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It's a weird issue honestly. I've been on reddit for almost a decade, and I don't like what it has become. I would love to switch to a better alternative, but t

by as1mov 6y ago

It's a weird issue honestly. I've been on reddit for almost a decade, and I don't like what it has become. I would love to switch to a better alternative, but the problem is any alternative that pops up seems to be filled with extremists as soon as it starts. This doesn't imply that anyone who wants to leave reddit is a neo-nazi, a lot of us are stuck with reddit because everything else is filled with shit.

foolfoolz 6y ago
there’s extremists on every platform
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  There is poo on every surface. The key question is the amount of poo relative to the other stuff.
  - edw 6y ago
    Here’s another question: Would any of our lives be any worse — or would they be better? — if we simply chose to walk away and not be a part of any of these platforms, HN included? How much of our lives is made up of karma whoring, level grinding, and falling into the <https://xkcd.com/386/> https://xkcd.com/386/> trap?
    - beervirus 6y ago
      I learn stuff on HN every time I visit. Reddit is (somewhat) entertaining, but I don’t usually learn anything important there.
      - the_af 6y ago
        Doesn't this depend on the subreddit? Some are "chatty" or full of memes, but others are very informative for some niches. If you want a subreddit for enthusiasts of $NICHE, you're likely to find it, and it's likely to be useful.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      I do it as I would otherwise be playing video games. If I have a big project going on, I’ll ignore Reddit and Hacker News for weeks. I also learn a lot of new stuff.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      I think you could credibly ask that question for nearly anything outside of human basic needs. But the answer is simple: people are entertained and enriched by different things. I certainly spend some amount of time on HN replying to things I shouldn't bother with, but the majority of my time on HN is filled with learning new things and hearing interesting perspectives on those things. I consider it a net positive in my life, and over the years I've gotten better at avoiding the negative parts.
    - gpm 6y ago
      I made 40 dollars last weekend by falling into the https://xkcd.com/386 https://xkcd.com/386 "trap". Thursday before last weekend someone released a starlink coverage map that was wrong, specifically it made arbitrary circles on a globe and pretended they were coverage. In order to fix this mistake I made https://droid.cafe/starlink https://droid.cafe/starlink. A reddit user was kind enough to spontaneously donate 40 dollar (in btc) to me despite the fact that I didn't solicit donations. It's also been a pretty productive endeavor for learning about front end development, listening to feedback and giving users what they're asking for, learning to use cloudflare/gcp, and now learning to optimize glsl shaders to enable a fancier renderer while still getting reasonable performance on cheap hardware. I feel like I often learn a lot about one random topic or another when I research so I can accurately correct someone who is being wrong on the internet. The above is an interesting example because there was a concrete deliverable at the end of the process, but I don't feel the fact that I learned from the process is particularly unique.
    - rhizome 6y ago
      > Would any of our lives be any worse — or would they be better? — if we simply chose to walk away and not be a part of any of these platforms Monks walk away from pretty much everything, and have been doing so for a long time now. They continue living. Does the result of that qualify as either better or worse than what you have now?
    - glenstein 6y ago
      I dislike this framing because I think the important thing here -- the need to resist false equivalences between different platfroms -- gets papered over, when it's a really practical and important question with real implications. I don't think 'all platforms are bad' represents forward motion in a conversation about what platforms are able to do differently to make them better than others.
- as1mov 6y ago
  Agreed, but at least reddit is unique in that it seems to get accused of being accused of both kinds of extremism, Tumble/Twitter/HN seem to think it's a right wing shithole, while the 4chan/Imageboard ilk thinks it's a leftie propaganda machine. That's not the case with the alternatives, most tend to go really hard on one side of the extremism scale (right: voat, left: raddle).
  - strombofulous 6y ago
    I can't imagine thinking reddit is right-wing in any way whatsoever. Just looking at the front page (/r/all) I counted five explicitly left-leaning posts (on subreddits like /r/whitepeopletwitter), three that alluded to left-leaning subjects in a positive way (such as a post on /r/atheism), and 0 posts that even came close to kind of sounding like it might have been right-leaning. And this doesn't even consider the comments which is where the real hivemind exists. Yes it hosts /r/the_donald or whatever but reddit as a whole is very left-leaning. Edit: Hey ya'll instead of downvoting me how about providing some evidence of widespread right-leaning thoughts that aren't isolated to individual subreddits and shamed throughout the rest of reddit? Spoiler: You can't
    - sampo 6y ago
      > /r/the_donald They shut it down. 0 new posts for past 3 months.
      - evan_ 6y ago
        Reddit didn't shut them down, the mods of r/t_d set it to only approved posters and nobody is approved.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - encom 6y ago
        Yes, they moved to https://thedonald.win/ https://thedonald.win/
- hcal 6y ago
  I think the problem is that because reddit banned a lot of extremist communities there is pent up demand within those groups for a new host platform. If you start a new reddit competitor, users with those extemist views are looking for a home and will be the first to find and adopt it. A large well formed community can survive a portion of its users with negative comments and posts, but I doubt you can build a community on the back of those users. Instead that negative group poisons the the platform for a more mainstream crowd. People won't join a plateform if the first thing they are exposed to supports extremist views.
Jimjamb98 6y ago
It's such a large site now with so many different communities and types of users. My opinion is it has transitioned from a forum to a social media platform. I think it caters to people who like the content side of social media, but do not wish to see people they know in real life (which can evoke jealousy and other negative emotions).
CM30 6y ago
The best way to stop an alternative becoming filled with extremists is to start it off as a community for a specific audience, then expand to a more general one later on. Twitch and Discord did well there for instance. Started out as gaming focused, then became more mainstream. By doing this, you bring in non extremists early on, and tilt the audience pecentages in such a way that most regulars aren't such extremists. The problem is most 'alternative' platforms market themselves as 'Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube except with free speech and no rules' rather than 'an art/gaming/music/sports themed alternative to Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube with free speech'. Former means you draw in the outcasts and extremists, latter means you draw in another audience that can then be made more mainstream by opening up support for more and more fields of interest.
- moomin 6y ago
  This is a seriously good observation. To add to it: moderation is _the_ hard problem of discussion forums. A nine year old can write a discussion board in python, any five decent developers can write one that scales reasonably. Or, you know, copy an open source codebase. Way harder is getting any actual users, but even that’s nothing compared to community maintenance. Saying you have no moderation is attractive to one crowd in particular (there are other people who theoretically favour it, but practically they’ll use a moderated forum anyway). So you get a quick numbers boost but you’ve now fundamentally limited your audience to people prepared to share head-space with that crowd. Reddit, Facebook and Twitter got in early and got to spend a lot of time learning on the job. Unless you start small, you’re not going to get that luxury now. (Please don’t take this as an endorsement of any particular moderation policy, in theory or practice. Most of them are kind of awful at times. But the problem is hard.)
  - needAnAltHN 6y ago
    Moderation is extremely difficult. I can't say HN is done well because there is a heavy subjective hand. The only thing good are the vast majority of users here have good intention. If only HN had multiple boards with various mods.
- jedberg 6y ago
commandlinefan 6y ago
> I would love to switch to a better alternative I would love to switch to Reddit from 2008.
- pelasaco 6y ago
  I would love to switch to the World from 2008...
  - harel 6y ago
    I'll take the 90s please... we all wanna go back to some period of time where the memories evoke the strongest feeling...
    - pelasaco 6y ago
      funny how people used to say that 90s were the worse decade.. Yesterday I was hearing the acoustic from Pearl Jam.. aaah the 90s, best decade <3
      - harel 6y ago
        I was just the right age to enjoy the 90s to full effect. So much happened (to me) musically and culturally in that decade, that it has to be the best.
rhizome 6y ago
What do you mean by "it," in "what it has become?" Also, what value(s) you're looking for in "better alternative," because none of anything in your comment is specific besides "neo-nazi." I'm aware of the site's problems with them of course, but they don't encroach on my daily usage, so I'm curious what might be pushing you away if it's something other than a constant barrage of neonazis in every subreddit you subscribe.
natdempk 6y ago
What are you thoughts on tildes? In my experience the community there is reasonable and definitely not filled with nazis.
- dorkinspace 6y ago
  I really liked the idea originally. Unfortunately it turned into a pretty hard left leaning echo chamber. This was partially driven by mods from extreme left subreddits being very active on the site.
- nichos 6y ago
  Had potential, but it's extreme far left now. Just as bad IMO.
  - speedgoose 6y ago
    Please. I understand that extreme left people can be super annoying but they never threatened me to kill my family and my friends.
    - decouvert 6y ago
      >Please. I understand that extreme left people can be super annoying but they never threatened me to kill my family and my friends. Simply write "All lives matter" on Twitter (because all lives DO matter, right?) and watch what happens.
      - speedgoose 6y ago
        The fact is that extreme right people did threaten me, my family, my friends. Today and in the past. Yes if I go trigger the worst kind of people on the worst social network, I will get mean messages. But I don't do that.
bananamerica 6y ago
Try tildes.net
yogthos 6y ago
the developers of Lemmy are very clear about their stance regarding nazis at least, and that's more than I can say for Reddit https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/34286 https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/34286 Their developer code of conduct also looks good in that regard https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUC... Seeing how the flagship instance is run by people who are socially conscious I don't see this being a problem. Pretty much same thing happened with Mastodon Social, and with millions of users the community is still great. It's far friendlier and more civilized than Twitter.

by as1mov 6y ago

foolfoolz 6y ago

there’s extremists on every platform

MattGaiser 6y ago
There is poo on every surface. The key question is the amount of poo relative to the other stuff.
- edw 6y ago
  Here’s another question: Would any of our lives be any worse — or would they be better? — if we simply chose to walk away and not be a part of any of these platforms, HN included? How much of our lives is made up of karma whoring, level grinding, and falling into the <https://xkcd.com/386/> https://xkcd.com/386/> trap?
  - beervirus 6y ago
    I learn stuff on HN every time I visit. Reddit is (somewhat) entertaining, but I don’t usually learn anything important there.
    - the_af 6y ago
      Doesn't this depend on the subreddit? Some are "chatty" or full of memes, but others are very informative for some niches. If you want a subreddit for enthusiasts of $NICHE, you're likely to find it, and it's likely to be useful.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    I do it as I would otherwise be playing video games. If I have a big project going on, I’ll ignore Reddit and Hacker News for weeks. I also learn a lot of new stuff.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    I think you could credibly ask that question for nearly anything outside of human basic needs. But the answer is simple: people are entertained and enriched by different things. I certainly spend some amount of time on HN replying to things I shouldn't bother with, but the majority of my time on HN is filled with learning new things and hearing interesting perspectives on those things. I consider it a net positive in my life, and over the years I've gotten better at avoiding the negative parts.
  - gpm 6y ago
    I made 40 dollars last weekend by falling into the https://xkcd.com/386 https://xkcd.com/386 "trap". Thursday before last weekend someone released a starlink coverage map that was wrong, specifically it made arbitrary circles on a globe and pretended they were coverage. In order to fix this mistake I made https://droid.cafe/starlink https://droid.cafe/starlink. A reddit user was kind enough to spontaneously donate 40 dollar (in btc) to me despite the fact that I didn't solicit donations. It's also been a pretty productive endeavor for learning about front end development, listening to feedback and giving users what they're asking for, learning to use cloudflare/gcp, and now learning to optimize glsl shaders to enable a fancier renderer while still getting reasonable performance on cheap hardware. I feel like I often learn a lot about one random topic or another when I research so I can accurately correct someone who is being wrong on the internet. The above is an interesting example because there was a concrete deliverable at the end of the process, but I don't feel the fact that I learned from the process is particularly unique.
  - rhizome 6y ago
    > Would any of our lives be any worse — or would they be better? — if we simply chose to walk away and not be a part of any of these platforms Monks walk away from pretty much everything, and have been doing so for a long time now. They continue living. Does the result of that qualify as either better or worse than what you have now?
  - glenstein 6y ago
    I dislike this framing because I think the important thing here -- the need to resist false equivalences between different platfroms -- gets papered over, when it's a really practical and important question with real implications. I don't think 'all platforms are bad' represents forward motion in a conversation about what platforms are able to do differently to make them better than others.
as1mov 6y ago
Agreed, but at least reddit is unique in that it seems to get accused of being accused of both kinds of extremism, Tumble/Twitter/HN seem to think it's a right wing shithole, while the 4chan/Imageboard ilk thinks it's a leftie propaganda machine. That's not the case with the alternatives, most tend to go really hard on one side of the extremism scale (right: voat, left: raddle).
- strombofulous 6y ago
  I can't imagine thinking reddit is right-wing in any way whatsoever. Just looking at the front page (/r/all) I counted five explicitly left-leaning posts (on subreddits like /r/whitepeopletwitter), three that alluded to left-leaning subjects in a positive way (such as a post on /r/atheism), and 0 posts that even came close to kind of sounding like it might have been right-leaning. And this doesn't even consider the comments which is where the real hivemind exists. Yes it hosts /r/the_donald or whatever but reddit as a whole is very left-leaning. Edit: Hey ya'll instead of downvoting me how about providing some evidence of widespread right-leaning thoughts that aren't isolated to individual subreddits and shamed throughout the rest of reddit? Spoiler: You can't
  - sampo 6y ago
    > /r/the_donald They shut it down. 0 new posts for past 3 months.
    - evan_ 6y ago
      Reddit didn't shut them down, the mods of r/t_d set it to only approved posters and nobody is approved.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - encom 6y ago
      Yes, they moved to https://thedonald.win/ https://thedonald.win/
hcal 6y ago
I think the problem is that because reddit banned a lot of extremist communities there is pent up demand within those groups for a new host platform. If you start a new reddit competitor, users with those extemist views are looking for a home and will be the first to find and adopt it. A large well formed community can survive a portion of its users with negative comments and posts, but I doubt you can build a community on the back of those users. Instead that negative group poisons the the platform for a more mainstream crowd. People won't join a plateform if the first thing they are exposed to supports extremist views.

Jimjamb98 6y ago

It's such a large site now with so many different communities and types of users. My opinion is it has transitioned from a forum to a social media platform. I think it caters to people who like the content side of social media, but do not wish to see people they know in real life (which can evoke jealousy and other negative emotions).

CM30 6y ago

The best way to stop an alternative becoming filled with extremists is to start it off as a community for a specific audience, then expand to a more general one later on. Twitch and Discord did well there for instance. Started out as gaming focused, then became more mainstream. By doing this, you bring in non extremists early on, and tilt the audience pecentages in such a way that most regulars aren't such extremists. The problem is most 'alternative' platforms market themselves as 'Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube except with free speech and no rules' rather than 'an art/gaming/music/sports themed alternative to Reddit/Facebook/Twitter/YouTube with free speech'. Former means you draw in the outcasts and extremists, latter means you draw in another audience that can then be made more mainstream by opening up support for more and more fields of interest.

moomin 6y ago
This is a seriously good observation. To add to it: moderation is _the_ hard problem of discussion forums. A nine year old can write a discussion board in python, any five decent developers can write one that scales reasonably. Or, you know, copy an open source codebase. Way harder is getting any actual users, but even that’s nothing compared to community maintenance. Saying you have no moderation is attractive to one crowd in particular (there are other people who theoretically favour it, but practically they’ll use a moderated forum anyway). So you get a quick numbers boost but you’ve now fundamentally limited your audience to people prepared to share head-space with that crowd. Reddit, Facebook and Twitter got in early and got to spend a lot of time learning on the job. Unless you start small, you’re not going to get that luxury now. (Please don’t take this as an endorsement of any particular moderation policy, in theory or practice. Most of them are kind of awful at times. But the problem is hard.)
- needAnAltHN 6y ago
  Moderation is extremely difficult. I can't say HN is done well because there is a heavy subjective hand. The only thing good are the vast majority of users here have good intention. If only HN had multiple boards with various mods.
jedberg 6y ago

commandlinefan 6y ago

> I would love to switch to a better alternative I would love to switch to Reddit from 2008.

pelasaco 6y ago
I would love to switch to the World from 2008...
- harel 6y ago
  I'll take the 90s please... we all wanna go back to some period of time where the memories evoke the strongest feeling...
  - pelasaco 6y ago
    funny how people used to say that 90s were the worse decade.. Yesterday I was hearing the acoustic from Pearl Jam.. aaah the 90s, best decade <3
    - harel 6y ago
      I was just the right age to enjoy the 90s to full effect. So much happened (to me) musically and culturally in that decade, that it has to be the best.

rhizome 6y ago

What do you mean by "it," in "what it has become?" Also, what value(s) you're looking for in "better alternative," because none of anything in your comment is specific besides "neo-nazi." I'm aware of the site's problems with them of course, but they don't encroach on my daily usage, so I'm curious what might be pushing you away if it's something other than a constant barrage of neonazis in every subreddit you subscribe.

natdempk 6y ago

What are you thoughts on tildes? In my experience the community there is reasonable and definitely not filled with nazis.

dorkinspace 6y ago
I really liked the idea originally. Unfortunately it turned into a pretty hard left leaning echo chamber. This was partially driven by mods from extreme left subreddits being very active on the site.
nichos 6y ago
Had potential, but it's extreme far left now. Just as bad IMO.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  Please. I understand that extreme left people can be super annoying but they never threatened me to kill my family and my friends.
  - decouvert 6y ago
    >Please. I understand that extreme left people can be super annoying but they never threatened me to kill my family and my friends. Simply write "All lives matter" on Twitter (because all lives DO matter, right?) and watch what happens.
    - speedgoose 6y ago
      The fact is that extreme right people did threaten me, my family, my friends. Today and in the past. Yes if I go trigger the worst kind of people on the worst social network, I will get mean messages. But I don't do that.

bananamerica 6y ago

Try tildes.net

yogthos 6y ago

the developers of Lemmy are very clear about their stance regarding nazis at least, and that's more than I can say for Reddit https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/34286 https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/34286 Their developer code of conduct also looks good in that regard https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUC... Seeing how the flagship instance is run by people who are socially conscious I don't see this being a problem. Pretty much same thing happened with Mastodon Social, and with millions of users the community is still great. It's far friendlier and more civilized than Twitter.