I still use Reddit but way less than I used to before, and I no longer use it for fun but just to read niche tech subs.
I refuse to use the official mobile app. I've always used Baconreader and then Relay on Android. Relay survived the API changes and adopted a subscription model.
But thanks to Revanced I was able to patch an old version of Relay to use my own API key for free.
Pretty much sums up every popular social media platform these days.
HN is still a good place to learn about whats going on in the tech world and what not because it's simple and filters out alot of "brainrot", although there is an increasing number of comments that soley react at the headline.
Reddit has become like meta, you either have an account or your user experience will be so horrible that you won't use it.
X simply doesn't allow you to use it, atleast it doesn't pretend.
I think we need more simple websites again, but I am not sure about the incentive structure.
Channel operator drama was a major thing with IRC back when it was popular (sometimes ending to like channel splits or even whole netsplits if the people involved were related to the server operators, bot/flood wars, etc), so yeah, there isn't anything specific to Reddit about it. I wasn't part of it but i am pretty sure you'd see the same patterns in Usenet back when that was popular (and despite the romantization, i somehow doubt that Usenet was all roses before the "Eternal September").
human population. Most people are stupid and the only way to have something nice is to gatekeep. Every single time any community grows too large it becomes shit.
That site wouldn’t have any spam, true. Though not because of the cost, but because it wouldn’t have any users to make it worth spamming. No one wants to pay per message. Everybody would be too nervous and quadruple-thinking “is this message worth a cent?” Once in a blue moon someone would post, get no reply, and be even more unlikely to post next.
And yes, yes, not literally everyone, but enough that it becomes a rounding error.
People were saying this about email 20+ years ago.
Not sure if it's the case here but there's a tendency for those in tech to think people problems can be solved with code.
Many of the bad things on the internet are a layer 8 issue and collective human behaviour isn't an easy problem to solve.
[1] https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works
Someone built this (a 4chan clone) on ethereum, I can't remember what it's called. It was pretty dead, but the project exists.
Check out this paper:
https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%...
From a purely theoretical level, there's a very broad range of incomes worldwide, so any price point you use to keep spammers out makes it unaffordable to the average person in many nations, and varying pricing by nation just means the spammers pretend to be from the cheapest nation(s).
We also have a demonstration of payment-based messaging systems in that price range with SMS and voice calls, which still get junk. (Nation-specific: my German SIM gets none while my UK SIM gets a lot… but only when I actually visit the UK).
For subscription-based payment filtering, similar — while it's hard for me to determine which of Musks's statements I should take seriously or literally, twitter premium pricing it's still a test of this idea even if it wasn't the true intent behind Musk's assertion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwELepvBAVY
> He said "if I was in charge of Facebook, mate, I'd be saying like 'fucking QUID A GO!'"
> It gave me a small sense of hometown pride when I realized the guy was serious... small sense of hometown pride that there must be very few places in the world where Mark Zuckerberg would be offered financial advice from a guy who was 15 pence short for [his bus fare]
The psychology is already there, "all" that's required a snowball to start adoption in the online media space.
Was this the initial idea of the Brave browser? Did that succeed to some extent?
Also it tends to be made illegal for obvious reasons (even if in practice, everyone but the most careful user eventually gets identified by their IP, the logs of which Web servers are legally obligated to keep in most states).
Otherwise, if you actually meant pseudonymous payments, well, Flattr actually tried to do it. Flattr 1.0 basically died in the 2012-2013 Twitter APIpocalypse, while Flattr 2.0 never managed to get enough reach, unlike the Silicon Valley backed, new competitor, Patreon.
It should cost at least 10 cents. And I think your idea is the future.
It seems like there are things reddit could do to squelch spam that it doesn't seem to be doing, like disallowing duplicate text in posts as one example. Beyond a certain karma it seems like posting rate becomes unrestricted and I think more than one post every 10 seconds is spamming regardless.
So I think reddit right now doesn't have much incentive to squelch spam since it's not doing that much, it would take effort, and effort == money.
I think the for profit model is reddit's biggest problem right now. Others have pointed to USENET's problems, but in an open protocol those were things that could have been surmounted with effort. The for-profit problem with reddit looks to be insurmountable and the rate of enshitification will only accelerate.
Probably a clone of the old reddit is in order. Like cleddit (.com is squatted on but not .org or .net) or something like that. Or a new version of the USENET protocol. For all it's problems USENET did reveal what made scientology 'tick' behind the scenes on alt.religion.scientology. Some new version of USENET might also address DMCA abuses also.
Then go make one. It’s easier now than ever. The social media mistake was trying to make one site everything to everyone but the web is still there.
I miss the old web, the old browser based games. So I'm digging out my old code from shareware I made 15 years ago and turning some of them into free games.
Likewise my blog, converted it from Wordpress into plain HTML. I have more control, at the "expense" of not having a visitor counter system that might go up to 100 if I post a link here but otherwise only goes up to 1-4 views.
This means no need for ads, which is a better user experience directly.
It also means no built-in tracking cookies that I can't remove, and by extension no need for a popup that parrots "we value your privacy" like it's a magic phrase to keep demons at bay even though they "value" the privacy in the same way that a pirate values the cargo of the ship they're taking from at cannon-point.
I only browse old.reddit logged out and log in if I want to to comment before logging out by deleting my cookies. I started doing this after seeing the first "year in review" thing they sent to my account, which creeped me out. Especially not being able to disable this type of data collection, on either of the two sites.
I may be having an easier time of it by using RES though.
Almost every app now degrades quickly after startup capital fades, maybe we should just all quit social apps the minute they show signs of degrading, because right now most of the content, ads, and people on these social apps are now just as uninteractive, repetitive, mundane, and unrewarding as watching TV.
The internet has always had nice discussion forums that were labors of love of generous people. In the case of HN, the generous person running the forum is actually a company managing billions of dollars. In the absence of a better funding model for the internet, maybe that’s the solution: altruistic billionaires finance more discussion forums that don’t exist to be profitable, at least not directly.
The exponential growth required of publicly traded social media companies drives different motives in moderating and promoting the discussions.
A certain person tried that, but HN has given them nothing but hate over it.
If there’s a specific idea you or others had in mind that was different, I haven’t seen any serious proposals or roadmaps posted. I’d love to see it though, I’d rather things be more decentralized without the contemporary gatekeeping that comes with it.
Also I’m not sure what you had in mind for altruistic. There’s a difference between financing people’s nostalgia fetishes and financing the repairing of society, but either could be squeezed into the definition.
Even if you run across a “news” subreddit and comment on something that doesn’t seem Left, you will get banned right now. It’s very toxic.
Best to stay away from Popular
You’re saying that you look explicitly for things that conform to your political views, comment things with your political views, then get banned?
Do you have a link to an example?
When you comment to complain, you get "Star Trek has always been political", "The Simpsons has always been political".
Yeah... but Star Trek memes hasn't always been. /r/SimpsonsShitposting used to be funny, not just sarcastic eye-rolls about [current-republican-bogey-man/woman strawman].
also any sub related to anything remotely gender specific immediately gets overrun with incel content (or female equivalent)
but I do think niche or regional community oriented subs are worth frequenting
Some stayed, of course, but I feel anecdotally that content on reddit now is mainly posted by casual users and bots.
Reddit is one of those great examples were management and execs all feel like they need to show their impact and justify their salary and just make the platform worse.
Bots and propaganda are literally everywhere. The platform keeps getting worse but I admit it is to some extent addictive.
I am somewhat happy that HN is one of those places where politics are generally avoided.
I am sick of people arguing about geopolitics and national politics like it was some fan battle while not even knowing their mayor candidates programs, hell many don't even know who their mayor is or what their city council is working on.
This stems imho from the dead of traditional newspapers who were often local, in favor of internet media which is in its nature global.
I swear most people in Italy know more about US politics than what's happening in their own backyard, completely backwards.
HN is avoiding it because somebody else pays to run it and there's zero images or videos.
Also re: politics, stuff the federal government does affects me a lot whereas most local governments seem pretty similar and powerless. If the pendulum can swing so broadly ever 4 years I'd better watch it, right?
The last mayor of my city decided to make the entirety of the fields in front of my house (in Italy, countryside near Rome) buildable and completely ruined the view from my house and filled it with traffic.
Honest question: If, other than voting every 4 years, you have no ability to impact change, why spend the time watching it? Why not spend the time doing something more constructive that you have the ability to impact? (aside from prior to the election to inform voting, of course)
To be clear, amidst this, reddit was still growing. So from an Excel sheet management perspective, nothing seems wrong. But most of that growth could be found in low effort content that honestly can be found on any social media platform. Where the sort of unique content that did set reddit apart slowly started to decrease in both quantity and quality over the years.
disclaimer: i created it to scratch my own itch for the reason you list
The bigger problem is the amount of lazy comments on the site, which are invariably highly upvoted.
I'm so sick of pun threads, and office references and any other popular culture reference.
They've just about made me start to hate Monty Python, which is quite an accomplishment.
The latest is that everyone is beating Dune references absolutely to death.
If someone wants an AI project idea, then a browser extension which used an LLM to score all the comments in a Reddit thread and filter out all the lazy comments would be useful. If it works, most of the comments on front page articles should disappear.
It would probably eliminate most of the actual bot comments as well.
Actually the genuine content (and votes) seems to be a minority now?
Reddit and X are both very bad, where is the non-video fun these days?
dont follow the very large subreddits
i mostly follow it for game specific subreddits, and my hobbies such as woodworking etc
lots of great users in there
The project got a (small) grant from NLNet a couple of months ago for me to work on having the functionality built-in into the Voyager client (a PWA Apollo clone). If more people or companies would like to help/support, hit me up.
Would it be viable to add a setting for your own Fediverse account so that you could click on the communities to redirect them to your own server? For instance, if I search for /r/switzerland, there would be a button by the Fediverser suggestion of switzerland@feddit.ch to open it on my own Fediverse server - like the 'Take me home' button on the Mastodon web client.
If your problem is in discovering the "canonical" community in case there are duplicates, then I'd invite you to take a look at https://fediverser.network
Sure, you can pick a random one like fediverser.network apparently does. Looking at one line from the list, I see that r/manga points to ani.social/c/manga which has 561 subscribers, when lemmy.ml/c/manga has 3,480. What?
The one thing that I have noticed is that I have been reaching to quite a good number of mods on Reddit to see if they would be interested in migrating their communities, but the absolute majority of them seem to really act like "landed Gentry", they complain about Reddit, but are downright apathetic to any type of change. They keep saying "being a mod is not fun/thankless/source of abuse", yet they refuse to let go of the position.
My shared IP has been network blocked by Reddit and anonymous browsing is disabled. I also see about fifty captchas per day. I really, really miss the old web and plain text too...
Also, they are part of the API much of which is actually restricted behind authorization.
Drug trade, online. The first taste is free. Authenticating it digs into the profits.
It has a single redeeming feature - network effects on good user conent. That's it...literally everything else about it is a dumpsterfire, including how they treat devs.
This is actually still working! Trying on one of the top posts right now, if you change
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my...
to
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my...
you get all comments as json, with no need for authentication. So it's probably trivial to develop a client that would use this and have a nice ui and bypass any and all ads. Interesting.
AFAIK, you don't actually get all comments, and it's impossible to enumerate all comments to a post via that method. Give it a try to enumerate based on the data that gets returned, and you'll end up with a way smaller number than the reddit UI shows on the website.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cxh3a/we_just_...
Reddit had a good community and content in the early days, but as it grew in popularity and squeezed profit the value dropped.
I think it’s funny that early LLM projects were bootstrapped by scraping Reddit. I guess it was better than random garbage from common crawl, but the world has moved on.
/a/? MAL? I think anime discussion is one of the few topics readily abundant elsewhere on the web, it's the other niches that are really hard to find.
The only API you need is HTTP. Those who try to pervert you into thinking that they can decide what user-agent you can use are only trying to control more than what they own.
Given that rss is _designed_ to be read by "bots" i.e. computer programs, what is Reddit's stance there? Do they also consider it "bypassing API restrictions"?
My trick: subscribe to the "top weekly" feeds for each of your subs, which keeps the fire hose at a very manageable level.
Management and SWEs being paid very comfortable salaries to build critical features like... an online indicator, or products that just get shut down after a year because they never bothered interfacing with the community and focusing on a better user experience.
Or, as it's better known, resume driven development.
It was my togo app, i spent hours browsing and reading random comments and articles, my English got surprisingly better than most of my peers and all it took was a mild internet addiction.
Now it's short form content for me. YouTube mainly (premium helps a lot, tiktok enshittified a little with shops and the slideshows).
I mourn RIF and count the days untill old.reddit is no longer supported.
Videos take much longer than reading text . And they mostly say the same things. It's just that the better content has moved to youtube, where it can be monetized better
But I’m a late boomer, so I come from the last century. I consume video content, but also, a great deal of written stuff.
"This is so ridiculous and funny " was my first reaction but then mind broke at the realization that this is the new future.
The same with ChatGPT...it's sad that it answers better than Google for generic information search, especially if you aren't familiar with specific terms in that field.
Text is dead
It was surprisingly easy to abandon it.
I miss the old Reddit, I hate the new. I used to use it a fair bit (and even contribute to niche topics) but deleted my account and content when they announced the API changes.
Reddit is a zombie site now, it’s effectively dead. Unless you’re into arguing US politics then that’s where the party is.
How the fuck was reddit not profitable?
The founder said it but i still don't belive it.
Was all the money spent in bullshit features no one still uses or it was before that?
This results in companies rapidly growing until no more profit can be made in the short term at which point they start cutting costs to continue show profit. The cuts result in destroying the long term value (firing valuable know how etc.) for a short term profit. At the end the company dies or becomes a sad zombie.
Rinse and repeat.
Before all this, before an IPO was considered an option, they actually did try to make the platform sustainable for a while. I can't remember the details, but buying gold (and getting some perks) you supported reddit. They actively promoted this and even had a counter that showcased how much you contributed to server costs and all that. This is also the only time I remember that reddit reported numbers in the black.
They could easily have built further on this and increased income sustainably and slowly growing over time. But clearly at some point it was decided that this approach was not enough and that they needed more rapid growth and work towards an IPO. Which is the point where they massively scaled up their staff, started attracting investments and started working on the redesigned reddit. Which truly marked the beginning of the end.
Not to say that things were perfect before that, far from it, the platform had enough issues back then as well. But there was a very distinct and clear point where things still could have turned around and reddit would be a radically different platform from what it is today.
The real users probably aren't worth much, advertising wise. The key young demographic doesn't use it, and only a small portion of the next most valuable does.
The key demo of 18 to 34 is mostly uninterested. Of the next demo, you only have one slice of the pie who interacts much at all. Compared to most other social media, it's not worth much.
This, however, is an anecdote of one data point of course.
Edit - Also, why pay to advertise when you can just make a shill account for free?
If anything, just by the logic of commodity economics, they should in theory be - at best - borderline profitable. They don't provide any obviously useful or difficult service apart from an easily recognisable domain name and they face global competition. No obvious moat, no obvious profits.
One of the founders admitted that they had created thousands of fake accounts to give the appearance of traction.
Well they have alienated the power users and made the site focused on the 9gag audience then wonder why the value per user goes down
Developers are cost centre and very expensive one when they spend time on things that do not generate any meaningful new revenue. On site like reddit as long as core product is decent users would stay due to network effects.
2019 350 million users
2024 504 million users
"It worked" but for what? Usually the idea is to focus on user growth first, and then eventually turn a profit, but what difference does it make if you succeed with the first step if you haven't even thought about the second step, much less be able to succeed with it?
The spend to grow. Sales and marketing $71 million, R&D $142 million. They could easily switch into 25% profit margin business if they stop investing into growth.
What I'm more surprised is that it wasn't profitable in the yishan/ellen pao era. They had reddit premium unlike the founders first run at the site, and they were still run by a handful of people in Conde Nast's back closet.
I could see Reddit as being a large source of content so worth the effort, at least until it's disabled--but that hasn't happened so far.
I think one is a perfectly sane and acceptable answer.
I wouldn't, but I left reddit when all of this happened anyway.
Honestly if they banned you it's because it threatened their IPO. Spez and co don't care about communities or the people. They never even gave mods their mod tools. They just left AutoModerator to sludge along laggingly on a single core after firing the creator of it that went on to create https://tildes.net - a better 'reddit'.
Reddit just sold everybody's data to google for the AI data and are going to sell the same data back to reddit users with walled gardens and its new 'search'. Fuck 'em.
I'm sure it's a decent app. I won't use reddit. it's an astroturfed left-swinging graveyard where even Alexis Ohanian quit its board and left completely due to its racism years ago.
There's libreddit and redlib for self hosted frontends similar to geddit, but yours as a mobile app I can see would be appealing since reddit's as I've heard is less than ideal.
You can slap on .rss and .json at the end of the URLs and get your favorite subs from a decent rss reader. No need to comment anyways.
With reddit, you're just commenting amongst bots such as these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU4sGCVZqWo
The dead internet theory I've found, isn't a theory.
Good on ya for making Geddit. Keep up the cool stuff.
I wish someone would actually invest in competing product, with less censorship and no braindead mods.
If you don't like the mods/censorship you can host your own or go choose a new instance. content will be the same, mods will be different and what they mod will be different
Not saying it's bad for everyone, just my personal experience. It chases me away.
"Check out Reddit. Pick a subreddit: can start with https://reddit.com/r/popular or start your own. It's where everybody flocked to. It's decent, has decent content, decent users.
If you don't like the mods/censorship you can start your own or go choose a new subreddit. content will be the same, mods will be different and what they mod will be different."
So if one community like say, https://lemmy.world/c/linux So .. /c/linux has mods and they're questionable you can go find a server/setup that you might think has better mods or a better mission behind them and their /c/linux will be moderated different from lemmy.world's /c/linux but they will all still have the same posts/comments, upvotes downvotes etc. Lemmy.world's deleted posts wont be the new one's deleted posts.
It's a federated Reddit (decentralized) - It gained millions of users when Reddit users jumped ship. It gains more every day because they're getting sick of the astroturfing, left swinging bias, bot bloat, and terrible mods/reddit policies.
So while you can't oust the mods per se you can just go find a different webserver that hosts a lemmy and it'll have different mods, admins etc
There's also Kbin, which for all practical purposes is Lemmy, and interoperates with Lemmy, but is developed by different people.
The advantage of going the proxy route is that you only have to do this once after which you can access those sites from all your devices without needing to install separate apps.