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And the most frustrating thing is that even if I don’t actually use Reddit I find myself ending up on it just because a lot of times it happens that a lot of de

And the most frustrating thing is that even if I don’t actually use Reddit I find myself ending up on it just because a lot of times it happens that a lot of dev related interesting material has been posted on it: so a call to any dev out there, can we stop posting stuff on Reddit please (and also discord ) Make forums great again please

soheil 5y ago
I feel the same about GitHub issues. We’ve regressed to a place on the internet that the only way to know what the right answer to a problem is by painstakingly scrolling and counting the number of heart and thumbs up emojis.
- nathancahill 5y ago
  Still sounds like progress considering we came from this: https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/
plazmatic 5y ago
throw_m239339 5y ago
You can block Javascript for reddit domain by default and still use old.reddit.com url if you're just browsing the website. There is absolutely no need to run Javascript for that. It's true there is a need for a programming focused community that is outside reddit. Reddit host objectively depraved material along with scientific or programming subs, and has been caught spreading revenge porn or grooming minors multiple times. Never used discord.
- beeboop 5y ago
  I'll never stop finding it hilarious that the very first step of the "Reddit crackdown" was the subreddit fatpeoplehate. They left up all the subreddits about abusing women, people getting murdered, revenge porn, outright racism and targeted harassment groups. But making fun of fat people? Gotta stomp that right out.
  - ugl 5y ago
    There were multiple waves of bans of varied types, I stumbled on it when it was still mostly admin sockpuppets (the horror unidan !) And the jailbait stuff was the first almost serious effort, albeit externally coerced by an old favorite "wont someone please think of the children" the first major overall regression was the absurd velocity reduction for front-page posts and its been downwards since. although as mentioned in these topics about Reddit/forums smaller subs, very specific topics, and the uhh one? Well-regulated large sub are informative with a decent S/N. Unfortunately it's a single point of failure and randomly entire types of subređdit are banned and disappear forever a recent example that springs to mind were the "sporetrading" mushroom ones, some 12+years old guttednowhosting none of the same content although the topic is only legally restricted in 3 states. So it goes.
SamuelAdams 5y ago
You can use Teddit, a text-only version of Reddit. It’s dependent on their API’s tho so if they ever follow Twitter and close them off, this breaks. https://teddit.net/ https://teddit.net/ Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25310206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25310206
- eek2121 5y ago
  or https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com.
duskwuff 5y ago
> Make forums great again please For that to happen, someone's going to need to write some great (and ideally open-source) forum software -- something that's as engaging to use as the centralized alternatives like Reddit and Discord. Most of the classic forum packages like phpBB have fallen by the wayside; more modern solutions like Discourse or Invision fail to hit the mark for various reasons.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  How about the software running HN?
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    It does a great job on HN, but I don't think it would be a good fit for most communities. Too spartan.
    - 878654Tom 5y ago
      Reddit and HN also kill long-term discussions. When a submission is 1 day old, it dies. If you want to have a conversation about a timeless topic Reddit and HN are fairly bad. With forums you sometimes have threads of over 100 pages that started in 2015 or older where people are still talking about the same thing and newcomers can diagonally read through the pages and see the progress of something.
      - duskwuff 5y ago
        It doesn't even have to be a discussion, per se. One common fixture in old-school community forums are participation topics -- open-ended, low-effort topics like "what music are you listening to" or "what did you have for lunch today" that can give people a low-commitment way to be active in a community. Link-centered forums like HN or Reddit don't handle this well.
- blackearl 5y ago
  Quite a few big forums running xenforo
wvenable 5y ago
Why isn't reddit considered a forum? It has posts and replies. Use old.reddit.com for a more traditional experience and I don't see why you need something else which, if it got popular enough, would just be reddit again anyway.
- __ryan__ 5y ago
  Yeah, you can count on old.reddit.com sticking around. What are they going to do, deprecate it in favor of some new dark-pattern-filled UI?
- Yaina 5y ago
  I'm a bit annoyed that some subreddits are pushing their Discord servers. I think Reddit is a great forum but Discord definitely isn't..
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    Discord has the same problem as IRC, although the latter at least might have provides logs. But Discord content is not discoverable because it cannot be crawled. A lot of good info is hidden behind a proprietary wall.
- jrootabega 5y ago
  It/its users have become focused on a live feed pattern. Posts might become popular for a day or so, but after that nobody pays any attention to them. Search sucks, and categorizing posts with flair seems pretty futile. The way voting is tied to post/comment visibility means that most subreddits, if not all once sufficiently large, devolve into corrupt ideological cliques, and anyone outside of them will essentially be invisible. Some subreddits are exceptions, but I think those may just be the ones that are so small they're essentially ghost towns.
QuikAccount 5y ago
> Make forums great again please I see this sentiment a lot here but people don't seem to understand why reddit "won." You essentially have access to thousands of forums without having to maintain an account on each of them. You may see this as a feature not a bug but given the popularity of reddit, I'd say most people disagree.
- hakfoo 5y ago
  That's what it always appeared to me as-- a constellation of forums with SSO. The fact a new account is so low-cost-- not even email required-- makes it feasible to split your identity as necessary. I recall in the old days there were a few services that would do hosted forums, but nobody seemed to think "hey, let's combine them under one hood and ebable discovery."
  - hombre_fatal 5y ago
    Actually, forums like EZBoard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard) and I think Proboards had a SSO solution (EZBoard Gold). Forums, for reasons we could go into, just never were as compelling to most people as Reddit's solution, though they are good for other things.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I don't think reddit is what actually killed forums. It was a factor, but what was the final nail in most coffins was the software they ran, which often was old LAMP code that needed constant patching and upkeep. Most of these message boards were run more or less non-commercially, as someone's pet project. They were also extremely juicy targets, not only from a "steal a bunch of emails and password-hashes" angle, but to spam with links for SEO-purposes. I think this constant attrition is what ultimately killed them. It simply became untenable for one person to stem the tide. Reddit lives because it has the economies of scale on its side.
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    Great points.
janto 5y ago
A .forum TLD costing more than $1k is also ridiculous.

soheil 5y ago

I feel the same about GitHub issues. We’ve regressed to a place on the internet that the only way to know what the right answer to a problem is by painstakingly scrolling and counting the number of heart and thumbs up emojis.

nathancahill 5y ago
Still sounds like progress considering we came from this: https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/

plazmatic 5y ago

throw_m239339 5y ago

You can block Javascript for reddit domain by default and still use old.reddit.com url if you're just browsing the website. There is absolutely no need to run Javascript for that. It's true there is a need for a programming focused community that is outside reddit. Reddit host objectively depraved material along with scientific or programming subs, and has been caught spreading revenge porn or grooming minors multiple times. Never used discord.

beeboop 5y ago
I'll never stop finding it hilarious that the very first step of the "Reddit crackdown" was the subreddit fatpeoplehate. They left up all the subreddits about abusing women, people getting murdered, revenge porn, outright racism and targeted harassment groups. But making fun of fat people? Gotta stomp that right out.
- ugl 5y ago
  There were multiple waves of bans of varied types, I stumbled on it when it was still mostly admin sockpuppets (the horror unidan !) And the jailbait stuff was the first almost serious effort, albeit externally coerced by an old favorite "wont someone please think of the children" the first major overall regression was the absurd velocity reduction for front-page posts and its been downwards since. although as mentioned in these topics about Reddit/forums smaller subs, very specific topics, and the uhh one? Well-regulated large sub are informative with a decent S/N. Unfortunately it's a single point of failure and randomly entire types of subređdit are banned and disappear forever a recent example that springs to mind were the "sporetrading" mushroom ones, some 12+years old guttednowhosting none of the same content although the topic is only legally restricted in 3 states. So it goes.

SamuelAdams 5y ago

You can use Teddit, a text-only version of Reddit. It’s dependent on their API’s tho so if they ever follow Twitter and close them off, this breaks. https://teddit.net/ https://teddit.net/ Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25310206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25310206

eek2121 5y ago
or https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com.

duskwuff 5y ago

> Make forums great again please For that to happen, someone's going to need to write some great (and ideally open-source) forum software -- something that's as engaging to use as the centralized alternatives like Reddit and Discord. Most of the classic forum packages like phpBB have fallen by the wayside; more modern solutions like Discourse or Invision fail to hit the mark for various reasons.

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
How about the software running HN?
- duskwuff 5y ago
  It does a great job on HN, but I don't think it would be a good fit for most communities. Too spartan.
  - 878654Tom 5y ago
    Reddit and HN also kill long-term discussions. When a submission is 1 day old, it dies. If you want to have a conversation about a timeless topic Reddit and HN are fairly bad. With forums you sometimes have threads of over 100 pages that started in 2015 or older where people are still talking about the same thing and newcomers can diagonally read through the pages and see the progress of something.
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      It doesn't even have to be a discussion, per se. One common fixture in old-school community forums are participation topics -- open-ended, low-effort topics like "what music are you listening to" or "what did you have for lunch today" that can give people a low-commitment way to be active in a community. Link-centered forums like HN or Reddit don't handle this well.
blackearl 5y ago
Quite a few big forums running xenforo

wvenable 5y ago

Why isn't reddit considered a forum? It has posts and replies. Use old.reddit.com for a more traditional experience and I don't see why you need something else which, if it got popular enough, would just be reddit again anyway.

__ryan__ 5y ago
Yeah, you can count on old.reddit.com sticking around. What are they going to do, deprecate it in favor of some new dark-pattern-filled UI?
Yaina 5y ago
I'm a bit annoyed that some subreddits are pushing their Discord servers. I think Reddit is a great forum but Discord definitely isn't..
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Discord has the same problem as IRC, although the latter at least might have provides logs. But Discord content is not discoverable because it cannot be crawled. A lot of good info is hidden behind a proprietary wall.
jrootabega 5y ago
It/its users have become focused on a live feed pattern. Posts might become popular for a day or so, but after that nobody pays any attention to them. Search sucks, and categorizing posts with flair seems pretty futile. The way voting is tied to post/comment visibility means that most subreddits, if not all once sufficiently large, devolve into corrupt ideological cliques, and anyone outside of them will essentially be invisible. Some subreddits are exceptions, but I think those may just be the ones that are so small they're essentially ghost towns.

QuikAccount 5y ago

> Make forums great again please I see this sentiment a lot here but people don't seem to understand why reddit "won." You essentially have access to thousands of forums without having to maintain an account on each of them. You may see this as a feature not a bug but given the popularity of reddit, I'd say most people disagree.

hakfoo 5y ago
That's what it always appeared to me as-- a constellation of forums with SSO. The fact a new account is so low-cost-- not even email required-- makes it feasible to split your identity as necessary. I recall in the old days there were a few services that would do hosted forums, but nobody seemed to think "hey, let's combine them under one hood and ebable discovery."
- hombre_fatal 5y ago
  Actually, forums like EZBoard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard) and I think Proboards had a SSO solution (EZBoard Gold). Forums, for reasons we could go into, just never were as compelling to most people as Reddit's solution, though they are good for other things.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
I don't think reddit is what actually killed forums. It was a factor, but what was the final nail in most coffins was the software they ran, which often was old LAMP code that needed constant patching and upkeep. Most of these message boards were run more or less non-commercially, as someone's pet project. They were also extremely juicy targets, not only from a "steal a bunch of emails and password-hashes" angle, but to spam with links for SEO-purposes. I think this constant attrition is what ultimately killed them. It simply became untenable for one person to stem the tide. Reddit lives because it has the economies of scale on its side.
- technobabbler 5y ago
  Great points.

janto 5y ago

A .forum TLD costing more than $1k is also ridiculous.