I mean, I've been using reddit since before all the people who escaped digg joined. There's just not really a good alternative. The main thing is to quit all the default subreddits and only join the specialty subreddits you're interested in, it's not that bad. A lot depends on how the subreddits are moderated. A good mod team goes a long way.

I used to think this was true. 'Specialty subreddits' are seemingly fantastic for starting into new hobbies or trying to learn basic information on a topic. But as I've become more and more involved in a number of my hobbies, I've realized much of the info in these subreddits is only accurate at the surface-level, arises repeatedly over time, and has no real legitimacy.

Even in specialty subreddits, folks take upvotes for legitimacy. When questions are repeated over time, answers are regurgitated paraphrasing of what has upvoted in the past. You end up with this vicious cycle of hivemind thinking that is difficult to introduce new or alternative viewpoints to - because people don't upvote what they don't already believe to be true.

for infosec and privacy topics reddit is shockingly bad even for a "specialist niche". not that toxicity is rare in these domains, but quality all stands and fails with the moderators. (who all are self-anointed "subject matter experts" with very big egos)

Also I don't think Reddit's design incentivises thoughtful or interesting discourse. The upvote/downvote system turns every thread into a popularity contest.

You don't get upvotes for asking interesting questions, or providing a niche/novel viewpoint. You get upvotes for answering leading questions with utter conviction, (whether you are correct or not) and generating emotional responses, usually outrage (whether deserved or not).

I am very disillusioned with Reddit at this stage.

>You get upvotes for answering leading questions with utter conviction, (whether you are correct or not) and generating emotional responses, usually outrage (whether deserved or not).

I miss slashdot's moderation system that was more nuanced: you could classify comments into a few buckets. Unfortunately reddit is so heavily gamed by people who want karma for profit that moderation and meta-moderation would be gamed as well. Not to mention people who troll simply to troll or advance a viewpoint or political agenda. I generally stay out of the main subreddits because there's just no point in interacting with people there any more.

There is some value in niche subreddits (which I won't mention here) but once they become "too" popular it draws the wrong sort of attention and they too lose utility.

Edit: Oh yeah, if someone would like to invite me to lobste.rs, please e-mail me at my username @ yahoo.

This is also a problem with Hacker News imo, it's just a lot less obvious. Most HN comments are not worth their weight because the system rewards power posters who know how to post over people who are concise, successful and busy.

I'd argue upvote systems in general dominate the world of tech discussion to the degree that some of these reddit mechanisms end up driving aspects of the industry.

I agree, while I think HN is better I also think it's a difference in scale, not a night and day difference.

Your point about people who "know how to post" is very interesting, as on Reddit I've noticed there's a certain style, or phrasing, of comment that tends to get upvoted more, which leads to a lot of comments having similar style and rhetoric in my experience.

>I'd argue upvote systems in general dominate the world of tech discussion to the degree that some of these reddit mechanisms end up driving aspects of the industry.

Oh yeah definitely, at this point there's no social media giant without an upvote system. Would a strictly chronological forum, like the forums of old, be better though? I don't know.

I've noticed that Reddit thing too. It's super weird, and it's a really grating style. I think one corollary on HN is overwriting. Comments do better when they're fluffed.

I think a reputation-based system (in the sense of real reputations, not virtual points) could work. I think it's happening in some places. People like Jon Blow, George Hotz & Handmade Hero smoke the competition when they stream on Twitch, and their currency is respect.

The best part of respect-based attention is people who know their shit are able to speak against the zeitgeist, without putting in much effort. That's the biiiig problem I have with upvote systems. It's not so much that they encourage groupthink, it's that they don't present reputation. Every post has to stand on its own merits, which is nice in theory, but in practice it means very experienced (and thus busy) people can't just state their opinion, they have to make an argument, so they end up not interacting full stop.

> The upvote/downvote system turns every thread into a popularity contest.

Agreed. I've been experimenting lately with ordering all threads by "old" by default and using CSS rules to hide comment points. It can make things much more interesting, as all you see are people talking in chronological order, and screw the fake point popularity contest. My next step might be hiding the age of each comment (or obfuscating it when <1 day), so I stop overfocusing on recent comments and stop thinking "I would like to reply to this, but the comment is 17 hours old so nevermind..."

That's a cool idea. I've also been put off from replying to older comments. The chronological thing is also interesting as it's a lot more like the forums of old, which I grew up on. Definitely a different experience from the algorithm heavy forums of today. Better of worse I can't say.

Some subreddits hide the vote count for X amount of minutes, which I also like. It doesn't stop the algorithm but it helps prevent dogpiling on popular comments.

I find controversial often works better than old. Also, reddit has a comment sort preference, you can just set it. But reddit has like three preference interfaces on different domains so I can't remember where it is. ;)

Every voting system on the Internet, from discussion forums to product reviews seems to confuse popularity with quality, rewarding one as if it were the other. You can crowdsource popularity but not quality.

The same mechanisms apply here though, with the tiny difference of HN being small and niche enough to keep most of the general population lunacy out so that the mod(s) don't get overwhelmed.

Small enough that HN does not attract attention of PACs who have basically co opted many of the political related subs on reddit. simple email blasts each morning and alerts through the day to get people to vote on stories and boost specific posters. Can also target people to report or poison a sub

people don't understand how much of what they read on reddit is actively managed by people who want the message controlled. This is the same for any popular social media site with twitter being the top of the heap

just be glad that HN isn't that important to where the issue becomes observable (we get enough indirect political tripe as it is with submissions)

HN also isn't a space that's dedicated to politics, and when topics do come up the crowd seems mostly "free-market, free speech libertarian"-leaning (although you have a small number of Trumpists as well as socialists like me for some balance).

Even if HN were bigger, it wouldn't be worth the attention of PACs and other activists IMO, the HN crowd is not their voter base. For Republicans the tech crowd is too diverse and immigration-friendly, for Democrats... I'd bet a case of beer that many/most of the US people here vote Democrat anyway since the actions of most Republicans run completely against the needs of tech people.

Oh yeah agreed, but I think that tiny difference leads to a noticeably different outcome. The Signal-to-Noise ratio here is more than Reddit, particularly Reddit's popular subreddits. As a result I find myself changing my mind while reading comments here a lot more than I would on Reddit.

Also I think dang (and whoever else) is a good mod, which makes a lot of difference.

There's also a recency bias, I've been on Reddit for 8 years and HN for ~3. Maybe my disillusionment has yet to come.

I've had some disillusionment with HN, having been on it for 6-7 years. The dialog is mostly cordial and respectful but precisely because of that I'd come to put a lot of faith into the knowledge of the commenters. But I realized a lot of people here talk about things they have only superficial knowledge about (me included, though I've been trying to curb this behaviour) and as a result there is a lot of quackery about, well formulated, respectful quackery but quackery nonetheless. So I try to check the credentials of people when they include them in their profiles before putting too much faith into what they say.

Now I'm not trying to disavow HN, it's a really cool place and there are a lot of knowledgable people here with lifetimes of experience in complex subjects but there are also a lot of technical topics where the discourse is clearly inferior to reddit, twitter or even discord.

I've been on HN for over eight years (just noticed it, how time flies by...), no need to worry for recency bias ;)

The problem is thinking that upvotes mean anything. If your goal is to have interesting conversations, then getting replies are maybe what you should value. But focus on conversations starts with how you approach the convo.

Generally that means focusing on the OP. If the OP is some short burp of a statement, the OP isn't there for conversation so the entire thread is a waste of time. Then secondly you can wait a day or so for the up/down locusts to have passed on. OPs who were genuinely interested in discussion will reply a few days later.

The tech oriented subreddits are virtually useless. It’s either extremely entry level discussion or people shilling their blog or product. If HN disappeared idk where I’d go for actual information lol

This so much. They'll ban you forever for a brain fart without blinking once. Unfortunate how many of these subs are frequented by actual professionals you can learn much from.

I unsubscribed from most of the infosec stuff on Reddit since it has low engagement, low quality posts in most subs. It seems the community thrives outside of reddit in smaller, more niche circles. Majority of my contacts/education comes from natural networking by just doing my job.

I agree - Reddit is a broad enough userbase that any one characterisation is incomplete. If you choose your communities, Reddit is still an excellent place.

> There's just not really a good alternative.

There's plenty of clones that work perfectly fine, comments like this come across as Stockholm syndrome. If a sub made a half-assed collective decision to move it would be simple to do so. If all the mods left for greener pastures it would become a wasteland within weeks.

Lobsters, Tildes, Ruqqus, etc.

And use old.reddit.com instead of www.

... or libreddit via privacy-redirect https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect

I joined Reddit 14 years ago and I've hated nearly every change that was implemented.

If Reddit ever gets rid of the old.reddit design then I'm out of there for good.

I don't know why people complain about the new design. It has been a very effective cure for my reddit addiction.

It just doesn't work on my old iPad. Why?

I use Apollo in portrait mode on my ipad, works great.

Same here, though my user is "only" 12 years old. They can take old.reddit.com from my cold, dead hands.

There's also teddit.net as an alternative less annoying front-end to reddit. I hope it keeps working for a long time.

I've also been on reddit since before the major digg exodus. I did start out on digg, though. The thing which drove me to reddit in the first place was better conversations and a relative lack of memes.

By better conversations, it's somewhat hard to quantify but I think if you were to use a tool to analyse the reading level of an aggregate of posts on digg compared that to reddit, the reading level for reddit would have been higher.

By lack of memes, memes weren't really as we think of them today. Digg was however filled with people posting ascii art in the comments because that was oh so hilarious /s. A common one was this, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pedobear, which I think is enough said. That behavior used to be downvoted into oblivion on reddit.

Reddit isn't quite as bad as digg was, I'd say, but only because you can filter out a lot of the nonsense by curating what subreddits you're on.

I've been looking for alternatives but it's not promising. The pattern so far has been for reddit to ban toxic subreddits, which then causes a flood of people into these nascent sites. Because they're small communities the culture of the toxic refugees quickly overwhelms the sites, which have tended to be built on the principles of free speech and anti censorship.

Voat and Ruqqus are both good examples of this. I was an early member of both. They start out with a good group of people, and then devolved into far right extremist insanity. You can pick a random thread on either one of these sites and chances are good that someone will be complaining about black or jewish people in not so nice terms. It doesn't even matter what the topic is, that's what you're likely to find.

I used to think that anti moderation was a good stance to have, but I don't think you can get such a site off the ground today without using a heavy hand. If you don't, you're going to sink into a well of toxicity which is impossible to escape from. Smart people are attracted to smart people, toxic people are attracted to toxic people.

So I'm still on reddit. Like another commenter said though, if old.reddit.com stops working I think I'm done.

I'm no Reddit historian, but I would agree and if I was any good at data science do some analysis to support it - looking at the usage, sentiment and of the word redditor against the growth of the platform (specifically the rise of the supermods, political subreddits and other people's analysis of bot accounts).

There used to be this idea that no matter what subreddit you were in, ultimately everyone was a redditor and had shared identity at some basic level - often self-deprecating sense of apart-ness from the mainstream. This community gave rise to the platform-wide schemes like the Christmas presents.

I rarely see the word redditor any more. To me that suggests that the shared identity is dead and if that's how you define a community, then Reddit is dead too. (Anecdotally I even saw a comment from someone saying that it's a stupid word in response to another comment just recently.)

Here's the poor man's version looking at worldwide Google Trends, from Reddit's launch to today. It's hard to read too much into it, but clearly interest in redditor has in no way kept pace with interest in reddit. And interest in redditor appears to be at a low point in late 2017 - the end of the sense of community? Major investment and value growth happened around this time, with staff numbers doubling and a major push on advertising. It took 10 years to recover the interest level high (2011-2021), during that same time there was an enormous growth of users.

- redditor - https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=2005-06-23%2...

- redditor vs reddit - https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=2005-06-23%2...

I’m no data analyst, but from my experience on various parts of the web Reddit is now often viewed as “cringe” and the term redditor is often used as a derogatory slur (most prominently seen on Twitter, although other sites have similar sentiments) There are more than ever people using Reddit, it’s just that the site kinda has an image problem and no one really wants to “boast” themselves about participating in it.

I tapped out after I realized that I was having an argument with someone that was probably no older than 15/16. When you do that you quickly ask yourself WTF am I doing here?

Are you serious? A lot of my political views have been shaped when I debated with adults in the internet at the end of the 90s. Did I most likely sound stupid during all these debates retrospectively? Definitely. But I suddenly had people to exchange ideas with that were non-existent in other kids my age. I no longer felt as alienated and I had a place where I felt I was safe in expressing my opinions. That was worth so much.

That is a very interesting point. I have specifically stayed longer on various platforms, because I really did feel that I had an interesting and more mature point of view that the clearly younger (and immature) general populace of those platforms might not otherwise see.

However, it's tough going, against the relentless reddit meme-spam and nitpickers who only care about being right instead of discussing ideas. I have now quit all other forms of social media except HN, and is a truly sad state of affairs that a large part of a generation has isolated itself from discussing and developing ideas, as they are sucked in by the addictive and shallow nature of social media.

Thanks for nothing, big tech.

> reddit meme-spam and nitpickers

8 years of basically no engagement from me (maybe 30 karma points) I call someone out and bam I'm getting downvoted to kingdom come but at the same time being gilded with silver. It just didn't make sense.

HN has so far been nothing but amazing conversations and it will hopefully stay like this. Big Tech played the PR game and won, PR is what makes a unicorn startup not so much the startup's product these days.

> I call someone out and bam I'm getting downvoted to kingdom come but at the same time being gilded with silver. It just didn't make sense.

That tells me that there's both sides reading it, just one is larger. Isn't the goal to preventing an echo chamber having both sides expressing themselves?

For sure I agree, I just tried to check my Reddit account and it has now been suspended due to some activity so that I could find the comment.

Unfortunately I cannot find it but ultimately it was not a debate, it was a classic teen response 'yeah but what have you done about it?!!?'. No value add and definitely nothing worth replying with.

> had people to exchange ideas with that were non-existent in other kids my age.

This I completely agree with. I've have many hobbies in my early years that were considered weird of just not in line with what my friends liked. Having a chat to learn more and dig deeper was amazing to do.

But there's debating and then there's just flat out teenager responses. I honestly don't mind having a debate or conversation but the lack of insight and knowledge only provides you with lacklustre meme attacks.

On reddit today there is no room for political debate. it's just 'accept the views of the subreddit or be banned'

Are there any good places for political debate online? They seem to be universally terrible to me. It may be that reasonable political debate can only be done in person.

Sometimes text lacks the context that we need to feel and see as humans. IMO debates and discussions via chat will always be terrible. People misread texts all the time assuming it was said in a way that was meant to be insulting.

Once we can manage our emotions and misinterpretation of text then we can start debating in a healthy fashion.

> the original user base has been alienated from it and has been supplanted by a profitable horde of "normies". Does anyone disagree?

Why the gatekeeping? What’s the point?

> What’s the point?

to keep the noise ratio at a bearable level? I'm not against gatekeeping but the way it is done needs to be transparent and those at the gate must have the right experience/background otherwise it's just grandstanding by mods and high-karma accounts that have no qualification other than having been there first (and perhaps louder than others).

What's wrong with gatekeeping?

That it severely limits new influences, because gatekeeping is usually taken to mean contend moderation on "we only accept more of what's already inside" style principles.

So what's wrong with that?

There are a lot of people these days that believe everyone should be included in every group, unless it's their own special group which is a special exception to that rule.

I wouldn't consider the new redditors normal. They are highly radicalized, highly emotional, highly active on the internet, and extremely motivated to ban anyone who dissents. Its exactly the same as the Tumblr population before Tumblr died.

This was on the top of reddit yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/ls6l54/...

I think this post is a good summary of what new reddit has become. Both the content and the comments within.

To be fair, many posts are also about pumping stock in a mediocre mall-based video game retailer to get rich quickly.

They've optimized for the most impressionable and vulnerable people.

It's probably very profitable for an ad driven site but it kills the community.

Reddit has a bunch of conspiracy theories flying about, being spread by the very people who claim not to be vulnerable to conspiracies and misinformation.

I've been sent quite a few of them from real life friends and thought they were pretty funny. People in general don't want child molesters to evade the law just because they're rich or powerful politicians.

It is funny and it spreads fast because it's the first thing most people think in a high profile suicide like this.

My main point was that it is a meme/conspiracy theory that people who don't think they fall for conspiracy theories have fallen for big time.

Tumblr didn’t die, it was killed. Not intentionally but by idiocy.

Look more like US agents to me.

Only rarely I encounter the St Petersburg FSB Trollfarm, and then they were immediately recognizable as such.

To be clear, your logic here is on Russian trolls is: There are no people hiding because I rarely see them any more.

As in they've lost their motive to hide which seems pretty implausible. Or the alternative would be you don't see them easily because after years of practice hiding they've gotten better at it. The latter seems more likely.

I'm just wondering, how do you spot these agents? For me, even though I know there's astroturfing going on, I can never spot them.

See e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/IntelligenceNews/

I came here from reddit because it got "too big" and full of simple people. Most communities became picture based, shallow, repetitive and uninspiring.

Often the text based articles end where they should start (this is a general problem that also touches the press), so you learn nothing. Then you see the same 10-20 repetitive factoid comments. (BTW. what a pity there is no more the "reddit frame")

With the inflow of simps reddit is becoming incredibly anti intelectual: ask for sources? Get downvoted. Write long paragraph of gibberish? Get upvoted.

Many people lament that /r/funny is not funny (I think it never was), /r/news is full of paid shills... but problem is that the site now caters to the lowest common denominator. Pictures everywhere. Compare /r/unitedkingdom (which banned pictures) with /r/Ireland (which didnt). And yes, I am aware that each community had own mods who generally are quite random people. But the New redesign is there to puść more pictures.

Askreddit mods did not want to receive reports so they straight out banned opening comment boxes in their subreddit. This leads to uninspiritng questions and constant repetition.

There are still some communities like /r/truereddit or /r/longreads (plus some niche heavily moderated subreďdits) but most mainstream is incredibly dull.

Sometimes I look on digg - and even this corpse of a website seems to have more interesting stuff than reddit.

Also new reddit just sucks. Once they disable i.reddit / old.reddit the site will become even worse: they don't want intelligent users who can have some sort of a discussion. They want as many users as possible. Because websites should grow like tumors...

Tbh, I mostly wonder now where to go when hacker news dies. The process seems to start too.

As someone who remembers Ron Paul 2008 mania and the narwhal bacon nonsense I think I like the normies more.

Sure it's a cringey joke, but I only encountered the narwhal bacon thing as an offhand sarcastic reference like 10 years ago and it definitely wasn't representative of what reddit was to me. Though I will give you that "advice animals" were cringey always.

As for the Ron Paul mania, there were definitely pro-Obama posts as well. And I definitely don't prefer the current censorship enforced hegemony.

Abso-fucking-lutely. Reddit used to be utterly insufferable.

As someone who remembers goatse, lemon party, and rotten.com, I think I'm happier with my kids growing up with narwal bacon and Nyan cat.

Fnord.

‘Toilet paper upwards lolololol’

> the original user base has been alienated

Facebook also was cooler when my mom wasn't on it. ;-)

Yeah, all my kids stopped using facebook when my mom got on it too.

the funny thing is my mom is actually on Reddit.

Independently of what I think about 4chan the main reason you keep nasty people around is because at least they will repel the normies to a degree resistors wanted a hugbox so they got the logical conclusion of the environment they fostered, they could have gone to voat but they didn’t want to do that so...

So nice you posted it twice?

Agree. They are near the top of their S-curve and all the typical patterns are playing out.

Insert obligatory Eternal September reference here.

I'm just there for the distractions and cat pictures.

Unfortunately all the distractions seem to have moved to onlyfans.

As a normie - what was the original user base? I joined a few years ago, am subscribed to a couple of niche subreddits, and find the thing pretty useful.

Niche subreddits more or less are the original users base. As long as you stay away from any sub that gets anywhere near the front page, and only gets readers who specifically sought that sub out, then reddit is still great.

There were no subreddits. There was a sizeable programmer user base that was somewhat academic about Haskell and lisp. I was a grad student at the time and I learned a lot about Functional programming. I remember the political discussion was somewhat similar to slashdot with Ron Paul and libertarian content sprinkled here and there.

Sounds like a fun place to be too. But still separating political discussions from other topics looks like a good idea for me.

I have this experience more with HN rather then Reddit. Granted that the popular subreddits are quite overloaded with "normies" but I still visit lesser know communities that still keep their spirit and a solid user base.

HN on the other hand suffers from having just "one subreddit" and it became quite bad over the past years.

I consistently have intelligent discussions on HN. Disagreement is tolerated and hashed out. This does NOT happen on Reddit now. Reddit is unambiguously worse in that aspect.

> Not dead in the sense that it has no users, but that the original user base has been alienated from it and has been supplanted by a profitable horde of "normies".

The simple fact that redditors like to be called redditors and call others "normies" is a big part of why reddit is a cesspool.

Reddit is definitely not dead ... I mean, WSB on its own almost took down established investment funds. That's not exactly dead. Also many other subreddits are very much alive and kicking. It rather seems to me that a lot of folks on HN compulsively wish reddit was dead.

WSB is one of the last interesting places on Reddit that shows up on the front page. I think that's because they've stayed above the political fray that has consumed the rest of Reddit.

That said, you are wrong to suggest that we wish Reddit was dead. We just want it to be the same as or better than it was 10 years ago. You may be too new to understand.

I've been using reddit almost daily for years. I am logged in, but Istick to the subreddits I find interesting, read only on desktop, and use Reddit Enhancement Suite exclusively... so none of the problems people seem to constantly complain about impact me.

Its been that way for at least several years now

It's not dead, you just grew up.

One day I was so frustrated with silly stuff on the reddit frontpage that I started nuking memes/funny/etc. posts with uBO as if they were ads. The problem was that I ended up with an empty front page.