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I really don’t miss Reddit, I’ve deleted the accounts I had there and am much better off for it. I’m not sure when the real tipping point was but that platform

I really don’t miss Reddit, I’ve deleted the accounts I had there and am much better off for it. I’m not sure when the real tipping point was but that platform has really lost its way.

Theizestooke 5y ago
The niche subreddits are still valuable to me, particularly stuff like r/emacs and r/AskHistorians
- haunter 5y ago
  >and r/AskHistorians You mean [deleted]
  - Bronze_Colossus 5y ago
    /r/AskHistorians like /r/AskScience are and retain a high quality due to the moderation efforts by the volunteer moderators. Deleting unsourced claims and jokes is for me a good thing.
- ansible 5y ago
  Just the other day I was having a nice little discussion with a stranger about drive exhaust in The Expanse universe. And it turns out that my initial position was likely very wrong. While there might be other SF boards where this kind of discussion is possible, it is much more convenient for me to join a few smaller communities of interest on reddit instead. I also like hearing about the latest developments on the RISC-V processor architecture. There actually is some discussion of this here on HN, but there's more over on /r/riscv.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  I've often wondered if AskHistorians wouldn't be better off as their own website?
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    Most subreddits would be better as things like HN in my opinion, a lot of the negative things to do with Reddit are down the way the platform is run rather than the format itself. A decentralised network where each subreddit is hosted independently and controlled wholly by its volunteer moderators rather than the (grossly incompetent in my opinion) side-wide administrators would solve many of the issues the Reddit format faces in my opinion.
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    But then you lose the network effect. reddit is so valuable because it brings together so many people from so many walks of life that would have never interacted otherwise.
    - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
      Yes, I feel they've done that bit, AskHistorians is a brand in it's own right now. Seems like contributors could form a coop, have a subscription model, use it to fund research, etc..
- pantulis 5y ago
  One thing that amazes with Reddit is how some subreddits are pure gold and others are basically crap.
  - discordance 5y ago
    Sorry if this sounds obvious, but it’s the people within the subs that make it or break it. Some subs just don’t have those active people that make it gold.
    - Ashanmaril 5y ago
      Bad moderation can also drive away good people and good discussion. I still tend to keep up with most Android news on /r/android but the mods there went super full crackdown on moderation the past several years, constantly removing threads for minor infractions of the rules, and breaking up good discussion in the comments section of a post because the OP was breaking some rule or another.
      - DynamicStatic 5y ago
        I'll tell you the reason that sometimes stuff gets removed for "minor infractions" is because if you don't people keep doing it and referring to those things that are minor infractions. "why can they do it but not I?". It just causes drama and I think the majority of the moderators are doing it for free on their own time.
  - nunez 5y ago
    This is why I love Reddit. The huge trash subs that drive most of the ad delivery are what fund the smaller subs that are extremely valuable
- scrooched_moose 5y ago
  Yeah, for all its faults, I'm going to be really sad when "old reddit" dies. The main pages are garbage, but I'm in some truly great niche communities that are going to be hard to replace. And even if I do, they'll be spread over a dozen websites instead of organized in a single place. I suppose cobbling together a replacement on discord is the future, which I've really tried to avoid.
  - eitally 5y ago
    Agreed. What Reddit provides is akin to what Medium tried to do for journalism/blogging and what PHPBB used to do for online forums: create a standardized, administratively curated platform for community engagement. The value it provides is the uniformity, not much more, and users will absolutely flee if they're treated too badly for too long.
nxpnsv 5y ago
I do miss the reddit I joined over 10 years ago.
cik 5y ago
If only the same freedom existed across all platforms. Like say HN. I do find it frustrating that the same freedom isn't accorded to you here.
- knolax 5y ago
  Dang please delete my account.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html CTRL+F "delete"
  - cik 5y ago
    I already know - it's not quite a thing. It would be possible to delete the account and not the content. Frankly, who cares if it guts a thread. Individuals whose opinions change over time, or desire said privacy should have the opportunity to fully eliminate their presence.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      We can agree to disagree on that. Individual opinions may change over time, but if expressed publicly in a community settings, they become a part of history of that community and its discussions. I think disassociating usernames from comments without purging the comments hits the right balance. Different people and communities may choose otherwise. On that note, I wish websites, in particular and especially HN, were a bit more up-front about this. Here, the information about moderators' approach to account deletion is somewhat buried - it's at the bottom of FAQ, and important clarifications are another link away. In general, I wish all community-hosting websites put information like this front-and-center during registration, not buried in an inscrutable ToS, so that users could make an informed choice before joining (or at least as much of an informed choice as you can make, if the choice will be binding a decade later).
    - RHSeeger 5y ago
      I care if it guts a thread. Maybe add the ability to disconnect an account from a specific comment.
herbst 5y ago
Some youtuber explained the breakdown of Reddit in parts with yahoo banning nsfw from Tumblr and their community suddenly looking for new safe places (hence the big banning on Reddit began at the same time)
- esperent 5y ago
  I really don't think it's the communities on Reddit that are the problem. I mean, yes, some communities there are problematic, but way more are great. The problem is the site owners. They are growing increasingly user hostile.
  - herbst 5y ago
    IMO Reddit got a lot more hostile in the small communities I were part of when the PC stuff started and many negative subs got banned without warning. Could be selection bias. But agreed the websites updates are horrible in every single way. I can't think of one new feature that did not make things worse, the only way I can use Reddit is adding the old. Subdomain manually every time
    - alichapman 5y ago
      You can use one of these addons below to always redirect to the old subdomain. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
      - dmm 5y ago
        Be careful with browser extensions. The edge old reddit redirect extension was malware and because they autoupdate your safety is dependent on the extension author refusing near-daily offers to sell out. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27305638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27305638
fffffg 5y ago
Reddit is very enthusiastic about handing out site wide bans these days. If you say the wrong thing on the wrong topic you can be permanent banned, whereas before you would just be downvoted or argued with. Same for subreddits being banned. But only when it comes to speech it seems, not picture or video. So, for example, we have the odd case of "truelesbians" subreddit being banned for being trans-exclusive, but "lesbians" subreddit which is also trans-exclusive, but dedicated to pornographic imagery, is allowed to stay.
- kwinten 5y ago
  You're aware there is a difference between discrimination and categorization, right?
  - retox 5y ago
    I don't understand the distinction or how it applies to the example above, can you please explain it to me.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      The distinction is that, for example, a 'world foods' (aka 'ethnic'!) aisle in a supermarket categorises stuff efficiently that the local ethnic minority group (predominantly) may be interested in, while more widely consumed (or consumed by local ethnic majority group) foods are distributed elsewhere categorised more according to food type; compared to saying 'you are {local ethnic minority}ian so you are not allowed to purchase {local ethnic majority} foods', which would be discrimination. Whether it applies to the example above though is I think more debatable.
    - jacoblambda 5y ago
      With respect to how it applies to the above: r/lesbians is a porn subreddit with content restricted to female same sex porn content. This is just categorisation. r/truelesbians was supposed to a subreddit for lesbians to aggregate and discuss stuff. What ended up happening was while it was still a lesbian focused subreddit, it became a breeding ground for anti-trans/TERF content/discussions/rhetoric and the moderation of the sub enforced those beliefs. This is what makes r/truelesbians discriminatory instead of just being categorisation. It takes a step from "don't post content that doesn't belong here" to "don't post content that doesn't belong here AND don't post at all here if you match some arbitrary biological definition we don't like or if you support those people". You also have r/actuallesbians which branched off from r/truelesbians when they got TERFy. r/actuallesbians is inclusive of all people who identify as female but have the same original focus of providing a platform to discuss and aggregate female same sex/lesbian content/discussions. This once again is categorisation and not discrimination because anyone can post there as long as the posts are on topic. Additionally the content of the sub isn't discriminatory in this case because it's focused on a topic (about same sex female relationships) rather than focused against another (against trans individuals). So r/lesbians and r/actuallesbians both are categorical while r/truelesbians was discriminatory on top of being categorical because of the exclusionary nature of the subreddit.
theshrike79 5y ago
Reddit is still a better forum platform than Facebook Groups. You have actual moderation tools, you can pin posts etc. People even visit the front page of the sub every now and then. Actual forums would be the best solution, but alas...
jokoon 5y ago
I still use multi-reddits but the front page is a shit show of violence and outrage, things like /r/publicfreakout etc and other non-wholesome content, which are generally politically divisive. The multi reddit allows me to browse only subreddits I like, and it's much much better this way. Digg did not have that.
healthysurf 5y ago
Shameless self promotion but I'm working on an extension to help filter out crud. I'm only in day 2 of dev work but I plan to have controls to select which categories you want removed so you never have to see political, angry, or controversial content on reddit (or any other major social media or news site): http://healthy.surf/ http://healthy.surf/

I really don’t miss Reddit, I’ve deleted the accounts I had there and am much better off for it. I’m not sure when the real tipping point was but that platform has really lost its way.

Theizestooke 5y ago

The niche subreddits are still valuable to me, particularly stuff like r/emacs and r/AskHistorians

haunter 5y ago
>and r/AskHistorians You mean [deleted]
- Bronze_Colossus 5y ago
  /r/AskHistorians like /r/AskScience are and retain a high quality due to the moderation efforts by the volunteer moderators. Deleting unsourced claims and jokes is for me a good thing.
ansible 5y ago
Just the other day I was having a nice little discussion with a stranger about drive exhaust in The Expanse universe. And it turns out that my initial position was likely very wrong. While there might be other SF boards where this kind of discussion is possible, it is much more convenient for me to join a few smaller communities of interest on reddit instead. I also like hearing about the latest developments on the RISC-V processor architecture. There actually is some discussion of this here on HN, but there's more over on /r/riscv.
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
I've often wondered if AskHistorians wouldn't be better off as their own website?
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  Most subreddits would be better as things like HN in my opinion, a lot of the negative things to do with Reddit are down the way the platform is run rather than the format itself. A decentralised network where each subreddit is hosted independently and controlled wholly by its volunteer moderators rather than the (grossly incompetent in my opinion) side-wide administrators would solve many of the issues the Reddit format faces in my opinion.
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  But then you lose the network effect. reddit is so valuable because it brings together so many people from so many walks of life that would have never interacted otherwise.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    Yes, I feel they've done that bit, AskHistorians is a brand in it's own right now. Seems like contributors could form a coop, have a subscription model, use it to fund research, etc..
pantulis 5y ago
One thing that amazes with Reddit is how some subreddits are pure gold and others are basically crap.
- discordance 5y ago
  Sorry if this sounds obvious, but it’s the people within the subs that make it or break it. Some subs just don’t have those active people that make it gold.
  - Ashanmaril 5y ago
    Bad moderation can also drive away good people and good discussion. I still tend to keep up with most Android news on /r/android but the mods there went super full crackdown on moderation the past several years, constantly removing threads for minor infractions of the rules, and breaking up good discussion in the comments section of a post because the OP was breaking some rule or another.
    - DynamicStatic 5y ago
      I'll tell you the reason that sometimes stuff gets removed for "minor infractions" is because if you don't people keep doing it and referring to those things that are minor infractions. "why can they do it but not I?". It just causes drama and I think the majority of the moderators are doing it for free on their own time.
- nunez 5y ago
  This is why I love Reddit. The huge trash subs that drive most of the ad delivery are what fund the smaller subs that are extremely valuable
scrooched_moose 5y ago
Yeah, for all its faults, I'm going to be really sad when "old reddit" dies. The main pages are garbage, but I'm in some truly great niche communities that are going to be hard to replace. And even if I do, they'll be spread over a dozen websites instead of organized in a single place. I suppose cobbling together a replacement on discord is the future, which I've really tried to avoid.
- eitally 5y ago
  Agreed. What Reddit provides is akin to what Medium tried to do for journalism/blogging and what PHPBB used to do for online forums: create a standardized, administratively curated platform for community engagement. The value it provides is the uniformity, not much more, and users will absolutely flee if they're treated too badly for too long.

nxpnsv 5y ago

I do miss the reddit I joined over 10 years ago.

cik 5y ago

If only the same freedom existed across all platforms. Like say HN. I do find it frustrating that the same freedom isn't accorded to you here.

knolax 5y ago
Dang please delete my account.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html CTRL+F "delete"
- cik 5y ago
  I already know - it's not quite a thing. It would be possible to delete the account and not the content. Frankly, who cares if it guts a thread. Individuals whose opinions change over time, or desire said privacy should have the opportunity to fully eliminate their presence.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    We can agree to disagree on that. Individual opinions may change over time, but if expressed publicly in a community settings, they become a part of history of that community and its discussions. I think disassociating usernames from comments without purging the comments hits the right balance. Different people and communities may choose otherwise. On that note, I wish websites, in particular and especially HN, were a bit more up-front about this. Here, the information about moderators' approach to account deletion is somewhat buried - it's at the bottom of FAQ, and important clarifications are another link away. In general, I wish all community-hosting websites put information like this front-and-center during registration, not buried in an inscrutable ToS, so that users could make an informed choice before joining (or at least as much of an informed choice as you can make, if the choice will be binding a decade later).
  - RHSeeger 5y ago
    I care if it guts a thread. Maybe add the ability to disconnect an account from a specific comment.

herbst 5y ago

Some youtuber explained the breakdown of Reddit in parts with yahoo banning nsfw from Tumblr and their community suddenly looking for new safe places (hence the big banning on Reddit began at the same time)

esperent 5y ago
I really don't think it's the communities on Reddit that are the problem. I mean, yes, some communities there are problematic, but way more are great. The problem is the site owners. They are growing increasingly user hostile.
- herbst 5y ago
  IMO Reddit got a lot more hostile in the small communities I were part of when the PC stuff started and many negative subs got banned without warning. Could be selection bias. But agreed the websites updates are horrible in every single way. I can't think of one new feature that did not make things worse, the only way I can use Reddit is adding the old. Subdomain manually every time
  - alichapman 5y ago
    You can use one of these addons below to always redirect to the old subdomain. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
    - dmm 5y ago
      Be careful with browser extensions. The edge old reddit redirect extension was malware and because they autoupdate your safety is dependent on the extension author refusing near-daily offers to sell out. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27305638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27305638

fffffg 5y ago

Reddit is very enthusiastic about handing out site wide bans these days. If you say the wrong thing on the wrong topic you can be permanent banned, whereas before you would just be downvoted or argued with. Same for subreddits being banned. But only when it comes to speech it seems, not picture or video. So, for example, we have the odd case of "truelesbians" subreddit being banned for being trans-exclusive, but "lesbians" subreddit which is also trans-exclusive, but dedicated to pornographic imagery, is allowed to stay.

kwinten 5y ago
You're aware there is a difference between discrimination and categorization, right?
- retox 5y ago
  I don't understand the distinction or how it applies to the example above, can you please explain it to me.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    The distinction is that, for example, a 'world foods' (aka 'ethnic'!) aisle in a supermarket categorises stuff efficiently that the local ethnic minority group (predominantly) may be interested in, while more widely consumed (or consumed by local ethnic majority group) foods are distributed elsewhere categorised more according to food type; compared to saying 'you are {local ethnic minority}ian so you are not allowed to purchase {local ethnic majority} foods', which would be discrimination. Whether it applies to the example above though is I think more debatable.
  - jacoblambda 5y ago
    With respect to how it applies to the above: r/lesbians is a porn subreddit with content restricted to female same sex porn content. This is just categorisation. r/truelesbians was supposed to a subreddit for lesbians to aggregate and discuss stuff. What ended up happening was while it was still a lesbian focused subreddit, it became a breeding ground for anti-trans/TERF content/discussions/rhetoric and the moderation of the sub enforced those beliefs. This is what makes r/truelesbians discriminatory instead of just being categorisation. It takes a step from "don't post content that doesn't belong here" to "don't post content that doesn't belong here AND don't post at all here if you match some arbitrary biological definition we don't like or if you support those people". You also have r/actuallesbians which branched off from r/truelesbians when they got TERFy. r/actuallesbians is inclusive of all people who identify as female but have the same original focus of providing a platform to discuss and aggregate female same sex/lesbian content/discussions. This once again is categorisation and not discrimination because anyone can post there as long as the posts are on topic. Additionally the content of the sub isn't discriminatory in this case because it's focused on a topic (about same sex female relationships) rather than focused against another (against trans individuals). So r/lesbians and r/actuallesbians both are categorical while r/truelesbians was discriminatory on top of being categorical because of the exclusionary nature of the subreddit.

theshrike79 5y ago

Reddit is still a better forum platform than Facebook Groups. You have actual moderation tools, you can pin posts etc. People even visit the front page of the sub every now and then. Actual forums would be the best solution, but alas...

jokoon 5y ago

I still use multi-reddits but the front page is a shit show of violence and outrage, things like /r/publicfreakout etc and other non-wholesome content, which are generally politically divisive. The multi reddit allows me to browse only subreddits I like, and it's much much better this way. Digg did not have that.

healthysurf 5y ago

Shameless self promotion but I'm working on an extension to help filter out crud. I'm only in day 2 of dev work but I plan to have controls to select which categories you want removed so you never have to see political, angry, or controversial content on reddit (or any other major social media or news site): http://healthy.surf/ http://healthy.surf/