> Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in.

Based off of my personal experience with many subreddits that have a four digit plus subscriber count, I think reddit has largely already achieved the above goal.

The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect" has grown significantly within the past few years, though has been a problem for a number of years prior.

Reddit won't come back from this stage of may-as-well-be-bots-posting.

There is already a large population of bots reposting formerly popular content, including the comments from the original thread. It’s eerie once you notice it.

I’ve seen entire (dozen reply long) comment chains on a repost (or similar content) that were re-created verbatim from an older post.

Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process.

Eerie was an understatement.

What’s the endgame here? Who is buying ripened accounts with lots of karma and why?

People who want to astroturf, from everything from products to politics (though honestly probably more for "products"). Reddit is well known for being one of the few places you can "trust" product reviews (that hasn't been fully true for a while now but it's still valuable). If a near-0 karma and/or new account says "I love X product" then they can sometimes be downvoted/called a shill but an account that's a couple years old and has decent karma? Looks like a real person.

That's at least the explanation I've heard many times.

Once you cross the extremely small karma barrier needed to get your comments allowed/not be rate limited...whats the point? I use reddit for a lot of recommendations/research and I have _never_ checked the karma of a user after reading their comment.

To appear trustworthy.

Account says buy bitcoin - user checks history and sees 7 year old account with thousands of posts, many highly upvoted, so assumes source is sane and not astroturf.

That's my point though: how often do people do that check? I don't think I personally ever have. Maybe I'm just weird though? I tend to not just go with a single user/comment/thread, but rather try to find multiple different answers and gestalt from there, so individual trustworthiness is less important.

You have to remember that with spam, they're looking for gullible people, and the marginal cost of the spam activity is extremely low. To some extent, the Nigerian prince scam works not in spite of, but because it's nonsense.

Obviously it's higher than zero, else the market for accounts wouldn't exist.

Isn’t this begging the question though?

I.e., the thing you have just stated is exactly the thing we’re trying to figure out.

No, because we're talking about a phenomenon that indisputably exists.

there are definitely browser extensions that will call the API to check account age and highlight suspicious accounts, that's how "checking" generally happens except in egregious cases.

Karma on Reddit is used as a proxy for "this user makes good contributions". At smaller scales in the past this might have been a useful proxy but when a pithy joke on a huge subreddit can get thousands of upvotes it's not longer a good proxy. But since people still use it as a proxy astroturfers wants as much karma and activity as they can manage because it makes the account look more realistic.

Did you see all those "where can I buy this flavor of snack in $location", or some weird anecdote involving a flavor of chips or similar. Tons of astroturfing on reddit.

I notice a lot of talking past each other in only tangentially related comments. Lately also here on hn.

Outside of buying accounts, some people literally just want control. For the same reason that people will spend countless hours moderating large subs for free. They want to push certain narratives on subs, so you'll see large accounts where all they post are generic filler distractions or inciteful links. It's not all super nefarious or political, often it's things like mindless fanboy wars, where they only post things that make their favorite companies look good.

For others, they do it because getting upvotes and reddit awards makes them feel good. They see themselves as community pillars. I suppose this kind of feeds into the above reason in some ways.

If you check /r/games today, you'll see one user is responsible for over half of the submissions. Such accounts are what I mean, where unless they have fine tuned a bot to such a degree, they're really just someone with a little bit too much time on their hands.

> Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original

What's sad is how many of those aren't bots. It's not uncommon for karma farmers to have their bots upvote each other, but it isn't cost effective to have hundreds (a 1 year old reddit account can run you approx $10 for 1000 post karma). The sad reality is that of those hundreds of upvotes, almost all represent a person who fell for it.

As the saying goes "a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on".

> (a 1 year old reddit account can run you approx $10 for 1000 post karma).

Someone who bought a reddit account here, I bought a 2 year old aged account with around 3000 post karma for $10. The karma has lost its value.

Without judging and out of pure curiosity, can I ask why?

> I’ve seen entire comment chains on a repost that were re-created verbatim from an older post.

I have seen this happen on one of those (former) small niche cozy subs, where it is small enough that people notice their content being recycled. No idea what the goal might be, so I wonder if it is a platform feature to pump-up engagement by automatically reposting content.

Lately, I’ve seen comments copied verbatim from lower in the very same comment section.

They’ll find a comment with upvotes rising above its thread neighbors, but with the entire thread neighborhood buried at the bottom of the comment section. Then they’ll just staple that low comment as a response to some visible comment in a thread much higher up the comment section.

I wanted to make one for a joke and see how long it takes for people to notice but I guess people did that already for nefarious purposes.

That was after I noticed that cat delivering bot I wrote for internal chat appears to have "infinity supply of cats" according to the users, while all it has is a ~200 long list of imgur links that never changes.

> The amount of mindless "me too!" and "here's how that works /confidentlyincorrect"

This is what gets me about all the people lately claiming that the only way to get good Google results is to append site:reddit.com - I have spent enough time looking at Reddit threads to know I would never trust them for important information. People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness becomes a meme (in the original sense of the word) that propagates through the site for literally years. New users read the confidently wrong information, take it as gospel and spread it to other new users.

1) Compared to what? It's really important to compare those reddit results to elsewhere and not the hypothetical "best" answer. Yeah, reddit answers are often not great, but in my experience, the rest of google search has, over the past 10 years, gone to complete and utter shit. If I don't already know where to look (and just want google to get me there faster), 99% of my results are going to be useless blogspam.

2) It's even more important to have an understanding of the _kinds_ of things reddit is good at answering, and which communities provide good answers to those questions. Reddit is so big that there are good and bad versions of almost everything.

> reddit answers are often not great, but in my experience, the rest of google search has, over the past 10 years, gone to complete and utter shit.

Fascinating.

I've read so many comments here about how people search reddit specifically in order to get better results, but I've never understood this. I don't find reddit to be better enough for that sort of thing to be worth going to reddit as a first choice.

Perhaps this explains it? I stopped using Google search a few years back because I find it hard to get to useful sites using it.

Are people comparing reddit-specific searches to general Google search results? That would be the explanation, because if I had to chose between the two, I'd go with a reddit-first approach, too.

It really depends what you're looking for answers to.

If you're looking for more trustworthy product reviews than the ones on an Amazon product page, or you're looking for how to fix an obscure problem with your 3d printer, it's damn reliable. Having the opportunity for open and anonymous conversation on these things increases the chance of meaningful discussion.

For the former, Google search results are a hodge podge of bought-and-paid for "best of" sites, and for the latter dominated by ancient niche forum posts and shitty Quora answers.

Half of the Internet is now soulless self promotion and devious attempts to advertise without you knowing you're being advertised to.

So two cheers to Reddit, frankly. We could do a hell of a lot worse.

> If you're looking for more trustworthy product reviews than the ones on an Amazon product page

I totally believe that! But since I personally don't look for product reviews on the internet at all (and absolutely wouldn't look on Amazon), I wouldn't really know.

All I'm saying is that for the sorts of things I tend to search for, anyway, finding good resources on the web isn't that hard, so I never really understood why people prefer to search reddit (unless they already are reddit users anyway, of course).

Without knowing what those things are this is a rather fruitless discussion.

It's really good for home type technical questions too. Like a stack overflow for plex or handyman type things for people who want to scan text and not watch a half hour youtube.

What are you using instead of google search?

DDG, although I think I'll be switching to Kagi in the future.

> for people who want to scan text and not watch a half hour youtube.

I never use YouTube videos for that sort of thing because I don't really learn well from videos. I'm a text kind of guy. But even for those sorts of things, I never have a problem finding good resources on the web, so I have no reason to have to go to reddit for them.

That's just me, though. It's not a criticism of reddit, just a preference. Reddit is just not my kind of place, so I like to avoid it when I can.

1) As always it depends on the query. For categories like cars/engines, gardening/landscaping and DIY stuff I've found that a Bing search often outperforms Google because it returns a dedicated section for internet discussions that isn't focused completely on Reddit. Here's an example of that section from a search about manifolds for an old engine[0].

There is a TON of (actually good) community discussion on such topics on "the old internet" as long as it doesn't need to be timely.

For topics that need more timeliness, I don't have a good answer. The internet in general is so enshittified that maybe Reddit is the only good answer when the alternative is AI-generated garbage.

2) In my experience, for factual information, it's just too much of a minefield. Try finding actually accurate information on Reddit about Roundup/glyphosate, for example. Compare what you find to the actual published research on the topic. It is very hard to find correct information on this topic on Reddit, and where you do see it, it will be downvoted to invisibility. [0] https://imgur.com/a/8NNcwTJ

For a subject like pesticides that is both emotionally fraught, and the subject of multi-billion dollar lawsuits, I'm genuinely not sure you can find accurate information anywhere. People are careful to say things like "not supported by credible science", because the industry has paid for some of the research.

it's a fairly common and incredible experience for me to see people on reddit assert the most inane drivel that collect hundreds or thousands of upvotes and enthusiastic agreement.

It makes me feel some combination of

1. Reddit is flooded with bots or brigades that seem to have cryptic agendas

2. My own reality is really far afield and the internet is bursting that bubble OR

3. The present young adult generation exists in a seriously orthogonal reality and absolutely sweeping societal changes are on the horizon (as may already be becoming evident)

I still find a lot of pleasant discourse on the smaller subreddits. But it's an absolute shock to visit some of the larger communities sometimes.

I think #3 is closest to the mark, but I don’t think it’s caged to young adults.

For example, if you were to look anywhere on Reddit and found yourself in a thread that just barely, tangentially, almost-not-in-this-plane-of-reality touches on something related to law, a hundred people will show up to give you all sorts of the most inane and dangerous legal advice.

Granted, for something like legal advice you: 1) shouldn’t go Reddit; and 2) should search for an attorney. That said, there are (were?) some places on Reddit where you could find advice or discussion attached to the reality shared by the rest of us. But that isn’t the current draw of the site to the masses.

I’m one of the people who (until this past week) used Reddit in a technical capacity.

That shouldn’t be taken as “I get my solutions from Reddit.” Rather, I posted and consumed niche technical information for unusual problems. There were (are?) a boatload of smaller, vendor specific, etc subreddits that _did_ (do?) have smart people who collaborate or rubber ducky tricky issues.

Most of Reddit is not and was not that.

And as I type that, I realize I must apologize for sort of hijacking your reply with a response to the parent comment. I’ll leave this and have prepended a direct response to the points you raise and added a reasonable segue.

> Granted, for something like legal advice you: 1) shouldn’t go Reddit; and 2) should search for an attorney.

Counterpoint, not everyone has access to an attorney, a mechanic, a doctor (sadly), tradesperson, or any number of expensive professionals when someone just needs to know if they can ignore something, can fix it themself, or if they should seek out professional advice. These communities can be of great help to people who just need to guided to the next step.

Wholeheartedly agreed.

I also avoid the larger communities. The value in reddit is having a number of doors to open and shut at will. Can I find a better place for discussion in a specific forum? Probably, but reddit is great for being able to visit and consult with many different groups.

This is the crux of the problem and why free moderation doesn't scale. Communities simply can't exceed a particular size without attracting chuds, and smaller communities self regulate because "being a member" of something useful is valuable.

Online discussions communities since Usenet always suffer the same problem. They become useful, attract too many users of the wrong kind and die. Reddit will be no exception.

Number 3 just seems like a fancy way of saying that you're getting older. Not that I disagree; I'm also getting older.

4. Most people are idiots.

The older I get, the more I go with #4

I’m 52 and frequent a mix of large and small subreddits.

Can you elaborate?

> assert the most inane drivel

Thank goodness that never happens here!

The Reddit algorithm of upvotes and downvotes means that, if >51% of voters agree with something, it's visible. If <49% do, it's at the bottom of the page or hidden.

This makes basically anything even remotely controversial within the specific demographic of the site invisible to reddit users.

I use reddit to search for a diverse set of options (= many possible solutions), not for facts (wikipedia), code (stackoverflow) or how-tos (YouTube).

Google only gives you a million times the same top n solutions iff your keywords are unique enough.

> People who post on Reddit are very often just completely wrong, and often that wrongness becomes a meme (in the original sense of the word) that propagates through the site for literally years.

Isn't that just a microcosm of the internet and society in general?

The internet I came from (in the days of discussion forums) didn't suffer this problem because there were no internet points attached to posts, and posts were ordered oldest to newest. Incorrect information was called out. On Reddit, the "right kind" of incorrect information is upvoted and boosted to the top, and anyone calling out this misinformation is downvoted.

Internet points are fine but the sort by votes order messes up any interesting discussion if people use downvotes as disagree buttons.

One thing it's still useful for is getting user reviews that actually tell you if a product is junk or has recently been replaced with an inferior version. Store sites and review pages make it too easy for companies to get negative reviews hidden.

People are going to go somewhere. I just can't see Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastadon gaining much traction.

For those old enough to remember Napster, it worked because it was centralized.

Napster worked because it was free and easy and that didn't exist before (FTP servers were not easy). If it were because it was centralized then bit-torrent would have never taken off.

Hm. FTP servers are pretty easy. "ls" to see files. "get" to get them. What wasn't easy was finding them, and then preventing them falling over when too many people tried to access them at the same time. Napster solved that with distributed file serving and consolidated listings of what was available.

Even easier if you used a nice client to access ftp. The notion that Napster was easier than FTP doesn't ring true to me, either.

napster was fire up the program and search. You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from, often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything. Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster? Because I did, and it was vastly more difficult.

> You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from

True, but that was easy. It was a bit less convenient than file-sharing systems because you had to search as a separate step, using a different program, but it wasn't hard.

> often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything

I saw that sort of thing with BBSes, but never with FTP sites. I didn't know that was a thing with them.

> Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster?

Those aren't ftp clients. I was questioning the premise that ftp was hard to use.

Apparently I'm mis-remembering Scour, but Audiogalaxy was definitely just a FTP site index. FTP isn't hard to use, but finding the files you were looking for and downloading them via FTP servers were definitely more difficult pre-napster. There weren't many that were just open, you'd have to upload content to be able to download something else. A lot of them were 10-1 ratios, or people were looking for specific things to trade.

FTP servers were easy...except for actually finding content on them where Napster was better. You literally described why Napster was better. FTP was only concerned with moving bytes. Napster added a search functionality on top of the moving bytes which is the thing most people actually wanted. Napster could have just been a fancy Archie front end and it would have been just about as popular.

> I just can't see Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastadon gaining much traction.

Me neither, but it’s worth a shot. I have set up a public Lemmy instance. Registration is open currently. Would be nice to see a handful of people join my instance.

I'm happy to join your Lemmy instance, having jumped ship from Reddit as there's no way I'll use their app. Would you share its address?

> Would you share its address?

Yes! :D https://zapad.nstr.no/

Napster was actually made up of a large number of servers that didn't really communicate much, especially for chat.

You couldn't choose your server on the official application, but others allowed you to do you could always meet the same persons. I was on the Orange server.

i’m feeling like i don’t understand the language around this recently. Lemmy/Kbin takes 1000’s of previously disparate forums and brings them into one UI and identity system: isn’t that more “centralized” than the old phpbb/forum way?

i mean architecturally it’s nearly as decentralized, but from a user point of view that’s not the part that matters. construct the Napster UI atop a decentralized architecture, and it’s all the same right? heck most large websites today are internally decentralized (sharding, load balancing, …) if you peek inside them: the real difference here is not that a service is distributed across machines, but across machines with different owners. it’s really more of a political distinction, the UX could be identical, it just isn’t (quite) due to preference or limited labor.

I'm on the fence about Lemmy/Kbin, but I think it has a better shot than Mastodon.

Twitter's thing was "giant conversation with everyone" - federation interferes with that.

Reddit was inherently fragmented (subreddits, and heavy redditors tended to describe groupings of related subreddits). Federation seems pretty natural here (community names can just have an @ symbol somewhere in there).

There are UI and discoverability issues, but those seem rather tractable.

I think performance at scale will be a real issue though.

I agree with you. /r/legaladvice is the peak example of this; as someone who enjoys reading threads there and generally avoids commenting as I'm no lawyer nor legal expert they've become practically unbearable as more and more ignorant people comment freely and without restraint.

Which is why I don't think that moderator strike will have much effect. All these popular trash filled subreddits are moderated. Moderators just don't do that good of a job. Managing a community is hard and I sympathize with people doing it for free and failing. But as result, the number of subreddits that will actually be destroyed by their mods leaving is too small to affect company balance sheet. Vast majority of Reddit is already pretty low quality and its users are fine with it.

I don't think the strike will have much of an effect because there is a end date.

My bet is that investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital are pulling their hairs out, seeing Reddit lose money at the end of the month, after Open AI and others are raising trillions by scraping their data

Not reddit data, users data.

This is the key. Reddit owns nothing except a very poorly performant app that no one wants and a very forced and shitty web experience unless you are on old.reddit.com.

Its mind boggling how wrong they've been getting it for as long as they've been getting it wrong. Like how can any company/ CEO be that dense?

Exactly, when users start migrating, Reddit is dead in the water.

Doesn't Reddit own the data now? That's the unfortunate truth of these platforms. They offer your a platform and pay for hosting and you give them your attention and content.

Legally, they don't own the data, but they do have a perpetual license to the data and can do basically whatever they want it with it. Not much of a difference but it's one of these things where the details might be crucial.

I haven't tested it but if as a user you were to ask for your days to be deleted they'd have to comply, at least in EU. So if there was a mass walkout a lot of comments and post would disappear.

No need to ask, just use Power Delete Suite: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

Not your keys, not your coins

Yes, this is true. However, the fact that reddit was where they got it means OpenAI capitalized on something that was given for free, and now reddit is trying to do the same and failing (because they have no value proposition).

It's sad that the place where all the users stored their data is getting burned down because it offered free access.

There's no way to win this battle, though. Are they going to ... stop the Internet? People will find a way to siphon data from sites where people contribute large volumes of data.

Wait, you're saying openai was trained on reddit posts?!

No wonder people are scared of AI.

It is well known, yes. This was discussed a way back during the whole glitch tokens deal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO2X3oZEJOA

A bunch of those, like " SolidGoldMagikarp" are Reddit users.

Reddit and StackOverflow notably. Most use https://commoncrawl.org/ or a derivative of it.

You can often google Copilot output and find the source StackOverflow post. Saves a step I guess.

Making the "weaponized autism" trope real

>Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in.

What the current decision makers within Reddit Inc. want is to make the site look profitable until the IPO, and then they don't care about what happens with it. Be it discussion site with cats, or cats feed with discussion, it doesn't really matter for them, as long as it looks profitable.

Talking about human brains, issues come up when someone claims their rights are being trampled on when an AI or human (correctly or not) removes their post for not being a cat.

Next up, getting rid of comment trees.

What's a good alternative when more than a few people are involved in the conversation?

TikTok and Instagram both limit comments to a single layer of "answering".

I guess that's a "good" alternative if your goal is to prevent the evolution of deep discussion and instead get people to move on and scroll over more ads.

multiple threads discussing different topics, or different aspects of a topic. Instead of "HUB 4090 review" where people are discussing everything about the 4090 in a single giant comment tree, you create a thread asking about the 4090's efficiency and people can discuss that one aspect.

the reason we do the "one big omnithread" for everything nowadays is because we have moved to a fundamentally reactive model, where youtube opinion leaders or news articles say a thing and people react to it, most people are the metaphorical AIs who don't have any independent thoughts until prompted by an external stimulus.

Actually in practice any internally-generated questions tend to be smashed down on reddit. Self-posts end up downvoted heavily. Some of that is that they're often low-quality content asking dumb shit that should have been a comment on some other related post rather than a full thread. But they also don't have anything to consume, and again, the 90-9-1 model applies. 90% of your users are readers, 10% are commenters. And actually beyond being a reader, they usually are not reading the comments either, they're reading the articles. While in fact the commenters often are the exact opposite, they don't read the article/watch the video because they're there to talk.

But the fact that 90% are not there to talk, and actually they don't even care about the comments at all - that's why Reddit is pivoting. Forums discussion is a smaller niche than content drips.

--

when you do a single megathread and content is moving super fast within a single thread (eg - politics debate-night threads), you have to resign yourself to not seeing every single comment in a thread, because it's literally going faster than you can read. And that's also true of reddit - you're not seeing every comments, you're seeing the top 50 comments. And if you sort by "new" it's a similarly torrential feed, and you stand no real chance of reading everything let alone replying to everything - but the "top" and "hot" and "best" sorts do a good job of surfacing the content that readers want to see, and it feels stable, so it cures that FOMO.

Technically there's no reason that's not a feature you couldn't build into a forum though. Surface me a view of a thread that's only comments above 10 karma, or with more than a certain number of replies, and show me a "top threads" view of a given forum. And reply notifications are not a novel feature.

but anyway, your question gets at another tangential point, which is that reddit and reddit-style models have become so dominant over the last 15 years that people literally don't know the ways to interact efficiently on web-1.0 forums anymore. People know how to work reddit, they know how to work twitter, they know how to work discord... do they know how to work phpBB anymore? probably not really, not the average user!

That future sounds like one where Reddit is just micro TV with professional channels (subreddits) and professional content producers (posters).

It sounds terrible and the opposite of what made Reddit great, and therefore I think your prediction is correct.

Reddit hasn't been hands off for about 6-7 years.... A lot of the hate, racism and legally ambiguous stuff left years ago for better or worse. Kind of unhappy they left a lot of the degen fetish stuff though, that's the thing stopping me admitting to using the service in public.

Now they have the lowest value user data of any social media company and are firing people from jobs they do for free (lol) to get the site working again.

What degen stuff are you referencing. I found reddit allowed me to explore my sexuality and discover new things about myself. I'm glad it was never very judgemental about people's sexuality.

I'm not going to rattle off the whole gross list but two which float to the top are all the MAP and Furry subs.

Now if children and animals are your bag of chips all power to you, its just not a website ill admit to using or potentially invest in if an IPO happened.

I use to be very judgemental of the furry community until I got to know some of them. I don't think most of them actually want to fuck real animals. One thing popular in those communities is the Harness Test[1]. Basically, sex is okay between indoviduals where consent is possible, which seems reasonable. If that's the case, what purpose does our judgement server?

Something interesting about the furry community is that it has been welcoming to LGBTQ+ people and folks who are not neurotypical for decades. It's been a safe space for those peole. The furry community has been "ahead" of the rest of us in that regard. I think we could all learn something from them about tempering our impulse to judge with empathy and tolerance.

I had to look up MAP. I'm pretty sure that is against the reddit ToS, and I've never seen it on reddit since jailbait was shut down years ago.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/harkness-test

The main problem is a lot of those sites started as web 2.0 platforms which should never be about deciding the content. only user generated content, but provide the platform

then the last 3-5 years, they are slowly creeping towards a curated model, and with that disrespecitng their userbase

All you have to do is look at what every other social media platform has done, which is devolve into an infinite scroll of the following:

- Kitty/puppy videos

- Exotic street food

- girls with shorts/leggings showing buttcrack or cameltoe acting oblivious or holding a product (i.e. using ambiguous sexuality to sell something)

- Someone doing some kind of weird elaborate craft as a form of spectacle

- Twerking or faux-twerking dances

- A person being kind to the homeless

- "you won't believe" compilations of various things like near car accidents

- Crazy/dangerous parkour

- Some green smoothie brand targeted at young people doing yoga

It's no wonder Reddit has been moving in this direction as well. People eat this shit up, they're more profitable as advertisements, require way less moderation, and are overall less of a hassle than hosting discussions.

You're right about people eating this shit up of course

But the question is if people will willingly remain on a Reddit which is just like Tiktok or YT shorts or Instagram, etc and has no differentiator

Especially with their lousy mobile experience

If there was a clear successor existing with a team that could scale fast, there wouldn't be a Reddit strike but a Reddit exodus. Lemmy and other garbage is not it...

So, dumb question incoming:

How hard would it be to make a thing with the same API as Reddit so the apps that are currently about to shut down can instead change base domain and keep going?

Including existing OSS servers, assuming there already is some (complete!) open source one somewhere — I can google for the attempts ("plebbit" was submitted here for discussion only last week) but I can't trivially tell if they're any good.

Probably not hard to write an adapter at all. But it's not the API that made these apps popular and appealing. It's the Reddit community. The apps would write their own adapters if there was an alternative social media website with this community.

If you flipped the switch on the apps, you'd have your community in no time

Iirc such things already exist.

Though I'm not certain, my guess is Reddit is calling everyone's bluff; they've run the numbers and know that the long game is in their favor if they Tiktokify. Every social media platform eventually declines, and they must know that they have to adapt-or-die to maintain a similar rate of growth.

You forgot:

- million dollars mansions tours

- asking strangers in the street how much is their rent or what's their salary

- asking strangers in the street to do X for money (e.g. do 10 pull ups for $100)

- tourism videos in "dangerous" places such as South America, Africa, Middle Orient, East Europe, Asia (i.e. everywhere not in NA and West Europe)

- silent walking/driving 4K videos in Japan/China/South Korea

- "one day in the life of a programmer/student/[whatever] at [prestigious company/college name]" videos, showing a person waking up, taking a shower, eating breakfast, etc.

-A stickman comic which just has the stickman saying something people on reddit agree with instead of a joke

...and reviews.

The amount that the market pays to inject adverts into youtube product reviews versus 'proper' content is staggering. A good guitarist is better doing a review on headphones, than actually playing a guitar. A runner is better doing a review on the latest Nikes rather than giving training advice.

Can't believe I forgot that one!

>Put those together and it's plausible that Reddit wants to go from a discussion site with cats to a cats feed site with meaningless discussion, and a bunch of ads mixed in.

That would align with the changes Reddit seemed to have made to their algorithm. They changed something last year that affected what posts were promoted to the top of sub.

In the r/movies sub, text posts were frequently getting to the top, which is fine is these were quality posts. Spoiler: they weren't. They'd be dumb questions like "DAE think X movie is underrated" where X movie is highly rated by everyone or a cult classic, or meaningless observations like "Y movie is now 30 years old!!" as if someone just discovered how time works. In the past, most top posts were links to articles, trailers, posters, etc. Discussion naturally happened in those posts. These low effort posts did spur a lot of discussion, but none of it was new or meaningful.

I think the mods are now filtering out these type of posts, because the sub is more or less back to how it used to be.

Make a site where nobody cares as much, by eliminating the "righteous fringe", and then settle in to make money.

The problem is that I want “unpleasant and controversial [legal] content”. Even if it isn’t something that I personally want to see, it prevents the creation of the echo chamber that Reddit and most other social media platforms have become.

I significantly improved my Reddit experience simply by filtering out the word “Trump”. This also had the effect of hiding a good 20% of Reddit, as there were dozens of stories every day about orange man bad. It’s been 3 years into a different guy’s presidency and Trump still gets more attention on Reddit than Biden does.

So when you avoid filtering as much, you end up with something closer to the chans, where you could see a post contemplating bestiality, and the next post proclaiming that pedophiles belong in woodchippers. Not a fan of the former, but you just ignore it and move on. There’s always something fresh and interesting.