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I see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities. Each community has its own set of reasons for hosting itself on reddit vs other location

I see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities. Each community has its own set of reasons for hosting itself on reddit vs other locations. Therefore I would predict that in the absence of reddit, not every community would move to the same place. I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere. But some others have still been the best places to get early information on certain topics. For example /r/stablediffusion had a lot of people posting their novel uses and techniques for image generation. The QR code topic which is now blowing up here was already being talked about on reddit a week ago.

8organicbits 3y ago
A directory tracking where different communities are migrating (or trying to migrate) would be awesome. With Reddit down/private I can't go on Reddit to coordinate the migration outbound.
- basch 3y ago
  A directory of best communities on the internet sorted and nested by topic would be great. A web directory 3.0. Whether they are on Reddit, mastodon, phpbb, discord.
  - jachee 3y ago
    Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle?
  - CommitSyn 3y ago
    Topsites 2.0: Subreddits Edition. Now federated and decentralized.
dabluecaboose 3y ago
>I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere. It's incredibly frustrating to discover a potential new hobby, check out the subreddit, and go to the top posts all time, only to find pages on pages of low-effort crossposted memes that are often barely relatable. It's also super frustrating being in one of those hyperfocused niche hobby subreddits and getting memes, and people treat you like some sort of wet blanket if you voice any opposition to low-effort content.
- vanilla_nut 3y ago
  I experienced exactly this a couple of years ago in /r/espresso. Fortunately the low-quality memespam pushed me to look for alternatives, and I found Home Barista forums, one of the best quality web forums I've ever participated in. Something similar happened to me in the bicycle space, which turns out to have a lot of forum activity as well. Seems some of the oldguard never switched to Reddit in the first place in both communities.
  - oplav 3y ago
    I had a similar experience. /r/turning had no memespam and good wood turning content, but I found the actual American Association of Woodturners forum to have very wide breadth and high quality information.
- redmerchant2 3y ago
  But what can you do beyond draconian moderation? One niche hobby sub I’m part of grew over 120x due to the pandemic. The mods cracked down hard but it had the side effect of suppressing quality conversations as well. I think they found a good balance but you forget how big the sub is now until some meme slips through the cracks, and has 10x the number of upvotes compared to usual posts.
  - AnotherGoodName 3y ago
    Communities tend to end up with a memes allowed and strictly meme free version of the community once they grow to a certain size. It splits the community and the meme version will tend to have 100x the users but that's ok imho. You'll find the meme free offshoot will have the same feel as the early smaller community and will be much better if the topic really does interest you.
  - tensor 3y ago
    Perhaps personal ai based filters that each user can train is an option. I know personally that there are topics or opinions that I just don't care to engage with or read and it would be lovely to be able to train my own filter to just censor all that out of my feeds. I currently use reddit user blocklist as a partial solution, but it's a rather crude tool.
dageshi 3y ago
> Each community has its own set of reasons for hosting itself on reddit vs other locations. I don't think much thought goes into hosting on reddit or elsewhere. The people who like reddit, setup on reddit, the people who like Discord setup on Discord. In the absence of reddit, I have no clue where many would go, there's no obvious place I would go.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  There's a few bits of thought to consider - I (and/or my community) wants/doesn't mind psuedo-anonymity. - I want a community that can quickly grow, not bound by region - It should be easy to share links - It should be easy to setup a longer form discussion Discord for example would probably only satisfy 2/4 conditions. But yes, there is no one glove fit all replacement as of now. If only because most new alternatives can't satisfy item #2 without some major money being put into advertisement.
mhink 3y ago
> I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere. I feel like I've seen the opposite, generally- there was always kind of a tension between serious posts and memes, but in the past few years it seems to have become much more common to see subreddits with a counterpart strictly for memes (/r/chess and /r/anarchychess being a recently popular example).
chrismorgan 3y ago
> I see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities. I’d say that Reddit used to be like that, but that they’ve been actively undermining that, because that’s not what they want to be any more. New Reddit (2018, I think) showed that they really don’t care about that aspect. New Reddit forces post lists to be massive space-wasting and thumbnailed stuff. On my laptop’s screen, it tends to fit about one and a half items per screen, and is clearly oriented around doom scrolling: consuming content. When you view a post, you can see about six comments at once, mostly only top-level ones with occasional second-level ones. Actually, it seems they might have improved it recently: last time I tried it, I think you couldn’t get it to display beyond third-level, and it would only expand one level at a time, whereas now it seems to expand more at once (though it’s still way too aggressive in its collapsing) and go up to fourth-level before going deeper takes you to a single comment thread view with hopelessly bad history management that makes anything but always opening in new tabs just about completely broken. Anyway, they’ve severely hobbled the threaded comments system, because they’re optimising for massive subreddits where comments average vapid. Basically, anti-community. By contrast, Old Reddit fit about a dozen items per screen, and required action to see an item at anything but a tiny size (70×70 or so), because it cared more about the comments thread. And it tends to fit about a dozen comments on my screen, and you can actually view nested comment threads meaningfully, and it all just works way better. Because it cared more about community. Communities depend on a much better commenting system than New Reddit wants to let you have. HN and Old Reddit are both way better. I’m fairly involved in r/rust. If Old Reddit ever disappears, so does my remaining use of Reddit, because I don’t think you can maintain a decent community without it. Reddit are forsaking their link discovery and community discussion roots, and becoming just mass social media and memes, and they’re making major technical decisions which enforce this, even for the subreddits that want things the way they used to be.
- balder1991 3y ago
  Also by default suggesting stuff you’re not subscribed to.
princevegeta89 3y ago
I only use Reddit when I am doing research, since it seems to be a straightforward way to see information written mostly by real users. The Frontpage in my opinion is utter trash - it's filled with woke bullshit, ignorant crap and other reposts of old posts that can be anywhere between a year and 5 years old. The memes and jokes have gotten so poor they just look plain stupid. A majority of the AskReddit posts are useless questions posted by kids and teens that make no value and only get posted to make the OP's look "cool". That said, it was once a good way to get news, and now with the stupid commercial push by the company it has now lost almost all of its status
twobitshifter 3y ago
I think a diffusion of communities to better forum software would be the best replacement for Reddit. Why should your posts on r/knitting and r/samurai be linked together in the same account? How often are people seeing the same person across Reddit communities and it ends up being helpful? The orangered inbox and tracking of karma on Reddit provide some encouragement to use a single site for this all, but can we solve that in diffuse communities? Is karma actually a benefit to users, or should it be hidden anyways?
rglullis 3y ago
There is no need for them to be in the same place, if the different places where they can talk with each other. So like you, I am also expecting people start looking into the the fediverse, disperse around a bit and reconnect. Instead of one global village, we need a globe of diverse villages. With that said, I opened up https://communick.news https://communick.news on the weekend to try out Lemmy and I wouldn't mind having a few hundred of you there to help me bootstrap it.
awill 3y ago
But the magic of reddit is that I can browse all my communities in one place. Playstation, Audi, Cooking, Tennis. It's super convenient to have a single account for all of this. Before I used reddit, I had an account at an Audi forum, a different account at a tennis forum etc.. Reddit is so much better. I'd rather some 'bluesky'-like competitor vs every community going their own way.
- q1w2 3y ago
  Not just in one place, but sorted by popularity, so that you don't need to read 100 headlines per day - you can just review the top 5 posts for the day across ALL the communities you're interested in.
- Emoticon4032 3y ago
  Maybe the model going forward is to go back to the use of RSS feeds from each of the discrete sites that you frequent? Not sure if RSS is a thing these days though.
  - gcoakes 3y ago
    It is still a thing. News sites have them. Most bloggers I've come across do. HN even has one which is what I use.
MisterTea 3y ago
> I see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities. I always called it a low effort forum of forums. Low effort because all you need is one account and you can wander about and annoy people in any community. But that was reddits strength - you didn't need to register and keep track of different accounts and sites. > I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere. The issue with focused reddits is once all the interesting shit has been posted and questions have been answered, where is the value in the community? At that point the sub has saturated and cant grow and the members are bored so memes and shitposts take over. I mean how many times can the same "n00b here - how do I dive into X" question be answered before users either ignore them, down-vote them or tell them to search the forum for similar answers already posted? Its stagnation that any community will face.
- koreth1 3y ago
  That's less true for communities that are focused on things that change over time. For example, TV show subreddits have plenty to talk about each time a new episode is released. Or maybe a better example, the Java subreddit has its share of "how do I dive into X" questions but also plenty of discussions about new and upcoming language changes.
that_guy_iain 3y ago
The thing is people want something where they have lots of communities like they do with Reddit. The ease of going there and finding something that is interesting for you is super easy. Switch it out with niche forums andit now becomes checking each niche instead of seeing what pops up. Multiple accounts multiple urls. Realistically, most Reddit users don’t want that and won’t migrate to smaller niche communities. Smaller niche communities that currently exist are way better than the Reddit versions 9/10.
hotshiitake 3y ago
> I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere. New Reddit needs to have a better way to sort this content out. Maybe extra arrows for funny/not funny?
balder1991 3y ago
> I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere. The tech focused can move elsewhere, but smaller communities with not so many tech savvy users will probably stick to where it’s more convenient.
tmaly 3y ago
/r/stablediffusion is awesome. That is one of the better subreddits. LocalLLaMa is another good one. Facebook groups had a really great interface that I thought worked well. There are still Forums out there running phpBB. I think the ultimately a replacement if one is found should be easy to use and easy to find information in.
wesapien 3y ago
Some subs can't have images or ban memes. It's the fault of mods if content is LQ. The tools are there. Some subs won't let you post if you're account is new or you have low karma. What Reddit should've done is delete the free karma or karma farming subs.

8organicbits 3y ago

A directory tracking where different communities are migrating (or trying to migrate) would be awesome. With Reddit down/private I can't go on Reddit to coordinate the migration outbound.

basch 3y ago
A directory of best communities on the internet sorted and nested by topic would be great. A web directory 3.0. Whether they are on Reddit, mastodon, phpbb, discord.
- jachee 3y ago
  Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle?
- CommitSyn 3y ago
  Topsites 2.0: Subreddits Edition. Now federated and decentralized.

dabluecaboose 3y ago

>I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere. It's incredibly frustrating to discover a potential new hobby, check out the subreddit, and go to the top posts all time, only to find pages on pages of low-effort crossposted memes that are often barely relatable. It's also super frustrating being in one of those hyperfocused niche hobby subreddits and getting memes, and people treat you like some sort of wet blanket if you voice any opposition to low-effort content.

vanilla_nut 3y ago
I experienced exactly this a couple of years ago in /r/espresso. Fortunately the low-quality memespam pushed me to look for alternatives, and I found Home Barista forums, one of the best quality web forums I've ever participated in. Something similar happened to me in the bicycle space, which turns out to have a lot of forum activity as well. Seems some of the oldguard never switched to Reddit in the first place in both communities.
- oplav 3y ago
  I had a similar experience. /r/turning had no memespam and good wood turning content, but I found the actual American Association of Woodturners forum to have very wide breadth and high quality information.
redmerchant2 3y ago
But what can you do beyond draconian moderation? One niche hobby sub I’m part of grew over 120x due to the pandemic. The mods cracked down hard but it had the side effect of suppressing quality conversations as well. I think they found a good balance but you forget how big the sub is now until some meme slips through the cracks, and has 10x the number of upvotes compared to usual posts.
- AnotherGoodName 3y ago
  Communities tend to end up with a memes allowed and strictly meme free version of the community once they grow to a certain size. It splits the community and the meme version will tend to have 100x the users but that's ok imho. You'll find the meme free offshoot will have the same feel as the early smaller community and will be much better if the topic really does interest you.
- tensor 3y ago
  Perhaps personal ai based filters that each user can train is an option. I know personally that there are topics or opinions that I just don't care to engage with or read and it would be lovely to be able to train my own filter to just censor all that out of my feeds. I currently use reddit user blocklist as a partial solution, but it's a rather crude tool.

dageshi 3y ago

> Each community has its own set of reasons for hosting itself on reddit vs other locations. I don't think much thought goes into hosting on reddit or elsewhere. The people who like reddit, setup on reddit, the people who like Discord setup on Discord. In the absence of reddit, I have no clue where many would go, there's no obvious place I would go.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
There's a few bits of thought to consider - I (and/or my community) wants/doesn't mind psuedo-anonymity. - I want a community that can quickly grow, not bound by region - It should be easy to share links - It should be easy to setup a longer form discussion Discord for example would probably only satisfy 2/4 conditions. But yes, there is no one glove fit all replacement as of now. If only because most new alternatives can't satisfy item #2 without some major money being put into advertisement.

mhink 3y ago

> I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere. I feel like I've seen the opposite, generally- there was always kind of a tension between serious posts and memes, but in the past few years it seems to have become much more common to see subreddits with a counterpart strictly for memes (/r/chess and /r/anarchychess being a recently popular example).

chrismorgan 3y ago

> I see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities. I’d say that Reddit used to be like that, but that they’ve been actively undermining that, because that’s not what they want to be any more. New Reddit (2018, I think) showed that they really don’t care about that aspect. New Reddit forces post lists to be massive space-wasting and thumbnailed stuff. On my laptop’s screen, it tends to fit about one and a half items per screen, and is clearly oriented around doom scrolling: consuming content. When you view a post, you can see about six comments at once, mostly only top-level ones with occasional second-level ones. Actually, it seems they might have improved it recently: last time I tried it, I think you couldn’t get it to display beyond third-level, and it would only expand one level at a time, whereas now it seems to expand more at once (though it’s still way too aggressive in its collapsing) and go up to fourth-level before going deeper takes you to a single comment thread view with hopelessly bad history management that makes anything but always opening in new tabs just about completely broken. Anyway, they’ve severely hobbled the threaded comments system, because they’re optimising for massive subreddits where comments average vapid. Basically, anti-community. By contrast, Old Reddit fit about a dozen items per screen, and required action to see an item at anything but a tiny size (70×70 or so), because it cared more about the comments thread. And it tends to fit about a dozen comments on my screen, and you can actually view nested comment threads meaningfully, and it all just works way better. Because it cared more about community. Communities depend on a much better commenting system than New Reddit wants to let you have. HN and Old Reddit are both way better. I’m fairly involved in r/rust. If Old Reddit ever disappears, so does my remaining use of Reddit, because I don’t think you can maintain a decent community without it. Reddit are forsaking their link discovery and community discussion roots, and becoming just mass social media and memes, and they’re making major technical decisions which enforce this, even for the subreddits that want things the way they used to be.

balder1991 3y ago
Also by default suggesting stuff you’re not subscribed to.

princevegeta89 3y ago

I only use Reddit when I am doing research, since it seems to be a straightforward way to see information written mostly by real users. The Frontpage in my opinion is utter trash - it's filled with woke bullshit, ignorant crap and other reposts of old posts that can be anywhere between a year and 5 years old. The memes and jokes have gotten so poor they just look plain stupid. A majority of the AskReddit posts are useless questions posted by kids and teens that make no value and only get posted to make the OP's look "cool". That said, it was once a good way to get news, and now with the stupid commercial push by the company it has now lost almost all of its status

twobitshifter 3y ago

I think a diffusion of communities to better forum software would be the best replacement for Reddit. Why should your posts on r/knitting and r/samurai be linked together in the same account? How often are people seeing the same person across Reddit communities and it ends up being helpful? The orangered inbox and tracking of karma on Reddit provide some encouragement to use a single site for this all, but can we solve that in diffuse communities? Is karma actually a benefit to users, or should it be hidden anyways?

rglullis 3y ago

There is no need for them to be in the same place, if the different places where they can talk with each other. So like you, I am also expecting people start looking into the the fediverse, disperse around a bit and reconnect. Instead of one global village, we need a globe of diverse villages. With that said, I opened up https://communick.news https://communick.news on the weekend to try out Lemmy and I wouldn't mind having a few hundred of you there to help me bootstrap it.

awill 3y ago

But the magic of reddit is that I can browse all my communities in one place. Playstation, Audi, Cooking, Tennis. It's super convenient to have a single account for all of this. Before I used reddit, I had an account at an Audi forum, a different account at a tennis forum etc.. Reddit is so much better. I'd rather some 'bluesky'-like competitor vs every community going their own way.

q1w2 3y ago
Not just in one place, but sorted by popularity, so that you don't need to read 100 headlines per day - you can just review the top 5 posts for the day across ALL the communities you're interested in.
Emoticon4032 3y ago
Maybe the model going forward is to go back to the use of RSS feeds from each of the discrete sites that you frequent? Not sure if RSS is a thing these days though.
- gcoakes 3y ago
  It is still a thing. News sites have them. Most bloggers I've come across do. HN even has one which is what I use.

MisterTea 3y ago

> I see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities. I always called it a low effort forum of forums. Low effort because all you need is one account and you can wander about and annoy people in any community. But that was reddits strength - you didn't need to register and keep track of different accounts and sites. > I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere. The issue with focused reddits is once all the interesting shit has been posted and questions have been answered, where is the value in the community? At that point the sub has saturated and cant grow and the members are bored so memes and shitposts take over. I mean how many times can the same "n00b here - how do I dive into X" question be answered before users either ignore them, down-vote them or tell them to search the forum for similar answers already posted? Its stagnation that any community will face.

koreth1 3y ago
That's less true for communities that are focused on things that change over time. For example, TV show subreddits have plenty to talk about each time a new episode is released. Or maybe a better example, the Java subreddit has its share of "how do I dive into X" questions but also plenty of discussions about new and upcoming language changes.

that_guy_iain 3y ago

The thing is people want something where they have lots of communities like they do with Reddit. The ease of going there and finding something that is interesting for you is super easy. Switch it out with niche forums andit now becomes checking each niche instead of seeing what pops up. Multiple accounts multiple urls. Realistically, most Reddit users don’t want that and won’t migrate to smaller niche communities. Smaller niche communities that currently exist are way better than the Reddit versions 9/10.

hotshiitake 3y ago

balder1991 3y ago

> I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere. The tech focused can move elsewhere, but smaller communities with not so many tech savvy users will probably stick to where it’s more convenient.

tmaly 3y ago

/r/stablediffusion is awesome. That is one of the better subreddits. LocalLLaMa is another good one. Facebook groups had a really great interface that I thought worked well. There are still Forums out there running phpBB. I think the ultimately a replacement if one is found should be easy to use and easy to find information in.

wesapien 3y ago

Some subs can't have images or ban memes. It's the fault of mods if content is LQ. The tools are there. Some subs won't let you post if you're account is new or you have low karma. What Reddit should've done is delete the free karma or karma farming subs.