #48

I eventually conceded to Medium’s constant harassment to sign in for free. Now it demands I pay. I wonder if there is a way to permanently exclude medium.com from all my search results.

I wonder that for many, many sites..

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#154

Post by dmix » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

eric_cc wrote: post #147

Are there any good alternatives to the reddit platform? I've been a user since 2006. When reddit blew up in popularity, many subs massively declined in quality as is to be expected. Niche subs, however, remained pretty great. But reddit as an organization is beyond repair at this point. Changes like this are now par for the course. Worse even, reddit is now engaged in censoring subs. The most obvious and possibly mos…

No there's not, I was recently a member of a harmless subreddit that got banned from someone abusing DMCA who had some vendetta against the subreddit over some nonsense. He sent hundreds of fake copyright claims to posts which he had no ownership but Reddit admins didn't give a shit when we complained. He got our next two subreddits banned even faster since they had little content but plenty of DMCA requests.

We tried every single open or alternative Reddit and they were all garbage. And trust me when I said we tried everything.

They are either awful early-2000s PHP-clone style sites, some stupid fringe political communities which push away mainstream users, or some weird moderation rules.

https://saidit.net/ was the closest clone but they had some bizarre "Pyramid of Debate" [1] moderation thing that seemed culty among their hardcore members, which our sub members got turned off from.

But ultimately it's the lack of good mobile apps for these sites that pushed us away and we never managed to rebuild the community.

Recreating a better Reddit is a project I've long been interested in doing myself.

[1] https://infogalactic.com/w/images/thumb/e/ef/The_Pyramid_Of_...

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#155

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

cdiddy2 wrote: post #93

mietek wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12 year club; charter member; already gone.

Is there somewhere people are going to? similar to when Digg went to reddit. where will reddit users go? Not all of the outcasts can end up on HN

[deleted]

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#156

Post by gomox » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

A few years ago I deleted the reddit app because I felt I was spending too much time on it. I would then use the web based version when I felt like wasting some time.

A month ago I ended up getting the app again because the web version became essentially unusable (they did some strange change where clicking on a link gave you the top three/five comments and then other posts from the same subreddit, wtf?).

I wonder what short term pipe they're smoking in the product department.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#157

Post by sitkack » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

WhompingWindows wrote: post #100

Someone1234 wrote: post #45

This is classic shortermism. Reddit is, in the short term, driving more external users towards creating user accounts while in the long term removing one of the major value funnels for why they would (i.e. the quality of comments, particularly in certain niche communities/about niche topics). This will give them a short term "bump" at the cost of the site's long term relevance (as it falls down Google's search result…

I wish Reddit had gone the way of VLC -- keep your core product, the thing people liked, and stop chasing profits. Why do so many of these companies fall to the profit motive and lose their "soul"?

This is why we need to making something like a digital commons co-op, maybe Mozilla, maybe Wikipedia Foundation or maybe Archive but Reddit has replaced usenet, and we need a site run for the people.

Since the web is based around single domains, the source runs behind those domains, this balkanizes what we see and who runs it, creating a winner take all dynamic. Unknowingly, the structure of the web makes it ideal to supplant public protocols for private walled gardens. Sure you can use a "standard" client to connect, but you are relying on the good of the owner, who can _pivot_ at any time.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#158

Post by goda90 » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:33 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #19

CM30 wrote: post #8

Hmm, I just checked myself, and I was able to read comment threads perfectly fine without being logged in, on both a desktop computer and a smartphone. Obviously old.reddit.com doesn't have these issues, but I'm pretty sure the session on smartphone used the new site, and that let me keep reading without any interruptions too. Either way, if Reddit does this, that's it. Not returning to the site. The internet doesn't…

Unfortunately the way things are going I can see them getting rid of old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com, at which point I think I'll also stop visiting the website (the mobile website is atrocious and I'm not going to install a dedicated app in order to read a forum).

For mobile, I've been using an open source app(RedReader). It's not actively developed anymore, so new "features" like silver and platinum, etc, are left out. I think the last big feature that was added was v.redd.it with sound. If Reddit ever locks down their APIs so third party apps don't work, I'll probably be done.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#159

Post by vorpalhex » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:33 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #144

Cephalopterus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because that content can be a bit salty. AKA the fate of every site that is a collection of usergenerated content with an ad based business model. If you want to get serious about monetization then you need to actively curtail any content that is not "advertiser friendly" which in most cases means alienating your core content generators, case in point, Tumblr.

I do believe Reddit admins heavily influence the culture of the hyper-modding but at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content because it doesn't fit their view of what the subreddit should be. They really aren't legitimately user-generated subreddits anymore and there's always thi…

I still am very upset about /r/politics becoming super partisan. Reddit as a whole has always had biases, but there was a time when /r/politics was fairly centrist and genuinely useful as an aggregator with intelligent commentary. It's now a reposting of vox/buzzfeed more or less.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#160

Post by Loughla » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 3:33 PM UTC

thedaemon wrote: post #143

Loughla wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this was at the same time, or roughly the same time, that slashdot started making 'improvements'. I dumped both slashdot and digg to go to reddit. And now I'm starting to look for somewhere else to go.

You have succeeded, you are on HackerNews. Isn't this why we are all here? HackerNews is kind of like what Slashdot,Digg and Reddit were originally; that is "news for nerds".

Yeah, but I still love dank memes, is the issue. I have just enough childish mess inside me that I want some deep fried memes or somethings like that. For example, one of my most frequented subreddits is r/Im15andthisisyeet.

Absolutely no value for the HN crowd, and it would piss me off to no end if that sort of thing came here, but I still want it occasionally.