8 ms·

Subreddit with almost 2M subs tries to migrate to custom platform

62 points by donkarma 4y ago

Havoc 4y ago
Surprised anyone thinks Reddit is a good investment. It’s such a volatile thing on any reasonable timescale it’s fairly likely to go the way of digg
- jiscariot 4y ago
  And x-years from the redesign now, the UI is still so bad that you have to use old.reddit.com to not have an abysmal user experience.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Most users acquired after 2016 have no knowledge of the Web 1.5-ish Reddit that used to be, especially if they use the official Reddit app and website. I'm surprised RES, the Reddit API and old.reddit still work, because it allows for easy blocking of ads and 'features' Reddit is pushing, such as RPAN live streaming and what not.
    - dorchadas 4y ago
      As soon as Old Reddit goes, I'm gone. I had to use New Reddit briefly to change some settings in a sub I mod (stupid design choice to not let me change them in Old Reddit), and it was absolutely awful. Looked like a worse Facebook, and, like, just let me read the comments and don't show me other posts halfway through.
    - Havoc 4y ago
      >I'm surprised RES, the Reddit API and old.reddit still work They promised to keep old going. However they said it won't get new features so it is gonna die a slow but certain death of incompatibility
walrus01 4y ago
this certainly looks like a shitshow all the way down. the 'cringetopia' subreddit seems dedicated to posting things beloved by basement dwelling 16 year old edgelords, so I can't say I'm surprised.
- dt2m 4y ago
  yeah, and the audacity of using a MLK quote to justify shitposting on a news aggregator isn't helping for me. a funny consequence of this is that the more reddit/twitter bans content that doesn't align with their advertisers' interests, the more incentive there is to fragmentize the internet yet again. them creating a new website is exactly what every community should be doing - it makes the internet more diverse, even if the content is literal dogshit.
  - xupybd 4y ago
    Literal dogshit is not far from the early days. The aesthetic reminds me of Geocities.
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    - rosndo 4y ago
      Well, that works as long as the … is some fairly unobjectionable group of people. It doesn’t work if you substitute it with “drunk drivers” for example. Not sure we should be too worried about “them” coming for a cyberbullying subreddit.
      - soundnote 4y ago
        I don't know if being unobjectionable is necessary. It helps, but: > The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. - H. L. Mencken
betwixthewires 4y ago
I don't know why anyone is surprised. The edgy subreddits (many of which were toxic cesspools) all warned everyone as they got banned, but people cheered as it happened. Finally the baddies were gone. It was never going to be limited to just them. On another note, I do not understand why all these banned subreddits that try to migrate to their own site always try to create their own software. the_donald did it famously and created an absolute clusterfuck of a website (and community). There are so many options, there's open source old reddit, there's federating varieties like Lemmy and littr.me (a good choice if you want to run a single community), why reinvent the wheel? If you want to move to an environment like reddit where everyone can interact, but give community moderators full control over their communities, a federated architecture is the way to go, and there are a couple of solutions that work out of the box.
- dwroberts 4y ago
  Most of these 'edgy' subreddits just normalise bullying. I think it's actually a good thing for the internet that they are pushed off the platform to somewhere less mainstream.
  - postsantum 4y ago
    One of the most recent high-profile bans was served to /r/menkampf which existed to call out bullies. "Normalizing" is just another un-word in the long string of ways to say "I don't like it but I have no arguments"
    - dwroberts 4y ago
      Normalizing means you make something normal. Reddit skews younger, and if the site mainly hosts subs that harass or bully, that's what their audience will see and probably the example they will follow: "Oh this is what we do on this site" > /r/menkampf which existed to call out bullies. You mean the sub that took sentences with the word 'white' in them and switched them for 'Jewish' supposedly to 'call out hypocrisy'. "Call out bullies"? Come on...
zarriak 4y ago
After all the scandals that Reddit has had you have to wonder how dangerous an ipo would be. I don’t think it will happen but if someone gets far enough in discovery you gotta imagine there’s some wild shit to be found.
thinkingemote 4y ago
As we know most users on a subreddit do not create the content for each other. Its a tiny minority. Additionally, Reddit themselves, in the effort to identify and quarantine/ban bad behaviour labelled subreddits "communities". Previously users would subscribe to a bunch of subreddits as a kind of casual action, now the site itself is framing it as joining a community, as an identity. (Communities from outside can join reddit and create a subreddit, bringing their users but this is a different case and not what I'm talking about.) Taken together the subreddits themselves can identify their own subscribers as forming a community. However the actual numbers are very low and the cohesiveness of the subreddit is illusory. Subreddits created from within reddit are not communities in actuality. They might have some dedicated people within it, but they won't be able to bring their community and the numbers they would like with them because the community doesn't actually exist.
- mid-kid 4y ago
  This reminds me of a part of 4chan history that the old admin (moot) talked about in his final q&a, where people used to post in all sorts of different boards all the time, but over time as the population grew, more people started staying on a single board, causing cultures to diverge, people to form their identities based on a small subset of boards, and starting cross-board flame wars and a general distaste for cross-boarders. I think these might case studies in societal behavior rather than directly being influenced by moderator action.
Traster 4y ago
We see this repeatedly with communities on Reddit whose sole purpose is to mock other communities. It always turns into brigading and harassment. I’m surprised they lasted this long but maybe it’s just tall poppy syndrome. The only thing I find really funny about this is that this “take something you disagree with and then advertise it” thing is basically the entire mechanism of how Twitter works so it’s interesting how it becomes far more centralised and organised on Reddit.
jterrys 4y ago
This reminds me of ChangeMyView aka ChangeAView aka...Ceasefire https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19591713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19591713 Essentially a reddit community about making compelling arguments in the hopes of changing someone's viewpoint. I never followed it closely, but from what I remember, the original moderators were worried that Reddit's moderation policies became too draconian whilst simultaneously selectively enforced it AND they made the community moderators bare the brunt of it. Reddit didn't do enough to combat brigading, nor offered a reasonable solution to the kinds of bans redditors were getting. Eventually they decided to break off from the platform, but their community was too small and the rebranding hurt them in trying to maintain a userbase. They couldn't monetize it and it died. The current version of the sub that remained on reddit is very ban happy with any semi-controversial viewpoint or anything within the realm of 'wrongthink' getting your thread locked. There's also virtually no mention of what happened. I think they were worried about losing the sub to a dedicated group of people who viewed it as a political indoctrination tool, allowing only a certain set of viewpoints... which ended up being true.
- prepend 4y ago
  Funny, I’ve followed the sub for a few years and was unfamiliar with this history. It explains a bit how all the threads are fairly boring and repetitive. I’ve never seen the rejected threads for other topics that might be more controversial or true debate.
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
I've oft thought AskHistorians (and AskScience, together maybe) would be better as a separate website with more control over form, potential for better community building, and opportunity to fund research and such. In part just dissociating from Reddit seems like it would give it more credence and use as a resource.
- dataengineer56 4y ago
  I think stackexchange.com has those subforums nailed down. I agree that the subreddits would have more control by moving elsewhere, but they'd lose almost all of their users. A post on the front page of /r/all will guarantee millions of views. Hardly anyone is going to go onto a specific askscience[.]com site.
404mm 4y ago
I wonder what does this mean (for them) from legal perspective. Aren’t they now much more vulnerable as the content hosts? Besides of other reasons, Reddit has rules to manage their content to comply with rules (Laws as well as app stores and similar).
badinsie 4y ago
this doesn't surprise me at all. /r/superstonk is probably next. i've had countless reddit accounts banned in the last 2 years just for asking simple questions about Gamestop. What are hedge funds? hedge funds are fucked.
- IronWolve 4y ago
  Some of r/wallstreetbets mods moved over to communities.win, the_donald guys who made their own site now named patriots.win and communities, basically a reddit type clone/alternative. You can basically make any new sub just like reddit now. The problem with building another alternative site, you start from scratch. Lots of tools/mods/services(gify) for reddit, even 3rd party like IFTTT integration, have to recreate from scratch. Same goes for twitter, gab took a long long time, but now they have more features than twitter, gab pay, gab video, gab marketplace, gab groups. But they even censor, even though they say they don't. I miss the old newsgroup usenet days, they had moderated and unmoderated newsfeeds. I loved reading subs, but then everyone broke out to their own personal websites, killing the good ones. Always wished someone made a website to usenet convertor, turn a reddit sub into a newsfeed, or quora/yahoo questions/stack exchange into a newsfeed. So much easier to search.

62 points by donkarma 4y ago

Surprised anyone thinks Reddit is a good investment. It’s such a volatile thing on any reasonable timescale it’s fairly likely to go the way of digg

jiscariot 4y ago
And x-years from the redesign now, the UI is still so bad that you have to use old.reddit.com to not have an abysmal user experience.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Most users acquired after 2016 have no knowledge of the Web 1.5-ish Reddit that used to be, especially if they use the official Reddit app and website. I'm surprised RES, the Reddit API and old.reddit still work, because it allows for easy blocking of ads and 'features' Reddit is pushing, such as RPAN live streaming and what not.
  - dorchadas 4y ago
    As soon as Old Reddit goes, I'm gone. I had to use New Reddit briefly to change some settings in a sub I mod (stupid design choice to not let me change them in Old Reddit), and it was absolutely awful. Looked like a worse Facebook, and, like, just let me read the comments and don't show me other posts halfway through.
  - Havoc 4y ago
    >I'm surprised RES, the Reddit API and old.reddit still work They promised to keep old going. However they said it won't get new features so it is gonna die a slow but certain death of incompatibility

walrus01 4y ago

this certainly looks like a shitshow all the way down. the 'cringetopia' subreddit seems dedicated to posting things beloved by basement dwelling 16 year old edgelords, so I can't say I'm surprised.

dt2m 4y ago
yeah, and the audacity of using a MLK quote to justify shitposting on a news aggregator isn't helping for me. a funny consequence of this is that the more reddit/twitter bans content that doesn't align with their advertisers' interests, the more incentive there is to fragmentize the internet yet again. them creating a new website is exactly what every community should be doing - it makes the internet more diverse, even if the content is literal dogshit.
- xupybd 4y ago
  Literal dogshit is not far from the early days. The aesthetic reminds me of Geocities.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  - rosndo 4y ago
    Well, that works as long as the … is some fairly unobjectionable group of people. It doesn’t work if you substitute it with “drunk drivers” for example. Not sure we should be too worried about “them” coming for a cyberbullying subreddit.
    - soundnote 4y ago
      I don't know if being unobjectionable is necessary. It helps, but: > The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. - H. L. Mencken

betwixthewires 4y ago

I don't know why anyone is surprised. The edgy subreddits (many of which were toxic cesspools) all warned everyone as they got banned, but people cheered as it happened. Finally the baddies were gone. It was never going to be limited to just them. On another note, I do not understand why all these banned subreddits that try to migrate to their own site always try to create their own software. the_donald did it famously and created an absolute clusterfuck of a website (and community). There are so many options, there's open source old reddit, there's federating varieties like Lemmy and littr.me (a good choice if you want to run a single community), why reinvent the wheel? If you want to move to an environment like reddit where everyone can interact, but give community moderators full control over their communities, a federated architecture is the way to go, and there are a couple of solutions that work out of the box.

dwroberts 4y ago
Most of these 'edgy' subreddits just normalise bullying. I think it's actually a good thing for the internet that they are pushed off the platform to somewhere less mainstream.
- postsantum 4y ago
  One of the most recent high-profile bans was served to /r/menkampf which existed to call out bullies. "Normalizing" is just another un-word in the long string of ways to say "I don't like it but I have no arguments"
  - dwroberts 4y ago
    Normalizing means you make something normal. Reddit skews younger, and if the site mainly hosts subs that harass or bully, that's what their audience will see and probably the example they will follow: "Oh this is what we do on this site" > /r/menkampf which existed to call out bullies. You mean the sub that took sentences with the word 'white' in them and switched them for 'Jewish' supposedly to 'call out hypocrisy'. "Call out bullies"? Come on...

zarriak 4y ago

After all the scandals that Reddit has had you have to wonder how dangerous an ipo would be. I don’t think it will happen but if someone gets far enough in discovery you gotta imagine there’s some wild shit to be found.

thinkingemote 4y ago

As we know most users on a subreddit do not create the content for each other. Its a tiny minority. Additionally, Reddit themselves, in the effort to identify and quarantine/ban bad behaviour labelled subreddits "communities". Previously users would subscribe to a bunch of subreddits as a kind of casual action, now the site itself is framing it as joining a community, as an identity. (Communities from outside can join reddit and create a subreddit, bringing their users but this is a different case and not what I'm talking about.) Taken together the subreddits themselves can identify their own subscribers as forming a community. However the actual numbers are very low and the cohesiveness of the subreddit is illusory. Subreddits created from within reddit are not communities in actuality. They might have some dedicated people within it, but they won't be able to bring their community and the numbers they would like with them because the community doesn't actually exist.

mid-kid 4y ago
This reminds me of a part of 4chan history that the old admin (moot) talked about in his final q&a, where people used to post in all sorts of different boards all the time, but over time as the population grew, more people started staying on a single board, causing cultures to diverge, people to form their identities based on a small subset of boards, and starting cross-board flame wars and a general distaste for cross-boarders. I think these might case studies in societal behavior rather than directly being influenced by moderator action.

Traster 4y ago

We see this repeatedly with communities on Reddit whose sole purpose is to mock other communities. It always turns into brigading and harassment. I’m surprised they lasted this long but maybe it’s just tall poppy syndrome. The only thing I find really funny about this is that this “take something you disagree with and then advertise it” thing is basically the entire mechanism of how Twitter works so it’s interesting how it becomes far more centralised and organised on Reddit.

jterrys 4y ago

This reminds me of ChangeMyView aka ChangeAView aka...Ceasefire https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19591713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19591713 Essentially a reddit community about making compelling arguments in the hopes of changing someone's viewpoint. I never followed it closely, but from what I remember, the original moderators were worried that Reddit's moderation policies became too draconian whilst simultaneously selectively enforced it AND they made the community moderators bare the brunt of it. Reddit didn't do enough to combat brigading, nor offered a reasonable solution to the kinds of bans redditors were getting. Eventually they decided to break off from the platform, but their community was too small and the rebranding hurt them in trying to maintain a userbase. They couldn't monetize it and it died. The current version of the sub that remained on reddit is very ban happy with any semi-controversial viewpoint or anything within the realm of 'wrongthink' getting your thread locked. There's also virtually no mention of what happened. I think they were worried about losing the sub to a dedicated group of people who viewed it as a political indoctrination tool, allowing only a certain set of viewpoints... which ended up being true.

prepend 4y ago
Funny, I’ve followed the sub for a few years and was unfamiliar with this history. It explains a bit how all the threads are fairly boring and repetitive. I’ve never seen the rejected threads for other topics that might be more controversial or true debate.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago

I've oft thought AskHistorians (and AskScience, together maybe) would be better as a separate website with more control over form, potential for better community building, and opportunity to fund research and such. In part just dissociating from Reddit seems like it would give it more credence and use as a resource.

dataengineer56 4y ago
I think stackexchange.com has those subforums nailed down. I agree that the subreddits would have more control by moving elsewhere, but they'd lose almost all of their users. A post on the front page of /r/all will guarantee millions of views. Hardly anyone is going to go onto a specific askscience[.]com site.

404mm 4y ago

I wonder what does this mean (for them) from legal perspective. Aren’t they now much more vulnerable as the content hosts? Besides of other reasons, Reddit has rules to manage their content to comply with rules (Laws as well as app stores and similar).

badinsie 4y ago

this doesn't surprise me at all. /r/superstonk is probably next. i've had countless reddit accounts banned in the last 2 years just for asking simple questions about Gamestop. What are hedge funds? hedge funds are fucked.

IronWolve 4y ago
Some of r/wallstreetbets mods moved over to communities.win, the_donald guys who made their own site now named patriots.win and communities, basically a reddit type clone/alternative. You can basically make any new sub just like reddit now. The problem with building another alternative site, you start from scratch. Lots of tools/mods/services(gify) for reddit, even 3rd party like IFTTT integration, have to recreate from scratch. Same goes for twitter, gab took a long long time, but now they have more features than twitter, gab pay, gab video, gab marketplace, gab groups. But they even censor, even though they say they don't. I miss the old newsgroup usenet days, they had moderated and unmoderated newsfeeds. I loved reading subs, but then everyone broke out to their own personal websites, killing the good ones. Always wished someone made a website to usenet convertor, turn a reddit sub into a newsfeed, or quora/yahoo questions/stack exchange into a newsfeed. So much easier to search.