It might have changed since then but from what I remember of reading through the lead devs reasoning behind the "feature" I want no part of that ecosystem.
I thought Tapatalk is more like a generic mobile client addon to forum wares than being a forum itself. I remember that nagging banner when I was on XDA years ago...
Nothing online is forever unless you attact the data hoarders.
- "There won't be as many people." That's ok, probably even a good thing. 1.5-2.5 million users are more than enough, especially considering most of them are power users. I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit.
- "Making a social network is hard." Yes, but it's not too hard. Scaling is hard, but we're not scaling to Reddit's size (100+ million); and Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks). HN runs on 2 servers and uses a LISP dialect (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379); even though HN is text-only and Apollo would have images or videos, I'm 100% certain there are enough dedicated Reddit users who can make this a reality.
- Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing)
There's absolutely going to be an exodus if Reddit does anything non-negligible, the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care.
So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users.
The API side could moderate their own content and restrict access to UIs that play nice and the UIs could refuse to surface content from API sides that suck.
The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.
Reddit has something like this, but definitely not as intentional,
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.json
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.rss
- https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.xml
>The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.
Old reddit had stylesheets and they could be very interesting. I still prefer that over the current thing they built.
No, they're just flailing.
The problem with Reddit is that its product is ideological conformity; but its owners are too busy pretending (or actually believing) that's not true to sell it honestly. Mods are, to put it bluntly, mostly replaceable, and charging for the ability to moderate an established large subreddit would go a long way provided whoever buys that power must go out of their way to plausibly deny that.
And ideological conformity is worth a lot of money- Twitter was fairly valued in the tens of billions for a very good reason- but much like Twitter, that sort of thing sells "at a loss" because having the kind of content which enforcement of ideological conformity upon is meaningful necessarily means major companies won't want to put their products next to that content. Reddit is not a product that can generate a concrete return on investment, which is partially why it can survive operating at a net loss for a long, long time; capital directly funds political power.
Cheap capital drying up means money is tighter- so financiers are getting harder to come by- and if you're in straits that dire and don't want to downsize you have to look for other sources of revenue. In Reddit's case, this will completely kill their main product, but they have a mental block that prevents them from dealing with that honestly so they might be screwed.
>Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks)
Mastodon has the same kind problem that Reddit does but massively amplified- server operators have power over user networks (the same thing happens on Reddit with bots) which is a no-go for honest communication.
Mastodon’s model is fine because there’s no gate to most communities. “Honest communication” is usually a term describing something noxious, but the beauty of mastodon is that if a right wing billionaire with mental problems takes over the server, you can just move.
Why? I would think it's the much simpler "having a ton of users is worth a lot of money".
Rather unfortunately, the position that "my opinion is unpopular, therefore contrarian and correct" is something that is easily manipulated. The demographic that falls for conspiracy theories loves to amplify the idea that they have some secret / esoteric knowledge. Again, a great way to manipulate people, encourage violence etc.
That's an ancient (in internet terms) problem, framing Reddit as some sort of intentional ideology-spreading-loss-leader-for-powerful-capitalists doesn't correspond with their actions - after all, Reddit has been deeply involved in the spreading of all sorts of ideas on all ends of political spectrums.
They're just running into the same issues all these "give something cool away then hope you can make it profitable later" business do of trying to turn the revenue knobs slowly enough to not drive everyone off.
Reddit’s product is ad-supported message boards. It has a high valuation because it gets an incredible number of eyeballs every day and investors want to monetise them. Reddit is flailing because those users aren’t as monetisable as investors hoped. I don’t think it’s a whole lot more complicated than that, not everything has to be a political conspiracy theory.
Twitter is similiar in that you’re self selecting who to follow, and who to engage with. Things you engage with have hashtags, have observable topics and categories that they generally post about, etc. If you’ve ever looked at the categories that you’re in after doing a Twitter data dump, you can see they know a _ton_ about you. What I don’t remember seeing in there is “confidence,” but it might just be that those numbers aren’t surfaced to users, or that it’s encoded in the ordering (and I don’t remember it).
The point is, Twitter and Reddit have largely the same types of signal that Facebook does, but certainly way less than Google. Facebook’s user engagement might be higher, but I’m willing to bet that the number of people using Facebook to follow their friends, and not random businesses and other accounts is greater, thus limiting confidence in understanding about someone’s preferences. What I mean is that my friends might never post about politics, and I might not follow political figures, or other talking heads, that suggest my affiliation…
In Google’s case, they drop a “pixel,” for tracking purposes, on 75% of the web (inflated estimate for effect), and analyze every accessible page on the internet with the goal of understanding what it says. As a result, they have far greater reach in what they can and do know about you…
This thread feels full of vague insinuations that some powerful political lobby is paying to use Reddit to manipulate opinions or something but no actual detail.
115 ru
129 de
215 tr
380 nsfw
765 ja
932 freeculture
985 request
1487 joel
1784 lipstick.com
2022 features
4208 science
31266 programming
322776 reddit.com
> "One thing I've noticed is that the bulk of reddit's content is usually IT-related or at least culturally related, while digg is more generalized in its content (perhaps this is a product of time?). My point is that it seems to me that the fact that the "who" uses the site has a greater influence on usability than "how" the site is used." -
> "In the beginning, digg was pretty much all tech-related links, and whenever someone posted anything else you'd get a flurry of "this is a tech news site"-type comments. As the userbase grows and you get a more diverse demographic using the site, it becomes less "elite" and expands into other areas."
The two forums in my top level comment do compare similarly as 4chan and reddit. The old one was previously known as the epicenter of shenanigans and memes in my language which has lost its shine, the new one being increasingly astroturfed and becoming more of an echo chamber day after day.
HN has about 5M unique monthly users depending on how you count them.
I only see a couple thousand people actively comment or vote.
Any stats you can share on registered user engagement?
I'd love to see a breakdown or writeup on this subject in general.
I don't recall seeing that chart - if anyone can link me to it I'd be interested in taking a look.
Is there a chance it’s getting better?
Twitter and Reddit tech neighborhoods have good reputations.
/b/ = random /trv/ = travel /pol/ = politically incorrect /gif/ = .gif and .webm files /wsg/ = the work safe version of /gif/ (its toned down but still not actually safe for work)
4chan was horrible and excellent at the same time. A sea of garbage that was also full of gold.
Probably the only online community I ever enjoyed to be a part of. All else was shit.
But I'm also much older now. I wondered if the community changed, or if I was the one that changed and can't appreciate it for what it is anymore. Maybe both I and the community changed in different directions.
I probably will never have an answer. But I still remember the old times there fondly.
In a sense, 4chan in the mid-2000's was probably my final experience with the old web, in a time before walled gardens, before social media trying to lock everyone in and tracking the shit out of everything to shove ads down the collective throat. A place still not neutered by contemporary political correctness and value systems. Full of extremely smart people and extremely dumb people in equal measure. It was maybe the ultimate form of the prior iteration of internet forums and irc chat rooms.
Nothing lasts forever, entropy dictates that on a long enough timeline all things become shit. Oh well.
You’re describing Reddit ten years ago. There’s not really a “typical Reddit user” at this point it’s so big. All kinds of people are on it and most of them are not techies with a particular ideological bent.
I think it's true that Reddit leans more towards supporting internet privacy initiatives, net neutrality, etc. whereas facebook users often have no awareness of these issues in the first place.
But at the same time, no requirement to associate with a real-world identity means there are more sockpuppet accounts, more astroturfing, etc.
What? Id say max 50k
I have to heavily disagree with this. Reddit content is way better in both quality and quantity. The only thing worse is maybe the Signal to noise ratio, and even that is questionable. For example, askHistorians is a gem. Many subreddits are very useful. Moreover, for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google. Not once have I needed it to find useful content on hacker news.
Ask about anything remotely controversial, and you'll see how quickly it's an echo chamber.
I do it more out of necessity than because reddit is a good site. You get into a niche enough subject and your choice is either a small subreddit or delving into the artifacts of the early internet like GameFaqs, Deviant Art, or some new site forums (the ones that still exist). I Still need to take a grain of salt and check if the redditor isn't blowing hot air or isn't on some unhinged rant.
HN is great but focused on very specific, technical contetnt. Not gonna be much oppurtunity to talk about media or craft hobbies here.
TBH, 4chan these days are nowhere near the days when it was known as the boogieman of the internet. Still stuck with language that wouldn't last 10 seconds on Twitter or even Reddit, but we're not talking about a doxxing/harassment hub anymore. Or at least, no more a hub for that than Twitter/Reddit.
The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all the filth that tries to be posted.
Only if they have a solution for that can try going their own way.
and yes, I've used content moderation AIs in the past (like Google's Perspective API) and they're not really usable. OpenAI moderation endpoint, embeddings classification, or even just gpt3.5-turbo would work marvelously.
First, I parsed the posts for the most common phrases at varying lengths, hand identifying 3,730 individual strings that I felt indicated spam within the post title, post body, reddit username, reddit user description or comment bodies.
These strings are then checked against new or updated records and things are flagged as spam as needed.
It's been weeks since I've had to manually intervene and identify more spam strings - that's not to say I won't need to eventually as trends and techniques change (or, as it happens - reddit's api changes), but this was a fantastically successful means for identifying and analyzing obvious spam.
Beyond the above, I used what was a relatively simple approach to identify similar post titles to those that were determined to be spam for a "if you thought that was spam then you'll probably think this is too..." type feature that was very effective.
If reddit's api changes weren't happening I'd have already started training an ML model/NN or whatever chatGPT told me was the best one to use in order to classify these objects from the existing data.
Ironically, all of this was in order to offer moderation bots to subreddits to help handle the spam problem.
I started with scraping the API to play with meilisearch as a search engine but was just awestruck at the amount of _obvious_ spam that was getting through automod/reddit's own spam filtering (if there is any?) before being published/available via the API. I just didn't want to store all the metadata I was generating for all the spam posts and couldn't depend on reddit to police the issues on their end.
Now they're still unable to get a handle on spam - but also cutting off the developers trying to help them.
The hard thing early on might be getting getting started with good training data. But chatgpt might already be good enough to make reasonable choices today with a good system prompt.
The removal of r/waterniggas (a sub about staying hydrated) seems absurd ideologically, even with that name.
Even $1 per month is enough to keep a lot of the outrage junkies out and you can use the revenue to pay for moderation of the smaller group of power users that remain.
The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all submissions and comments that conflict with the narrative being pushed by the establishment.
Hacker News is great because many of the comments are substantive, thought-provoking and don't read like State Department press releases or obvious corporate astroturfing.
Most web development is downloading. Social networks have massive uploading and frequent changes.
Twitter literally invented microservices because of this.
Service-oriented architecture: Am I just a joke to you?
My hunch is that the Apollo founder would be unwilling to participate in the same schemes.
Moves like this are what caused the huge Digg -> Reddit exodus that significantly boosted Reddit's popularity. People need other places to go when their favorite platform takes this seemingly inevitable path.
Create post -> share url -> instant chatroom based around the topic -> live chat with anyone on the net in seconds (hopefully have fun). Open to feedback :)
This is their real motivation. You can’t fight that honestly. Greed is good for these folks.
Now with Reddit trying to shutdown Apollo and other 3rd party clients with this pricing move I can see myself never using Reddit, their official client sucks a lot (it's unfortunate they bought Alien Blue just to kill it, which gave Apollo the chance to rise from those ashes), if Apollo dies... I will simply not use Reddit as much, the only other way I can use Reddit right now is through old.reddit.com, that sucks on mobile browsers without RES.
It seems I will soon experience a repeat of Digg with Reddit, slowly use it less and less because the experience is broken until the moment I forget it exists.
I have no idea what is out there as an alternative at this point, there just seems to be too much chaff everywhere.
Pretty much all alternatives I looked at lacked community. Not expecting reddit numbers, but even a threshold as simple as "more than 5 posts/20 comments a day" was a huge hurdle here. Social media is just so centralized now.
This not expensive or a hard problem. You grab a bunch of servers, you set them up properly, and then you write your app properly.
No resume-driven bullshit; no hype-driven bullshit; no “we need to be galaxy scale now” bullshit. No email notifications, besides basic “thanks for registering, here is your login” and “here’s a password reset link.” No cloud-based bullshit. Don’t use fucking python. Use a real systems language to eek out as much performance as you can from the hardware. Actually understand databases and how your specific databases work. Use Postgres unless you have a very good reason not to.
Just a few thousand dollars a month, and a brief reprieve from short-term mania to actually think, and you too can literally serve 1 billion pages a day.
Why does everyone run into problems with this? Because they have personal hang-ups and delude themselves (or simply don’t care). This path has been tread numerous times before. The mistakes have been made thousands of times. The people who made those mistakes are available to help you out (for the right price, or if you’re good enough company).
I am sick and tired of systems engineering being grandized, when all you have to do is sit down somewhere quiet and think about the problem — with a bit of tea, and some way to access reference material.
Reddit is not a hard or interesting problem.
> Reddit is not a hard or interesting problem.
Exactly, tech is full of this weird hubris that everything has to be super complicated and over-engineered.
Heck, while you exclaim disdain for Python, I've seen large web services run on Django and a few servers behind load balancers with very few problems.
Unlike Reddit, you'll have the benefit of the hindsight of 2023 instead of managing 20 years of tech debt.
[0]https://instagram-engineering.com/static-analysis-at-scale-a...
The keyword here of course is "at scale". At what scale? Any commenter that believes what was written upthread should create a system and demonstrate that it can scale to Reddit levels.
I'm sure not even HN "does only that" and even that it does with a lot of help from caching, etc
No... not again... I can't.
I said large, not huge :P
I'm afraid I don't want to dox myself so I can't post publicly stuff from my employer. And I don't really have time to do what ask and write it up in my free time.
I doubt something the size of reddit would run properly on Python, but I think both mine and the commenter I replied to had the point that most sites on the internet WOULD run fine without all the bloatware and overengineering complexity. Very very few sites have the traffic that reddit does. Most websites belong to the long tail, and for those almost any tech stack would work - so why choose a needlessly complex one?
"Take my word for it, I'm just superior" the comment, which would be as fitting on r/SneerClub today SlashDot 15 years ago or Usenet 30 years ago as a dismissive geek putdown-cum-status grab, could have been summarised as.
The app has been regularly nagging existing paid users, who paid to remove ads in the app, about “amazing” deals to “upgrade” to a monthly subscription to the app to get some virtual stickers and other silly things of dubious value over and over. People complain about it every time they come up on the Apollo subreddit, directly mention the app’s author, who has yet to ever respond on this matter.
I think Reddit is being greedy, but I’m only sad if Apollo goes away because the Reddit client is so shitty; not because I love Apollo.
I get nags to upgrade to something I couldn't care less about, in an app I paid to avoid these ads and nags, every time I open the app (i.e. multiple times per day) on "promo" days (i.e. any US holiday)
These nags have also been disingenuous, because the price will usually go up on "promo" days so that Apollo advertises a "special deal" that is basically the price it's always been before. It's advertised with a full-screen popup upon opening the app (or while using the app)
If it was no big deal and nobody minded, there wouldn't be a slew of posts complaining about it every time, and the app's author wouldn't consistently ignore these posts and comments as he has done every time while always answering praise and positive comments in the same threads and subreddits.
Selling me something to remove all ads and then showing me your own ads anyway is dishonest. Either mention this at the time of payment, or make it opt-in like virtually every other company I deal with (aka "do you want our marketing material?")
Make it work with https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy would be one idea. I have absolutely no clue how hard this would be though.
Twitter used to have a vibrant ecosystem of clients, most of them working better than the official app both on web and mobile. Twitter was able to kill their third party app ecosystem with their paid API changes and lived to thrive as a company till recently.
The reality is, you need a good cohort of content and users to move who can sustain the content, moderation and discussion. Just moving Apollo users doesn't ensure that. There are other good third party clients like Relay etc as well
Most forum have gone into demise, unless they focus on some very small niche (so they're small already). People prefer apps, otherwise they forget about things unless they're enormous.
About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market.
Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and stealing ad revenue.
Then a couple years later, in 2017, the 3rd party client's devs launched its own forum reusing the third-party client's name. It exploded in popularity and quickly took over as the most popular message board among the youth.
The old forum now has a sort of boomer or mentally ill stigma to it.
I hope to see Apollo go down this route.
Oh, and I think both forums in the story did not monetize as hard as reddit going to paid awards and memberships.