11 ms·

The failure that is Reddit is the failure of the web.

by musha68k 3y ago

roncesvalles 3y ago
That's interesting because I consider Reddit to be one of the great victories of the Internet.
- RoyGBivCap 3y ago
  With their blatantly sexist and racist policies, and their Free Speech bait & switch I vehemently disagree: From reddit a employee: "Our rule1 protects groups that are attacked based on a vulnerability, which doesn't pertain to white people or men as a group." Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NgOxEg0.png https://i.imgur.com/NgOxEg0.png What is rule 1? "Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned." (https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy) So in practice, according to one of their employees it's actually: "Remember the non-white male human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking non-white people or women. Everyone except white people and men have a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate against non-white people or women will be banned." And this is absolutely born out in their repeated banning of male-centric subs, while the most toxic community I've ever seen remains, because it's wildly sexist against the correct gender. And there are multiple "fragile white redditor" type subs also, but all other "fragile <race> redditor" subs were instantly banned. And the bait & switch: "We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it." — Reddit FAQ 2005 "We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content" — u/kn0thing 2008 "A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets." — u/kn0thing 2012 "We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal." — u/reddit 2012 "We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse)." — u/yishan 2012 "Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech" >— u/spez 2015
  - banhamm 3y ago
    > And this is absolutely born out in their repeated banning of male-centric subs, while the most toxic community I've ever seen remains, because it's wildly sexist against the correct gender. They banned a load of female-centred subreddits too, a couple of years back. The moderators of these subs then set up their own Reddit-like forum at https://ovarit.com https://ovarit.com, with a mission to uplift women's voices, especially on topics where they had been censored on Reddit. Reddit also discriminates specifically against homosexual women, in similar ways: /r/lesbians is a pornography forum dedicated to the male gaze, while /r/actuallesbians is filled with men pretending to be women. Any lesbian subreddit that is created exclusively for actual female women to use gets swiftly banned, and similarly for comments that support being exclusively same-sex attracted. This sort of 'progressive' misogyny and homophobia is increasingly common in other forums too, not just on Reddit. The common theme of all this banning and censorship is users not toeing the line towards a particular set of US-centric political viewpoints that are currently popular amongst those who call themselves 'progressive'. Though in reality their views and actions are regressive and authoritarian.
    - RoyGBivCap 3y ago
      >while /r/actuallesbians is filled with men pretending to be women Accurate: https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/actuallesbians https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/actualles...
    - DoItToMe81 3y ago
      They've also banned pretty much anything remotely controversial since maybe 2015. It started out with shock videos and gore, but gradually progressed into pretty much anything deemed offensive by the demographic they're catering to. The connecting thread in all these bans is that if you're not in the niche of American 'polite society' that they market to, you can expect to be tolerated only to give an illusion of plurality to the site.
- tempest_ 3y ago
  If that is the case I suppose we have drastically different ideas about what "the Internet" is.
  - throw_pm23 3y ago
    as well as "victory"
- chakintosh 3y ago
  > 92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5 people https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jamilton 3y ago
    The other million subreddits are most of the good part of reddit, IMO.
    - nbar1 3y ago
      Until you get automatically banned from the top subreddit simply for commenting in a completely separate subreddit the mods don't like.
      - WeylandYutani 3y ago
        Maybe I have nostalgia glasses on but when I grew up on the internet forums only deleted posts that had illegal content. They did not remove unpopular opinions. Reddit is were actual discussion goes to die. Comes with the downvote ability I suppose.
        nbar1 3y ago
        10 years ago we seen a lot of open-discussion platforms. That all died when picking a side became profitable.
        scrollaway 3y ago
        You don’t have nostalgia glasses on. You have a nostalgia blindfold on. Mods on the “old forums” routinely deleted posts and banned users because they don’t like their opinion or hell even just as a “fuck why not it’s funny”. Source: was a mod and active participant of such forums and saw it all the time. Did my fair share too.
- musha68k 3y ago
  It definitely is one of the great victories of the commercial internet (in “mobile” 2023 sans web for the most part, mind you). BBS like systems and forums had been successfully in use since the early 70s. Usenet is more than 40 years old by now IIRC? Very similar function and open by design. Even without falling into “Endless September” rose tinted glasses I would argue that we really, really could do a whole lot better in 2023 and going forward. I guess someone must work on Ted Nelson’s ideas at least (Xanadu, etc)?
  - rrdharan 3y ago
    How so? I thought they had terrible monetization?
    - nomel 3y ago
      That's generally a good thing, from the user perspective.
  - bcrosby95 3y ago
    Reddit most closely reminds me of ezboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      Or proboards: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProBoards https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProBoards But Reddit is really bad at long on-going conversations unless it has enough to support its own subreddit. Car maintenance forums are something I feel doesn’t work well on the Reddit system. Or anything you’d want chronological or heavy in-like image/video embedding
      - officeplant 3y ago
        Too bad so many older car forum posts are useless outside of their text now. Everywhere you go its just large swaths of photobucket/cardomain embed failures for the forums that didn't do image hosting.
- skilled 3y ago
  Please. Are you saying people would not have figured out how to host personal communities if it wasn't for Reddit? Oh wait... They did that long before Reddit even existed.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    I think Reddit can claim credit for making an easy framework for creating new communities, unifying the UI experience, and making discovery somewhat easier. I still think it has devolved into one of the biggest tire fires on the Internet, but it was a cute idea. Maybe the next attempt will suck less.
- bufio 3y ago
  It has been a great victory for centralisation.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  Do you mean in terms of adoption, revenue, growth, etc., or do you mean something else? I can see that the business is successful, but from where I stand it's a bit of a mixed bag in terms of quality of discussion, experience as a user, treatment of its community, and perhaps its overall effect on the culture. Would like to hear more about what you mean, in other words.
  - tornato7 3y ago
    There's a reason it's a meme that people always append "site: Reddit" to the end of web searches. It's one of the greatest sources of genuine, peer-to-peer information out there. They also have open APIs that allow everyone from researchers to developers to access it.
    - rootusrootus 3y ago
      Thanks to ChatGPT that is about to become a thing of the past. First the APIs, and then the content. There was already quite a lot of paid fluff on Reddit, but it was fairly easy to recognize. Now it's easier to make and more plausible sounding, and it's going to completely drown out the humans. The value of "site:reddit.com" is plummeting.
      - bezier-curve 3y ago
        If all your research can be handled by whatever Open AI trained ChatGPT on, sure.
        ysavir 3y ago
        I think the GP means that soon ChatGPT-generated content will be flooding reddit and drowning out the human-created content. Whether you use ChatGPT yourself or not isn't relevant when all the search results are ChatGPT authored pieces of content.
        rootusrootus 3y ago
- glonq 3y ago
  In the same way that Walmart is one of the great victories of the retail industry. It snuffed out small independant competitors, dominates an industry, and wields its tremendous power in a negligent, self-serving, and irresponsible manner.
- RoyGBivCap 3y ago
  [flagged]
- m463 3y ago
  I think it worked quite well at first, because it had mostly-democratic algorithms. It was distributed curation that generally followed common sense. Before that, I remember slashdot, which was pretty good at culling comments, but article selection was not democratic. But money screws up everything.
  - George83728 3y ago
    Slashdot's system works better than Reddit's or HNs, but unfortunately Slashdot fell for other reasons (gross mismanagement, nonexistent editing, etc) Slashdot's moderation was great though. Specifically, I really like the way Slashdot provides more categories for rating comments. '+5 Funny' vs '+5 Insightful' is a very useful distinction. '-1 Off Topic' vs '-1 Flamebait/Troll' is a useful distinction. I don't want to read off topic spam, but I often do want to read unpopular dissenting opinions. Slashdot let me read the "trolls" (dissenters) without having to wade through the literal spam. Great system, HN and reddit would be better if they had something similar.
    - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
      I was seemingly randomly selected to be a moderator a couple of times on Slashdot. I don't remember how long each term lasted, maybe a couple of weeks? It seemed like a good system to keep anyone from being in the role for long enough to be the target of corruption and to prevent much damage if the selected person was simply a shitty moderator.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        The way I remember it working was it would randomly select users, and you were given the ability to give +1/-1 to posts for a certain period of time (day? week?) and you could only use that in threads that you were not posting in. And once in awhile you'd get picked to meta moderate where you'd be asked if the moderation choice of another user was reasonable.
        midoridensha 3y ago
- dec0dedab0de 3y ago
  You may not be old enough to remember the internet before reddit. There were many separate forums dedicated to specific interests, and quite a few of those communities moved to subreddits, and the quality suffered greatly. I'm sure someone is going to chime in and say how it was the same thing with newsgroups before, but to me it feels like that time just before reddit and facebook took over everything was the peak of the internet.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    There are two different but similar effects occurring. Dedicated forums for particular topics were generally tiny. A forum with 10k+ people was a sizable forum, and not many where that large. Small communities got very little attention from spammers, and while they had their own trolls giving problems they were much less rarely subjected general trolls unless something like 4chan or whatever came before it picked up on them. The internet is also huge and has zero degrees of separation in most places. I could post a link to a tiny forum here and 1000 people may see it. I could post it to reddit subthread and a hundred thousand people could see it. Or I could get a front page post on Reddit and a million+ people could see it. And with it tons of trolls, spam, and general idiots will follow and quality goes to trash. This barely has anything to do with Reddit/Facebook itself. It's the power of network effects congregating people. Facebook was always going to happen, maybe in a slightly different flavor, or slightly different form, but once we got the computing capability to have millions of people at one place at once time, someone was always going to build it.
  - officeplant 3y ago
    At least subreddits are still searchable. I'm running into a lot of instances now of forums/subreddits turning mostly into Discord servers. It sucks when all of the troubleshooting and repair instructions get moved into a Discord server and become unsearchable unless you join discord. Video game producers are starting up fan discords that also have the troubleshooting/bug reports channels for the game on them. Video game mod communities are moving to discord. Its going to really suck when a few years go by and a company closes or moves onto a new game and shuts down their discord. A lot of community sourced info is going to be flushed down the drain if people don't archive it.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  I wish we’d have less of these “victories” that go from a half decent forum software to an ad-ridden hellhole full of childish gay jokes and regurgitated memes in place of actual discussion.
- RickJWagner 3y ago
  I really like some of the content on Reddit, and especially the variety. But the childishness.....
- evilspammer 3y ago
  [dead]
cmh89 3y ago
The saga of Violentacrez and /r/jailbait showed that the folks who run Reddit have zero integrity.
- trehalose 3y ago
  I hadn't heard of this guy, so I just looked him up. He ran a subreddit for sharing photographs of children for the express purpose of jerking off to, and the CEO of Reddit at the time (Yishan Wong) defended that? That's bad indeed.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    That was back when reddit was 'absolute free speech' oriented and nothing the guy posted was illegal.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    On the flip side, the knee jerk reaction "think of the children" has resulted in many awful policies which do more aggregate harm than good. It is useful to have someone defend things which are distasteful but not illegal. When we snuff out a particular bit of speech we should have to think about it, however briefly.
    - ALittleLight 3y ago
      I don't think so. The legal and moral principle of free speech is meant to protect different political, scientific, philosophical, etc. views. It's not meant to protect a pedophile's right to sexualize children. What do we lose by censoring those people?
      - pixl97 3y ago
        Everybody has a group they consider 'those people'. It is at least best we have a discussion before banning any of 'those people' before we realize that the people in charge consider 'those people' whatever group you are in.
      - 3y ago
lazzlazzlazz 3y ago
Reddit is one part of the web. It's a privately controlled company. It should never have accumulated as much importance as it has. We need to design the next Reddits so they're credibly neutral parts of the internet with their own, distributed controls.

The failure that is Reddit is the failure of the web.

roncesvalles 3y ago

That's interesting because I consider Reddit to be one of the great victories of the Internet.

RoyGBivCap 3y ago
With their blatantly sexist and racist policies, and their Free Speech bait & switch I vehemently disagree: From reddit a employee: "Our rule1 protects groups that are attacked based on a vulnerability, which doesn't pertain to white people or men as a group." Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NgOxEg0.png https://i.imgur.com/NgOxEg0.png What is rule 1? "Remember the human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned." (https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy) So in practice, according to one of their employees it's actually: "Remember the non-white male human. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking non-white people or women. Everyone except white people and men have a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence. Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate against non-white people or women will be banned." And this is absolutely born out in their repeated banning of male-centric subs, while the most toxic community I've ever seen remains, because it's wildly sexist against the correct gender. And there are multiple "fragile white redditor" type subs also, but all other "fragile <race> redditor" subs were instantly banned. And the bait & switch: "We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it." — Reddit FAQ 2005 "We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content" — u/kn0thing 2008 "A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets." — u/kn0thing 2012 "We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal." — u/reddit 2012 "We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse)." — u/yishan 2012 "Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech" >— u/spez 2015
- banhamm 3y ago
  > And this is absolutely born out in their repeated banning of male-centric subs, while the most toxic community I've ever seen remains, because it's wildly sexist against the correct gender. They banned a load of female-centred subreddits too, a couple of years back. The moderators of these subs then set up their own Reddit-like forum at https://ovarit.com https://ovarit.com, with a mission to uplift women's voices, especially on topics where they had been censored on Reddit. Reddit also discriminates specifically against homosexual women, in similar ways: /r/lesbians is a pornography forum dedicated to the male gaze, while /r/actuallesbians is filled with men pretending to be women. Any lesbian subreddit that is created exclusively for actual female women to use gets swiftly banned, and similarly for comments that support being exclusively same-sex attracted. This sort of 'progressive' misogyny and homophobia is increasingly common in other forums too, not just on Reddit. The common theme of all this banning and censorship is users not toeing the line towards a particular set of US-centric political viewpoints that are currently popular amongst those who call themselves 'progressive'. Though in reality their views and actions are regressive and authoritarian.
  - RoyGBivCap 3y ago
    >while /r/actuallesbians is filled with men pretending to be women Accurate: https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/actuallesbians https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/actualles...
  - DoItToMe81 3y ago
    They've also banned pretty much anything remotely controversial since maybe 2015. It started out with shock videos and gore, but gradually progressed into pretty much anything deemed offensive by the demographic they're catering to. The connecting thread in all these bans is that if you're not in the niche of American 'polite society' that they market to, you can expect to be tolerated only to give an illusion of plurality to the site.
tempest_ 3y ago
If that is the case I suppose we have drastically different ideas about what "the Internet" is.
- throw_pm23 3y ago
  as well as "victory"
chakintosh 3y ago
> 92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5 people https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jamilton 3y ago
  The other million subreddits are most of the good part of reddit, IMO.
  - nbar1 3y ago
    Until you get automatically banned from the top subreddit simply for commenting in a completely separate subreddit the mods don't like.
    - WeylandYutani 3y ago
      Maybe I have nostalgia glasses on but when I grew up on the internet forums only deleted posts that had illegal content. They did not remove unpopular opinions. Reddit is were actual discussion goes to die. Comes with the downvote ability I suppose.
      - nbar1 3y ago
        10 years ago we seen a lot of open-discussion platforms. That all died when picking a side became profitable.
      - scrollaway 3y ago
        You don’t have nostalgia glasses on. You have a nostalgia blindfold on. Mods on the “old forums” routinely deleted posts and banned users because they don’t like their opinion or hell even just as a “fuck why not it’s funny”. Source: was a mod and active participant of such forums and saw it all the time. Did my fair share too.
musha68k 3y ago
It definitely is one of the great victories of the commercial internet (in “mobile” 2023 sans web for the most part, mind you). BBS like systems and forums had been successfully in use since the early 70s. Usenet is more than 40 years old by now IIRC? Very similar function and open by design. Even without falling into “Endless September” rose tinted glasses I would argue that we really, really could do a whole lot better in 2023 and going forward. I guess someone must work on Ted Nelson’s ideas at least (Xanadu, etc)?
- rrdharan 3y ago
  How so? I thought they had terrible monetization?
  - nomel 3y ago
    That's generally a good thing, from the user perspective.
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  Reddit most closely reminds me of ezboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    Or proboards: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProBoards https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProBoards But Reddit is really bad at long on-going conversations unless it has enough to support its own subreddit. Car maintenance forums are something I feel doesn’t work well on the Reddit system. Or anything you’d want chronological or heavy in-like image/video embedding
    - officeplant 3y ago
      Too bad so many older car forum posts are useless outside of their text now. Everywhere you go its just large swaths of photobucket/cardomain embed failures for the forums that didn't do image hosting.
skilled 3y ago
Please. Are you saying people would not have figured out how to host personal communities if it wasn't for Reddit? Oh wait... They did that long before Reddit even existed.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  I think Reddit can claim credit for making an easy framework for creating new communities, unifying the UI experience, and making discovery somewhat easier. I still think it has devolved into one of the biggest tire fires on the Internet, but it was a cute idea. Maybe the next attempt will suck less.
bufio 3y ago
It has been a great victory for centralisation.
karaterobot 3y ago
Do you mean in terms of adoption, revenue, growth, etc., or do you mean something else? I can see that the business is successful, but from where I stand it's a bit of a mixed bag in terms of quality of discussion, experience as a user, treatment of its community, and perhaps its overall effect on the culture. Would like to hear more about what you mean, in other words.
- tornato7 3y ago
  There's a reason it's a meme that people always append "site: Reddit" to the end of web searches. It's one of the greatest sources of genuine, peer-to-peer information out there. They also have open APIs that allow everyone from researchers to developers to access it.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    Thanks to ChatGPT that is about to become a thing of the past. First the APIs, and then the content. There was already quite a lot of paid fluff on Reddit, but it was fairly easy to recognize. Now it's easier to make and more plausible sounding, and it's going to completely drown out the humans. The value of "site:reddit.com" is plummeting.
    - bezier-curve 3y ago
      If all your research can be handled by whatever Open AI trained ChatGPT on, sure.
      - ysavir 3y ago
        I think the GP means that soon ChatGPT-generated content will be flooding reddit and drowning out the human-created content. Whether you use ChatGPT yourself or not isn't relevant when all the search results are ChatGPT authored pieces of content.
        rootusrootus 3y ago
glonq 3y ago
In the same way that Walmart is one of the great victories of the retail industry. It snuffed out small independant competitors, dominates an industry, and wields its tremendous power in a negligent, self-serving, and irresponsible manner.
RoyGBivCap 3y ago
[flagged]
m463 3y ago
I think it worked quite well at first, because it had mostly-democratic algorithms. It was distributed curation that generally followed common sense. Before that, I remember slashdot, which was pretty good at culling comments, but article selection was not democratic. But money screws up everything.
- George83728 3y ago
  Slashdot's system works better than Reddit's or HNs, but unfortunately Slashdot fell for other reasons (gross mismanagement, nonexistent editing, etc) Slashdot's moderation was great though. Specifically, I really like the way Slashdot provides more categories for rating comments. '+5 Funny' vs '+5 Insightful' is a very useful distinction. '-1 Off Topic' vs '-1 Flamebait/Troll' is a useful distinction. I don't want to read off topic spam, but I often do want to read unpopular dissenting opinions. Slashdot let me read the "trolls" (dissenters) without having to wade through the literal spam. Great system, HN and reddit would be better if they had something similar.
  - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    I was seemingly randomly selected to be a moderator a couple of times on Slashdot. I don't remember how long each term lasted, maybe a couple of weeks? It seemed like a good system to keep anyone from being in the role for long enough to be the target of corruption and to prevent much damage if the selected person was simply a shitty moderator.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      The way I remember it working was it would randomly select users, and you were given the ability to give +1/-1 to posts for a certain period of time (day? week?) and you could only use that in threads that you were not posting in. And once in awhile you'd get picked to meta moderate where you'd be asked if the moderation choice of another user was reasonable.
      - midoridensha 3y ago
dec0dedab0de 3y ago
You may not be old enough to remember the internet before reddit. There were many separate forums dedicated to specific interests, and quite a few of those communities moved to subreddits, and the quality suffered greatly. I'm sure someone is going to chime in and say how it was the same thing with newsgroups before, but to me it feels like that time just before reddit and facebook took over everything was the peak of the internet.
- pixl97 3y ago
  There are two different but similar effects occurring. Dedicated forums for particular topics were generally tiny. A forum with 10k+ people was a sizable forum, and not many where that large. Small communities got very little attention from spammers, and while they had their own trolls giving problems they were much less rarely subjected general trolls unless something like 4chan or whatever came before it picked up on them. The internet is also huge and has zero degrees of separation in most places. I could post a link to a tiny forum here and 1000 people may see it. I could post it to reddit subthread and a hundred thousand people could see it. Or I could get a front page post on Reddit and a million+ people could see it. And with it tons of trolls, spam, and general idiots will follow and quality goes to trash. This barely has anything to do with Reddit/Facebook itself. It's the power of network effects congregating people. Facebook was always going to happen, maybe in a slightly different flavor, or slightly different form, but once we got the computing capability to have millions of people at one place at once time, someone was always going to build it.
- officeplant 3y ago
  At least subreddits are still searchable. I'm running into a lot of instances now of forums/subreddits turning mostly into Discord servers. It sucks when all of the troubleshooting and repair instructions get moved into a Discord server and become unsearchable unless you join discord. Video game producers are starting up fan discords that also have the troubleshooting/bug reports channels for the game on them. Video game mod communities are moving to discord. Its going to really suck when a few years go by and a company closes or moves onto a new game and shuts down their discord. A lot of community sourced info is going to be flushed down the drain if people don't archive it.
edgyquant 3y ago
I wish we’d have less of these “victories” that go from a half decent forum software to an ad-ridden hellhole full of childish gay jokes and regurgitated memes in place of actual discussion.
RickJWagner 3y ago
I really like some of the content on Reddit, and especially the variety. But the childishness.....
evilspammer 3y ago
[dead]

cmh89 3y ago

The saga of Violentacrez and /r/jailbait showed that the folks who run Reddit have zero integrity.

trehalose 3y ago
I hadn't heard of this guy, so I just looked him up. He ran a subreddit for sharing photographs of children for the express purpose of jerking off to, and the CEO of Reddit at the time (Yishan Wong) defended that? That's bad indeed.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  That was back when reddit was 'absolute free speech' oriented and nothing the guy posted was illegal.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  On the flip side, the knee jerk reaction "think of the children" has resulted in many awful policies which do more aggregate harm than good. It is useful to have someone defend things which are distasteful but not illegal. When we snuff out a particular bit of speech we should have to think about it, however briefly.
  - ALittleLight 3y ago
    I don't think so. The legal and moral principle of free speech is meant to protect different political, scientific, philosophical, etc. views. It's not meant to protect a pedophile's right to sexualize children. What do we lose by censoring those people?
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Everybody has a group they consider 'those people'. It is at least best we have a discussion before banning any of 'those people' before we realize that the people in charge consider 'those people' whatever group you are in.
    - 3y ago

lazzlazzlazz 3y ago

Reddit is one part of the web. It's a privately controlled company. It should never have accumulated as much importance as it has. We need to design the next Reddits so they're credibly neutral parts of the internet with their own, distributed controls.