4 ms·

I miss the reddit of 15 years ago. Such an exciting place. Can we recreate it?

Macha 6y ago
Small, dominated by techies. Isn't that pretty much what HN has become, minus the porn that was on Reddit from early on? It's hard to argue that HN is still really focused on startups. They get an outsized influence because of who runs it and where it came from, but they're still a small percentage of the content. Reddit was only founded 15 years ago, but I'm pretty sure HN is actually larger than the reddit of 12 years ago, when I joined. /u/Deimorz (former Reddit admin, prior to that foudner of r/Games, which was one of the more successful attempts at doing a "same topic but more serious" competitor to a sub that ended up meme filled) is also trying his own competitor at tildes.net for more general purpose. Notably it's not a "free speech zone" like Voat and other attempted alternatives, so shouldn't be full of nazis when more reasonable users are looking for somewhere to migrate to.
- dang 6y ago
  > It's hard to argue that HN is still really focused on startups. I hope so! That was the intention behind its name change in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html.
- echlebek 6y ago
  HN feels more like a single subreddit than reddit as a whole. There is far greater cultural diversity on reddit.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  Part of the problem is that all of us who have Reddit nostalgia are also 15 years older, largely set in our careers, and oftentimes have families and other demands on our attention. Reddit was founded at a specific moment in history, and a lot of what made it special was what was going on in that moment of history. It was right when the web became useful and mainstream and it became possible for a few guys to put together a website and change the world. A lot of the excitement of that time period was around "What else is about to change in the near future that we could take advantage of?" The early Reddit userbase was often 20-somethings and a few late teens, right around the age range when peoples' futures are most fluid and eager to jump on the next thing. There are a bunch of similar exciting developments happening right now, with similar exciting communities. DeFi, drones, self-driving cars, robotics, EVs, a lot of climate tech. Curiously, most of them get dismissed when they're posted on Hacker News, much like how most 40-somethings dismissed Web 2.0 when it happened. Maybe it's more a function of the age than the community or tech.
  - thewarrior 6y ago
    You’re one of the people on HN whose comments I follow. I’d be curious to hear your opinions on DeFi: Sounds really interesting but feels like something really niche not like the next Reddit. Drones: Drones are really cool and programmable. Fully agreed. Self driving: Potentially transformative in 10-15 years. There’s not much most of us can do to be a part of it. It will be dominated by Tesla, Waymo. Robotics: The eternal dream. But right now it’s hard to even make a robot that prepares Amazon packages. Might definitely change at some point. EVs and climate tech: Very important work but it’s hard to get rich quickly off of it. That reduces interest.
    - nostrademons 6y ago
      DeFi: Very interesting long-term, but the infrastructure isn't there yet - Ethereum (or alternative) needs to scale, and there need to be better ways of representing real-world things on the blockchain. I'd say at least a decade off, and could go the way of the 2000-2005 P2P boom (note though that that boom had some very lasting effects: Bittorrent, Skype & VC, DVCSs like git, and Bitcoin). We'll probably have periodic bubbles and busts until then. May get some help from Fed policy. If it succeeds it will revolutionize everything - the financial sector is 25% of American GDP and our primary export, features a lot of moral hazard and grift, and smart contracts enable some forms of commerce we haven't seen before. Drones: My 3-year-old will ask me "Daddy can you fly the drone now?" and absolutely loves chasing it. Great toy now, starting to find some industrial uses with insurance/forestry/firefighting/etc. Will absolutely revolutionize warfare when the next war happens. Self-driving: Another wartime technology. I think this will limp along in niche markets until then, and then explode (no pun intended) when we need to maintain logistics networks under armed threat. Likely to be a cornerstone of post-war transportation networks, but not in the form they are now. Rather than struggle with sensor algorithms, we'll likely build the sensors & coordination into the road infrastructure and ban manual driving. Robotics: This is like AI in that when it succeeds, it's no longer called "robotics". It's already used very extensively in manufacturing and logistics (have you ever looked up airport baggage handling systems on YouTube?). We aren't going to get general-purpose robots, but we might see a wave of micro-manufacturing appliances a la 3D printing (put in raw materials, get back a product made to your specifications, distribute products digitally) as well as descendants of today's household appliances (we already have this with Roombas, robotic lawn mowers, robotic tractors, etc). EVs: Will probably go mainstream around 2023-2024. If you're already a top-notch electrical engineer you can likely get very rich on this right now by founding a company and letting a SPAC take you public next year. For the rest of it the excitement will be in buying one and upgrading our solar panels, power wall, power grid to support it. Climate tech: Will likely ultimately fail in stopping global warming but will invent lots of useful innovations that might be applied to other industries in the future (sort of like how microwave ovens came out of radar and computers came out of artillery guidance). If you have good skills and a long time horizon, the play is to go work for one of these companies, learn everything you can, spend your time researching, and then ride it until it goes bankrupt and then apply the technologies toward something more mundane. I'd agree that we're not in 2005 now - it feels more like 2002-03, where you can tell that there's interesting stuff going on but nothing's really ready for primetime yet. We had stuff like Friendster, Kazaa, LiveJournal, BaseCamp, then - all precursors to really important stuff, but the specific successes hadn't yet happened.
LanceH 6y ago
I find it is constantly being recreated in different subs, though they do tend to get more specific.
- karaterobot 6y ago
  Unfortunately, in many small subs that become popular and then become victims of success, the entire lifecycle of Reddit is recapitulated, and not just the fun early days.
  - aroman 6y ago
    Reminds me of the eternal September effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
holler 6y ago
Agree, my time spent in r/worldnews way way back was an influence in building Sqwok, as I wanted a Slack-like public app for discussing the news. There are many options out there these days but I believe there's still room for that vision & actively building it. https://sqwok.im/p/Q4KowEDMcpY9iw https://sqwok.im/p/Q4KowEDMcpY9iw

Small, dominated by techies. Isn't that pretty much what HN has become, minus the porn that was on Reddit from early on? It's hard to argue that HN is still really focused on startups. They get an outsized influence because of who runs it and where it came from, but they're still a small percentage of the content. Reddit was only founded 15 years ago, but I'm pretty sure HN is actually larger than the reddit of 12 years ago, when I joined. /u/Deimorz (former Reddit admin, prior to that foudner of r/Games, which was one of the more successful attempts at doing a "same topic but more serious" competitor to a sub that ended up meme filled) is also trying his own competitor at tildes.net for more general purpose. Notably it's not a "free speech zone" like Voat and other attempted alternatives, so shouldn't be full of nazis when more reasonable users are looking for somewhere to migrate to.

dang 6y ago
> It's hard to argue that HN is still really focused on startups. I hope so! That was the intention behind its name change in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html.
echlebek 6y ago
HN feels more like a single subreddit than reddit as a whole. There is far greater cultural diversity on reddit.
nostrademons 6y ago
Part of the problem is that all of us who have Reddit nostalgia are also 15 years older, largely set in our careers, and oftentimes have families and other demands on our attention. Reddit was founded at a specific moment in history, and a lot of what made it special was what was going on in that moment of history. It was right when the web became useful and mainstream and it became possible for a few guys to put together a website and change the world. A lot of the excitement of that time period was around "What else is about to change in the near future that we could take advantage of?" The early Reddit userbase was often 20-somethings and a few late teens, right around the age range when peoples' futures are most fluid and eager to jump on the next thing. There are a bunch of similar exciting developments happening right now, with similar exciting communities. DeFi, drones, self-driving cars, robotics, EVs, a lot of climate tech. Curiously, most of them get dismissed when they're posted on Hacker News, much like how most 40-somethings dismissed Web 2.0 when it happened. Maybe it's more a function of the age than the community or tech.
- thewarrior 6y ago
  You’re one of the people on HN whose comments I follow. I’d be curious to hear your opinions on DeFi: Sounds really interesting but feels like something really niche not like the next Reddit. Drones: Drones are really cool and programmable. Fully agreed. Self driving: Potentially transformative in 10-15 years. There’s not much most of us can do to be a part of it. It will be dominated by Tesla, Waymo. Robotics: The eternal dream. But right now it’s hard to even make a robot that prepares Amazon packages. Might definitely change at some point. EVs and climate tech: Very important work but it’s hard to get rich quickly off of it. That reduces interest.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    DeFi: Very interesting long-term, but the infrastructure isn't there yet - Ethereum (or alternative) needs to scale, and there need to be better ways of representing real-world things on the blockchain. I'd say at least a decade off, and could go the way of the 2000-2005 P2P boom (note though that that boom had some very lasting effects: Bittorrent, Skype & VC, DVCSs like git, and Bitcoin). We'll probably have periodic bubbles and busts until then. May get some help from Fed policy. If it succeeds it will revolutionize everything - the financial sector is 25% of American GDP and our primary export, features a lot of moral hazard and grift, and smart contracts enable some forms of commerce we haven't seen before. Drones: My 3-year-old will ask me "Daddy can you fly the drone now?" and absolutely loves chasing it. Great toy now, starting to find some industrial uses with insurance/forestry/firefighting/etc. Will absolutely revolutionize warfare when the next war happens. Self-driving: Another wartime technology. I think this will limp along in niche markets until then, and then explode (no pun intended) when we need to maintain logistics networks under armed threat. Likely to be a cornerstone of post-war transportation networks, but not in the form they are now. Rather than struggle with sensor algorithms, we'll likely build the sensors & coordination into the road infrastructure and ban manual driving. Robotics: This is like AI in that when it succeeds, it's no longer called "robotics". It's already used very extensively in manufacturing and logistics (have you ever looked up airport baggage handling systems on YouTube?). We aren't going to get general-purpose robots, but we might see a wave of micro-manufacturing appliances a la 3D printing (put in raw materials, get back a product made to your specifications, distribute products digitally) as well as descendants of today's household appliances (we already have this with Roombas, robotic lawn mowers, robotic tractors, etc). EVs: Will probably go mainstream around 2023-2024. If you're already a top-notch electrical engineer you can likely get very rich on this right now by founding a company and letting a SPAC take you public next year. For the rest of it the excitement will be in buying one and upgrading our solar panels, power wall, power grid to support it. Climate tech: Will likely ultimately fail in stopping global warming but will invent lots of useful innovations that might be applied to other industries in the future (sort of like how microwave ovens came out of radar and computers came out of artillery guidance). If you have good skills and a long time horizon, the play is to go work for one of these companies, learn everything you can, spend your time researching, and then ride it until it goes bankrupt and then apply the technologies toward something more mundane. I'd agree that we're not in 2005 now - it feels more like 2002-03, where you can tell that there's interesting stuff going on but nothing's really ready for primetime yet. We had stuff like Friendster, Kazaa, LiveJournal, BaseCamp, then - all precursors to really important stuff, but the specific successes hadn't yet happened.

LanceH 6y ago

I find it is constantly being recreated in different subs, though they do tend to get more specific.

karaterobot 6y ago
Unfortunately, in many small subs that become popular and then become victims of success, the entire lifecycle of Reddit is recapitulated, and not just the fun early days.
- aroman 6y ago
  Reminds me of the eternal September effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

holler 6y ago

Agree, my time spent in r/worldnews way way back was an influence in building Sqwok, as I wanted a Slack-like public app for discussing the news. There are many options out there these days but I believe there's still room for that vision & actively building it. https://sqwok.im/p/Q4KowEDMcpY9iw https://sqwok.im/p/Q4KowEDMcpY9iw