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You might be tempted to say some of the following: - But Reddit has an API, and lots of third-party clients! - But you can just use https://old.reddit.com htt

You might be tempted to say some of the following: - But Reddit has an API, and lots of third-party clients! - But you can just use https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com or https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com instead! The problem is that the user-hostile trends of current Reddit (e.g. locking the user out and prompting them to install an app) make it apparent that most of these workarounds and such are going to be made invalid in, say, the next 5 years. Even if they do survive, they will be mothballed and largely inaccessible to someone who is starting to use Reddit today. As it IPOs, these user-hostile patterns driven by people who focus on next quarter's returns to the exclusion of all else are only going to increase. So I agree with Karl's conclusion here – don't contribute anything relevant to forums that aren't decentralized to start off with. What do I suggest as an alternative? This is just my personal opinion, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. It's 2022, and we have much better techniques to apply to spam filtering. I will take the tradeoff of the occasional spammy email for having my conversations with others archived under my own control without a ton of effort (I can just use regular old OS tools like Mail, Outlook, and such instead of the more complex information management efforts built by more dedicated folks.

notriddle 5y ago
> This is just my personal opinion, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. It's 2022, and we have much better techniques to apply to spam filtering. I contend that this isn’t true. First of all, if it was true, there would not be so many deliverability problems with email. But, more importantly, there are solid, definitional reasons why spam filtering can never be particularly good. Is it spam if a bot copies questions from one mailing list to another one with a similar topic, in an attempt to build out a reputation? The copied “spam” emails have identical content to legitimate traffic, but there’s no human at the other end, and the seemingly-good user is eventually going to “cash in” on their reputation by posting actual spam. Similar tactics can attack Bayesian filters, and IP address-based systems are getting less useful over time as CG-NAT becomes more popular. Personally, I think “spam filtering” as a heuristic that you tack onto an otherwise spam-vulnerable protocol has been about as good as it will ever get for the last decade [1]. Email and traditional web forums share most of the same problems, but web forums have two big advantages: * Forums can reactively remove spam, as can USENET [2]. Mailing lists have to filter everything before fanning out. ML archives can be redacted, but anyone maintaining their own personal archive has to do any post-delivery filtering themselves. * Forums have somewhat more operational flexibility. You won’t see Reddit/HN-style voting in mailing lists unless you customize your local tooling to support it. Normally, all a ML can do is decide whether to block it entirely or not. [1]: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt [2]: http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/ http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/
- upofadown 5y ago
  Generally email lists these days only accept submissions from those on the list. So general spam is not a problem as the spammers don't know who is on the list so that they can spoof them. Spammers could do bogus signups for open lists but they can do that for any type of forum. The technology is not the problem here. It rarely is.
  - notriddle 5y ago
    > Generally email lists these days only accept submissions from those on the list. I always assumed that, if spammers were intent on exploiting mailing lists, they would sign up for the list or crawl the archives to figure out who's on it. Most of the spam I've seen moderating a web forum seems to be aimed at search engine indexes, and not at the forum users themselves. This is why the spammer would start out by copying questions from a different website*, then start silently injecting their spam links later, after the software stops sending the spammer through the mod queue every time they include a link. They don't even want the forum users to see the link; it's entirely for Googlebot's eyes. Obviously, this is just as applicable to mailing lists as it is to forums, as long as the mailing list has a public archive. We can assume that if mailing lists aren't receiving as much abuse as forums are, it's because the spammers don't think the ML archive has enough page rank to justify it. A lot of them even use human beings in sweatshops to solve CAPTCHAs, if you're thinking that would help. Forums have the ability to remove all the bogus posts after someone notices the spam links. But how would you remove them from the locally-stored archives that mailing-list users maintain? I brought up USENET cancel messages for a reason: purpose-built discussion board software has needed this ability since the early 2000's at least. You can't just wish the need away by deciding that some sense of free speech is more important, and it makes no sense to advocate for it if your anti-spam strategy is actually to just remain unpopular enough to not be a target. * or "spinning" questions with a markov text generator, which is sometimes obviously machine-generated gibberish, but sometimes just looks like the kind of gibberish a newbie who is totally lost would post
charcircuit 5y ago
>but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute I strongly dislike the UX of email lists. I'd prefer to keep my email usage to registering accounts / resetting passwords instead of trying to shoehorn a chatroom onto the email protocol. Even if it may not be decentralized I much strongly prefer joining Discord servers due to it having a much better UX. As you said it's 2022 and I can't be bothered to deal with email.
- etchalon 5y ago
  I find it weird to say someone is "shoehorning a chat room" onto a protocol that was designed for one-to-many communication. If anything, we've shoehorned a notification system onto a chatroom.
  - em-bee 5y ago
    that particular example is a matter of UI/UX. the protocol itself is not the problem, but the client interface is. deltachat shows that it is very well possible to do an excellent chat over smtp. it also shows that seamless sender authentication is possible, and we can extrapolate that a forum with voting and spam removal can be done over smtp too.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
>This is just my personal opinion, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. Yeah, and IRC is the best web chat. We kept hearing that myopic old-school-dev-centered view on things for ages. What did it result in? People now beg FOSS projects not to use Discord (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098). New generations of people, even software developers, aren't accustomed to old featureless technologies; and they consider them crappy. No, they aren't going to tinker with setting up an FTP server, they will just install Dropbox contrary to what HN users were commenting on that thread when Dropbox was announced (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224). After all of that happening can we at least agree that email is not a good substitute for Reddit?
- Shared404 5y ago
  > New generations of people, even software developers, aren't accustomed to old featureless technologies; and they consider them crappy. 20 year old who uses SFTP/FTP and IRC, and has never touched Dropbox + barely touched Discord checking in. While there is some truth to what you say, it's not the full story. Even people from my generation can look around at the state of tech and see what does and doesn't make sense.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hvidgaard 5y ago
  I think one of the things that "old school" people completely miss, is convenience. Your examples of Discord and Dropbox are two very good examples of that. They just work. They work on workstation and mobile devices alike. I totally get why people choose that. I think the sad thing is that the free tools could be close to that and with careful open standard planning, it could even have for-profit companies participating. Email is one such example. Chat and screen sharing should have been another.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    > it could even have for-profit companies participating Why would they? edit: "Old school people" don't "miss" convenience, they would love convenience. Instead they have standards and platforms that are sabotaged or abandoned when convenient by companied building lock-in. What we get was built by people in their spare time, or chiseled out of academic funding, and though it often sucks we should be thankful for it. I think the chance that anything on Discord will exist in 10 years is probably about 2%. If Discord exists (25%?), they'll have blanket deleted old data multiple times by then. Not that it matters much, because finding anything old on Discord is impossible anyway.
basq 5y ago
Email is too socially antiquated at this point to be useful in that regard, and that's not even taking into consideration that because everyone uses gmail, you're trading one centralized service (reddit) for another (google).
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  GMail isn't really centralized, it's (still) federated.
sdevonoes 5y ago
> But you can just use https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com or https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com instead! That's the trap. While reddit is still pushing awful UX practices (e.g., subreddits accessible only via app), we keep visiting it via the `old.` subdomain: net outcome -> we are keeping Reddit happy. Now imagine if we all stop visiting the `old.` subdomain... then we may have a voice, a chance to say "Reddit, stop doing stupid things or you are gonna end up with zero users".
- raverbashing 5y ago
  I mean, at some point. Well, yes, they're keeping the old users happy. As much as I hate the new design (and I mean, I hate it). old.reddit is keeping a lot of people happy. And as long as that fallback works (and it is an official fallback) it is hard to justify not using it. And I think reddit knows the rejection to the new interface is huge amongst old users (and those who contribute the most). I hope they know that if they flip the switch they will digg their own hole.
  - optimalsolver 5y ago
    I see what you did there.
- Gareth321 5y ago
  I strongly believe they're going to remove old.reddit in the near future, and this problem will solve itself because most of us will leave for good. Every once in a while I'm thrown into the new layout and it's just awful. Unbelievably bad. I can't believe people accept it. The problem is: I don't see a strong Reddit alternative. I really like the structure of nested conversations. I think it's a lot more efficient than forums and emails and chat rooms. Certain platforms like Gab are taking off, but that is more or less a Facebook clone. Getr is seeing enormous growth after Joe Rogan signed up, but that is a Twitter clone. Honestly, just give me Reddit of 10 years ago and don't mess it up again.
  - VVVExobyte 5y ago
diogenesjunior 5y ago
>e.g. locking the user out and prompting them to install an app this has never happened to me in 5+ years of using reddit
- oblio 5y ago
  Maybe they don't do that, but for sure they log me out almost every day from Firefox/Android and I'm willing to bet dollars to peanuts they don't do that on the app. I even have freaking 2FA but they still don't remember the device and ask me every time for the code.
  - diogenesjunior 5y ago
    i think that happens because of cookies, if they're cleared you get logged out. do you have settings on firefox that do that? i don't use it so can't tell you.
    - oblio 5y ago
      Nope.
      - diogenesjunior 5y ago
        doesn't happen to me on chrome
        oblio 5y ago
        Try it on Firefox. Plenty of things don't happen on Chrome because that's all devs test. That and Safari iOS. Which does make things less of an evil intent and more of a "if our laziness pushes our users to where we make money, that's an unfortunate side effect".
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Lost a ten year old account because I didn't give them my email address fast enough. New policy. Account gone forever.
btdmaster 5y ago
If you're stuck with reading (not writing) relevant things from Reddit, there's always a Teddit[0] or Libreddit[1] instance somewhere. [0] https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit#instances https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit#instances [1] https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit#instances https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit#instances That these will break eventually is absolutely true however so to the Fediverse we shall slowly walk towards.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  The Fediverse isn't all that better: https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/cdqo4o/this_mastodon_blacklist_considers_free_speech_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/cdqo4o/this...
  - btdmaster 5y ago
    This is one specific instance being unreasonable[0] rather than the software itself having unreasonable defaults (which could be modified if it is free). Having the whole network impose same filtering, like Reddit does, is significantly worse. [0] https://toot.cafe/about/more#blocked-instances https://toot.cafe/about/more#blocked-instances
zild3d 5y ago
> I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. Huh? Typically I land on reddit when maybe I google some question which has a community of people discussing the topic, say gardening or fitness for example. How does an email list help get me a quick answer to my question that someone else asked 2 years ago (and there was a healthy discussion on it, voting, etc). For email there's no discoverability, history, searchability for people who were not already on that thread

notriddle 5y ago

> This is just my personal opinion, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. It's 2022, and we have much better techniques to apply to spam filtering. I contend that this isn’t true. First of all, if it was true, there would not be so many deliverability problems with email. But, more importantly, there are solid, definitional reasons why spam filtering can never be particularly good. Is it spam if a bot copies questions from one mailing list to another one with a similar topic, in an attempt to build out a reputation? The copied “spam” emails have identical content to legitimate traffic, but there’s no human at the other end, and the seemingly-good user is eventually going to “cash in” on their reputation by posting actual spam. Similar tactics can attack Bayesian filters, and IP address-based systems are getting less useful over time as CG-NAT becomes more popular. Personally, I think “spam filtering” as a heuristic that you tack onto an otherwise spam-vulnerable protocol has been about as good as it will ever get for the last decade [1]. Email and traditional web forums share most of the same problems, but web forums have two big advantages: * Forums can reactively remove spam, as can USENET [2]. Mailing lists have to filter everything before fanning out. ML archives can be redacted, but anyone maintaining their own personal archive has to do any post-delivery filtering themselves. * Forums have somewhat more operational flexibility. You won’t see Reddit/HN-style voting in mailing lists unless you customize your local tooling to support it. Normally, all a ML can do is decide whether to block it entirely or not. [1]: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt [2]: http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/ http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/

upofadown 5y ago
Generally email lists these days only accept submissions from those on the list. So general spam is not a problem as the spammers don't know who is on the list so that they can spoof them. Spammers could do bogus signups for open lists but they can do that for any type of forum. The technology is not the problem here. It rarely is.
- notriddle 5y ago
  > Generally email lists these days only accept submissions from those on the list. I always assumed that, if spammers were intent on exploiting mailing lists, they would sign up for the list or crawl the archives to figure out who's on it. Most of the spam I've seen moderating a web forum seems to be aimed at search engine indexes, and not at the forum users themselves. This is why the spammer would start out by copying questions from a different website*, then start silently injecting their spam links later, after the software stops sending the spammer through the mod queue every time they include a link. They don't even want the forum users to see the link; it's entirely for Googlebot's eyes. Obviously, this is just as applicable to mailing lists as it is to forums, as long as the mailing list has a public archive. We can assume that if mailing lists aren't receiving as much abuse as forums are, it's because the spammers don't think the ML archive has enough page rank to justify it. A lot of them even use human beings in sweatshops to solve CAPTCHAs, if you're thinking that would help. Forums have the ability to remove all the bogus posts after someone notices the spam links. But how would you remove them from the locally-stored archives that mailing-list users maintain? I brought up USENET cancel messages for a reason: purpose-built discussion board software has needed this ability since the early 2000's at least. You can't just wish the need away by deciding that some sense of free speech is more important, and it makes no sense to advocate for it if your anti-spam strategy is actually to just remain unpopular enough to not be a target. * or "spinning" questions with a markov text generator, which is sometimes obviously machine-generated gibberish, but sometimes just looks like the kind of gibberish a newbie who is totally lost would post

charcircuit 5y ago

>but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute I strongly dislike the UX of email lists. I'd prefer to keep my email usage to registering accounts / resetting passwords instead of trying to shoehorn a chatroom onto the email protocol. Even if it may not be decentralized I much strongly prefer joining Discord servers due to it having a much better UX. As you said it's 2022 and I can't be bothered to deal with email.

etchalon 5y ago
I find it weird to say someone is "shoehorning a chat room" onto a protocol that was designed for one-to-many communication. If anything, we've shoehorned a notification system onto a chatroom.
- em-bee 5y ago
  that particular example is a matter of UI/UX. the protocol itself is not the problem, but the client interface is. deltachat shows that it is very well possible to do an excellent chat over smtp. it also shows that seamless sender authentication is possible, and we can extrapolate that a forum with voting and spam removal can be done over smtp too.

LudwigNagasena 5y ago

>This is just my personal opinion, but I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. Yeah, and IRC is the best web chat. We kept hearing that myopic old-school-dev-centered view on things for ages. What did it result in? People now beg FOSS projects not to use Discord (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098). New generations of people, even software developers, aren't accustomed to old featureless technologies; and they consider them crappy. No, they aren't going to tinker with setting up an FTP server, they will just install Dropbox contrary to what HN users were commenting on that thread when Dropbox was announced (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224). After all of that happening can we at least agree that email is not a good substitute for Reddit?

Shared404 5y ago
> New generations of people, even software developers, aren't accustomed to old featureless technologies; and they consider them crappy. 20 year old who uses SFTP/FTP and IRC, and has never touched Dropbox + barely touched Discord checking in. While there is some truth to what you say, it's not the full story. Even people from my generation can look around at the state of tech and see what does and doesn't make sense.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hvidgaard 5y ago
I think one of the things that "old school" people completely miss, is convenience. Your examples of Discord and Dropbox are two very good examples of that. They just work. They work on workstation and mobile devices alike. I totally get why people choose that. I think the sad thing is that the free tools could be close to that and with careful open standard planning, it could even have for-profit companies participating. Email is one such example. Chat and screen sharing should have been another.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > it could even have for-profit companies participating Why would they? edit: "Old school people" don't "miss" convenience, they would love convenience. Instead they have standards and platforms that are sabotaged or abandoned when convenient by companied building lock-in. What we get was built by people in their spare time, or chiseled out of academic funding, and though it often sucks we should be thankful for it. I think the chance that anything on Discord will exist in 10 years is probably about 2%. If Discord exists (25%?), they'll have blanket deleted old data multiple times by then. Not that it matters much, because finding anything old on Discord is impossible anyway.

basq 5y ago

Email is too socially antiquated at this point to be useful in that regard, and that's not even taking into consideration that because everyone uses gmail, you're trading one centralized service (reddit) for another (google).

GoblinSlayer 5y ago
GMail isn't really centralized, it's (still) federated.

sdevonoes 5y ago

> But you can just use https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com or https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com instead! That's the trap. While reddit is still pushing awful UX practices (e.g., subreddits accessible only via app), we keep visiting it via the `old.` subdomain: net outcome -> we are keeping Reddit happy. Now imagine if we all stop visiting the `old.` subdomain... then we may have a voice, a chance to say "Reddit, stop doing stupid things or you are gonna end up with zero users".

raverbashing 5y ago
I mean, at some point. Well, yes, they're keeping the old users happy. As much as I hate the new design (and I mean, I hate it). old.reddit is keeping a lot of people happy. And as long as that fallback works (and it is an official fallback) it is hard to justify not using it. And I think reddit knows the rejection to the new interface is huge amongst old users (and those who contribute the most). I hope they know that if they flip the switch they will digg their own hole.
- optimalsolver 5y ago
  I see what you did there.
Gareth321 5y ago
I strongly believe they're going to remove old.reddit in the near future, and this problem will solve itself because most of us will leave for good. Every once in a while I'm thrown into the new layout and it's just awful. Unbelievably bad. I can't believe people accept it. The problem is: I don't see a strong Reddit alternative. I really like the structure of nested conversations. I think it's a lot more efficient than forums and emails and chat rooms. Certain platforms like Gab are taking off, but that is more or less a Facebook clone. Getr is seeing enormous growth after Joe Rogan signed up, but that is a Twitter clone. Honestly, just give me Reddit of 10 years ago and don't mess it up again.
- VVVExobyte 5y ago

diogenesjunior 5y ago

>e.g. locking the user out and prompting them to install an app this has never happened to me in 5+ years of using reddit

oblio 5y ago
Maybe they don't do that, but for sure they log me out almost every day from Firefox/Android and I'm willing to bet dollars to peanuts they don't do that on the app. I even have freaking 2FA but they still don't remember the device and ask me every time for the code.
- diogenesjunior 5y ago
  i think that happens because of cookies, if they're cleared you get logged out. do you have settings on firefox that do that? i don't use it so can't tell you.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Nope.
    - diogenesjunior 5y ago
      doesn't happen to me on chrome
      - oblio 5y ago
        Try it on Firefox. Plenty of things don't happen on Chrome because that's all devs test. That and Safari iOS. Which does make things less of an evil intent and more of a "if our laziness pushes our users to where we make money, that's an unfortunate side effect".
datavirtue 5y ago
Lost a ten year old account because I didn't give them my email address fast enough. New policy. Account gone forever.

btdmaster 5y ago

If you're stuck with reading (not writing) relevant things from Reddit, there's always a Teddit[0] or Libreddit[1] instance somewhere. [0] https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit#instances https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit#instances [1] https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit#instances https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit#instances That these will break eventually is absolutely true however so to the Fediverse we shall slowly walk towards.

Dracophoenix 5y ago
The Fediverse isn't all that better: https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/cdqo4o/this_mastodon_blacklist_considers_free_speech_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/cdqo4o/this...
- btdmaster 5y ago
  This is one specific instance being unreasonable[0] rather than the software itself having unreasonable defaults (which could be modified if it is free). Having the whole network impose same filtering, like Reddit does, is significantly worse. [0] https://toot.cafe/about/more#blocked-instances https://toot.cafe/about/more#blocked-instances

zild3d 5y ago

> I think email lists the most accessible decentralized substitute. Huh? Typically I land on reddit when maybe I google some question which has a community of people discussing the topic, say gardening or fitness for example. How does an email list help get me a quick answer to my question that someone else asked 2 years ago (and there was a healthy discussion on it, voting, etc). For email there's no discoverability, history, searchability for people who were not already on that thread