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I hate how many online communities have centralized themselves around reddit and discord. I'm involved a lot of communities and fandoms where everybody congreg

I hate how many online communities have centralized themselves around reddit and discord. I'm involved a lot of communities and fandoms where everybody congregates on those two platforms, and those two platforms alone. Things were a lot better in the 00s when these sorts of communities existed primarily on webforums. That said, I'm not sure how many of the problems are problems with reddit itself vs how many of the problems would still exist on other platforms even if reddit didn't. Forum moderators have always had a reputation for being napoleonic idiots who abuse their power for extremely petty purposes. The problem of corporations and wealthy celebrities buying out moderators and admins to push their narratives and silence criticisms of their products[1] could easily have happened on webforums. There's an unfortunate drive towards centralization in online communities these days that we'd all be better without. I personally think fediverse is the best solution to this as it centralizes communities without centralizing the actual platform, but I'm not so confident it will succeed when it's up against well-funded and well-established platforms like facebook, reddit, etc. [1] i don't have any real proof there's a monetary interest involved, but I'm perma-banned from /r/startrek for saying that the creators behind "Star Trek: Picard" and "Star Trek Discovery" probably aren't even fans of Star Trek based on the shows' many discontinuities with their predecessors, and it makes me wonder if the mods are on paramount's payroll or something. This should not be a controversial statement after how terrible the most recent season of Picard was.

mym1990 4y ago
I think centralization is just a byproduct of the ease of setting up a community on such sites/apps. I lurk in a few subreddits these days, but I almost never feel the pull to chime in or contribute because it kind of feels like my contribution just goes out into a vast universe, and I just think 'why bother?'. I feel like the days of personalized forums truly felt like a little tight community in the very wide web.
- bavell 4y ago
  > I lurk in a few subreddits these days, but I almost never feel the pull to chime in or contribute because it kind of feels like my contribution just goes out into a vast universe, and I just think 'why bother?' Definitely resonates with me as mostly a life-long lurker. HN is on a very, very short list of online communities I actually post on and engage with. Never got into reddit, left social media long ago.
jotm 4y ago
I'm permabanned from Reddit, as in all my accounts (yes, I let it get so bad I had multiple accounts) and any new accounts (yep... tried making more) are banned based on previous logins and IPs (they're actually pretty thorough with it). Some mods are power tripping, but also the value of a user is now near-zero. As long as you don't piss off too many, your subreddit will be fine. Especially for popular keywords - it's like owning "startrek.com", people will find it. Subreddit owners can't actually make money in most traditional ways (so yeah, they may be paid behind the scenes), and there's a strong anti-monetization culture among Redditors, which is hilarious given that it's a for profit company that makes money off everyone's content. They still see it as an underdog online community. Newsflash, Facebook users also think they're enlightened on an exclusive platform/group. Setting up a forum has never been easier - even security wise. Yet even that is too hard for people, so centralization is what we get. Hell, it's too much of a pain even for companies (for different reasons) - I still can't believe they shut down NotebookReview Forums - I was a long time active contributor. Surely no one in their right mind does that? Surely the decent Google traffic is worth something? Apparently not! Now I look suspiciously at TechPowerUp and Level1techs Forums... I hope Reddit's asinine Facebook inspired user acquisition strategies will lead to its downfall, but I don't know... too many people have/make accounts. Hell, people make Facebook/Instagram and even Pinterest accounts, so clearly gating works. Maybe once they decide to disallow indexing by search engines? But then again Facebook is doing fine... Discord is even worse - contributing unique information publicly (apparently that's what users believe, that it's "public"!) on chat platforms? I don't even know why people started doing that.
- huimang 4y ago
  Honestly, I'm not sure if anyone is really interested in advice from someone who somehow managed to get permabanned on reddit.
  - jklqa 4y ago
    Yes, being permabanned on some Internet discussion forum is the single defining characteristic of a human being! Off to the Gulag with him and shame him whenever he speaks up! /s
toastal 4y ago
I mean sooo many things are centralizing around Discord now which is just as bad—except its worse since it can't be indexed by search engines. I appreciate that most big-enough programming language communities offer a Discourse which is self-hosted and you can choose to subscribe and reply in many manners.
- winternett 4y ago
  Discord is madness, just the captcha process not working repeatedly reminds me that I can be severed at any time from everything I post there. I stopped logging on when TFA became arbitrary on there, I already get far too many spam calls. At least the slack channels I check on don't require it, but I'm done with walled gardens.. I just chose to cultivate my own site as the primary source of my content, no more social platform dependency, and I can just create burner accounts if need be.
  - snickerbockers 4y ago
    > I stopped logging on when TFA became arbitrary on there Did they do this for everybody or only certain people? In my experience Discord is one of the few apps that doesn't constantly make me dig up my phone or help train some dumb AI image recognition every time I use it.
    - antifa 4y ago
      Discord is the worst offenders of apps that make me TFA and answer captchas every time I have the misfortune of needing to use it.
_fat_santa 4y ago
One thing I noticed the other day on Reddit is some subreddits will now ban you by proxy. On my main account I subscribe to alot of subs. While I won't say which one, there was a controversial sub I left a comment on, the comment was benign, I think I was explaining some tech concept. Almost immediately though I got banned from ~20 subreddits, the wording was basically: "we see that you have participated in this sub, take down your comment or else you're banned here". It really put a bad taste in my mouth, basically the mods saying: "you're only welcome here if you also agree with our political theory on stuff over there".
- SSLy 4y ago
  It was kotakuinaction, no?
  - kentrado 4y ago
    Why does it matter what specific subreddit was? Are you trying to cast aspersions on his character? Why?

mym1990 4y ago

I think centralization is just a byproduct of the ease of setting up a community on such sites/apps. I lurk in a few subreddits these days, but I almost never feel the pull to chime in or contribute because it kind of feels like my contribution just goes out into a vast universe, and I just think 'why bother?'. I feel like the days of personalized forums truly felt like a little tight community in the very wide web.

bavell 4y ago
> I lurk in a few subreddits these days, but I almost never feel the pull to chime in or contribute because it kind of feels like my contribution just goes out into a vast universe, and I just think 'why bother?' Definitely resonates with me as mostly a life-long lurker. HN is on a very, very short list of online communities I actually post on and engage with. Never got into reddit, left social media long ago.

jotm 4y ago

I'm permabanned from Reddit, as in all my accounts (yes, I let it get so bad I had multiple accounts) and any new accounts (yep... tried making more) are banned based on previous logins and IPs (they're actually pretty thorough with it). Some mods are power tripping, but also the value of a user is now near-zero. As long as you don't piss off too many, your subreddit will be fine. Especially for popular keywords - it's like owning "startrek.com", people will find it. Subreddit owners can't actually make money in most traditional ways (so yeah, they may be paid behind the scenes), and there's a strong anti-monetization culture among Redditors, which is hilarious given that it's a for profit company that makes money off everyone's content. They still see it as an underdog online community. Newsflash, Facebook users also think they're enlightened on an exclusive platform/group. Setting up a forum has never been easier - even security wise. Yet even that is too hard for people, so centralization is what we get. Hell, it's too much of a pain even for companies (for different reasons) - I still can't believe they shut down NotebookReview Forums - I was a long time active contributor. Surely no one in their right mind does that? Surely the decent Google traffic is worth something? Apparently not! Now I look suspiciously at TechPowerUp and Level1techs Forums... I hope Reddit's asinine Facebook inspired user acquisition strategies will lead to its downfall, but I don't know... too many people have/make accounts. Hell, people make Facebook/Instagram and even Pinterest accounts, so clearly gating works. Maybe once they decide to disallow indexing by search engines? But then again Facebook is doing fine... Discord is even worse - contributing unique information publicly (apparently that's what users believe, that it's "public"!) on chat platforms? I don't even know why people started doing that.

huimang 4y ago
Honestly, I'm not sure if anyone is really interested in advice from someone who somehow managed to get permabanned on reddit.
- jklqa 4y ago
  Yes, being permabanned on some Internet discussion forum is the single defining characteristic of a human being! Off to the Gulag with him and shame him whenever he speaks up! /s

toastal 4y ago

I mean sooo many things are centralizing around Discord now which is just as bad—except its worse since it can't be indexed by search engines. I appreciate that most big-enough programming language communities offer a Discourse which is self-hosted and you can choose to subscribe and reply in many manners.

winternett 4y ago
Discord is madness, just the captcha process not working repeatedly reminds me that I can be severed at any time from everything I post there. I stopped logging on when TFA became arbitrary on there, I already get far too many spam calls. At least the slack channels I check on don't require it, but I'm done with walled gardens.. I just chose to cultivate my own site as the primary source of my content, no more social platform dependency, and I can just create burner accounts if need be.
- snickerbockers 4y ago
  > I stopped logging on when TFA became arbitrary on there Did they do this for everybody or only certain people? In my experience Discord is one of the few apps that doesn't constantly make me dig up my phone or help train some dumb AI image recognition every time I use it.
  - antifa 4y ago
    Discord is the worst offenders of apps that make me TFA and answer captchas every time I have the misfortune of needing to use it.

_fat_santa 4y ago

One thing I noticed the other day on Reddit is some subreddits will now ban you by proxy. On my main account I subscribe to alot of subs. While I won't say which one, there was a controversial sub I left a comment on, the comment was benign, I think I was explaining some tech concept. Almost immediately though I got banned from ~20 subreddits, the wording was basically: "we see that you have participated in this sub, take down your comment or else you're banned here". It really put a bad taste in my mouth, basically the mods saying: "you're only welcome here if you also agree with our political theory on stuff over there".

SSLy 4y ago
It was kotakuinaction, no?
- kentrado 4y ago
  Why does it matter what specific subreddit was? Are you trying to cast aspersions on his character? Why?