I just realized that I barely recognize the modern net vs. the one I grew up with.
My latest gripe is that they're breaking the "back" button for no useful reason.
The "Anti Evil Ops" team are also full of braindead morons who do not distinguish between context and targeted harassment.
In a private sub (A PRIVATE SUB, FOR FUCK'S SAKE!), I quoted what a cop said to me when I went to report an assault and I got permanently suspended. (Cop said I was "probably being a [bundle of sticks].") The suspension reason? "Hateful speech."
Someone randomly posted a single word post ("N-hard-r!") in response to someone in a public sub. The post was still there one month later despite being reported by multiple people. Based on the user's posting activity, was not suspended for the slur, either.
There are people in trans subs who have been given suspensions for openly talking about the kind of harassment they've received and the things that have been said to them. Some of it instantaneous based on keywords. Some of the people I know who have appealed have had their appeals denied.
But apparently someone using a racial slur in a post all by itself with absolutely zero context for it is somehow acceptable in comparison.
Reddit had gone down some really questionable paths before, arguably tacitly allowing criminal behaviour on the site until it was noticed by the media... and then they draw the line at queer or trans people talking about their own experiences.
At this point I can only say "Everything." if someone were to ask me what is wrong with Reddit... and this is coming from someone who had a 14 year account on that site.
This place has been impacted too, maybe I'm misremembering but I swear people never downvoted on here as much as they do today.
hn is just a big subreddit with one party line. we get bombarded by party propaganda. almost everything is anti-others. seeing through propaganda, stating the obvious or pointing the elephant in the room is autamatically and conveniently 'whataboutism'. and that is if you are lucky! you probably get deleted or worse shadowbanned. what a disgusting practice. what you are left with is posts written by seemingly brillant bigots and jingoists.
On mobile, avoid the "official" app entirely - it's very pretty but is very very clearly focused on showing you as many ads as possible. Apollo is my pick for iOS and Relay is fairly comparable on Android.
Yeah, and so does millions of people. My account is over a decade old and I considered the "new reddit" unusable for all of 3 days, once you get used to how the modals work it's better, IMO. Not to mention the responsive layout which was atrocious on old reddit when I switched.
As for the app maybe the user acquisition techniques are annoying, but well inside the app I really have zero problem with it. And I used to be a diehard Alien Blue user, which is the gold standard.
Also, Reddit went from being a place with a lot of room for freedom of speech to a place that disallow a lot of discussions on different opinions and wedge issues. Even Twitter is now more open to diversity of opinions.
I'm pretty much forced to use Reddit or else disconnect from communities I'm interested in.
You missed the point. Reddit redesign is ensuring everybody flocks back to a more readable form of social media that does not look like reddit redesign.
This varies by subreddit, of course, but anything with mainstream appeal is likely to have most users on mobile web or an app.
As more and more stuff disappears from the clear web, I assumed more people would realize that .onion sites don’t have to be a wasteland of largely spooky scams.
But if anything the quality of hidden services seems to have declined in recent years. I’m guessing it’s a mix of darknet FUD combined with less and less people knowing how to host a website without using an easy to deploy service
Also less people just caring about anything that isn't the normal open web. Have to install something? Nope, no way. Unless some very dramatic and visible changes take place in our society (or big companies with too much power step in and make the choice for the average user), darknets are doomed to be a tiny tiny niche.
Right now tor stats says there are between 2M and 2.5M users.. and if you discount everyone who's just using it to hide their IP / piracy / working around geo blocks, the potential audience for content hosted as a hidden service is absolutely tiny.
I also think that if tor or any such system got really big among normies, governments would start cracking down. Right now it's probably just a convenient tool for hosting honey pots and keeping an eye on the few people that use it.
Every once in a while I think about hosting a blog or a forum on tor but then I get the vibe that I'd have about as many readers as I would if I just wrote my thoughts on toilet paper before flushing.
My experience convinced me that any network that advertises itself as anonymous and is actually anonymous will swiftly be filled with deviant material. That will be my litmus test for anonymous networks going forward.