18 ms·

Louis Rossmann calls community to leave Reddit

565 points by hubraumhugo 3y ago

jrflowers 3y ago
Who is Louis Rossman?
- happymellon 3y ago
  I think he runs a repair shop. I'm not sure why his appeal to authority should matter for most people. There are plenty of reasons to leave Reddit.
  - kristoff_it 3y ago
    > I'm not sure why his appeal to authority should matter for most people. The Right to Repair stuff gives him an interesting perspective on how big tech operates, which is relevant to the Reddit thing.
    - bzzzt 3y ago
      How does insight into phone construction and repairs extend to community management for big social networks?
      - kristoff_it 3y ago
        He runs some very important initiatives around Right to Repair, which do indeed play into politics, business management etc.
        happymellon 3y ago
        And insights into API fees to get some of that sweet large language model funding?
        lgas 3y ago
        How does that extend to community management for big social networks?
      - deepserket 3y ago
        He found a video format that gets him views and attention. I love him for the right to repair and his troubleshooting lives are interesting, but I've stopped watching most of his videos because the format of "dude films himself while reading an article " is really boring and a waste of time.
        shever73 3y ago
        This is the first Louis Rossmann video I'd seen. I agree with a lot of what he's saying, but I don't like this format of delivery. Speaking rapidly, barely taking a breath, constant repetition. It makes my brain tired to listen to him, and I keep expecting to be offered a timeshare.
      - preisschild 3y ago
        Because it's similar. He advocates against locked down hard- and software. Reddit is locking down the API.
        happymellon 3y ago
        Except they aren't locking it down like that, they just aren't doing it for free any more. You can still have a 3rd party app, and it can still use the API. You just pay for it. Right to repair is because you cannot buy a 3rd party screen, and you cannot use it. You have to have Apple/John Deere/etc do it.
        The_Colonel 3y ago
        > You can still have a 3rd party app, and it can still use the API. You just pay for it. Yes, but can is not will. The practical effect of this pricing will mean that almost all 3rd party apps for reddit will die, and Reddit won't get significant revenue from this change. Management knows all this, which means they are in fact trying to kill 3rd party apps, not salvage API operating costs.
        iamtedd 3y ago
        If you want to speak about Reddit's changes in 'Right to Repair' terms, it's like Apple selling a replacement screen, but pricing it at $20,000.
      - sethaurus 3y ago
        The connection is about the different incentives between a tech company and its users — and the way a company will try to exert control against the users’ interests.
      - veave 3y ago
        He was given a huge megaphone because of his expertise in a certain field and now he thinks he has important insights about everything in the world. A story as old as time itself.
      - rchaud 3y ago
        He has ~2m subscribers on Youtube, I think he would know a thing or two about moderating large communities.
- gary_0 3y ago
  "Louis Rossman is an American independent repair technician, YouTuber, and right to repair activist." - Wikipedia
  - blitzar 3y ago
    "Influencer"
    - faeriechangling 3y ago
      Man is getting bills voted on, how influential does one have to be to be an influencer?
    - sacrosancty 3y ago
      Before he was a right to repair activist, he was a complaining-about-Apple-making-life-difficult-for-independent-repairmen Youtuber, and before that, he was a showing people how he repairs computers Youtuber. He didn't just appear overnight to be an influencer.
    - goodpoint 3y ago
      The word you are looking for is "activist".
    - asylteltine 3y ago
      He’s an activist. Influencers don’t actually accomplish anything or provide value, like the ceo of Reddit
- preisschild 3y ago
  He has had an Apple repair store for many years and is a prominent right to repair activist.
- shpx 3y ago
  He started out repairing Apple computers and complaining about it on YouTube and discovered a lucrative market of long form Apple hate videos. He makes one type of video, it's him sitting in his chair wearing a microphone talking about how whatever Apple recently did is terrible.
  - hugi 3y ago
    I perceive him very differently (despite being a 100% Apple guy for the past 30 years - the stuff he criticizes Apple for is justified in my opinion). He's done a lot of good for the world with his activism and work on Right to Repair.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      Any company deserves to receive flak for badly designed(electrically and mechanically) products or making getting spare parts or needed information to repair them harder. Specially the users should like that. It is making their products last much longer...
  - hakube 3y ago
    [flagged]
- s9w 3y ago
  [dead]
- tinco 3y ago
  He is a youtuber who is widely known for his incredibly strong ethics. He started out making tech repair videos, advertising his repair business but the channel grew out into more general social commentary and updates on his activism. It's a bit weird that someone could be famous for his strong ethics, but just watch some of his videos and you'll get it. The guy is relentless in both demanding ethics from others as reflecting on his own actions. It's really inspiring. edit: If you want an example of this, here's a video where he apologizes for something he did, and in his apology he plays a recording of a conversation with his lawyer where his lawyer recommends to do the thing, and he relents, which he later regrets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGd_Ixy9Mzc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGd_Ixy9Mzc You don't have to watch the whole thing, you'll see his character come through in the first minute of the video.
  - sumedh 3y ago
    His videos about New York real estate were interesting/amusing/sad.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  A dude with a lovely but hard to spot cat.
Gazoo101 3y ago
I agree in general with most of his position. One statement that fell outside of my agreement was him balking at how people leaving Reddit could cause it to crash. Fewer people should mean less load :O That position reminds of me of the Simpsons episode where Homer runs for mayor. At a debate, Homer's opponent shows up late because someone cut his car's break lines, and Homer goes - "Well then you should have been here early!" Any sufficiently large irregular site activity will cause issues. The people who are 'leaving' aren't being inactive. They're either disabling accounts, or disabling sub-reddits, all of which causes activity on the servers. It's absolutely to be expected that outages occur.
- 369548684892826 3y ago
  For example, to make some numbers up, if only the top 10 posts in each subreddit are cached, in normal circumstances the Popular page can be constructed from cache. If the number of open subreddits reduces by 95% then suddenly a request for Popular might be hitting the database a lot more. Whatever happened is going to be more complicated than that, but I can believe people leaving, and subreddits going dark, could cause a crash.
  - Nathan2055 3y ago
    Pretty much a week after starting any web development job, you discover that 95% of making a site fast is simply reducing the number of times it has to call the database. Typically, this means caching everything as much as you possibly can. This is the same reason why Wikipedia can’t just roll out a cookie-based “revert to old look” option for logged out users. It would require caching every page twice since you’d need a file prepared for both skins. The reason they can have skins for logged in users is because they already bypass the cache for logged in users (to allow for individual user scripts and stylesheets to be run, among other things). Even then, things like article text and category lists are still stored in various database caches, hence why there’s a “Purge cache” option available to logged in users.
- hnick 3y ago
  I can't remember the last time I deleted an account. I only do it for legal reasons. I would probably just visit Reddit less and less, until one day it's for the last time, and I never go back - not even to delete it, because it's just not occupying my thoughts anymore. Maybe if I wanted to send a message by deleting? But I think most people would just trail off and move on.
kristoff_it 3y ago
Reddit never seemed to behave in a way that made any business sense. VC money has distorted its business model since the beginning, and now it seems that Reddit is willing to burn itself to the ground to put up a barrier for preventing new players from accessing the data that OpenAI and other big tech companies have already used to train their LLMs. I guess that since it never turned a profit this is the only way VCs can get their money back. Honestly, I find this a very repugnant way of dealing with the user base. A business that never tried to earnestly generate enough value to be sustainable can only be classified as a scam in my book.
- blitzar 3y ago
  I know it will be as popluar as rabies around here ... but that is litterally the entire business model of Silicon Valley, including YC (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S05 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S05).
  - ramijames 3y ago
    Absolutely agree with this. Everything that is wrong with modern tech business models has to do with VCs and chasing funding or valuation.
  - eschaton 3y ago
    No, it’s the business model of YC and “New Silicon Valley.” The original companies that caused people to start calling this entire region Silicon Valley were making—and, in a few cases, are still making—real things intended to make their users’ lives better. It was the dot-com bubble and its couple of resurgences that really fucked things up here and made everything off-kilter. The finance bros were drawn like vultures to “easy profit,” and brought with them attitudes like treating Google’s chef getting rich too as a “problem” to be “solved” rather than the system working as designed.
    - rvense 3y ago
      Wait, I thought it was called Silly Con Valley because of this exact model?
Dave3of5 3y ago
I agree with a lot that Louis says and what strikes me on this one is when he said the guy doesn't care about you and that he thinks the value is in the servers and the api. I've worked in tech with a lot of people like this. They will tell you straight up they don't care about users or employees. CTO I've worked with said that developers are like "machines working in a factory" that they shouldn't think above their level and should just do the same thing over and over. I'll tell you one thing you'll never change the reddit managements minds, never ever ever. Same as I was never able to change any of these other peoples minds.
- koliber 3y ago
  > CTO I've worked with said that developers are like "machines working in a factory" that they shouldn't think above their level and should just do the same thing over and over. This shows how important it is to learn about a company, it's culture, philosophy, and values before joining. I can see how some people operate like this, and I don't want to work with them. For anyone reading this who thinks all companies are like the one that parent described, I want to share that it is not true. There are plenty of companies who based their collaboration with their workers on other mental models than cogs-in-the-machine.
  - koito17 3y ago
    > learn about a company, it's culture, philosophy, and values before joining. I may sound dumb, but how does one do this? What question would you ask in an interview in order to determine whether the management are apathetic to their users or employees? The three interviews I did at my current company gave me a glimpse into the culture, but only a surface-level "first impression" kind of knowledge. With that said, I think I successfully ascertained the company's vision with the product I'm working on, but that's way easier to learn than culture IMO.
    - smugma 3y ago
      “Tell me about a time when Engineering changed the product direction…” Open-ended questions like that.
black_puppydog 3y ago
We all know the drill: pick up the shambles of your community. Move to a federated service (lemmy in this case) and try to get as many of your peers to join you there. Actually, subreddits being mapped as lemmy instances makes more sense to me than the "single identity" of reddit.
- fastball 3y ago
  The problem with that plan is that a huge amount of the value of Reddit was that it was well-indexed by search engines so that when you went searching for something, the conversations from Reddit would pop up, which were generally quite high-quality as far as forum-type content goes. If you move everything to Lemmy, that won't happen much and as a result fewer people will join the community that don't already know about it somehow.
  - zo1 3y ago
    I'm sure with enough community-support someone will write a plugin or tool to expose Lemmy content to http pages that can be indexed? I haven't used Lemmy before, but if I was making a Reddit-like clone, that sort of thing would have been baked in from the start.
    - Gareth321 3y ago
      To my knowledge, Lemmy instances can all be crawled by Google already. Using "site:lemmy.world" for example, returns indexed results. It's just that Google's algorithm has received billions of reddit searches for years, so they're biasing Reddit results. This will change organically.
  - mlatu 3y ago
    well, what good is it when google indexes ANYTHING? even cohost appears high in results nowadays... and dont get me started about how google includes also crap generated by llms... google is on its course of devalueing itself. the human internet is probably doomed. long live the llm generated internet oh which gives me an idea: fake users as a service: using llm to generate comments for reddit after the dark
silisili 3y ago
I took him more seriously when he was in a shop showing us things and explaining things and really exposing things. Lately he's just a person on a recliner whining about the world. This doesn't discredit his ideas, mind you, I actually agree with a lot. But there's no more special sauce...anyone could make ranting videos from their recliner. I find the whole format incredibly bizarre and unprofessional...
- alpaca128 3y ago
  What makes you think he isn't exposing things anymore? He just mostly moved from electronics-level videos to showing what corporations and their PR do in general, which makes sense given he's now much more active in the Right to Repair-initiative, which is still the exact same range of topics he covered earlier. Edit: and I guess not having a motherboard in view all the time helps with reaching a larger audience.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Since you agree with it, what about it doesn't make you feel like he is being a mouthpiece for you? Someone needs to say what he's saying, might as well be him. Mind you, I don't disagree with you, I feel the same way, I'm exploring why the format is just off somehow.
  - Remmy 3y ago
    I'm not sure why it feels so weird either, but it definitely does. I was never a big fan of him personally, but have to agree with a lot of what he says. I think, for me at least, watching him work on a board while saying these things made it more relatable where this feels more like, "Gather round the big comfy chair, children. I cle Louis is going to rant and profanely scream about X, then talk to his cat in a baby voice." Just... Odd.
  - dagw 3y ago
    Someone needs to say what he's saying, might as well be him. Much like many meetings should be an email, many youtube videos should be 400-800 word essays. If you're going to present that sort of information in an audio-visual form you need add some value above and beyond just the words you say, and I don't feel he does that. I feel the same way several channels I subscribe to, like Gamers Nexus. Every time I watch one of their videos, I always come away thinking "that was some pretty useful information, I'm really glad they put in the work to make it available, I really wish I could have read it in a blog post"
drumhead 3y ago
Reading one of the threads about it someone lamented that "the old relationship on Reddit is dead now". It really did feel like a unique relationship between the users and management for a long time. But that much money can corrupt the best of us.
- Nathan2055 3y ago
  I’d argue that the management/user relationship has been dead ever since they killed Secret Santa. Some others might argue that the Victoria firing is what did it, but at least the admins were still showing up publicly at that point in random threads and trying to justify it to the community. For Secret Santa, they basically just said “this doesn’t make us money, so we’re not putting any resources into it anymore.” It was made even worse by the fact that it was originally a community thing that Reddit corporate willingly took over to help manage better. And they just killed it as soon as it wasn’t generating value anymore.
  - drumhead 3y ago
    Yeah, you're right about Secret Santa, that was such a cross sub community activity. It was really petty of them to get rid of it but it was foretaste of what was to come and their attitude towawrds the community spirt of Reddit.
thih9 3y ago
Is there a text summary for those who cannot watch the video at the moment?
- fragmede 3y ago
  https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZOm_UKGyrZg https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZOm_UKGyrZg
zmmmmm 3y ago
There's a problem with the fundamental underlying argument here, which rests on the notion that all the value of Reddit actually comes from the moderators and the users posting content. The problem is, if Reddit itself has no value, why does every other option suck? During the blackout I made an honest to god attempt to use other things. I tried Lemmy. I tried Discord. I tried Mastodon. I hated them all. It's definitely partly just critical mass - the communities just aren't there - but it's not only that. Nobody has managed to replicate the classic / old Reddit UI/UX either. I hate all the new UIs. I don't know what's so hard about it. It's a list of links with some upvote / downvote buttons. I'll be more ready to believe there's no value in Reddit when I see that somebody has actually successfully cloned it and made a place for these communities to go to that's anything like as good as what Reddit offers.
- slikrick 3y ago
  if reddit itself had no communities would that UI/UX even matter? you didn't learn it because it was good, you learned it because you had to to use the site lol
- 1500100900 3y ago
  Give Mastodon a threaded view and technically it's the same as reddit, but federated? Usenet, but not just for nerds.
  - Nathan2055 3y ago
    That’s basically just Lemmy/kbin. Those two services can even interconnect with Mastodon thanks to ActivityPub. As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, moving text around on the Internet has been a solved problem ever since NNTP. And that was 1986! The only problem is that there’s not a lot of money in it, which is why having the ability to federate a bunch of smaller services together is such a good solution (at least on a technical level).
- ehnto 3y ago
  Reddit Inc doesn't even believe in the UX you're talking about, old.reddit won't be around forever and the API move is killing off alternative apps. Discord is a fundamentally different platform to Reddit so I am not surprised it didn't compare. What reddit has is a network effect and good enough technology, given their tech is already available as open source clones ready to be deployed, their only edge is their network effect. Kill off the community and all you are left with is some easily reproducible code and a server bill.
nologic01 3y ago
You never know what a corporate entity is really made of until you see it in a downturn. That is when the actual contracts that make people tick kick-in, removing the obfuscation from free money and subsidized freebies.
beloch 3y ago
The problem is that many people have come to think of reddit as a public utility. People expect a public utility to, perhaps, not be that innovative and maybe a little poorly run at times. What they do expect from a public utility is long-term reliability. They expect it to be there, doing what it does now, five or ten years from now. For some people (e.g. the blind), all of reddit is going dark on July 1st. Reddit is not a public utility. It's owners have decided that short-term profits are more important than serving as a long-term non-profit public utility. I can't fault any business person for making this decision, but it's the key reason why we need publicly controlled infrastructure to do what reddit does now. Reddit is many beneficial things. Just for one example, it's a new foundation of journalism. How many professional journalists rely on reddit to find and research news stories? If you read your local city's sub and then read your local newspaper the following day, there will be a surprising amount of repeated material. Governments in many countries run public broadcasting corporations, public news programs, and even subsidize privately owned news companies, although in many cases that's mere corporate welfare. They do this because they realize that journalism is a cornerstone of free society. The functions that reddit now performs are too important to leave in the hands of short-sighted corporate executives who have absolutely zero interest in anything beyond their next quarterly report and the bonuses tied to it. We must not jump from reddit into the hands of yet another corporation or this will simply happen again. Public funding has produced things like lemmy.ml, but such projects aren't ready to scale nor, arguably, interested in doing so. This is something the UN should tackle to prove they still have relevance in the modern world. Instead of simply issuing non-binding warning after warning, perhaps it's time for international organizations to build the kind of public infrastructure that provides a benefit to all of humanity.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  >> How many professional journalists rely on reddit to find and research news stories? That would be very unprofessional journalists. At least with the issues of the current war the flow of information is as follows: small telegram channels -> large telegram channels -> translation -> twitter -> reddit.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > The problem is that many people have come to think of reddit as a public utility. (...) Reddit is not a public utility. It's owners have decided that short-term profits are more important than serving as a long-term non-profit public utility. I can't fault any business person for making this decision, but it's the key reason why we need publicly controlled infrastructure to do what reddit does now. Exactly this. And the same applies to Twitter and Facebook as well. And probably increasingly Discord. In the end, both sides lose because of this misunderstanding (well, except the investors on the business side win). There is demand for both, and there is space for both, and I think the society at large is going to slowly realize that the two things - utility-like social media and regular private business - are different, and learn to differentiate between them - and maybe then, finally, the utility-like social media will be created.
czechdeveloper 3y ago
I left today. Very sad about it too.
sharts 3y ago
Usenet, IRC, and Gopher have always been better alternatives to Reddit, Slack, and the bloated web.
- Ultimatt 3y ago
  This is an underrated notion, but I'd maybe point at XMPP instead as a better throwback
- saboot 3y ago
  That fills some void, but not all. I particularly liked the <local city> subreddits, used it to find cool events, but now the only alternative is .. Facebook or nextdoor (yikes)
  - sireat 3y ago
    There used to be local city newsgroups about 30 years ago. I do not see why there couldn't be moderated usenet groups again. Then again, last time I read a newsgroup was some 12 years ago when I created a simple newsgroup client (with built in Python nntplib) and qt. There was some active news groups but very few.
gonzo41 3y ago
Ok fine go. Just tell me where to go next. I'm ready. I don't really care where. I'm just waiting for a viable option to hit critical mass. Honestly. Does Reddit even cost that much to run? If you ran it like wikipedia what would that look like?
- vanilla_nut 3y ago
  Not to be a bandwagoner, but Lemmy has really picked up over the last few days. There's plenty of scaling issues right now, but take a look at the centralized community browser (https://browse.feddit.de/ https://browse.feddit.de/) to see if there are enough interesting budding subreddits there to pique your interest. Will 90% of Redditors move over? Not immediately, and likely not ever. But if maybe 10% leave -- largely comprised of enthusiasts, moderators, and power users who benefited the most from old.reddit and third party apps -- then we've got a community the size of 2007 Reddit anyway. Which everyone seems to agree was a better-sized community than Reddit today anyway.
- rossriley 3y ago
  mainly we're moving to the fediverse sites, for most people it's one of Lemmy, Kbin or beehaw and a lot of communities have grown to be really substantial over the last few days.
- bombcar 3y ago
  You're already here! HN is "good Reddit for nerds". You have to find alternate sources of your cat video discussion, however. I wonder if my YC submission for "HackerNudes" as a NSFW clone will fly? I just need to find someone named Don G. to moderate it ... (/sarcasm)
- asylteltine 3y ago
  You don’t need a place to go next. Nothing on Reddit or similar sites is a valuable use of time. Literally, nothing. Go touch grass, learn some skill, or build something.
LatteLazy 3y ago
I remember when people left Digg for Reddit. You need two things for an exodus: a push <Tick Emoji here> AND a viable alternative <Question mark Emoji here> Where is everyone to go?
- atourgates 3y ago
  This is the big difference. At the time I left Digg for Reddit, Reddit already had a strong community that offered me better content and discussion than Digg. As far as I can tell, with the exception of perhaps Discord, the alternatives being proposed to Reddit are asking users to _build_ their community on an alternative platform, not join an existing strong community. That seems like a bar too high at the moment, though I hope I’m wrong. That said, I expect it’ll take time. Reddit’s C-Suite have lost the plot, and lost sight of the value of their service and their relationship with their community. I don’t expect them to be supplanted in the next week or two, but I’d be shocked if they were still around at anything like Reddit’s current size and active userbase in a year or two.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    There have already been multiple Reddit "splinter sites" created (usually when a subreddit got banned) with more or less success. If a few big good subs do the same, it could start an avalanche. By "good" I mean subs that have actual substantive content, not just people looking at lefunnypost.
- rchaud 3y ago
  In 2010, it was Reddit that was the question mark. People that left Digg could have gone to Slashdot, Something Awful, Twitter, Fark, Cracked forums or topic-specific phpBB boards (there were many).
pyronaur 3y ago
I don't know where this will end up in, but I know I can: sudo echo "127.0.0.1 reddit.com # The real blackout" >> /etc/hosts
- ctde 3y ago
  unfortunately this doesn't work if the user doesn't have write permissions for /etc/hosts already. perhaps: echo "127.0.0.1 reddit.com # The real blackout" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts ?
  - LinuxBender 3y ago
    If they are using the uBlock Origin addon they can go to Preferences -> My Filters and add: # Block Reddit Experiment ||redd.it^ ||redditblog.com^ ||reddit.com^ ||redditinc.com^ ||redditmail.com^ ||redditmedia.com^ ||redditstatic.com^ ||redditstatus.com^ I've been using that as an experiment to see how many times I click a link that is blocked. Thus far only once.
bentxt 3y ago
One interesting (maybe obvious) point Louis was making: This company and brand is worth nothing without its user. There is simply no interesting tech here. That leads to the question: What would it take to create a website that is similar enough, to make user instantly feel at home, but different enough to not get into legal trouble?
- haunter 3y ago
  Fork and deploy old Reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
  - bentxt 3y ago
    Why not? Would that be legal though?
    - haunter 3y ago
      Why wouldn’t? It’s open source Reddit is a trademark but that’s another story
      - bentxt 3y ago
        I think the code is less interesting then the (graphic) design and some of the wording (kharma) that people are used to. And maybe further expressions like AITA or /r/whathever. How is the legal situation here I wonder
        hedora 3y ago
        The old code that reddit published says you have to put a copyright on any service that runs the software, so /r/foo would be fine, and the bottom of each page would say something like “Portions of server software copyright reddit 2017”. I am not a lawyer, but that’s my reading of the license on that repo.
    - nmlrqf 3y ago
mekoka 3y ago
Reddit's main value is (was?) collective convenience and familiarity. Like Whatsapp. Like Facebook. Those social networks where you wish that everybody you're connected with would just quit to join something else, together, all at once. But your family and friends just won't budge. You could hate the management itself, but knew what to expect from it and could find solace in the idea that "surely, they won't shoot themselves in the foot!" A devil you know kinda deal. But now, Reddit has gone and shot itself in the foot and the communities are trying to understand what it means for them. The difficulty to find a new home is likely political. So many users migrating to a single new network is a lot of power afforded to any one entity. In an age where so many visionaries have claimed to want a good future for humanity, but ended up either selling that dream away, or revealing their own dystopian version of it, who are you going to trust? Short of the enduring brand and gravitas of something like the Wikimedia Foundation, or Craigslist, who are you going to entrust such a responsibility?
- guerrilla 3y ago
  > who are you going to entrust such a responsibility? Nobody aka ourselves, which is why we need to get the fediverse working instead of standing on the side bitching about how it's not good enough yet.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    How would you get the fediverse working?
    - guerrilla 3y ago
      Start by participating, and then identifying and elaborating concrete problems and potential solutions to them.
      - hutzlibu 3y ago
        So what concrete problems and potential solutions do you see? Edit: People have been participating in federated networks since ages. But it is hard. Especially if you want to give users the same experience as with non federated sites. And I am not sure, if for example lemmy has solved it https://programming.dev/post/50696 https://programming.dev/post/50696 So it is an open question, if a federated network can work as stable and easy as a centralized instance. I would think so, but so far it is only a hypothesis.
epolanski 3y ago
I deleted my account. Was looking for an excuse to remove myself from that time-sink website anyway, but can't lie, the changes they made in the last decade have progressively ruined my experience.
- vanilla_nut 3y ago
  I was on the fence for the past couple of weeks. But this interview (https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...) pushed me over the edge. Huffman's doublespeak, white lies (I'm certain there's a bunch of third party apps that you won't name that are still "in talks" about the new API pricing), and actual lies (trying to smear Christian's name) point to a company that simply cannot be trusted. Even if Reddit fixed all of the API issues today, I wouldn't want to go back. And you bring up the most important issue anyway: every single Reddit community I've participated in has become noticeably worse over the past decade. They don't care because we're not the meme-and-ad-slurpee sipping target audience who will mindlessly scroll pictures and videos on the official Reddit app.
- JustBreath 3y ago
  Instead of deleting your account I'd recommend editing all your posts to make a statement. This way you're not only removing yourself, but also burning the content you provided.
neatze 3y ago
Is it unethical (stupid) to sell your reddit account(s), instead of deleting them, to maximize effects of protest?
- bombcar 3y ago
  It probably does the most damage to delete all your posts and then sell your account, if your goal is to inflict maximum harm on Reddit, but it also harms the community (which may be the point of the operation). Maybe you could export all your posts to your blog first for any ones that may contain useful info (probably less than we’d like to think).
  - hedora 3y ago
    Has anyone tried using the reddit data dump to just stand up a copy of an old subreddit? Apparently the whole site is 2TB, so you can probably fit all your subreddits on a tiny cloud instance somewhere.
    - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
      I know of several active efforts, but am unclear about their progress.
  - nickthegreek 3y ago
    Reddit is restoring deleted posts.
  - JustBreath 3y ago
    Instead of deleting your posts/comments, edit as many of them as you can to make a statement.
throwaway1777 3y ago
What a fool
nromiun 3y ago
It's really funny how many subreddits have posts telling people to join Discord. I mean, Discord, really? Where are the Discord third party clients that consume tiny amount of data and have low latency? At least with reddit we still have the old interface. Feeling really sad for the all the lost communities.
- David_SQOX 3y ago
  I've read several comments here on HN from so called "insiders" over the last few months that old.reddit.com is going to go away this year. They already shutdown i.reddit.com for mobile users so I tend to believe that old.reddit is next.
- diydsp 3y ago
  Well there's the Thing Reddit Should Have Done: made their awful feeble chat more like discord!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - stjohnswarts 3y ago
    Yeah I've said this at least dozens of times. The subs for those who want a slower reddit and discussion linked to the subs for faster communication, probably with some levers like "you're talking too fast" or "AI has detected too. many cucks and soyboys, calm down, here's a 24 hour time out"
- fastasucan 3y ago
  Yeah I'm slightly dumbfounded that we are so much at loss on where to go next, I can't really take calls to boicot reddit but go to Discord seriously. Where are the lightweight newsletters or lightweight forums as an alternative.
- dcchambers 3y ago
  I like Discord well enough for the right purposes but it does make me truly sad to see so many niche communities go behind closed doors like Discord. Discord isn't indexed or searchable by folks (or search engines) outside of the server, and even then, it's a real-time chat application that just doesn't lend itself to the type of content that makes reddit special. Discord also has investors who will want payback on their investment...so users on Discord may find themselves in the same boat some years down the line. But people use it because the barrier to entry is so low. Even non-technical people can set up good looking and functional communities.
chippy 3y ago
One way Reddit could make money and please users is if they targeted commercial non-advertising use. Many subreddits are either customer support, product PR, or brand management factories even if they don't explicitly state so. Everything from interviews (AMA), sports, entertainment, movies, music and news to porn. A significant portion of active submissions and comments are from employees being paid. Big and small companies are spending money on people who spend time on reddit. By identifying and charging commercial users it will clean up reddit for the normal user and increase income.
- hedora 3y ago
  They could also charge for scraping data for use in LLM training. I think the bigger concern is that most of their user base simultaneously decided they can’t trust the company moving forward.
nottorp 3y ago
I'm not clear why people are looking for alternatives with "critical mass". Do you want to be fed "content" or participate in some communities you care about? If the former, anywhere you go will f- you over, like digg, like reddit now. It should be clear. If the latter, who cares if those communities are centralized or not?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jadbox 3y ago
Discourse, open source, is probably the most mature platform for tight communities. One issue with Discord is that it can't be search indexed, but Discourse is more similar to a forum and can be indexed (if public). https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/
- cunidev 3y ago
  I wish it was federated in a Mastodon fashion, that would remove most of the hassle and cost of migration
- LightHugger 3y ago
  the discourse forum software is awful from a user experience perspective unfortunately, having been victim to multiple migrations from older traditional forum software to it.
  - solardev 3y ago
    What do you dislike about it?
    - LightHugger 3y ago
      Infinite scroll, takes over ctrl-f, bad handling of subforums ("categories" were made for this purposes but ended up being extremely clunky). Then there's the visual design aspects, huge amounts of wasted screen space (depending on your aspect ratio, 1/3 of the screen width is taken up by a bloody scroll bar), lack of clear separations in the UI. I've stopped using discourse forums so i'm forgetting a lot of the complaints i would have while using them.
      - solardev 3y ago
        Those are all pretty legit!
  - stiltzkin 3y ago
    I see the opposite, older traditional forums are pain to use.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
When I use Reddit without logging in, the homepage for my country shows some really detestable subreddits promoting outright, peak election-season Facebook-tier propaganda and hateful content.
damnesian 3y ago
"When someone tells you what they think of you, believe them." Powerful advice.
symlinkk 3y ago
This guy sucks, he loves to get involved in controversial topics for attention
appel 3y ago
I'm a long time Reddit user, joined around 2008. I absolutely love it, it's pretty much the only social platform I frequent and engage in every day. How many platforms exist where users stick around for 15+ years? All the stuff that went down over the last month, the outrageous API pricing, the smearing of Apollo's developer, the gaslighting, corpospeak and non-answers in Huffman's "AMA", his complete tone-deaf memo, the ouster of mods, they have left such a foul taste in my mouth that even if they were to reverse course, which seems unlikely at best, I'm not sure if I'm sticking around after July 1st. Huffman's killing Reddit and I think it's a colossal loss for the Internet. I hope a better alternative will rise from its ashes, one that isn't beholden to shareholders or the whims of one misguided CEO.
wedesoft 3y ago
Maybe it's time for something based on Nostr. For example there is nvote.co (not working right now). I started using the iris.to Nostr web client which acts like a Twitter replacement.
scrumlord 3y ago
[dead]

565 points by hubraumhugo 3y ago

jrflowers 3y ago

Who is Louis Rossman?

happymellon 3y ago
I think he runs a repair shop. I'm not sure why his appeal to authority should matter for most people. There are plenty of reasons to leave Reddit.
- kristoff_it 3y ago
  > I'm not sure why his appeal to authority should matter for most people. The Right to Repair stuff gives him an interesting perspective on how big tech operates, which is relevant to the Reddit thing.
  - bzzzt 3y ago
    How does insight into phone construction and repairs extend to community management for big social networks?
    - kristoff_it 3y ago
      He runs some very important initiatives around Right to Repair, which do indeed play into politics, business management etc.
      - happymellon 3y ago
        And insights into API fees to get some of that sweet large language model funding?
      - lgas 3y ago
        How does that extend to community management for big social networks?
    - deepserket 3y ago
      He found a video format that gets him views and attention. I love him for the right to repair and his troubleshooting lives are interesting, but I've stopped watching most of his videos because the format of "dude films himself while reading an article " is really boring and a waste of time.
      - shever73 3y ago
        This is the first Louis Rossmann video I'd seen. I agree with a lot of what he's saying, but I don't like this format of delivery. Speaking rapidly, barely taking a breath, constant repetition. It makes my brain tired to listen to him, and I keep expecting to be offered a timeshare.
    - preisschild 3y ago
      Because it's similar. He advocates against locked down hard- and software. Reddit is locking down the API.
      - happymellon 3y ago
        Except they aren't locking it down like that, they just aren't doing it for free any more. You can still have a 3rd party app, and it can still use the API. You just pay for it. Right to repair is because you cannot buy a 3rd party screen, and you cannot use it. You have to have Apple/John Deere/etc do it.
        The_Colonel 3y ago
        > You can still have a 3rd party app, and it can still use the API. You just pay for it. Yes, but can is not will. The practical effect of this pricing will mean that almost all 3rd party apps for reddit will die, and Reddit won't get significant revenue from this change. Management knows all this, which means they are in fact trying to kill 3rd party apps, not salvage API operating costs.
        iamtedd 3y ago
        If you want to speak about Reddit's changes in 'Right to Repair' terms, it's like Apple selling a replacement screen, but pricing it at $20,000.
    - sethaurus 3y ago
      The connection is about the different incentives between a tech company and its users — and the way a company will try to exert control against the users’ interests.
    - veave 3y ago
      He was given a huge megaphone because of his expertise in a certain field and now he thinks he has important insights about everything in the world. A story as old as time itself.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      He has ~2m subscribers on Youtube, I think he would know a thing or two about moderating large communities.
gary_0 3y ago
"Louis Rossman is an American independent repair technician, YouTuber, and right to repair activist." - Wikipedia
- blitzar 3y ago
  "Influencer"
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    Man is getting bills voted on, how influential does one have to be to be an influencer?
  - sacrosancty 3y ago
    Before he was a right to repair activist, he was a complaining-about-Apple-making-life-difficult-for-independent-repairmen Youtuber, and before that, he was a showing people how he repairs computers Youtuber. He didn't just appear overnight to be an influencer.
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    The word you are looking for is "activist".
  - asylteltine 3y ago
    He’s an activist. Influencers don’t actually accomplish anything or provide value, like the ceo of Reddit
preisschild 3y ago
He has had an Apple repair store for many years and is a prominent right to repair activist.
shpx 3y ago
He started out repairing Apple computers and complaining about it on YouTube and discovered a lucrative market of long form Apple hate videos. He makes one type of video, it's him sitting in his chair wearing a microphone talking about how whatever Apple recently did is terrible.
- hugi 3y ago
  I perceive him very differently (despite being a 100% Apple guy for the past 30 years - the stuff he criticizes Apple for is justified in my opinion). He's done a lot of good for the world with his activism and work on Right to Repair.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Any company deserves to receive flak for badly designed(electrically and mechanically) products or making getting spare parts or needed information to repair them harder. Specially the users should like that. It is making their products last much longer...
- hakube 3y ago
  [flagged]
s9w 3y ago
[dead]
tinco 3y ago
He is a youtuber who is widely known for his incredibly strong ethics. He started out making tech repair videos, advertising his repair business but the channel grew out into more general social commentary and updates on his activism. It's a bit weird that someone could be famous for his strong ethics, but just watch some of his videos and you'll get it. The guy is relentless in both demanding ethics from others as reflecting on his own actions. It's really inspiring. edit: If you want an example of this, here's a video where he apologizes for something he did, and in his apology he plays a recording of a conversation with his lawyer where his lawyer recommends to do the thing, and he relents, which he later regrets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGd_Ixy9Mzc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGd_Ixy9Mzc You don't have to watch the whole thing, you'll see his character come through in the first minute of the video.
- sumedh 3y ago
  His videos about New York real estate were interesting/amusing/sad.
DonHopkins 3y ago
A dude with a lovely but hard to spot cat.

Gazoo101 3y ago

I agree in general with most of his position. One statement that fell outside of my agreement was him balking at how people leaving Reddit could cause it to crash. Fewer people should mean less load :O That position reminds of me of the Simpsons episode where Homer runs for mayor. At a debate, Homer's opponent shows up late because someone cut his car's break lines, and Homer goes - "Well then you should have been here early!" Any sufficiently large irregular site activity will cause issues. The people who are 'leaving' aren't being inactive. They're either disabling accounts, or disabling sub-reddits, all of which causes activity on the servers. It's absolutely to be expected that outages occur.

369548684892826 3y ago
For example, to make some numbers up, if only the top 10 posts in each subreddit are cached, in normal circumstances the Popular page can be constructed from cache. If the number of open subreddits reduces by 95% then suddenly a request for Popular might be hitting the database a lot more. Whatever happened is going to be more complicated than that, but I can believe people leaving, and subreddits going dark, could cause a crash.
- Nathan2055 3y ago
  Pretty much a week after starting any web development job, you discover that 95% of making a site fast is simply reducing the number of times it has to call the database. Typically, this means caching everything as much as you possibly can. This is the same reason why Wikipedia can’t just roll out a cookie-based “revert to old look” option for logged out users. It would require caching every page twice since you’d need a file prepared for both skins. The reason they can have skins for logged in users is because they already bypass the cache for logged in users (to allow for individual user scripts and stylesheets to be run, among other things). Even then, things like article text and category lists are still stored in various database caches, hence why there’s a “Purge cache” option available to logged in users.
hnick 3y ago
I can't remember the last time I deleted an account. I only do it for legal reasons. I would probably just visit Reddit less and less, until one day it's for the last time, and I never go back - not even to delete it, because it's just not occupying my thoughts anymore. Maybe if I wanted to send a message by deleting? But I think most people would just trail off and move on.

kristoff_it 3y ago

Reddit never seemed to behave in a way that made any business sense. VC money has distorted its business model since the beginning, and now it seems that Reddit is willing to burn itself to the ground to put up a barrier for preventing new players from accessing the data that OpenAI and other big tech companies have already used to train their LLMs. I guess that since it never turned a profit this is the only way VCs can get their money back. Honestly, I find this a very repugnant way of dealing with the user base. A business that never tried to earnestly generate enough value to be sustainable can only be classified as a scam in my book.

blitzar 3y ago
I know it will be as popluar as rabies around here ... but that is litterally the entire business model of Silicon Valley, including YC (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S05 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=S05).
- ramijames 3y ago
  Absolutely agree with this. Everything that is wrong with modern tech business models has to do with VCs and chasing funding or valuation.
- eschaton 3y ago
  No, it’s the business model of YC and “New Silicon Valley.” The original companies that caused people to start calling this entire region Silicon Valley were making—and, in a few cases, are still making—real things intended to make their users’ lives better. It was the dot-com bubble and its couple of resurgences that really fucked things up here and made everything off-kilter. The finance bros were drawn like vultures to “easy profit,” and brought with them attitudes like treating Google’s chef getting rich too as a “problem” to be “solved” rather than the system working as designed.
  - rvense 3y ago
    Wait, I thought it was called Silly Con Valley because of this exact model?

Dave3of5 3y ago

I agree with a lot that Louis says and what strikes me on this one is when he said the guy doesn't care about you and that he thinks the value is in the servers and the api. I've worked in tech with a lot of people like this. They will tell you straight up they don't care about users or employees. CTO I've worked with said that developers are like "machines working in a factory" that they shouldn't think above their level and should just do the same thing over and over. I'll tell you one thing you'll never change the reddit managements minds, never ever ever. Same as I was never able to change any of these other peoples minds.

koliber 3y ago
> CTO I've worked with said that developers are like "machines working in a factory" that they shouldn't think above their level and should just do the same thing over and over. This shows how important it is to learn about a company, it's culture, philosophy, and values before joining. I can see how some people operate like this, and I don't want to work with them. For anyone reading this who thinks all companies are like the one that parent described, I want to share that it is not true. There are plenty of companies who based their collaboration with their workers on other mental models than cogs-in-the-machine.
- koito17 3y ago
  > learn about a company, it's culture, philosophy, and values before joining. I may sound dumb, but how does one do this? What question would you ask in an interview in order to determine whether the management are apathetic to their users or employees? The three interviews I did at my current company gave me a glimpse into the culture, but only a surface-level "first impression" kind of knowledge. With that said, I think I successfully ascertained the company's vision with the product I'm working on, but that's way easier to learn than culture IMO.
  - smugma 3y ago
    “Tell me about a time when Engineering changed the product direction…” Open-ended questions like that.

black_puppydog 3y ago

We all know the drill: pick up the shambles of your community. Move to a federated service (lemmy in this case) and try to get as many of your peers to join you there. Actually, subreddits being mapped as lemmy instances makes more sense to me than the "single identity" of reddit.

fastball 3y ago
The problem with that plan is that a huge amount of the value of Reddit was that it was well-indexed by search engines so that when you went searching for something, the conversations from Reddit would pop up, which were generally quite high-quality as far as forum-type content goes. If you move everything to Lemmy, that won't happen much and as a result fewer people will join the community that don't already know about it somehow.
- zo1 3y ago
  I'm sure with enough community-support someone will write a plugin or tool to expose Lemmy content to http pages that can be indexed? I haven't used Lemmy before, but if I was making a Reddit-like clone, that sort of thing would have been baked in from the start.
  - Gareth321 3y ago
    To my knowledge, Lemmy instances can all be crawled by Google already. Using "site:lemmy.world" for example, returns indexed results. It's just that Google's algorithm has received billions of reddit searches for years, so they're biasing Reddit results. This will change organically.
- mlatu 3y ago
  well, what good is it when google indexes ANYTHING? even cohost appears high in results nowadays... and dont get me started about how google includes also crap generated by llms... google is on its course of devalueing itself. the human internet is probably doomed. long live the llm generated internet oh which gives me an idea: fake users as a service: using llm to generate comments for reddit after the dark

silisili 3y ago

I took him more seriously when he was in a shop showing us things and explaining things and really exposing things. Lately he's just a person on a recliner whining about the world. This doesn't discredit his ideas, mind you, I actually agree with a lot. But there's no more special sauce...anyone could make ranting videos from their recliner. I find the whole format incredibly bizarre and unprofessional...

alpaca128 3y ago
What makes you think he isn't exposing things anymore? He just mostly moved from electronics-level videos to showing what corporations and their PR do in general, which makes sense given he's now much more active in the Right to Repair-initiative, which is still the exact same range of topics he covered earlier. Edit: and I guess not having a motherboard in view all the time helps with reaching a larger audience.
fragmede 3y ago
Since you agree with it, what about it doesn't make you feel like he is being a mouthpiece for you? Someone needs to say what he's saying, might as well be him. Mind you, I don't disagree with you, I feel the same way, I'm exploring why the format is just off somehow.
- Remmy 3y ago
  I'm not sure why it feels so weird either, but it definitely does. I was never a big fan of him personally, but have to agree with a lot of what he says. I think, for me at least, watching him work on a board while saying these things made it more relatable where this feels more like, "Gather round the big comfy chair, children. I cle Louis is going to rant and profanely scream about X, then talk to his cat in a baby voice." Just... Odd.
- dagw 3y ago
  Someone needs to say what he's saying, might as well be him. Much like many meetings should be an email, many youtube videos should be 400-800 word essays. If you're going to present that sort of information in an audio-visual form you need add some value above and beyond just the words you say, and I don't feel he does that. I feel the same way several channels I subscribe to, like Gamers Nexus. Every time I watch one of their videos, I always come away thinking "that was some pretty useful information, I'm really glad they put in the work to make it available, I really wish I could have read it in a blog post"

drumhead 3y ago

Reading one of the threads about it someone lamented that "the old relationship on Reddit is dead now". It really did feel like a unique relationship between the users and management for a long time. But that much money can corrupt the best of us.

Nathan2055 3y ago
I’d argue that the management/user relationship has been dead ever since they killed Secret Santa. Some others might argue that the Victoria firing is what did it, but at least the admins were still showing up publicly at that point in random threads and trying to justify it to the community. For Secret Santa, they basically just said “this doesn’t make us money, so we’re not putting any resources into it anymore.” It was made even worse by the fact that it was originally a community thing that Reddit corporate willingly took over to help manage better. And they just killed it as soon as it wasn’t generating value anymore.
- drumhead 3y ago
  Yeah, you're right about Secret Santa, that was such a cross sub community activity. It was really petty of them to get rid of it but it was foretaste of what was to come and their attitude towawrds the community spirt of Reddit.

thih9 3y ago

Is there a text summary for those who cannot watch the video at the moment?

fragmede 3y ago
https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZOm_UKGyrZg https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZOm_UKGyrZg

zmmmmm 3y ago

There's a problem with the fundamental underlying argument here, which rests on the notion that all the value of Reddit actually comes from the moderators and the users posting content. The problem is, if Reddit itself has no value, why does every other option suck? During the blackout I made an honest to god attempt to use other things. I tried Lemmy. I tried Discord. I tried Mastodon. I hated them all. It's definitely partly just critical mass - the communities just aren't there - but it's not only that. Nobody has managed to replicate the classic / old Reddit UI/UX either. I hate all the new UIs. I don't know what's so hard about it. It's a list of links with some upvote / downvote buttons. I'll be more ready to believe there's no value in Reddit when I see that somebody has actually successfully cloned it and made a place for these communities to go to that's anything like as good as what Reddit offers.

slikrick 3y ago
if reddit itself had no communities would that UI/UX even matter? you didn't learn it because it was good, you learned it because you had to to use the site lol
1500100900 3y ago
Give Mastodon a threaded view and technically it's the same as reddit, but federated? Usenet, but not just for nerds.
- Nathan2055 3y ago
  That’s basically just Lemmy/kbin. Those two services can even interconnect with Mastodon thanks to ActivityPub. As I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, moving text around on the Internet has been a solved problem ever since NNTP. And that was 1986! The only problem is that there’s not a lot of money in it, which is why having the ability to federate a bunch of smaller services together is such a good solution (at least on a technical level).
ehnto 3y ago
Reddit Inc doesn't even believe in the UX you're talking about, old.reddit won't be around forever and the API move is killing off alternative apps. Discord is a fundamentally different platform to Reddit so I am not surprised it didn't compare. What reddit has is a network effect and good enough technology, given their tech is already available as open source clones ready to be deployed, their only edge is their network effect. Kill off the community and all you are left with is some easily reproducible code and a server bill.

nologic01 3y ago

You never know what a corporate entity is really made of until you see it in a downturn. That is when the actual contracts that make people tick kick-in, removing the obfuscation from free money and subsidized freebies.

beloch 3y ago

The problem is that many people have come to think of reddit as a public utility. People expect a public utility to, perhaps, not be that innovative and maybe a little poorly run at times. What they do expect from a public utility is long-term reliability. They expect it to be there, doing what it does now, five or ten years from now. For some people (e.g. the blind), all of reddit is going dark on July 1st. Reddit is not a public utility. It's owners have decided that short-term profits are more important than serving as a long-term non-profit public utility. I can't fault any business person for making this decision, but it's the key reason why we need publicly controlled infrastructure to do what reddit does now. Reddit is many beneficial things. Just for one example, it's a new foundation of journalism. How many professional journalists rely on reddit to find and research news stories? If you read your local city's sub and then read your local newspaper the following day, there will be a surprising amount of repeated material. Governments in many countries run public broadcasting corporations, public news programs, and even subsidize privately owned news companies, although in many cases that's mere corporate welfare. They do this because they realize that journalism is a cornerstone of free society. The functions that reddit now performs are too important to leave in the hands of short-sighted corporate executives who have absolutely zero interest in anything beyond their next quarterly report and the bonuses tied to it. We must not jump from reddit into the hands of yet another corporation or this will simply happen again. Public funding has produced things like lemmy.ml, but such projects aren't ready to scale nor, arguably, interested in doing so. This is something the UN should tackle to prove they still have relevance in the modern world. Instead of simply issuing non-binding warning after warning, perhaps it's time for international organizations to build the kind of public infrastructure that provides a benefit to all of humanity.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
>> How many professional journalists rely on reddit to find and research news stories? That would be very unprofessional journalists. At least with the issues of the current war the flow of information is as follows: small telegram channels -> large telegram channels -> translation -> twitter -> reddit.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> The problem is that many people have come to think of reddit as a public utility. (...) Reddit is not a public utility. It's owners have decided that short-term profits are more important than serving as a long-term non-profit public utility. I can't fault any business person for making this decision, but it's the key reason why we need publicly controlled infrastructure to do what reddit does now. Exactly this. And the same applies to Twitter and Facebook as well. And probably increasingly Discord. In the end, both sides lose because of this misunderstanding (well, except the investors on the business side win). There is demand for both, and there is space for both, and I think the society at large is going to slowly realize that the two things - utility-like social media and regular private business - are different, and learn to differentiate between them - and maybe then, finally, the utility-like social media will be created.

czechdeveloper 3y ago

I left today. Very sad about it too.

sharts 3y ago

Usenet, IRC, and Gopher have always been better alternatives to Reddit, Slack, and the bloated web.

Ultimatt 3y ago
This is an underrated notion, but I'd maybe point at XMPP instead as a better throwback
saboot 3y ago
That fills some void, but not all. I particularly liked the <local city> subreddits, used it to find cool events, but now the only alternative is .. Facebook or nextdoor (yikes)
- sireat 3y ago
  There used to be local city newsgroups about 30 years ago. I do not see why there couldn't be moderated usenet groups again. Then again, last time I read a newsgroup was some 12 years ago when I created a simple newsgroup client (with built in Python nntplib) and qt. There was some active news groups but very few.

gonzo41 3y ago

Ok fine go. Just tell me where to go next. I'm ready. I don't really care where. I'm just waiting for a viable option to hit critical mass. Honestly. Does Reddit even cost that much to run? If you ran it like wikipedia what would that look like?

vanilla_nut 3y ago
Not to be a bandwagoner, but Lemmy has really picked up over the last few days. There's plenty of scaling issues right now, but take a look at the centralized community browser (https://browse.feddit.de/ https://browse.feddit.de/) to see if there are enough interesting budding subreddits there to pique your interest. Will 90% of Redditors move over? Not immediately, and likely not ever. But if maybe 10% leave -- largely comprised of enthusiasts, moderators, and power users who benefited the most from old.reddit and third party apps -- then we've got a community the size of 2007 Reddit anyway. Which everyone seems to agree was a better-sized community than Reddit today anyway.
rossriley 3y ago
mainly we're moving to the fediverse sites, for most people it's one of Lemmy, Kbin or beehaw and a lot of communities have grown to be really substantial over the last few days.
bombcar 3y ago
You're already here! HN is "good Reddit for nerds". You have to find alternate sources of your cat video discussion, however. I wonder if my YC submission for "HackerNudes" as a NSFW clone will fly? I just need to find someone named Don G. to moderate it ... (/sarcasm)
asylteltine 3y ago
You don’t need a place to go next. Nothing on Reddit or similar sites is a valuable use of time. Literally, nothing. Go touch grass, learn some skill, or build something.

LatteLazy 3y ago

I remember when people left Digg for Reddit. You need two things for an exodus: a push <Tick Emoji here> AND a viable alternative <Question mark Emoji here> Where is everyone to go?

atourgates 3y ago
This is the big difference. At the time I left Digg for Reddit, Reddit already had a strong community that offered me better content and discussion than Digg. As far as I can tell, with the exception of perhaps Discord, the alternatives being proposed to Reddit are asking users to _build_ their community on an alternative platform, not join an existing strong community. That seems like a bar too high at the moment, though I hope I’m wrong. That said, I expect it’ll take time. Reddit’s C-Suite have lost the plot, and lost sight of the value of their service and their relationship with their community. I don’t expect them to be supplanted in the next week or two, but I’d be shocked if they were still around at anything like Reddit’s current size and active userbase in a year or two.
- bombcar 3y ago
  There have already been multiple Reddit "splinter sites" created (usually when a subreddit got banned) with more or less success. If a few big good subs do the same, it could start an avalanche. By "good" I mean subs that have actual substantive content, not just people looking at lefunnypost.
rchaud 3y ago
In 2010, it was Reddit that was the question mark. People that left Digg could have gone to Slashdot, Something Awful, Twitter, Fark, Cracked forums or topic-specific phpBB boards (there were many).

pyronaur 3y ago

I don't know where this will end up in, but I know I can: sudo echo "127.0.0.1 reddit.com # The real blackout" >> /etc/hosts

ctde 3y ago
unfortunately this doesn't work if the user doesn't have write permissions for /etc/hosts already. perhaps: echo "127.0.0.1 reddit.com # The real blackout" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts ?
- LinuxBender 3y ago
  If they are using the uBlock Origin addon they can go to Preferences -> My Filters and add: # Block Reddit Experiment ||redd.it^ ||redditblog.com^ ||reddit.com^ ||redditinc.com^ ||redditmail.com^ ||redditmedia.com^ ||redditstatic.com^ ||redditstatus.com^ I've been using that as an experiment to see how many times I click a link that is blocked. Thus far only once.

bentxt 3y ago

One interesting (maybe obvious) point Louis was making: This company and brand is worth nothing without its user. There is simply no interesting tech here. That leads to the question: What would it take to create a website that is similar enough, to make user instantly feel at home, but different enough to not get into legal trouble?

haunter 3y ago
Fork and deploy old Reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
- bentxt 3y ago
  Why not? Would that be legal though?
  - haunter 3y ago
    Why wouldn’t? It’s open source Reddit is a trademark but that’s another story
    - bentxt 3y ago
      I think the code is less interesting then the (graphic) design and some of the wording (kharma) that people are used to. And maybe further expressions like AITA or /r/whathever. How is the legal situation here I wonder
      - hedora 3y ago
        The old code that reddit published says you have to put a copyright on any service that runs the software, so /r/foo would be fine, and the bottom of each page would say something like “Portions of server software copyright reddit 2017”. I am not a lawyer, but that’s my reading of the license on that repo.
  - nmlrqf 3y ago

mekoka 3y ago

Reddit's main value is (was?) collective convenience and familiarity. Like Whatsapp. Like Facebook. Those social networks where you wish that everybody you're connected with would just quit to join something else, together, all at once. But your family and friends just won't budge. You could hate the management itself, but knew what to expect from it and could find solace in the idea that "surely, they won't shoot themselves in the foot!" A devil you know kinda deal. But now, Reddit has gone and shot itself in the foot and the communities are trying to understand what it means for them. The difficulty to find a new home is likely political. So many users migrating to a single new network is a lot of power afforded to any one entity. In an age where so many visionaries have claimed to want a good future for humanity, but ended up either selling that dream away, or revealing their own dystopian version of it, who are you going to trust? Short of the enduring brand and gravitas of something like the Wikimedia Foundation, or Craigslist, who are you going to entrust such a responsibility?

guerrilla 3y ago
> who are you going to entrust such a responsibility? Nobody aka ourselves, which is why we need to get the fediverse working instead of standing on the side bitching about how it's not good enough yet.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  How would you get the fediverse working?
  - guerrilla 3y ago
    Start by participating, and then identifying and elaborating concrete problems and potential solutions to them.
    - hutzlibu 3y ago
      So what concrete problems and potential solutions do you see? Edit: People have been participating in federated networks since ages. But it is hard. Especially if you want to give users the same experience as with non federated sites. And I am not sure, if for example lemmy has solved it https://programming.dev/post/50696 https://programming.dev/post/50696 So it is an open question, if a federated network can work as stable and easy as a centralized instance. I would think so, but so far it is only a hypothesis.

epolanski 3y ago

I deleted my account. Was looking for an excuse to remove myself from that time-sink website anyway, but can't lie, the changes they made in the last decade have progressively ruined my experience.

vanilla_nut 3y ago
I was on the fence for the past couple of weeks. But this interview (https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...) pushed me over the edge. Huffman's doublespeak, white lies (I'm certain there's a bunch of third party apps that you won't name that are still "in talks" about the new API pricing), and actual lies (trying to smear Christian's name) point to a company that simply cannot be trusted. Even if Reddit fixed all of the API issues today, I wouldn't want to go back. And you bring up the most important issue anyway: every single Reddit community I've participated in has become noticeably worse over the past decade. They don't care because we're not the meme-and-ad-slurpee sipping target audience who will mindlessly scroll pictures and videos on the official Reddit app.
JustBreath 3y ago
Instead of deleting your account I'd recommend editing all your posts to make a statement. This way you're not only removing yourself, but also burning the content you provided.

neatze 3y ago

Is it unethical (stupid) to sell your reddit account(s), instead of deleting them, to maximize effects of protest?

bombcar 3y ago
It probably does the most damage to delete all your posts and then sell your account, if your goal is to inflict maximum harm on Reddit, but it also harms the community (which may be the point of the operation). Maybe you could export all your posts to your blog first for any ones that may contain useful info (probably less than we’d like to think).
- hedora 3y ago
  Has anyone tried using the reddit data dump to just stand up a copy of an old subreddit? Apparently the whole site is 2TB, so you can probably fit all your subreddits on a tiny cloud instance somewhere.
  - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
    I know of several active efforts, but am unclear about their progress.
- nickthegreek 3y ago
  Reddit is restoring deleted posts.
- JustBreath 3y ago
  Instead of deleting your posts/comments, edit as many of them as you can to make a statement.

throwaway1777 3y ago

What a fool

nromiun 3y ago

It's really funny how many subreddits have posts telling people to join Discord. I mean, Discord, really? Where are the Discord third party clients that consume tiny amount of data and have low latency? At least with reddit we still have the old interface. Feeling really sad for the all the lost communities.

David_SQOX 3y ago
I've read several comments here on HN from so called "insiders" over the last few months that old.reddit.com is going to go away this year. They already shutdown i.reddit.com for mobile users so I tend to believe that old.reddit is next.
diydsp 3y ago
Well there's the Thing Reddit Should Have Done: made their awful feeble chat more like discord!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- stjohnswarts 3y ago
  Yeah I've said this at least dozens of times. The subs for those who want a slower reddit and discussion linked to the subs for faster communication, probably with some levers like "you're talking too fast" or "AI has detected too. many cucks and soyboys, calm down, here's a 24 hour time out"
fastasucan 3y ago
Yeah I'm slightly dumbfounded that we are so much at loss on where to go next, I can't really take calls to boicot reddit but go to Discord seriously. Where are the lightweight newsletters or lightweight forums as an alternative.
dcchambers 3y ago
I like Discord well enough for the right purposes but it does make me truly sad to see so many niche communities go behind closed doors like Discord. Discord isn't indexed or searchable by folks (or search engines) outside of the server, and even then, it's a real-time chat application that just doesn't lend itself to the type of content that makes reddit special. Discord also has investors who will want payback on their investment...so users on Discord may find themselves in the same boat some years down the line. But people use it because the barrier to entry is so low. Even non-technical people can set up good looking and functional communities.

chippy 3y ago

One way Reddit could make money and please users is if they targeted commercial non-advertising use. Many subreddits are either customer support, product PR, or brand management factories even if they don't explicitly state so. Everything from interviews (AMA), sports, entertainment, movies, music and news to porn. A significant portion of active submissions and comments are from employees being paid. Big and small companies are spending money on people who spend time on reddit. By identifying and charging commercial users it will clean up reddit for the normal user and increase income.

hedora 3y ago
They could also charge for scraping data for use in LLM training. I think the bigger concern is that most of their user base simultaneously decided they can’t trust the company moving forward.

nottorp 3y ago

I'm not clear why people are looking for alternatives with "critical mass". Do you want to be fed "content" or participate in some communities you care about? If the former, anywhere you go will f- you over, like digg, like reddit now. It should be clear. If the latter, who cares if those communities are centralized or not?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jadbox 3y ago

Discourse, open source, is probably the most mature platform for tight communities. One issue with Discord is that it can't be search indexed, but Discourse is more similar to a forum and can be indexed (if public). https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/

cunidev 3y ago
I wish it was federated in a Mastodon fashion, that would remove most of the hassle and cost of migration
LightHugger 3y ago
the discourse forum software is awful from a user experience perspective unfortunately, having been victim to multiple migrations from older traditional forum software to it.
- solardev 3y ago
  What do you dislike about it?
  - LightHugger 3y ago
    Infinite scroll, takes over ctrl-f, bad handling of subforums ("categories" were made for this purposes but ended up being extremely clunky). Then there's the visual design aspects, huge amounts of wasted screen space (depending on your aspect ratio, 1/3 of the screen width is taken up by a bloody scroll bar), lack of clear separations in the UI. I've stopped using discourse forums so i'm forgetting a lot of the complaints i would have while using them.
    - solardev 3y ago
      Those are all pretty legit!
- stiltzkin 3y ago
  I see the opposite, older traditional forums are pain to use.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

When I use Reddit without logging in, the homepage for my country shows some really detestable subreddits promoting outright, peak election-season Facebook-tier propaganda and hateful content.

damnesian 3y ago

"When someone tells you what they think of you, believe them." Powerful advice.

symlinkk 3y ago

This guy sucks, he loves to get involved in controversial topics for attention

appel 3y ago

I'm a long time Reddit user, joined around 2008. I absolutely love it, it's pretty much the only social platform I frequent and engage in every day. How many platforms exist where users stick around for 15+ years? All the stuff that went down over the last month, the outrageous API pricing, the smearing of Apollo's developer, the gaslighting, corpospeak and non-answers in Huffman's "AMA", his complete tone-deaf memo, the ouster of mods, they have left such a foul taste in my mouth that even if they were to reverse course, which seems unlikely at best, I'm not sure if I'm sticking around after July 1st. Huffman's killing Reddit and I think it's a colossal loss for the Internet. I hope a better alternative will rise from its ashes, one that isn't beholden to shareholders or the whims of one misguided CEO.

wedesoft 3y ago

Maybe it's time for something based on Nostr. For example there is nvote.co (not working right now). I started using the iris.to Nostr web client which acts like a Twitter replacement.

scrumlord 3y ago

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