The thing about leaving is that I don't know where I would go. As much as I much preferred the way Usenet clients worked the weak moderation made it untenable. Most of the competing sites are overrun with the neo-nazis that were kicked out of Reddit or topics are limited to whatever the news story of the day is. The ability to create long term communities around extremely niche topics is the strength of Reddit. Despite its slogan about being the front page of the Internet, Reddit's front page is almost completely worthless, and the people who chase after the front page are a detriment to the site.
Similar, 65k, but still hanging on. I mod a couple small subs.
My observation is the worst aspect of monetization is on the communities themselves. For the first half, say, it was standard spectrum: some trolls and schmucks but for the most part regular folks with something to say. April Fools projects from the admins wowed us year after year at the creativity and cordiality.
Then came the ads and the apps, no picnic but down in the subs was a new problem: site policy. At some point, subs and posts were getting yanked or even altered by admins. Censorship, astroturfing, shilling, kowtowing to foreign investors, the whole political manipulation thing: you couldn't trust anybody's motivations anymore in a conversation. Most lately, the standard disney/youtube-ification has started.
There are some things on Reddit that I thankfully rarely experience, but that drive me absolutely mad when I do : automatic thread locking after some time and shadow bans.
Both of these violate netiquette!
As a reminder, proper netiquette is to necropost instead of creating a duplicate thread.
And shadow banning is not a tool that most moderators should even have, and should only be used against the most horrible trolls!
I'm not sure I agree about necroposting. I find it tends to increase the noise level more than simply creating a new thread about the topic in some cases, as people see a post with tons of comments and don't realize that many of those comments are out of date and no longer accurate/relevant.
There's obviously a line to draw somewhere. You don't want 50 posts on the same topic clogging the top of the feed, but zombie threads where the first 90% is out of date or irrelevant are also bad. Locking a thread after it has been idle for a week or two seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
And completely unreasonable to me. Even on reddit the cutoff is... 6 months ?
People not realizing that it's a necropost is either a failure of the poster not declaring it as such, or of the forum software - see how Discourse auto-highlights necroposting !
How is a poster supposed to go back to the 5 year old thread starting comment and change it to note that the post is out of date?
Good forum software makes it less of a sin, but that's pretty rare on the Internet. This isn't the Usenet where people's clients could be fully featured on every topic.
Usenet would have it worse, because there you can choose your software yourself (and pick one without that feature)?
BTW, I prefer decentralized protocols like Usenet, there are plenty of features that would be unthinkable to leave out of "modern" clients, this could be one of them !
And I remember what brought me there. Was people spamming about it on slashdot and digg. I have the decss controversy to thank for bringing me to a place that didnt censor a number just cuz it might be illegal in some states. I had heard of it before and checked it when it was linked to, but that was the first time I gave it a chance as my go to page when first logging onto the internet. Reddit has long been replaced as that "first page of the day."
For a while I actually switched to facebook lists, but then facebook got hostile towards allowing people to sort their follows into categories. That one I really cant understand, because it made facebook infinitely more pleasant to use.
Please forgive my pedantry, but I just wanted to note that you’re referring to the AACS (used for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) decryption key censored on Digg. The DeCSS stuff with Jon Lech Johansen was five years earlier than that. Cheers :)
I’ve been an active member of various communities and forums over the years (excluding reddit), and I never actively left one. It was always just a realization I hadn’t been to the site (or really aging myself, BBS) in a year. Most of them where daily habits at one point.
I wonder if there is a market for a Reddit alternative that is somehow treads the line between being a cesspool like that one site that tried to replace Reddit when they banned a lot of fascist stuff was and that other site that infantilized everyone. Is there a middle ground? I feel like treading it would be useful.
There is a market for this, and I believe at some point a site like this will probably replace Reddit... but it can't be started on that basis. It'll have to be set up independently of Reddit, grow organically with its own community, then get successful enough that people move over when there's already an established userbase.
That's how communities get big without becoming cesspools or going over the top on the moderation. See recent examples of Discord and Twitch, which started out targeted to gamers, and have gone mainstream from there.
I think if anything, Discord will get a lot of what Reddit had in certain communities. Particularly anything around hobbies. It's a shame because things in discord get lost the moment after they happen, but I can find years old reddit posts about something I'm newly interested in.
I agree with you. The move towards platforms like Slack and Discord where you need to be logged in to see anything at all is a terrible one, and it basically kills discoverability stone dead. Also gonna make for an interesting future for Google if it becomes the norm, since it's also unusable in their search engine.
Alas, it definitely seems to be the direction these services are going in, and (at least in my opinion), seems to be on the verge of outright replacing Reddit for communities about games and media related topics.
Any "Reddit alternative" will have a hard time gathering users as long as Reddit exists (and doesn't alienate a critical mass of their users ala Digg). Dan Olson of the YouTube channel Folding Ideas made a very insightful video about the problem of setting up "alternatives" to popular social media platforms (having lived through several painful platform transitions himself): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3snVCRo_bI
The tl;dw is that if your "alternative" platform doesn't launch with unique and valuable features of its own to attract users away from the original platform then you will only attract toxic people who get kicked off the original platform as the first users of your "alternative" platform (because they are the only ones really in need of an "alternative"). This creates a self-reinforcing pattern where non-toxic users are repulsed from your alternative platform by the toxic users so growth only comes from more toxic users. You can clearly see this in the dynamic between Reddit and Voat.
Isn't that, in itself, a unique and valuable feature? An established player that becomes highly censorious creates the market for a newcomer offering an explicitly free-speech-oriented alternative. I personally value that very highly.
I'd remind you too that a lot of people - including myself - don't see this "toxic" dynamic the way you apparently do. Our stomachs might turn at the sight of much of what is on reddit nowadays just as yours might when you see the front page of Voat.
Maybe userbases are generally dividing as we seek providers with which we are more politically aligned, with decreasing focus on the bells and whistles they have on offer. That's their value.
The first one you're referencing is voat.co. I can't remember the name of the second, but I do remember cute-looking dinosaurs all over the place and I think that's the one you're talking about.
Side note - I thought Victoria Taylor (/u/chooter) left for that competitor, but it appears that she was at WeWork and now at LinkedIn (as of August - just in time!)
Victoria never worked at Imzy though (and didn't leave for anything - she was fired). She was at Cake (https://cake.co/) for a while, I think that was between WeWork and LinkedIn.
Thanks! Wow, Cake looks terrible. I wish someone would just fork reddit and stop trying to make it look cute. Dense text may not be beautiful from afar but it looks so much better from a user's perspective than acres of whitespace and endless scrolling.
edit: just checking out your project. Looks more like what I'm talking about!
Fun fact, before it was re-branded to voat it was called whoaverse and wasn't a giant trove of nationalist and racist posts. It actually had decent discussions. Over time as more and more of the people were banned from posting on Reddit they had to migrate somewhere, and eventually overtook whoaverse at which point putt re-branded it to voat.
I use tildes now, although it’s still growing I like the community so far. Small site, very open to feedback, open source and (most importantly) it’s non-profit.
