And I think this is why Reddit won't try to cater their main app to "our crowd" (Powerusers, HN readers, etc). In a way they already have an app just for us: their API.

Reddit knows it's going to be impossible to design a single app to cater to all types of users. They know there is always going to be a group of people that complain about one feature or another so they in-turn expose the API that we can build out own. Now if a group of users has a specific workflow they like, they can build an app that will specifically cater to them.

This would be fine if they just plain and simple catered to a group. What Reddit does though is they are actively hostile to one group.

I'm somewhat in the boat the parent is. I see the incredible value in something like Reddit - or maybe the Reddit of old. Where niche communities can self police and create a space for information and content that isn't found anywhere else.

Unfortunately everything has to be monetized. The people who own Reddit want to make money and therefore they try to toe the line of using just enough dark patterns to force the tiktok group to use the Reddit app and not to terminally piss off the nice groups.

Eating the core users that got you started is pretty much the playbook for almost every Internet site that tries to win the mainstream.

And I believe Digg doing that was the start of Reddit?

Do you remember Slashdot Beta? That got me into Reddit and HN.

It was pretty bad, though I'd argue the bigger problem with Slashdot were the comment[er]s themselves. :)

Reddit was fairly popular before Digg killed itself. I remember reading about the Digg exodus on Reddit.

Yep. The same attitude and everything.

What irks me is they're selling out their business to a userbase that is just as quick to ditch them when someone makes something that gives them a faster/strong hit of dopamine.

Yahoo. Facebook.

Not everything has to be monetized. Reddit is a data store of links, text posts (EDIT: as well as images and video per FalconSensei), comments, user identities, and associated meta data. Let's Encrypt runs on a budget of $3MM-$4MM/year. OpenStreetMap's budget is a few hundred thousand dollars a year. The Free Law Project could store and serve all of PACER for a similar amount. HackerNews is hosted on a single server. You could run a clone of Reddit off of the Internet Archive if built properly.

Funding is needed, monetization at all costs is not.

I feel like your argument is making the case for "Nothing has to be monetized", rather than "Not everything has to be monetized".

Not everyone is going to share this altruistic approach to running a business. The majority of monetization probably does, plain and simply, come down to greed. But outside of that, you have ambitious people who envision so much more than what they currently offer—which may require large scale growth.

Regardless, I'm sure the majority of people's morality will be skewed when the service you offer grows to 430+ million active monthly users [0].

Each user goes from being an individual to just a single part of this mass-collective, where the difference between making $1 and $2 off each user is so mind-boggling high that it's hard to keep morals in check.

I guess there's a reason sociopaths do so well in business.

[0] https://redditblog.com/2019/12/04/reddits-2019-year-in-revie...

You're not wrong. I think there's a certain flavor of Trotsky's "Eternal Revolution" at play when you have an industry based off of zero marginal cost economics, with the battle always raging between those who can deliver on a shoestring (and are satisfied staying small) versus those who are attempting to capture the entire TAM (or the appearance of attempting to capture the TAM to pay themselves well from investor funds) and milk it for all it's worth.

The defense against sociopaths is eternal vigilence.

text posts? They store images and videos also

The best answer to this is probably the fediverse. I don't know how well it works today, but I think that's going to be the way to go now.

Unfortunately >"our crowd" doesn't make money for social networks as consumers, we sink the ads into the Pi Hole, we don't buy the virtual emoji currency, even Twitter struggled to make any money when it was just a platform for wordsmiths and that's issue with social networks targeting niche crowds. Pushing non-contextual ads on Reddit is extraordinarily hard as every subreddit is a platform of its own, so if the >"tiktok-esque" part of Reddit makes them money to sustain, I don't mind as long as they stop degrading the experience for those who are not into it.

I get your general breakdown but my issue is somewhere in between.

I never use the tiktok meme machine part of reddit anymore. As you mentioned I do have a bunch of smaller hobby subreddits that I only visit on my locked down oldreddit RES configured personal devices.

My problem comes when I'm not on my own machine/device and I'm trying to troubleshoot with "xyz question site:reddit.com" through google and get bogged down in new reddit or app reddit. It's really infuriating the way new reddit compresses threads to only a handful of magically prepicked comments out of possibly hundreds. You have to remember everytime to click to load the entire comment section just to browse the UX abomination they created.

Sync is a pretty good client for mobile, if you're willing to pay a few bucks.

> Examples where the subreddit is the best source of open discussion on the internet for that niche: dota2, manga, soccer, metal, prog, civilized discourse, history, male fashion (kinda), calisthenics, small cities, fantasy fiction, niche YT channels, super authentic cooking....and that's just for me.

With the risk of sounding elitist, for some of those topics the main subreddit is overran with pointless and repetitive memes. You'd have to go to the r/true* subreddit to get the serious, in depth discussions.

Unfortunately many of the true subreddits are now alt right havens.

Actual alt-right havens, or just... not left?

The subs I often frequent are exhausting in their claims of being overrun by alt-right types. While I'm in no way saying that there aren't politically obnoxious people (even specific users whose damn job seems to be shitposting political content), in subs like /r/seattle, just being not 100% aligned with the popular hot takes gets you labeled as alt-right. Hell even disagreeing with part of something gets you in trouble. Are you for police reform but against the rioting? You probably didn't know this about you, but you're an alt-right troll.

It's funny how I've been labelled an alt-right troll and was banned from the UK subreddit for a while, because I stated that Gandhi's statue should not have been toppled, that he wasn't a racist, that Sadiq Khan and the London mayoralty is partly responsible for high rents, etc etc. Incidentally, at the time, I was a Labour member, with a whole ton of MPs in my phone book, including the current leader, and some of whom I was so close that we invited each other to our homes. It was laughable.

But that experience and the constant name-calling against people not expressing a far-left opinion kind of soured the whole reddit experience for me. I barely look at country subs or any of the major subs now, and focus instead on niche subs, only because reddit is also a good way to get some questions answered. Especially when stackoverflow comes up short and I get downvoted to oblivion for asking supposedly noob questions, I get much more help from the respective reddit sub.

There are plenty of both extremes, what's mostly missing are moderate "political" subreddits that aren't full of SJW and cancel culture. That's why I only bother on the hobby/computer subs. They're generally fairly well behaved and neutral as long as politics doesn't come up and the better mods are good at shutting such nonsense down. I don't care if you're a biden or trump support if I'm in r/diy

r/neutralpolitics requires you to cite credible sources for factual claims and is generally quite productive in its conversations

r/neoliberal for discussion of center left politics focusing on evidence based policy.

That one confuses me because I've only ever heard the label used as a slur so I expect the posts to be like /r/EnlightenedCentrism but it's actually a boring pro-Democrat sub. Certainly not evidence-based policy, unless you consider "removing Trump" as a policy.. . which apparently is Biden's platform, so yeah it fits.

The name is a joke. Moderate democrats get labeled as neoliberals by reddit leftists so they embraced it, the sub isn't actually neoliberal. Right now there are a lot of memes, but once the election happens it'll go back to normal. You can still look at the effortposts which are pretty high quality.

And?

If you don't like those subreddits, don't visit. I'm not interested in alt right (or left;) but your 'unfortunately' seems misplaced to me.

I'll admit most of those topics are those I don't browse reddit for, so it may be different for them, but in my experience most "true"/"real"/"uncensored" versions of subs are just full of bigots who got banned from the main one.

I can't speak for the others but in the case of Dota 2 the "true" subreddit just discusses the strategy of the game itself while the main one posts memes and fan art and talks about meta topics like eSports and the microtransactions.

meta topics are what most people care about. "true dota" is a bunch of 3k players trying to give generic advice.

There are so many examples where a niche subreddit got filled with drama, and then a significant chunk split off and created another subreddit that now fights with the original occasionally. Gaming subreddits appear to be particularly bad at this.

I unironically miss forums. It was a completely different experience from post/comment based sites because everything was one thread, but the biggest thing I miss is that forums were usually pretty well moderated, smaller, and devoted to one topic.

Reddit is the de facto site for making a community on, but there's something to be said for the focused insular forums of just a few years ago.

I hate time-ordered subs. They are so inefficient. You end up being forced to read hundreds of "me too" comments with zero substance.

Voting, for all its problems of bias and agenda driven voting, eliminates 99% of the chaff that makes chrono-forums unreadable.

The issue with voting based forums is they tend to cater to low quality mass appeal comments.

More often than not an informative comment, while maybe not being downvoted, won't be the top comment. Instead, you'll see really low effort "zingers" which make it to the top. Those are further piled on with a flood of comments trying to one up each other.

So, you end up often needing really strict moderation to curtail this problem.

Chrono ordering suffers the same issue, somewhat, though it doesn't have the pile on problem (not to the same extent).

pun chain!

Take my upvote!

Here's gold for you good sir, hearty lols!

To be fair, I do get a good chuckle out of some of the pun chains...

You can hide the whole subtree with one click though.

It's a trade-off.

The Reddit/HN format makes everything time sensitive. If the post falls off the front-page, nobody will even see your comment, the discussion immediately dies. It's completely unfit for longer form discussion over time.

Sometimes you want a forum for discussion, not just a comments section of highlight reel one-liners.

Is there an algorithm that would facilitate discussion though? Regardless of time sensitivity?

Disagree entirely. Trading chronological sort for whatever drives the most ad impressions and engagements is responsible for the destruction of otherwise decent services.

This boils down to the community you are a part of.

One of the games I like to play has its own forums and they are still the best source of info compared to reddit. Discussions are surprisingly readable, though that may have something to do with the older target audience.

I agree, I can't stand them. That's why I won't use arstechnica comment section. I might look at the first few. I much prefer reddit and hackernews style

But that allows for discussion bubbles to form in this case. Contrarian views are downvoted to oblivion. Not much of an issue in HN, as it is in reddit.

You can add like buttons to posts with out it effecting the time ordering and absorb a bunch of me too comments that way.

Another solution to this is discussion wikis.

Originally I was more in favor of phpbb style forums and anti likes/favorites/upvotes but I've abandoned that attitude.

I really think it's the same as it ever was. If you want to find quality you need to start with your interests and then find a community from there. Discovering a huge community and being frustrated or upset that it's not catered to your preferences is a mistake. The lower the barrier to entry, the lower the quality of the forum will be.

And it's important to remember barrier to entry isn't just technical knowledge. Barrier to entry could be something as obvious but unspoken as writing style. Even as I'm typing this comment I'm aware that using my "hacker news voice" with all of the attendant style rules that make it fit with the community.

*edit: also I'm sorry to see that you are being downvoted because I get your sentiment

There is also a large NSFW scene on reddit.

It's pretty wild that the largest discussion site on the internet with untold numbers of young kids on it regularly has NSFW posts hit the top or second page.

It makes me wonder if Reddit will try to push down or altogether ban NSFW content a la Tumblr because of the site's popularity.

Don't you have to log in to get that content to show up by default?

Yeah and? 12-year olds have reddit accounts for things like gaming or other discussions. I think if you go to r/All it features nsfw content

It's still off by default, especially on mobile.

And if you have a kid with unmonitored access to the internet, they're going to access nsfw content regardless of what a site operator does.

I think you may still have to flip a switch in settings saying you're OK with seeing that–but really you don't have to go very far to find content like that anyways, just click on the comments for any post and you'll find something questionable quite quickly.

I use it as both. Not everyone fits in whatever category you've designated there is a lot of middle ground on reddit. It's far better as a platform than facebook that force your identity. If reddit ever isn't mostly anonymous I'll head out.

> Every one here has a 3rd party reddit app or uses RES. (if you don't, please do).

I sometimes go long stretches without using Reddit, but I'm 100% in the second column when I use it. I've never used a 3rd party reddit app and I don't use RES. The reason is that I only ever browse Reddit on the computer (logged in, in "old" Reddit mode). If you don't browse Reddit on your phone, these aren't really necessary. (This isn't just a Reddit thing, I also don't browse Twitter, Facebook, or any other social platform on my phone. Mainly, this is because I want to avoid the dark patterns and unblockable ads of mobile apps.)

For me I use it for boardgames, boardgamedeals, BoardGameNews, 18xx, digitaltabletop, some other even more niche board gaming subreddits, woodworking, artisanbread, breadit, bodyweightfitness, stormlight_archive, gardening, etc.

For me, Reddit is a single place to go for all of my niche hobbies.

"no where to go"

Indeed, subs and groups in social media have decimated web forums, web2.0 has consolidated most communities within a handful of sites.

there are three 'main' tabs on the app --- News, Home, Popular.. When I'm done reading News,and Home... i say to myself, "time to stupid!" and click "Popular" lol