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The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that h

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last standing service that is way more open that the rest. But the raise of Whatsapp and equivalents are challenging that. One day all our communication will depend on a monopoly. We are starting to know what would have happened if AT&T have never been split.

Danathar 3y ago
As long as TCP/IP exists there will always be a way for people to communicate, it just won’t be at the scale of what we see right now. As an example, use that news groups still exist. It’s a shadow of itself but it’s still there and it still works despite the fact that Reddit and all sorts of other form based communications, took over.
rafark 3y ago
The trend that I hate the most is blogs without comments. I don’t know when it started, but a few years ago I suddenly noticed most blogs started to turn off their comments section one by one. I don’t know why they’d do that. Interacting with the author or other people was half the fun. Now there’s just silence. It’s what made me stop visiting blogs altogether. I used to browse a bunch of the same blogs everyday and now I don’t. I don’t even remember most of them. Even when googling, I usually just stick to the sites that allow interaction like reddit, stack over flow or this site. A few weeks ago I remembered the names of a couple of blogs I used to browse and it’s sad to see them become spam and/or low-content farms.
- krapp 3y ago
  It isn't the 1990s anymore. The vast majority of comments on blogs will be spam, bots or, in the extreme rare case of an actual human reader, raving lunatics. The chance of an actual human being reading your blog and leaving a sincere comment in good faith is so low that you can safely assume it will never happen.
  - rafark 3y ago
    I know spam is a ver big deal, but that wasn’t my experience. I wasn’t around in the 90s so I don’t know what it used to be like. But just a little over half a decade ago the blogs I used to visit still had people interacting with each other and it was common for posts to have meaningful conversations. I miss that a lot.
enugu 3y ago
The cause seems to be software from private companies gets more resources for features, feedback, maintenance etc. If that is correct, the obvious solution is generating some substantive funding for important open source projects which develop software and protocols for billions of users. Of course, there are organizations already doing funding for open source projects, but maybe moving the scale of funding by a few orders of magnitude can help.
supernikio2 3y ago
It's getting worse by the minute, too. What used to be a subreddit might now be a Discord server, which is in my opinion even worse, keeping solutions/questions to certain issues within Discord's own walls. You now have to enter a server, search for your specific problem, and, if not found, ask someone and wait for them to respond. If results are on the first page of google it's much more friction-less and convenient imho.
- bazmattaz 3y ago
  I absolutely despise Discord. I understand that it’s essentially a chat room for communities where content is ephemeral, but so many communities use it slightly differently. For example lots of communities use it to provide help to other users but then complain when users ask the same questions over and over. (See Python discord) What I like about Reddit or any forum is the ability to search for a topic or question you need help with and then see people discussing it and resolving it. Forums are a great Archive for discussions like this. Where discord plays a good role is in fleeting chat. Water cooler type chat. Discord is fun if you’re heavily involved in a community, you can spend many hours a day in your favourite discord but for someone like me who just likes to pop in a now and again, it’s borderline useless. I suppose what I’m getting to is that, for me, discord is for low effort throwaway chat, Reddit or HN for that matter is better for discussions that should be read again by interested minds.
- chrisrogers 3y ago
  Sounds a bit like IRC to be honest.
  - Zardoz84 3y ago
    but IRC was never controlled by a unique corporation/business. Was community driven
  - DanAtC 3y ago
    IRC is ephemeral. Discord becomes a de facto knowledge dump like Slack in the corporate world.
judge2020 3y ago
Centralization was always inevitable with scale. New users aren't going to spend the same amount of time and brainpower managing their internet presence as OGs do/have. So they will choose the services that enable them to reduce the overhead of using the internet. For many, this doesn't just mean using Reddit for their interest-based communities, but using Gmail for spam prevention, Apple products for their curated store, Steam for ease of access, etc. This would only be solvable if you had government-forced interop so that e.g. Twitter posts were accessible on Mastodon timelines with no cost to the site operators, but even then any small barrier is something for a platform to optimize and sell in the form of a subscription/using their user base for ads.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Honestly I’d LOVE to revert to the old phpBB or vBulletin forum days There’s literally no reason why not and it’s never been cheaper to run
- judge2020 3y ago
  Few users of reddit communities are dedicated enough to that community to be willing to use it via an app that doesn't aggregate their interests into one doom-scrollable UI, much less donate to a site for hosting costs to keep it afloat.
  - Tepix 3y ago
    The community around Qwitzatteracht, the golf game is very dedicated!
- jeffbee 3y ago
  99% of phpBB installations were pwned and distributing malware. It’s a terrible model. If we want small distributed operation of software like that we need a revolution in software operability and quality.
  - rafark 3y ago
    Most forums run on xenforo nowadays which is extremely solid and reliable.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Suggestions?
  - nyadesu 3y ago
    That's one of the reasons centralized model works so well nowadays, nobody wants to take care of things anymore, self hosting your own apps is becoming a small niche
    - ansible 3y ago
dale_glass 3y ago
It's getting easier to counteract though. Software development is easier than ever, CPU power and bandwidth are quite cheap, and there are working federated structures like Mastodon. There's no reason why Reddit couldn't be turned into a federated system as well, in fact it almost is one as it is. Eg, just like on Mastodon servers can choose whether to interact with each other, on Reddit it's not uncommon to get auto-banned from somewhere if you post in a subreddit they dislike.
- black_puppydog 3y ago
  > just like on Mastodon servers can choose whether to interact with each other, on Reddit it's not uncommon to get auto-banned from somewhere if you post in a subreddit they dislike. That feels like a very incomplete implementation of federation, to say the least. Being able to defederate is one part of that, but "just make alts for the various mutually defederated subsets of subreddits" seems like a pretty unpractical way of going about it. :D
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    That's Reddit for you, the actual site doesn't really serve the needs of many of its users, so they had to invent workarounds like "run a bot that auto-bans people that post in r/placewehate". But the actual dynamic of that to me seems to resemble what you get under federation. It's just that Reddit doesn't let people do it easily, so weird workarounds are needed.
    - black_puppydog 3y ago
      huh, I guess seeing reddit like this makes some sense. kinda like Ankh-Morpork on the disk world: not free in any real sense, but free enough in practice for people to get done what they want done. Not the bright future we had hoped for, but the one we built...
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Software development is easier than ever Yeah but also no? The skills required to be a basic "full stack" developer have multiplied to the point where I think that term is on the verge of obsolesence just as "webmaster" was before it. There is of course nothing stopping anybody from simply writing PHP like it's 2005 even though it's 2023, but going against the currents has its own set of costs.
fsckboy 3y ago
> One service goes down and everybody suffers "everybody"'s boycott brought this service down, the suffering is completely self inflicted, and people can end it whenever they want.
- black_puppydog 3y ago
  "everybody" in GP's context is "everyone using google" while "everybody" in your comment seems to mean "everyone using reddit" There's significant overlap here (to the point of it nearly being a subset relationship, I'd guess) but these are not the same thing.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    but everybody who googles and finds reddit results either ignores them or clicks to join everybody who uses reddit...
    - black_puppydog 3y ago
      well I guess if I'm gonna start arguing semantics with you, this is a valid come-back. so, "use" in my reply means "actively using, creating posts & comments" while "use" in your post means "view content". Is that a fair summary? I think I'll end the definition game here. :D
      - fsckboy 3y ago
        I thought your response was good thumbsup_emoji.jpg It's an interesting question "who is entitled to see reddit communities up and running at all times" and "how much public-interest is being affected"
lisper 3y ago
Email is dying too. I have run my own email server for 20 years. A few years ago my original ISP was acquired, forcing me to switch providers and hence get a new IP address. Ever since then my server has been blacklisted by one major player or another as a source of spam. I even tried changing to a new IP address, but the result of that was just a different set of providers blacklisting me. I'm about ready to throw in the towel and switch to Fastmail. :-(
- mmh0000 3y ago
  I had this exact experience, I had an email server running on the same ISP for 15 years, got great delivery. I got a new ISP, blacklisted nearly everywhere. IP reputation is super hard and time consuming to build. So I made the switch to Fastmail, and honestly, it's the best descision I made. Migrating was super simple, and they've been rock-solid for me. I didn't realize how much time I was wasting administrating an email server with one user until I switched.
  - lisper 3y ago
    I spend pretty much zero time administering my server. Once it's set up, it pretty much just runs itself. The reason I want to run my own server is that I want to run my own spam filter, whose algorithm requires seeing my outgoing mail as well as my incoming. (Though I guess I could do that through IMAP by looking at my SENT folder. But for me it's also just the principle of the thing. I remember the good old days, and I'm not going down without a fight.)
  - lost_tourist 3y ago
    How much does it cost for a low to moderate traffic (annually) "your own domain" server?
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      $50/year for fastmail. One of the very few things I pay for online other than my ISP service. A VPS is cheaper if you actually want to run your own, but the cheap VPSs typically have very bad IP reputations.
dghughes 3y ago
reddit isn't doing so well either. The locking of posts was a terrible idea. The old.reddit vs reddit shows many like the old style. Hate the app. All the information on reddit is user generated yet the reddit owners seems to think they own it. My view is the "frontpage" doesn't own the story just because they printed it. Back in the 1990s I feel users were much more cable and there was so many more pages or forums especially as you noted forums.
willio58 3y ago
I think what's happening with Twitter and Reddit is actually a good thing in that it's exposing the failures of centralized networks. The thing is, these failures aren't big enough yet for people to jump ship and I think the main problem is none of the decentralized social networks have provided a solution that's better. Mastodon is theoretically a better version of Twitter, but normal people get lost the moment someone starts talking about "instances". It's this gap we need to cross somehow. How do networks provide all or most of the pros of being centralized without being centralized?
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  also, do search engines even index mastodon? i've never seen a mastodon result in my life, compared to reddit.
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
    It's a good question. Regardless of Twitter, Kbin and Lemmy (and maybe others?) will be even more important for ensuring they get indexed properly. The organic/real nature of Reddit comments (at least those not astroturfed .. heh) were valuable to search. We (devs) need to make sure Fediverse stuff provides that value. At least in my view. Is there something Mastodon/Kbin/Lemmy might be doing that could cause poor indexing? I'm working on yet-another-lemmy-thing and i'd like to not commit sins on this front.
    - frickinLasers 3y ago
      I only know Mastodon: There's a large LGBTQ+ community who don't want to be indexed out of concern for their safety (because, for example, there are small far-right communities on other instances looking to cause mayhem). The ability to be oneself online without worrying about getting brigaded, doxxed, or whatever, is a selling point. Indexing runs counter to that.
      - unshavedyak 3y ago
        Agreed, but is it a choice or a requirement from the software? I love choice, that instances (and users!) can and should get to choose the level of indexing. If it's software wide, not sure i can get behind that. Especially since .. doesn't ActivityPub sort of ruin that? Ie any instance you federate with could expose your data, regardless of Mastodon's rules. Federated instance data visibility and agreed visibility rules of course come into play. But if i understand this right it would mean you can only federate with instances or software that agrees to your privacy rules. Which is totally viable, but that also then means Mastodon can't federate with, for example, a Reddit clone that wants to be indexed. It's a complex web of requirements. Definitely something i'll be thinking on as i implement my own ActivityPub instance.
mrtksn 3y ago
> are now reduced to be a Subreddit. I don't know if anything else was possible, the IT need for communities is about the same and it makes total sense to have those on one place. It solves the infrastructure problem, it solves discoverability problem, it solves the user account management problem and it is all "free". It comes at the cost of fragility, true, but as always convenience is the king.
- TX81Z 3y ago
  [flagged]
- michaelchisari 3y ago
  Maybe the solution isn't decentralization, but a non-profit approach like Wikipedia. Reddit already functions entirely on volunteer labor anyways, adding venture capital requirements makes much less sense than a just-keep-the-lights-on non-profit model.
  - ansible 3y ago
    > ... non-profit approach ... It may be a better way to go for a public forum like Reddit. Don't kid yourself though into thinking the non-profit foundation won't also be rife with petty politics, hidden agendas, and the usual crap. There will still be issues, and how to handle NSFW content is still going to be a big conflict.
    - michaelchisari 3y ago
      | Don't kid yourself though into thinking the non-profit foundation Those aren't the problems I was expecting to solve. Those are other problems that exist regardless of funding model, because they're fundamentally social problems. A non-profit funding model simply solves the problem of venture capital undermining the core product in search of profits.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        >A non-profit funding model simply solves the problem of venture capital undermining the core product in search of profits. It also introduces a larger problem of shutting down entirely if they can't pay for server costs. That's always going to be a bigger problem than VC's. Wikipedia only does so because it is bankrolled by universities and other institutions. And we should note that Wikipedia doesn't have to host videos, and has strict requirements on how to host images. I can't think of those places doing the same for Reddit.
AlbertCory 3y ago
+1 to that last point. In the 80's, the OSI suite of protocols, owned by the telephone monopolies of the world, actually had pretensions of becoming what the Internet did become. OSI lost, but the spirit never died, apparently.
TrackerFF 3y ago
I still use a couple "old school" forums, but I have to say - the reddit tree format is just so, so much easier. It is impossible to de-rail a thread, and there's a certain level of anti-spam and self-moderation mechanism to the reddit format. The older forums still need some hardcore moderation, or else many threads become unreadable. Nothing worse than when two users start arguing, and the thread turns into shit. But that's just the how things have evolved. It's so much easier to just start a subreddit, than to host your own forum.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  "It is impossible to de-rail a thread" citation needed, I've seen many reddit threads degenerate into name-calling, logical fallacies, political posturing, and what have you. If they don't, my guess is it's a very focused subreddit that doesn't attract much general interest, or the mods are very on top of things.
  - bena 3y ago
    It usually gets contained to a branch however. You can choose not to engage with that branch and instead start your own.
    - Ralfp 3y ago
      But 95%% of attention will go to the "top" branches which are usually memes and "dumbass marathons" were people are trying to keep the original joke going.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        Compared to how most of the attention in a traditional forum will go to people trying to respond to the TC/OP? Even in cases where 4-5 pages in the TC already resolved the issue? The only benefit for a forum is that it "bumps" a topic when you participate in it, so you can keep a topic alive. But that isn't too difficult for a threaded style forum to replicate. That just wasn't how Reddit wanted topics to work (nor HN, in our case). Reddit never even implemented a way to subscribe to a topic despite a 3rd party extension having a feature for over a decade.
low_tech_love 3y ago
And what’s worse, the contents of subreddits are incredibly homogeneous; there is no place for dissent. A subreddit named ”music” or ”films” or ”games” (just conceptually, ok?) fancies itself as the reference for that specific thing, when it’s actually just a reflection of whatever political stance the mods have (usually simply reduction to average). Outside people will see that and think ”oh nice a centralized discussion for concept X” and that just makes things even worse.
- sacado2 3y ago
  And the public upvote / downvote system make it even worse. Soon, you're reduced to a small subset of opinion because any slightly dissenting opinion will be downvoted to hell and hidden at the very bottom of the page. Not necessarily an issue for small communities focused on a non-controversial topic (mostly anything about jokes/memes, or very niche technical stuff), but bigger communities focusing on slightly political topics become hell. The "europe" subreddit is incredibly toxic for this reason. Not because of individual redditors, but because of the group effect. HN doesn't suffer from this problem both because of the niche aspect and because downvotes are restricted.
  - rafark 3y ago
    Yes. The mob mentality is an issue on reddit and has made me refrain from giving my honest opinion on a lot of topics because of the fear of being downvoted to hell. I think an upvote or like only system like Facebook or twitter would be much better.
paulpauper 3y ago
The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. Some people argue that blogs are the answer to a more centralized or impersonal web. I disagree. Reddit answers and comments are better than blogs, which are full of ads, SEO-spam, signup forms, and generic and vague copywritten filler . Reddit comments are written by actual humans who are either looking for answers, or are supplying incisive answers or explanations, not filler. And most importantly, based on unbiased, personal, first-hand experiences. Many bloggers are paid to promote products and are not fully honest, or do not use the products they endorse. If you want to know if interment fasting works, instead of reading a vague blog about the benefits of fasting or having to sign up to a newsletter, why not read actual people's experiences with it.
Quarrel 3y ago
A big part is that a lot of the internet isn't available to google anymore. Lots of good forums just have a robots.txt with "Disallow: /". Google can be a pain. People use DMCA in flagrantly illegal ways, etc, so lots of places just opt out of being easily found. Then, as others have said, there are the discord etc, or irc style, that have never been very searchable, but have lots of good content. It is fracturing back to more like it used to be?
Gloomily3819 3y ago
Would it be better then to have a decentralized reddit clone where each subreddit is its own instance?
666satanhimself 3y ago
[dead]
flir 3y ago
Protocols, not sites. But there's no profit in that, so I've no idea how we get back to it.
JohnBooty 3y ago
the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. How "open" were those blogs and forums, though in a functional sense? Instead of an untrustworthy/unreliable corporation like Twitter or Reddit owning a data and community.... we used to have a zillion untrustworthy/unreliable individual "webmasters" owning those blogs and forums. "Your" "community" might be gone in the blink of an eye because the guy running it threw a hissy fit, or forgot to pay his hosting bill. All other things being equal, the current near-monoculture does suck worse. But the old days sort of sucked too.
- xctr94 3y ago
  Valid point, but only partially true. It was remarkably easy to simply take a database dump and clone the server. Or pay the bill again. Or have multiple billing admins. There’s a very good number of forums still alive, proving they have some resilience to show for themselves. It’s also a form of distributed resilience, i.e. one forum going down isn’t as bad as all of Reddit. Eh…
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    It was remarkably easy to simply take a database dump and clone the server Huh? I'm not following. That helps the admin(s) and nobody else. The other 99.99% of users are in functionally the same predicament as Reddit users: they have zero control over the data. Theoretically a forum admin could make those dumps publicly available, I guess? I'm sure that has happened once or twice, but I've never heard of anybody doing that.
- notacoward 3y ago
  > we used to have a zillion untrustworthy/unreliable individual "webmasters" owning those blogs True enough, but the chance of many blog/forum owners all having a hissy fit at the same time - the equivalent of what has happened to Twitter with Musk or Reddit with Huffman - was infinitesimal. Also, because there were many, competition worked. Don't like one forum? Go to another, often on the same topic, and losing all the friends you knew on other forums was never even a possibility. Thanks to network effects, that hasn't been the case with the every-topic megasites. Returning to a more decentralized model won't solve everything, and will even (re)introduce a few other problems, but it's still more resilient especially with regard to crazy CEOs.
musha68k 3y ago
It’s also a clash between the profit motive of these platform runners / investors and the increasing value of data itself (in the “age of AI”). Enthusiasts need our help as Usenet as is, phpBB, etc just don’t cut it anymore in terms of ease of use for admins and exploration and fun for users. Todos then: 1. Centralized solution it ain’t 2. Remove (boundless, blunt) profit motive out of equation (don’t depend on this at least) 3. Actually care and be professional about UX. UX quality for centralized services has been decreasing over the last ~10 years (I blame Apple for continuously dropping their own ball there; role models are important) so it’s actually not as high a barrier as it used to be (relatively speaking).
jtode 3y ago
Lemme tell you bout a place called the fediverse, friend.
Blackthorn 3y ago
It's worse than that. What used to be blogs and forums now is Discord, which is not indexed at all!
chaosjevil 3y ago
This is another reason why it's good for everyone if Reddit dies. At those times I wish that I could be as eloquent as Cicero was, when he tells Lucius Catalina that his death has been determined by the Senata. I'd tell Reddit the same.
Spooky23 3y ago
Google really fucked up by killing Google+ and not buying Reddit
sosuke 3y ago
I see this opinion often. I hold it myself. But I don't know how to have individuals hosting zero maintenance secure platforms. The amount to learn how to do a community administration is both difficult and obscure. The normal used to be hosting a phpbb forum and moving on. Now that doesn't seem feasible to protect from bad actors. I have a webserver I admin and I found a crypto miner happily running away on it one day. I still have no idea how it got there.
heywhatupboys 3y ago
> The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. try rdrama dot net, one last bastion of the old "bb board". style forum. and good OC discussions.
notacoward 3y ago
> What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. One might quibble about blogs being Reddit when Tumblr and Medium and Substack exist, or forums being Reddit when Facebook groups exist, but that would be missing the point. Whether the number is one or a dozen, or even several dozen, it's not like the thousands upon thousands of independent sites that used to exist. While openness and distributed ownership/control are not the same thing, it seems like it's hard for the former to survive without the latter. That's why so many people are looking to the fediverse and its imitators to replace the falling monoliths. There are problems there as well, both technical and social, but at least there's hope that they can grow into solutions without being assassinated by a single rich psycho. All it takes is for people to stop thought-experimenting on yet another rich-guy-owned monolith and start actually hacking toward a permanent and public solution.
kafkaesque 3y ago
Here is an idea: forums are easy to build. What if people got back into them and just hosted them on their domain and then there was a webring attached to all forums like sites were back in the 90s, except there would now be a main site that would serve as a directory of forums divided by interest. so everything would be owned separately: the directory and each forum, but all connected through a webring like it was before. It would "decentralize" the Web in some ways (except for there being a directory).
thefz 3y ago
> The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. As much as I try to explain this to newer generations, I am hit by the Cassandra syndrome. Nobody understands that siloing everything is bad.
fennecfoxy 3y ago
Ah yes, signing up to a dozen different forums. Don't want to go back to that, either. Tbh we've kind of failed to unify software properly. Hardware is semi unified, Apple's efforts besides, but things like Wifi/Ethernet TCP/IP, HDMI, USB C etc all tie things together decently well now (but it could still be better). But when it comes to software...why don't we have a universal identity/login system that everyone & everything supports? Why don't governments enforce/mandate hardware/software compatibility for (larger?) companies. It should be like "if you want to support your own custom login/identity you can but you must also support minimal x" Wifi for example, as a standard isn't legally enforced, it's purely supported for business reasons. If Apple could get away with rolling their own that only works with iDevices I'm sure they would. But if the usage purely for economical reasons disappears, we need law to force companies to use a minimal standard for interoperability.
- afroboy 3y ago
  > signing up to a dozen different forums.Don't want to go back to that, either. That will cost you 3 minutes if you want to ask a question, if not you don't have to sign up. in exchange we will preserve data and make it easy to search. and not make single entity to rule every community.

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last standing service that is way more open that the rest. But the raise of Whatsapp and equivalents are challenging that. One day all our communication will depend on a monopoly. We are starting to know what would have happened if AT&T have never been split.

Danathar 3y ago

As long as TCP/IP exists there will always be a way for people to communicate, it just won’t be at the scale of what we see right now. As an example, use that news groups still exist. It’s a shadow of itself but it’s still there and it still works despite the fact that Reddit and all sorts of other form based communications, took over.

rafark 3y ago

The trend that I hate the most is blogs without comments. I don’t know when it started, but a few years ago I suddenly noticed most blogs started to turn off their comments section one by one. I don’t know why they’d do that. Interacting with the author or other people was half the fun. Now there’s just silence. It’s what made me stop visiting blogs altogether. I used to browse a bunch of the same blogs everyday and now I don’t. I don’t even remember most of them. Even when googling, I usually just stick to the sites that allow interaction like reddit, stack over flow or this site. A few weeks ago I remembered the names of a couple of blogs I used to browse and it’s sad to see them become spam and/or low-content farms.

krapp 3y ago
It isn't the 1990s anymore. The vast majority of comments on blogs will be spam, bots or, in the extreme rare case of an actual human reader, raving lunatics. The chance of an actual human being reading your blog and leaving a sincere comment in good faith is so low that you can safely assume it will never happen.
- rafark 3y ago
  I know spam is a ver big deal, but that wasn’t my experience. I wasn’t around in the 90s so I don’t know what it used to be like. But just a little over half a decade ago the blogs I used to visit still had people interacting with each other and it was common for posts to have meaningful conversations. I miss that a lot.

enugu 3y ago

The cause seems to be software from private companies gets more resources for features, feedback, maintenance etc. If that is correct, the obvious solution is generating some substantive funding for important open source projects which develop software and protocols for billions of users. Of course, there are organizations already doing funding for open source projects, but maybe moving the scale of funding by a few orders of magnitude can help.

supernikio2 3y ago

It's getting worse by the minute, too. What used to be a subreddit might now be a Discord server, which is in my opinion even worse, keeping solutions/questions to certain issues within Discord's own walls. You now have to enter a server, search for your specific problem, and, if not found, ask someone and wait for them to respond. If results are on the first page of google it's much more friction-less and convenient imho.

bazmattaz 3y ago
I absolutely despise Discord. I understand that it’s essentially a chat room for communities where content is ephemeral, but so many communities use it slightly differently. For example lots of communities use it to provide help to other users but then complain when users ask the same questions over and over. (See Python discord) What I like about Reddit or any forum is the ability to search for a topic or question you need help with and then see people discussing it and resolving it. Forums are a great Archive for discussions like this. Where discord plays a good role is in fleeting chat. Water cooler type chat. Discord is fun if you’re heavily involved in a community, you can spend many hours a day in your favourite discord but for someone like me who just likes to pop in a now and again, it’s borderline useless. I suppose what I’m getting to is that, for me, discord is for low effort throwaway chat, Reddit or HN for that matter is better for discussions that should be read again by interested minds.
chrisrogers 3y ago
Sounds a bit like IRC to be honest.
- Zardoz84 3y ago
  but IRC was never controlled by a unique corporation/business. Was community driven
- DanAtC 3y ago
  IRC is ephemeral. Discord becomes a de facto knowledge dump like Slack in the corporate world.

judge2020 3y ago

Centralization was always inevitable with scale. New users aren't going to spend the same amount of time and brainpower managing their internet presence as OGs do/have. So they will choose the services that enable them to reduce the overhead of using the internet. For many, this doesn't just mean using Reddit for their interest-based communities, but using Gmail for spam prevention, Apple products for their curated store, Steam for ease of access, etc. This would only be solvable if you had government-forced interop so that e.g. Twitter posts were accessible on Mastodon timelines with no cost to the site operators, but even then any small barrier is something for a platform to optimize and sell in the form of a subscription/using their user base for ads.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

Honestly I’d LOVE to revert to the old phpBB or vBulletin forum days There’s literally no reason why not and it’s never been cheaper to run

judge2020 3y ago
Few users of reddit communities are dedicated enough to that community to be willing to use it via an app that doesn't aggregate their interests into one doom-scrollable UI, much less donate to a site for hosting costs to keep it afloat.
- Tepix 3y ago
  The community around Qwitzatteracht, the golf game is very dedicated!
jeffbee 3y ago
99% of phpBB installations were pwned and distributing malware. It’s a terrible model. If we want small distributed operation of software like that we need a revolution in software operability and quality.
- rafark 3y ago
  Most forums run on xenforo nowadays which is extremely solid and reliable.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Suggestions?
- nyadesu 3y ago
  That's one of the reasons centralized model works so well nowadays, nobody wants to take care of things anymore, self hosting your own apps is becoming a small niche
  - ansible 3y ago

dale_glass 3y ago

It's getting easier to counteract though. Software development is easier than ever, CPU power and bandwidth are quite cheap, and there are working federated structures like Mastodon. There's no reason why Reddit couldn't be turned into a federated system as well, in fact it almost is one as it is. Eg, just like on Mastodon servers can choose whether to interact with each other, on Reddit it's not uncommon to get auto-banned from somewhere if you post in a subreddit they dislike.

black_puppydog 3y ago
> just like on Mastodon servers can choose whether to interact with each other, on Reddit it's not uncommon to get auto-banned from somewhere if you post in a subreddit they dislike. That feels like a very incomplete implementation of federation, to say the least. Being able to defederate is one part of that, but "just make alts for the various mutually defederated subsets of subreddits" seems like a pretty unpractical way of going about it. :D
- dale_glass 3y ago
  That's Reddit for you, the actual site doesn't really serve the needs of many of its users, so they had to invent workarounds like "run a bot that auto-bans people that post in r/placewehate". But the actual dynamic of that to me seems to resemble what you get under federation. It's just that Reddit doesn't let people do it easily, so weird workarounds are needed.
  - black_puppydog 3y ago
    huh, I guess seeing reddit like this makes some sense. kinda like Ankh-Morpork on the disk world: not free in any real sense, but free enough in practice for people to get done what they want done. Not the bright future we had hoped for, but the one we built...
JohnBooty 3y ago
Software development is easier than ever Yeah but also no? The skills required to be a basic "full stack" developer have multiplied to the point where I think that term is on the verge of obsolesence just as "webmaster" was before it. There is of course nothing stopping anybody from simply writing PHP like it's 2005 even though it's 2023, but going against the currents has its own set of costs.

fsckboy 3y ago

> One service goes down and everybody suffers "everybody"'s boycott brought this service down, the suffering is completely self inflicted, and people can end it whenever they want.

black_puppydog 3y ago
"everybody" in GP's context is "everyone using google" while "everybody" in your comment seems to mean "everyone using reddit" There's significant overlap here (to the point of it nearly being a subset relationship, I'd guess) but these are not the same thing.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  but everybody who googles and finds reddit results either ignores them or clicks to join everybody who uses reddit...
  - black_puppydog 3y ago
    well I guess if I'm gonna start arguing semantics with you, this is a valid come-back. so, "use" in my reply means "actively using, creating posts & comments" while "use" in your post means "view content". Is that a fair summary? I think I'll end the definition game here. :D
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      I thought your response was good thumbsup_emoji.jpg It's an interesting question "who is entitled to see reddit communities up and running at all times" and "how much public-interest is being affected"

lisper 3y ago

Email is dying too. I have run my own email server for 20 years. A few years ago my original ISP was acquired, forcing me to switch providers and hence get a new IP address. Ever since then my server has been blacklisted by one major player or another as a source of spam. I even tried changing to a new IP address, but the result of that was just a different set of providers blacklisting me. I'm about ready to throw in the towel and switch to Fastmail. :-(

mmh0000 3y ago
I had this exact experience, I had an email server running on the same ISP for 15 years, got great delivery. I got a new ISP, blacklisted nearly everywhere. IP reputation is super hard and time consuming to build. So I made the switch to Fastmail, and honestly, it's the best descision I made. Migrating was super simple, and they've been rock-solid for me. I didn't realize how much time I was wasting administrating an email server with one user until I switched.
- lisper 3y ago
  I spend pretty much zero time administering my server. Once it's set up, it pretty much just runs itself. The reason I want to run my own server is that I want to run my own spam filter, whose algorithm requires seeing my outgoing mail as well as my incoming. (Though I guess I could do that through IMAP by looking at my SENT folder. But for me it's also just the principle of the thing. I remember the good old days, and I'm not going down without a fight.)
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  How much does it cost for a low to moderate traffic (annually) "your own domain" server?
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    $50/year for fastmail. One of the very few things I pay for online other than my ISP service. A VPS is cheaper if you actually want to run your own, but the cheap VPSs typically have very bad IP reputations.

dghughes 3y ago

reddit isn't doing so well either. The locking of posts was a terrible idea. The old.reddit vs reddit shows many like the old style. Hate the app. All the information on reddit is user generated yet the reddit owners seems to think they own it. My view is the "frontpage" doesn't own the story just because they printed it. Back in the 1990s I feel users were much more cable and there was so many more pages or forums especially as you noted forums.

willio58 3y ago

I think what's happening with Twitter and Reddit is actually a good thing in that it's exposing the failures of centralized networks. The thing is, these failures aren't big enough yet for people to jump ship and I think the main problem is none of the decentralized social networks have provided a solution that's better. Mastodon is theoretically a better version of Twitter, but normal people get lost the moment someone starts talking about "instances". It's this gap we need to cross somehow. How do networks provide all or most of the pros of being centralized without being centralized?

whimsicalism 3y ago
also, do search engines even index mastodon? i've never seen a mastodon result in my life, compared to reddit.
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  It's a good question. Regardless of Twitter, Kbin and Lemmy (and maybe others?) will be even more important for ensuring they get indexed properly. The organic/real nature of Reddit comments (at least those not astroturfed .. heh) were valuable to search. We (devs) need to make sure Fediverse stuff provides that value. At least in my view. Is there something Mastodon/Kbin/Lemmy might be doing that could cause poor indexing? I'm working on yet-another-lemmy-thing and i'd like to not commit sins on this front.
  - frickinLasers 3y ago
    I only know Mastodon: There's a large LGBTQ+ community who don't want to be indexed out of concern for their safety (because, for example, there are small far-right communities on other instances looking to cause mayhem). The ability to be oneself online without worrying about getting brigaded, doxxed, or whatever, is a selling point. Indexing runs counter to that.
    - unshavedyak 3y ago
      Agreed, but is it a choice or a requirement from the software? I love choice, that instances (and users!) can and should get to choose the level of indexing. If it's software wide, not sure i can get behind that. Especially since .. doesn't ActivityPub sort of ruin that? Ie any instance you federate with could expose your data, regardless of Mastodon's rules. Federated instance data visibility and agreed visibility rules of course come into play. But if i understand this right it would mean you can only federate with instances or software that agrees to your privacy rules. Which is totally viable, but that also then means Mastodon can't federate with, for example, a Reddit clone that wants to be indexed. It's a complex web of requirements. Definitely something i'll be thinking on as i implement my own ActivityPub instance.

mrtksn 3y ago

> are now reduced to be a Subreddit. I don't know if anything else was possible, the IT need for communities is about the same and it makes total sense to have those on one place. It solves the infrastructure problem, it solves discoverability problem, it solves the user account management problem and it is all "free". It comes at the cost of fragility, true, but as always convenience is the king.

TX81Z 3y ago
[flagged]
michaelchisari 3y ago
Maybe the solution isn't decentralization, but a non-profit approach like Wikipedia. Reddit already functions entirely on volunteer labor anyways, adding venture capital requirements makes much less sense than a just-keep-the-lights-on non-profit model.
- ansible 3y ago
  > ... non-profit approach ... It may be a better way to go for a public forum like Reddit. Don't kid yourself though into thinking the non-profit foundation won't also be rife with petty politics, hidden agendas, and the usual crap. There will still be issues, and how to handle NSFW content is still going to be a big conflict.
  - michaelchisari 3y ago
    | Don't kid yourself though into thinking the non-profit foundation Those aren't the problems I was expecting to solve. Those are other problems that exist regardless of funding model, because they're fundamentally social problems. A non-profit funding model simply solves the problem of venture capital undermining the core product in search of profits.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >A non-profit funding model simply solves the problem of venture capital undermining the core product in search of profits. It also introduces a larger problem of shutting down entirely if they can't pay for server costs. That's always going to be a bigger problem than VC's. Wikipedia only does so because it is bankrolled by universities and other institutions. And we should note that Wikipedia doesn't have to host videos, and has strict requirements on how to host images. I can't think of those places doing the same for Reddit.

AlbertCory 3y ago

+1 to that last point. In the 80's, the OSI suite of protocols, owned by the telephone monopolies of the world, actually had pretensions of becoming what the Internet did become. OSI lost, but the spirit never died, apparently.

TrackerFF 3y ago

I still use a couple "old school" forums, but I have to say - the reddit tree format is just so, so much easier. It is impossible to de-rail a thread, and there's a certain level of anti-spam and self-moderation mechanism to the reddit format. The older forums still need some hardcore moderation, or else many threads become unreadable. Nothing worse than when two users start arguing, and the thread turns into shit. But that's just the how things have evolved. It's so much easier to just start a subreddit, than to host your own forum.

SoftTalker 3y ago
"It is impossible to de-rail a thread" citation needed, I've seen many reddit threads degenerate into name-calling, logical fallacies, political posturing, and what have you. If they don't, my guess is it's a very focused subreddit that doesn't attract much general interest, or the mods are very on top of things.
- bena 3y ago
  It usually gets contained to a branch however. You can choose not to engage with that branch and instead start your own.
  - Ralfp 3y ago
    But 95%% of attention will go to the "top" branches which are usually memes and "dumbass marathons" were people are trying to keep the original joke going.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Compared to how most of the attention in a traditional forum will go to people trying to respond to the TC/OP? Even in cases where 4-5 pages in the TC already resolved the issue? The only benefit for a forum is that it "bumps" a topic when you participate in it, so you can keep a topic alive. But that isn't too difficult for a threaded style forum to replicate. That just wasn't how Reddit wanted topics to work (nor HN, in our case). Reddit never even implemented a way to subscribe to a topic despite a 3rd party extension having a feature for over a decade.

low_tech_love 3y ago

And what’s worse, the contents of subreddits are incredibly homogeneous; there is no place for dissent. A subreddit named ”music” or ”films” or ”games” (just conceptually, ok?) fancies itself as the reference for that specific thing, when it’s actually just a reflection of whatever political stance the mods have (usually simply reduction to average). Outside people will see that and think ”oh nice a centralized discussion for concept X” and that just makes things even worse.

sacado2 3y ago
And the public upvote / downvote system make it even worse. Soon, you're reduced to a small subset of opinion because any slightly dissenting opinion will be downvoted to hell and hidden at the very bottom of the page. Not necessarily an issue for small communities focused on a non-controversial topic (mostly anything about jokes/memes, or very niche technical stuff), but bigger communities focusing on slightly political topics become hell. The "europe" subreddit is incredibly toxic for this reason. Not because of individual redditors, but because of the group effect. HN doesn't suffer from this problem both because of the niche aspect and because downvotes are restricted.
- rafark 3y ago
  Yes. The mob mentality is an issue on reddit and has made me refrain from giving my honest opinion on a lot of topics because of the fear of being downvoted to hell. I think an upvote or like only system like Facebook or twitter would be much better.

paulpauper 3y ago

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. Some people argue that blogs are the answer to a more centralized or impersonal web. I disagree. Reddit answers and comments are better than blogs, which are full of ads, SEO-spam, signup forms, and generic and vague copywritten filler . Reddit comments are written by actual humans who are either looking for answers, or are supplying incisive answers or explanations, not filler. And most importantly, based on unbiased, personal, first-hand experiences. Many bloggers are paid to promote products and are not fully honest, or do not use the products they endorse. If you want to know if interment fasting works, instead of reading a vague blog about the benefits of fasting or having to sign up to a newsletter, why not read actual people's experiences with it.

Quarrel 3y ago

A big part is that a lot of the internet isn't available to google anymore. Lots of good forums just have a robots.txt with "Disallow: /". Google can be a pain. People use DMCA in flagrantly illegal ways, etc, so lots of places just opt out of being easily found. Then, as others have said, there are the discord etc, or irc style, that have never been very searchable, but have lots of good content. It is fracturing back to more like it used to be?

Gloomily3819 3y ago

Would it be better then to have a decentralized reddit clone where each subreddit is its own instance?

666satanhimself 3y ago

[dead]

flir 3y ago

Protocols, not sites. But there's no profit in that, so I've no idea how we get back to it.

JohnBooty 3y ago

the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. How "open" were those blogs and forums, though in a functional sense? Instead of an untrustworthy/unreliable corporation like Twitter or Reddit owning a data and community.... we used to have a zillion untrustworthy/unreliable individual "webmasters" owning those blogs and forums. "Your" "community" might be gone in the blink of an eye because the guy running it threw a hissy fit, or forgot to pay his hosting bill. All other things being equal, the current near-monoculture does suck worse. But the old days sort of sucked too.

xctr94 3y ago
Valid point, but only partially true. It was remarkably easy to simply take a database dump and clone the server. Or pay the bill again. Or have multiple billing admins. There’s a very good number of forums still alive, proving they have some resilience to show for themselves. It’s also a form of distributed resilience, i.e. one forum going down isn’t as bad as all of Reddit. Eh…
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  It was remarkably easy to simply take a database dump and clone the server Huh? I'm not following. That helps the admin(s) and nobody else. The other 99.99% of users are in functionally the same predicament as Reddit users: they have zero control over the data. Theoretically a forum admin could make those dumps publicly available, I guess? I'm sure that has happened once or twice, but I've never heard of anybody doing that.
notacoward 3y ago
> we used to have a zillion untrustworthy/unreliable individual "webmasters" owning those blogs True enough, but the chance of many blog/forum owners all having a hissy fit at the same time - the equivalent of what has happened to Twitter with Musk or Reddit with Huffman - was infinitesimal. Also, because there were many, competition worked. Don't like one forum? Go to another, often on the same topic, and losing all the friends you knew on other forums was never even a possibility. Thanks to network effects, that hasn't been the case with the every-topic megasites. Returning to a more decentralized model won't solve everything, and will even (re)introduce a few other problems, but it's still more resilient especially with regard to crazy CEOs.

musha68k 3y ago

It’s also a clash between the profit motive of these platform runners / investors and the increasing value of data itself (in the “age of AI”). Enthusiasts need our help as Usenet as is, phpBB, etc just don’t cut it anymore in terms of ease of use for admins and exploration and fun for users. Todos then: 1. Centralized solution it ain’t 2. Remove (boundless, blunt) profit motive out of equation (don’t depend on this at least) 3. Actually care and be professional about UX. UX quality for centralized services has been decreasing over the last ~10 years (I blame Apple for continuously dropping their own ball there; role models are important) so it’s actually not as high a barrier as it used to be (relatively speaking).

jtode 3y ago

Lemme tell you bout a place called the fediverse, friend.

Blackthorn 3y ago

It's worse than that. What used to be blogs and forums now is Discord, which is not indexed at all!

chaosjevil 3y ago

This is another reason why it's good for everyone if Reddit dies. At those times I wish that I could be as eloquent as Cicero was, when he tells Lucius Catalina that his death has been determined by the Senata. I'd tell Reddit the same.

Spooky23 3y ago

Google really fucked up by killing Google+ and not buying Reddit

sosuke 3y ago

I see this opinion often. I hold it myself. But I don't know how to have individuals hosting zero maintenance secure platforms. The amount to learn how to do a community administration is both difficult and obscure. The normal used to be hosting a phpbb forum and moving on. Now that doesn't seem feasible to protect from bad actors. I have a webserver I admin and I found a crypto miner happily running away on it one day. I still have no idea how it got there.

heywhatupboys 3y ago

> The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. try rdrama dot net, one last bastion of the old "bb board". style forum. and good OC discussions.

notacoward 3y ago

> What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. One might quibble about blogs being Reddit when Tumblr and Medium and Substack exist, or forums being Reddit when Facebook groups exist, but that would be missing the point. Whether the number is one or a dozen, or even several dozen, it's not like the thousands upon thousands of independent sites that used to exist. While openness and distributed ownership/control are not the same thing, it seems like it's hard for the former to survive without the latter. That's why so many people are looking to the fediverse and its imitators to replace the falling monoliths. There are problems there as well, both technical and social, but at least there's hope that they can grow into solutions without being assassinated by a single rich psycho. All it takes is for people to stop thought-experimenting on yet another rich-guy-owned monolith and start actually hacking toward a permanent and public solution.

kafkaesque 3y ago

Here is an idea: forums are easy to build. What if people got back into them and just hosted them on their domain and then there was a webring attached to all forums like sites were back in the 90s, except there would now be a main site that would serve as a directory of forums divided by interest. so everything would be owned separately: the directory and each forum, but all connected through a webring like it was before. It would "decentralize" the Web in some ways (except for there being a directory).

thefz 3y ago

> The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. As much as I try to explain this to newer generations, I am hit by the Cassandra syndrome. Nobody understands that siloing everything is bad.

fennecfoxy 3y ago

Ah yes, signing up to a dozen different forums. Don't want to go back to that, either. Tbh we've kind of failed to unify software properly. Hardware is semi unified, Apple's efforts besides, but things like Wifi/Ethernet TCP/IP, HDMI, USB C etc all tie things together decently well now (but it could still be better). But when it comes to software...why don't we have a universal identity/login system that everyone & everything supports? Why don't governments enforce/mandate hardware/software compatibility for (larger?) companies. It should be like "if you want to support your own custom login/identity you can but you must also support minimal x" Wifi for example, as a standard isn't legally enforced, it's purely supported for business reasons. If Apple could get away with rolling their own that only works with iDevices I'm sure they would. But if the usage purely for economical reasons disappears, we need law to force companies to use a minimal standard for interoperability.

afroboy 3y ago
> signing up to a dozen different forums.Don't want to go back to that, either. That will cost you 3 minutes if you want to ask a question, if not you don't have to sign up. in exchange we will preserve data and make it easy to search. and not make single entity to rule every community.