4 ms·

Honestly, it sounds like a great reason for the world to not care about Reddit. I hope people start seeing the value in decentralization again.

taskforcegemini 3y ago
nah, they will go and use discord instead.
colordrops 3y ago
A reddit style forum seems like it would be relatively easy to decentralize and federate. Any node could host one or more moderated forums, with other nodes caching messages for the users who access the network through those nodes.
- dindresto 3y ago
  Yup, that's what Lemmy does: https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    As with any of these concepts, they will ultimately live and die by their userbase and thus value of the content presented. Having the software itself is only a small part of the battle ahead. https://join-lemmy.org/instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances says there's only 2.6k monthly active users in the entire "lemmyverse". That's not even getting off the starting blocks for even a single niche sub-Reddit. Getting people to even humour the idea of going elsewhere when there's genuine value in pre-existing content is difficult, especially when it comes to troubleshooting, guides, advice et al, which unfortunately, Reddit is brimming with. Windows Phone was a pretty good example of the "no users" problem: a solid alternative to iOS and Android, but not much in the way of big apps because of a lack of users, but the lack of users primarily stemmed from a lack of big apps. Chicken-and-egg scenario ad infinitum.
    - geysersam 3y ago
      Would it be possible to "replicate" all (or most) existing reddit content to bootstrap a new system? Not sure if all data is available anywhere? (Common crawl? Those big internet scrapes used to train language models?)
      - hammyhavoc 3y ago
        It's certainly possible, but there's no recipient on the other end of any interactions for it. On some Reddit threads, I can chime in years later and ask how x panned out for someone in terms of advice taken, or if they ever found a solution, or what they are now doing after x solution is no longer viable. Most of the value that I derive from older content is being able to recontextualize it for the present day, especially with extremely niche stuff. However, user hostility from Reddit itself is likely going to lead to an exodus of power users, just like with Twitter post-acquisition. It might not be huge numbers of people quitting, but they're meaningful users, which are a sad loss community-wise. Especially if you assume that way more people just view a platform than actually post things on it, which is apparently vastly skewed in that way for most platforms; "lurkers".
      - jakabia 3y ago
        The whole reddit (posts and comments separately) from 2005-06 until 2022-12 is on this [1] torrent link, it's very easy to download, extract and use the data [2]. I'm writing my thesis about the connection between the reddit post's type and the comment structure, and I've been working with this data, for a few months, it's amazing. [1] https://academictorrents.com/details/7c0645c94321311bb05bd879ddee4d0eba08aaee https://academictorrents.com/details/7c0645c94321311bb05bd87... [2] https://github.com/Watchful1/PushshiftDumps https://github.com/Watchful1/PushshiftDumps
        hammyhavoc 3y ago
        If that thesis is ever publicly available, I would love to read it: me@hammyhavoc.com
        3y ago
zo1 3y ago
I stopped posting on Reddit years ago when the whole equity language nonsense popped up and it's been great. It's captured, and is such a toxic and hostile community for any non-mainstream ideas, that it was a breath of fresh air to leave that behind.
- altacc 3y ago
  In general leaving social media is g odd thing, especially if you're exposed to the negative behaviours that are rife on the larger public forums. I find that many non-mainstream ideas thrive on Reddit in smaller subreddits as it's a central point for people to go and find communities. I also see no equity language, not that I care enough about it to not it. However this might depend upon the definition of "non-mainstream" as for some people that's currently defined as a narrow set of politically driven partisan bigotry & repressive control, ignoring the massive amount of variety that does still exist in our cultures and instead trying to divide the world into us and them.
smsm42 3y ago
There's about zero value for most people in Reddit itself, as a software. The value of it is in established communities and serving as a Schelling point for locating those communities. That still exists, and saying "let's just all decide it isn't" doesn't change it. Communities and cultural focal points take time and effort to create, and hard to move.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  I said this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36192957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36192957 But what either of us said doesn't negate the sentiment of my original comment.
- lrem 3y ago
  As with all such sites, the value is in what you don't see: the 99.9% of input that gets silently devnulled as spam. It's terribly hard to automate away in a small-scale decentralised operation.
  - pas 3y ago
    and most of that is manual labor by mods (speaking from experience, yes, it sometimes it's better, sometimes worse, the UX is constantly horrible though - no notifications to mods, just strange "deleted by reddit" corpses)
    - lrem 3y ago
      Maybe? Don't know. I have a very legacy email account at a past employer. Impossible to go through the inbox, endless spam, I only read it via search. But comparing volumes of that inbox and the spam folder, the spam filter is catching the vast majority of spam. One year I'll figure out a way to estimate the ratio of ham to spam, caught and uncaught, in a way compatible with my attention spam ;)
- zigman1 3y ago
  > Communities and cultural focal points take time and effort to create, and hard to move. Thanks, I struggled to express myself in words about that, and this is spot on what I am thinking. Also it became a go-to place for search. I know a lot of people, including myself, now constantly use "site:reddit.com" when searching for information since the rest of the mainstream web is mostly crap.
dimmke 3y ago
I keep seeing comments like this. “Man, if only people cared about decentralization” or “this proves that centralization is a failure” As if we don’t all know that and have thought that forever. All of this stuff WAS decentralized before Reddit. IRC was decentralized before Discord and Slack. Decentralization lost. We can’t just be ideological about software we have to be pragmatic. You can’t just say “let’s throw up a decentralized Reddit” and boom problem solved. You have to figure out how to build something that is sustainable, that people want to use, without a bunch of money. That’s super hard.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  I addressed this here, eleven hours before your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36192957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36192957 It borders on obvious to anybody who frequents HN.
  - dimmke 3y ago
    To me the "fediverse" is an ideological answer. I think a more practical approach is starting software companies that aim smaller, and don't take on VC funding. Imagine a version of Reddit that doesn't need to IPO. That only has a staff of 50-100 employees. Same with Uber, or whatever. I think ultimately, decentralized services will always fail over centralized ones because they're less controllable. If you look at a lot of the scandals that Reddit has had over the years - it was external forces putting pressure on the company to change what they allow on their service. When there's no organization backing something, bad actors will be involved, muddy the waters and then all of a sudden the "fediverse" or whatever is associated with things you don't want to be associated with, so you either don't try it (because of what you've heard) or you don't promote it's use (because you're worried about what people will think of you) - additionally, any time it's open source and self hosted, the technical barrier will be too high for a large group of people. If we can change software companies, stop thinking of them as "startups" and treat them more like normal companies instead of these potential multi billion dollar companies, I think that's a path to something more sustainable.
    - 3y ago

taskforcegemini 3y ago

nah, they will go and use discord instead.

colordrops 3y ago

A reddit style forum seems like it would be relatively easy to decentralize and federate. Any node could host one or more moderated forums, with other nodes caching messages for the users who access the network through those nodes.

dindresto 3y ago
Yup, that's what Lemmy does: https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  As with any of these concepts, they will ultimately live and die by their userbase and thus value of the content presented. Having the software itself is only a small part of the battle ahead. https://join-lemmy.org/instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances says there's only 2.6k monthly active users in the entire "lemmyverse". That's not even getting off the starting blocks for even a single niche sub-Reddit. Getting people to even humour the idea of going elsewhere when there's genuine value in pre-existing content is difficult, especially when it comes to troubleshooting, guides, advice et al, which unfortunately, Reddit is brimming with. Windows Phone was a pretty good example of the "no users" problem: a solid alternative to iOS and Android, but not much in the way of big apps because of a lack of users, but the lack of users primarily stemmed from a lack of big apps. Chicken-and-egg scenario ad infinitum.
  - geysersam 3y ago
    Would it be possible to "replicate" all (or most) existing reddit content to bootstrap a new system? Not sure if all data is available anywhere? (Common crawl? Those big internet scrapes used to train language models?)
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      It's certainly possible, but there's no recipient on the other end of any interactions for it. On some Reddit threads, I can chime in years later and ask how x panned out for someone in terms of advice taken, or if they ever found a solution, or what they are now doing after x solution is no longer viable. Most of the value that I derive from older content is being able to recontextualize it for the present day, especially with extremely niche stuff. However, user hostility from Reddit itself is likely going to lead to an exodus of power users, just like with Twitter post-acquisition. It might not be huge numbers of people quitting, but they're meaningful users, which are a sad loss community-wise. Especially if you assume that way more people just view a platform than actually post things on it, which is apparently vastly skewed in that way for most platforms; "lurkers".
    - jakabia 3y ago
      The whole reddit (posts and comments separately) from 2005-06 until 2022-12 is on this [1] torrent link, it's very easy to download, extract and use the data [2]. I'm writing my thesis about the connection between the reddit post's type and the comment structure, and I've been working with this data, for a few months, it's amazing. [1] https://academictorrents.com/details/7c0645c94321311bb05bd879ddee4d0eba08aaee https://academictorrents.com/details/7c0645c94321311bb05bd87... [2] https://github.com/Watchful1/PushshiftDumps https://github.com/Watchful1/PushshiftDumps
      - hammyhavoc 3y ago
        If that thesis is ever publicly available, I would love to read it: me@hammyhavoc.com
        3y ago

zo1 3y ago

I stopped posting on Reddit years ago when the whole equity language nonsense popped up and it's been great. It's captured, and is such a toxic and hostile community for any non-mainstream ideas, that it was a breath of fresh air to leave that behind.

altacc 3y ago
In general leaving social media is g odd thing, especially if you're exposed to the negative behaviours that are rife on the larger public forums. I find that many non-mainstream ideas thrive on Reddit in smaller subreddits as it's a central point for people to go and find communities. I also see no equity language, not that I care enough about it to not it. However this might depend upon the definition of "non-mainstream" as for some people that's currently defined as a narrow set of politically driven partisan bigotry & repressive control, ignoring the massive amount of variety that does still exist in our cultures and instead trying to divide the world into us and them.

smsm42 3y ago

There's about zero value for most people in Reddit itself, as a software. The value of it is in established communities and serving as a Schelling point for locating those communities. That still exists, and saying "let's just all decide it isn't" doesn't change it. Communities and cultural focal points take time and effort to create, and hard to move.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
I said this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36192957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36192957 But what either of us said doesn't negate the sentiment of my original comment.
lrem 3y ago
As with all such sites, the value is in what you don't see: the 99.9% of input that gets silently devnulled as spam. It's terribly hard to automate away in a small-scale decentralised operation.
- pas 3y ago
  and most of that is manual labor by mods (speaking from experience, yes, it sometimes it's better, sometimes worse, the UX is constantly horrible though - no notifications to mods, just strange "deleted by reddit" corpses)
  - lrem 3y ago
    Maybe? Don't know. I have a very legacy email account at a past employer. Impossible to go through the inbox, endless spam, I only read it via search. But comparing volumes of that inbox and the spam folder, the spam filter is catching the vast majority of spam. One year I'll figure out a way to estimate the ratio of ham to spam, caught and uncaught, in a way compatible with my attention spam ;)
zigman1 3y ago
> Communities and cultural focal points take time and effort to create, and hard to move. Thanks, I struggled to express myself in words about that, and this is spot on what I am thinking. Also it became a go-to place for search. I know a lot of people, including myself, now constantly use "site:reddit.com" when searching for information since the rest of the mainstream web is mostly crap.

dimmke 3y ago

I keep seeing comments like this. “Man, if only people cared about decentralization” or “this proves that centralization is a failure” As if we don’t all know that and have thought that forever. All of this stuff WAS decentralized before Reddit. IRC was decentralized before Discord and Slack. Decentralization lost. We can’t just be ideological about software we have to be pragmatic. You can’t just say “let’s throw up a decentralized Reddit” and boom problem solved. You have to figure out how to build something that is sustainable, that people want to use, without a bunch of money. That’s super hard.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
I addressed this here, eleven hours before your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36192957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36192957 It borders on obvious to anybody who frequents HN.
- dimmke 3y ago
  To me the "fediverse" is an ideological answer. I think a more practical approach is starting software companies that aim smaller, and don't take on VC funding. Imagine a version of Reddit that doesn't need to IPO. That only has a staff of 50-100 employees. Same with Uber, or whatever. I think ultimately, decentralized services will always fail over centralized ones because they're less controllable. If you look at a lot of the scandals that Reddit has had over the years - it was external forces putting pressure on the company to change what they allow on their service. When there's no organization backing something, bad actors will be involved, muddy the waters and then all of a sudden the "fediverse" or whatever is associated with things you don't want to be associated with, so you either don't try it (because of what you've heard) or you don't promote it's use (because you're worried about what people will think of you) - additionally, any time it's open source and self hosted, the technical barrier will be too high for a large group of people. If we can change software companies, stop thinking of them as "startups" and treat them more like normal companies instead of these potential multi billion dollar companies, I think that's a path to something more sustainable.
  - 3y ago