Reddit banned me for developing Geddit
buzl.ukReddit was my favorite website growing up. I'd discover new interesting subs, read random posts and comments. The frontpage was somewhat interesting too, but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine.
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.
> but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine.
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.
Well, reddit became worse than that ~10 years ago because of the inconsistent, absurd, immature unreasonableness of a sizable fraction of mods who added suck and subtracted cool from the world. Maybe this is a pattern common to most all group-oriented social media platforms where community mods skew towards being drama-oriented, elitist, and/or crazy because no one else wants the job and so, like policing, it attracts certain personality disorder-like individuals.
> Maybe this is a pattern common to most all group-oriented social media
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").
> despite the romantization, i somehow doubt that Usenet was all roses before the "Eternal September"
Usenet was the best discussion platform I've ever used. People who posted questions to comp.lang.c without first reading K&R were commonly killfiled. People who posted questions to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring newsgroups without first reading relevant W3C specs were commonly killfiled. It was awesome. Can anyone direct me to a discussion platform created during the past 25 years where people are blocked or banned for failing to RTFM? I'm not aware of any.
Note killfiles were per-user (they could be shared, but this was optional and required specific clients), so those blocked people were still visible for non-regulars.
The result was that newsgroups were very different for insiders vs outsiders: insiders saw nice clean message feed, outsiders saw tons of low-content messages with no replies and rare nugget of interesting info.
This was one of the big reasons why Usenet died for me: too much spam and useless messages, as there is no group-wide authority (and no, cancel bots never seemed to work)
Today, if you want heavily moderated group, there is plenty - they are simply scattered on the web. Many of them are phpbb-style forums, some discords and slacks (ugh...).
These are criticisms that are leveraged against stack overflow all the time. I'm more lenient on SO's stance because it at least wants (or claims to) to be a repository for truth, rather then filtering out questions because of "lol noob"
I am sure places like this have their right to exist, and they would probably be a great place to consume… without actively participating. By nature of being strict and exclusionary they will essentially tend towards becoming a relatively small exclusive club perhaps slightly bordering on being an echo chamber. Whether you consider that a bad thing or good, I am not making a judgement call here.
Also the cycle/churn of software is so quick nowadays that manuals are often written as a second or third thought for majority of the projects. So I can not really blame folks for just directly probing for tribal knowledge.
So, in other words, people were banned about as aggressively as they are on Reddit, by a cabal about as small as on Reddit, but they didn't even know they were banned and this is somehow considered a positive thing.
Maybe it's because I'm not at the top % of developers but it feels like this would go over the top for the issues of most developers. I'd guess very few people need to go into uncharted territory nowadays unless using some tiny tool with no documentation to begin with. It's always a big warning light when I notice I'm going deep into anything as it usually means I'm using it for an unintended purpose.
Most of my issues, especially before LLMs have been regarding misunderstanding documentation, knowing I'm somehow misunderstanding it and just needing someone to rephrase it since I'm burnt out going in circles yet have to finish X before the end of the day so I can't let it marinate in my head.
My impression is that communities trying hard to enforce doing your research prior to asking often end up skill issueing plebians. In that line of thinking it might be cool to see a "question difficulty" option on sites like SO. I've never really had a question where I couldn't roughly gauge how complicated it is and if trying to answer questions it'd be cool to be able to roughly filter like you'd do in leetcode.
Well, they were kind of snippy with me on the FreeBSD forum some years ago when they felt like I hadn't done enough on my end, so there's that
> It was awesome.
TBH this doesn't sound awesome, it sounds exactly the hotbed that spawns community drama, passive aggressive behavior and other human stuff you still see to this day :-P.
Not only do the jannies do it for free, I bet Reddit could get them to pay to be moderators, in the same way that free-to-play games exist so that the "whales" (big spenders) can pay the game operator real money to have an unfair advantage over the regular player base.
As if there wasn't already an issue with corporate sponsorship of moderation in some cases.
This would destroy the eusocial for-free moderation by people who simply want to create an environment they value and others benefit from in the process.
> because of the inconsistent, absurd, immature unreasonableness of a sizable fraction of
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.
I don't think that the newcomers are necessarely worse, but that you mainly lose the ability to know most users by name when the number grow too big.
I can see the function of mods being taken over by ai at some point. Pros might outweigh cons.
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I feel like this is another example of a problem that could be easily solved if we had integrated, anonymous and frictionless payments on the web. For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. For a regular user it takes a while to build up even a hundred comments, meanwhile for a spammer, this could quickly become costly. The hurdle of course is that no one wants to put their credit card details into a bunch of random sites, or nearly any site for that matter. If we had anonymous payments integrated into our browsers, it would be very straightforward though, click a button and you give a site a dollar and you're good for a while. This would generalize and improve many other sides of the web as well, from sponsoring open source projects to creators. Removing the payment friction could help improve many things online, but I don't think I've ever seen a feasible, realistic path proposed towards that.
> imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. For a regular user it takes a while to build up even a hundred comments, meanwhile for a spammer, this could quickly become costly.
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.
>but every comment you want to post costs one cent
So the wealthiest people get to spread the most propaganda?
You could take a page out of quadratic voting and scale costs nonlinearly. Then spamming would be disproportionately costly. This raises some interesting problems like, why not simply create multiple accounts, which have a different tradeoff calculus.
I think you have to have assets worth significantly more than one cent in order to count yourself among the wealthiest. Just my two cents.
> Everybody would be too nervous and quadruple-thinking “is this message worth a cent?"
I think that's well below the threshold people would care.
The problem is that $0.01 is too low, it'd be well worth spending to advertise or propagandize. For context, USA presidential elections will spend billions, they could make ten billion posts for a fraction of their war chest.
> I think that's well below the threshold people would care.
People don’t even pay 0.99$ for apps they use all day every day, opting instead to suffer through ads and have their batteries drained. There’s no chance they’d pay 0.01$ per message.
For the vast majority, there are two price points: free and not free. The psychological difference between free and 0.01$ is magnitudes larger than the difference between 0.01$ and 1$.
This is largely because of payment friction: is some scammy site going to manage its own subscription and call to make me cancel? Do I accidentally sign up to some dumb minimum term etc.
I don’t think I agree.
Something that is free is an unlimited resource. Something which costs even $0.01 is a limited resource (even if the limit is very high).
People naturally deal with limited resources different than unlimited. If it’s unlimited, each usage requires no further consideration. If it’s limited, each usage requires evaluating whether to spend dollars/credits/capacity on it.
I use a paid search engine. I paid extra for the “unlimited” option even though I should have fallen well under a lower tier. It wasn’t because of payment friction. (I was already paying a monthly fee, the only difference was the amount.) I paid the extra because as soon as this transitioned from unlimited to limited, I needed to keep a mental accounting of every usage. I needed to consider if each usage was worth buying.
If you give me a sheet of stickers for free I will struggle to stick them on anything. They are, by their nature as a physical thing, a limited resource. Payment doesn’t matter because they were free. What matters is I can run out so I need to ensure I’m making the best use of a limited resource.
It is not. This happens with the App Store, which is as low friction as you can get and is not a scammy site.
> every comment you want to post costs one cent
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.
> Many of the bad things on the internet are a layer 8 issue and collective human behaviour isn't an easy problem to solve.
Sure, clever analogy. The internet barely facilitates many best practices for congregating on a communal basis, barring a user's self-sovereign strive to cultivate, recognize and then compensate for its failings with whatever sort of information, interactions and dealings one happens to seek.
20+ years ago, i just settled for lurking whatever boards popped out of the ether and playing EverQuest, RuneScape and Habbo Hotel, to soak in its novelty. Such persistent asymmetricity should never be lost.
I built it. [1] They didn't come.
[1] https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works
Throwing pennies around isn’t a big enough appeal or a viable business, see my other comment in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41337617
No need to charge per message. Just make every user pay an annual membership fee for entrance. This is how https://communick.com works. I have a small userbase, but zero issues with spam and abuse.
> I have a small userbase, but zero issues with spam and abuse.
You have zero issues with spam and abuse because you have a small user base, not because of the fee.
Twitter has TONS of paid accounts for spam.
First: citation needed in spammers using paid accounts. Why would they pay to spam, go through credit card fraud detection and so on when a free account is (by definition) zero cost? Mind you, I am talking about pure spam and not crazy sophisticated phishing scams. Those certainly exist in Twitter.
Second: scale. Twitter has millions of users, it is not profitable and is suing advertisers in a desperate attempt to justify its lack of revenue. Let's just say that a miracle happens and I get my dream number of paid accounts (10k at $29/year). The operation would be profitable enough to pay myself more than I ever made in any job and still contribute back to the downstream projects. I could literally close registrations on my service, or start a different vetting process.
Spam is not just unsolicited commercial messages. Remember: Stupid Pointless Annoying Message.
The worst I see on Twitter when I peek in come from checkmarks. Cryptocurrency shills are some of the worst offenders and they seem to have taken over.
> Remember: Stupid Pointless Annoying Message.
That looks to be retrofitted, not the origin of the term.
I know. It's also one of the meanings.
All the accounts seen on the popular "ignore previous instructions" screenshots have paid for twitter. There's no reason to believe that these bots don't operate at scale and don't all spend $8 a month.
On top of that, they are effectively paying per word to post through paying for tokens. This does not stop them.
Bots being paid by a state that is a misinformation campaign is not the same as spam.
Assuming the Fediverse was as popular as Twitter/FB, they could simply run their own instances, no need to pay for access through any specific server.
> they could simply run their own instances
And then what? No one is going to navigate an instance that is just spam, and other instances will promptly block them.
Right, the incentive will be to create accounts on the popular instances, not on the paid ones.
There was a spam wave some months ago. The spammers were using Mastodon and Sharkey instances that had open registrations. They were not signing up to paid-only instances to become "legit".
Bots spamming misinformation isn't spam, gotcha. Really moving the goalposts there
I meant spam as shorthand for "bulk send of messages of similar content". Cheap to produce and to send. If bots paid by some government count as spam, then we should also say the same about sponsored content or PR releases.
Anyway, my point is that charging for access to a network where access is already open is good enough for a filter to avoid spam originating from your node. Spammers are not going to be interested in paying $29/year to be able to send posts via Mastodon when they can just create a bunch of accounts on servers with open registrations or simply running their own botnet.
I classify both sponsored content and PR-speak as spam, personally.
Should we start complaining about HN's "spam problem" because of all the "Launch HN" posts? And what about YC companies that have job ads pushed to the top of the frontpage?
Hell, I don't even have to be a complete cynic to make the argument that basically any news piece today only gets to be written if it serves the economic interests of its publisher. That is valid from the NYT and Washington Post to an indie game developer talking about their project on Mastodon.
If everything is "spam", then there is no ham. If there is no ham, there is no way to build an classifier. If there is no way to build a classifier, then what is the problem we are trying to solve in the first place?
Bots spreading misinformation are bad and a problem on Twitter/Facebook/TikTok, sure. But the reason that an entrance fee does not solve this problem is because these networks are built on the idea of controlling what content people get to see. On the "open social web", people are in charge, there is no "algorithm" and manipulation becomes a lot harder.
> Should we start complaining about HN's "spam problem" because of all the "Launch HN" posts?
No? That doesn't mean they aren't spam, though.
>For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent.
Someone built this (a 4chan clone) on ethereum, I can't remember what it's called. It was pretty dead, but the project exists.
Ethereum has (had?) the added problem of fees and latency. After ~2018, doing anything on Ethereum required you to spend like $20 and wait 40 minutes.
Was it Steemit? They had a reasonable amount of activity for awhile, some of it was good content, most of it wasn’t though.
One cent sounds low but it’s not zero, which has a special place in pricing.
Check out this paper:
https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%...
I doubt that payments of any kind will help much.
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.
We used to have that for texting on mobile phones. Everyone and their dog hated it with a passion, and now "free" texting is built into the majority of phone plans in the US, even before things like fb messenger and Whatsapp. Same is true for long distance calling.
> For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent.
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]
That only makes it easier for those with the $$$ to control the narrative.
The friction might be beaten as part of a network effect. Onboard a large internet celebrity, create a payment platform that syncs to open markets, soomething like the ronin bridge, people's funds can then be used to pay to post on said celebrities forums, expand to other web content, not just for posts but for viewing, 402 replaces ads.
The psychology is already there, "all" that's required a snowball to start adoption in the online media space.
Payments are already overwhelmingly frictionless online.
> If we had anonymous payments integrated into our browsers
Was this the initial idea of the Brave browser? Did that succeed to some extent?
"good for a while" is incompatible with "anonymous" : which means there's no account that could be linked back to you (think how 4chan is used).
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.
Everything crap about the modern web is a result of commercialization, so I'm skeptical that doubling down on commercialization is going to do anything but dig this hole even deeper.
> but every comment you want to post costs one cent.
It should cost at least 10 cents. And I think your idea is the future.
A fee schedule would help, but I think what may end up happening is what happened to spamcop. The realtime black hole list at one point shutdown open SMTP relays, but how spammers got around it was Spam As A Service providers like mailchimp, sendgrid, salesforce, maropost, and others. Someone will come up with a fee based reddit spam service one can buy to flood reddit with spam drowning out real people (the 'reals' or 'non-bots').
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.
> I think we need more simple websites again, but I am not sure about the incentive structure.
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.
This.
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.
Is the reddit experience that much worse without an account?
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.
I think the key to keeping a site/app good for as long as possible is to avoid an IPO... The need for dramatic year-over-year profit increase ruins the very fabric of innovation. Reddit also got rid of the very key features to it's initial success like displaying the number of upvotes and downvotes, and a lot of other key things like not collapsing comments, that kept it fair and transparent...
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.
reddit is still good for some niches. non mainstream subreddits still have decent conversation and you can find help and info about topics or products that you cant find anywhere else. its not what it used to be but if you steer away from the home page and go directly to what you need its still good.
Niches are better served by old plain forums which are still to date, imho, the best way to talk most topics.
Notably, unlike Reddit, HN isn’t a business that needs to be profitable, to my knowledge. It’s a recruiting tool for a major Silicon Valley VC firm. Brainrot isn’t going to attract as much of the talent or stimulate the ideas they’d want to fund, so HN has been good at resisting brainrot. This is my own analysis, I don’t have a source for it.
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.
They don't have to be billionaires, but they do have to be altruistic. The good corners of the old web were run by one or two guys spending a few hours a week, and that's all that was needed because each corner was small, but there were many of them.
> altruistic billionaires finance more discussion forums that don’t exist to be profitable, at least not directly.
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.
You mean Twitter? It's pretty much opposite from what I want from a platform.
What I want is more or less Mastodon. A feed ordered by date, a complete lack of algorithmic suggestion (unless maybe I explicitly ask for it), a complete lack of advertising, and stringent moderation that enforces things in my preferred direction.
I’m sure there’s some bozo GitHub repo out there that does exactly what you’re asking for. But you or someone needs to make a serious pitch with a viable roadmap and explain how it will add to society, and be prepared to tirelessly champion it as a movement, not just another shitty pet project.
If it’s to service a nostalgia kick then that’s not going to be a big enough sell. Otherwise it needs to be a business, which is obviously not an option either.
Xitter obviously made a lot of mistakes, but the appeal to society wasn’t one of them (the execution is another story), but that’s the only reason it is still around. There’s obviously a demand for it that isn’t being fulfilled.
I’m not referring to “free speech”, I think that is the wrong message to focus on, though I do think big tech and Reddit had that wrong. Social media is responsible for the enshittification of society at large. It just takes a click to make someone an un-person at the slightest offense. Whether that be to exclude them from their social community with a block or ban, or expose something they said out of context.
It’s not really a censorship issue as much as it is a self-censorship issue with the secondary effects that has on society as a whole. To put it more plainly: people are too afraid to express themselves, even under pseudonyms. There are exceptions but when they stand out it has a tendency to look weird, so it’s passively discouraged in that way as well. Even if you are allowed to do so, that doesn’t stop cancel culture from taking things you said or did out of context. You can’t have the old web culture back until that’s solved, and I don’t even know if that’s possible to do.
So instead, we are stuck with gatekeepers and overzealous moderation (though the latter was a problem in the old days too). What a way to live, eh?
It's not just the app, the content itself has regressed. Where previously many subs actually had content related to their name, now it's 90% American political content. Evert r/pics is not immune. It's not just the posts, the comments too have political stances in them too, for many posts even unrelated to politics. It's tiring to read.
The content died around the same time the app was released. It made Reddit more accessible and thus it got a much wider and worse (and younger) audience than it previously had.
Eternal September
It is sad. I don’t browse Popular anymore and stick to the subreddits I care about which aren’t political.
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
I’m kinda confused by this.
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?
r/politics is known for leaning heavily Left. There are a bunch of new subreddits popping up like r/inthenews that if you comment or post anything not leaning Left OR if you are a member of r/Conservative then you will be banned. If you try to use a separate account to bypass the ban then both accounts will be automatically banned by Reddit for 7 days. There is no appeal.
I was banned from r/Damnthatsinteresting, for example, because they said r/Conservative supports abortion. I have never seen that. It’s mostly just Trump leaning articles.
American politics has eaten everything, even my beloved Simpsons Shitposting sub. And my Star Trek Memes sub.
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].
Hopefully after this cycle the MAGAism dies out (assuming Trump doesnt win) and politics becomes boring again
You’ll likely have worse problems on deck in that case, with no fashionable scapegoat to blame this time, even if we consider the effects of the wars alone. If you’re complaining about hearing too much about political drama, that just means you’ve been insulated from the real problems that haven’t reached your social class yet. I predict it won’t be long though.
it's a lot better if you mute a sub the first time it fails to moderate off topic political shit. it's fundamentally a moderation issue
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
As most places do, reddit followed the pareto principle. Most people viewed, some peopel comment, and even fewer people post. The people who post, tend to be power users. I feel with the removal of third party apps, they alianated a lot of power users who used to moderate, and post the actually interested content.
Some stayed, of course, but I feel anecdotally that content on reddit now is mainly posted by casual users and bots.
Their apps and website both keep getting worse and worse.
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.
I thought the site was getting worse because that's the natural life cycle of image hosts and Reddit decided to become an image host.
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?
How can the federal government impact you more, when anything from building permits, roads, garbage collection impact your daily life regularly?
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.
Abortion and trans rights and stuff
> If the pendulum can swing so broadly ever 4 years I'd better watch it, right?
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)
That's what you get when a company spends years neglecting and sometimes actively working against the users and content that give unique value to the platform. The final straw being the API debacle of course. But even before, you could see people who really cared for various communities on reddit just give up and leave because it became too much of a struggle to deal with all the antics or apathy from the company itself.
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.
If you'd rather get a daily/weekly digest for the niche tech subs, you can use https://redditletter.com
disclaimer: i created it to scratch my own itch for the reason you list
It goes downhill after Aaron Schwatz death , and doomed after investor comes in, they bring political agendas with their money.
> a bot fest and propaganda machine.
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.
I tried to use the official Reddit app, but it's buggy as hell. Everytime I launch it I am shown the Reddit logo for ~30 seconds, then it asks me to login again. This is not an uncommon issue, and the advice I've seen to fix it is to enable it to run in the background.
Lemmy is pretty good but still needs to grow in terms of active communities for any topic the way Reddit is. Still a worthwhile project and probably the most likely dominant alternative to Reddit
The Reddit app is so buggy and full of features that prevent you from leaving the app when clicking links. It’s so obnoxious. I miss my third party apps.
The current anti-Trump content is off the chart. I know it's the elections but for (at least) non-Americans it's not that interesting.
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?
reddit has had off the chart anti-trump content for nearly a decade now, as have nearly every single mainstream media outlet
I'm from UK and it annoys me too but I can't really blame American redditors for being so engaged. Trump is an existential threat to peace and prosperity so I'll just wait it out.
How many wars did he start, or get started on his watch? Real ones, with dead children, not twitter flame wars.
He certainly continued wars, opting to increase the number of drone strikes even higher than Obama. He's no pacifist.
Every America politician is an existential threat to world peace and stability.
the trick about reddit is just use it for your niche hobbies and such.
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
Looks like it's time for me to plug my fediverser [0] project. It can help people migrate away from Reddit by letting people sign up to a Lemmy instance [1] with their Reddit credentials and automatically subscribe them to the corresponding Lemmy alternative. The alternatives are crowdsourced. There is a "flagship" deployment at https://fediverser.network but if you want to fork it, you just need to run your instance and manage it as you see fit.
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.
Congratulations on the NLnet grant! I'm one of the 'silent' contingent on Reddit - frequently reads, but never posts. It is possible to use Mastodon or another ActivityPub application to interact with Lemmy (and vice-versa) to some extent, which will hopefully allow the two types of social networks to help each other grow.
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.
Thanks! Something like what you want is in the works, but I'd like first to be able to authenticate Lemmy accounts in a way that does not scare users.
Sounds exciting :) I do want to point out that the way Mastodon does it doesn't require authentication from your home server - it just creates a URL redirect that points to it.
I would really love for a Lemmy constellation to reproduce the peak Reddit experience. So far the activity isn’t there, but I’m trying to show up and be part of the solution.
That's the spirit!
Its the most active out there of alternatives, like forums with reddit style using Voyager or Sync for Lemmy. not going back
The problem with Lemmy is that subreddits ("communities") are tied to a specific instance. So basically every instance has its own separate c/linux, c/funny, c/technology, c/anime, etc. This makes it really hard to use.
This is absolutely not true. As long as your instance is federating properly, you can follow communities regardless of where they are rooted.
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
Being able to "follow communities regardless of where they are rooted" just means that I can follow each one of the dozens of c/linux, c/opensource, c/funny. Each with their separate comment threads on similar submissions. Why would I want to do that?
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?
> Why would I want to do that?
Differences in policy. There are wildly different ideas about what is and isn't acceptable.
> 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?
That's not random. There was drama. The lemmy.ml admins are hostile to a lot of anime-related content and drove off most of the community that was accumulating there last year. ani.social is where the active, non-tankie communities are now. It's run with what seem like fairly reasonable policies and actually welcomes the subject matter. If you were relatively happy with the handling of anime-related content on reddit a few years ago then the communities on ani.social are probably what you're looking for; it's a good recommendation.
> That's not random. There was drama. The lemmy.ml admins are hostile (...)
That just makes it worse. Not only is it too large a field to bring a community together, but it's a minefield?!
Your parent is exaggerating. The admins from .ml are not persecuting anyone, not exposing anyone and not even kicking out the existing subscribers that are ok with following the rules of the instance. The "drama" is just that they were clear they are not interested in hosting NSFW content and are not interested in providing a space for the hentai/loli/furry crowd. They defederated from ani.social because ani.social communities were posting loli, and that was it.
Because number of subscribers does not mean activity momentum, and recommendations for communities on topic-specific instances are preferred over communities on the "larger" instances.
Lemmy.ml was the first instance, so naturally many people created communities there before. This does not mean that it's still where the anime fans want to congregate. The admins of lemmy.ml also said that they want to promote decentralization so they want as few communities there as possible.
Does this address the problem of power-tripping mods?
I'll be honest with you: I have been having more trouble finding mods than with the mods themselves. Also, I've always stayed away from the controversial/political subreddits, so I never experienced much of "power tripping" mods.
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.
I left all "popular" groups when I posted in a "anti-vaccine" group pointing how how one guy was so far off into the weeds that he might circle around to be being right someday. The mere fact that I posted in there over some ludicrous article/comments got me banned in 9 different "popular" groups, some of which I'd never even been in because I dared to post somewhere "unapproved".
I have similar experience with reddit. First few times I got banned it actually impacted me. I thought I really messed up or did something wrong, even tried to have a conversation with the mod team. Then I realized being banned from most popular subs should be worn like a badge of honour because it just means you're not part of the circle jerk.
Geddit still works and it's a great app (it can read posts labelled nsfw without an account). The other working one I know of is RedReader, which Reddit have left unbroken due to its advanced accessibility features for disabled readers (but it cannot access nsfw things -- you get a message saying to use the website).
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...
A weird aspect of the reddit API crackdown is that they never actually shut down unauthenticated access to the API. rif is fun also still works (or worked last time I started it a month or two ago), it's just read-only. The JSON endpoints Geddit uses are the reddit API, and it's wide open, so in no way is it "bypassing API restrictions".
When I used to browse reddit, the main thing I was interested in was my accounts feed of posts from all the subreddits I was subscribed to, I assume this is what the API that was shut down offered vs just this JSON view of a single subreddit
Not entirely, depending on what you want from those endpoints. A lot of the information and features of new reddit are not accessible through those json endpoints as they never have been updated. They also have a much lower ratelimit restriction when logged out.
Also, they are part of the API much of which is actually restricted behind authorization.
They've drastically tightened rate limits. What we could use is a distributed API system so each of us could fetch requests under the limit, and together build a complete feed again, which could be displayed openly.
Well yeah, when they sell the data people need an endpoint!
Drug trade, online. The first taste is free. Authenticating it digs into the profits.
Rereader can access NSFW if the logged in account is a moderator, even of a one person subreddit.
Why don't you just use old.reddit.com ? Works great for me.
Reddit was a cool place when I first discovered it during the Digg exodus. Sadly, it was too fragile to stay as good as it was, and the repeat drama caused by the admin's mismanagement took its toll on the goodwill. The company responded to this by becoming more adversarial to users, and there's no sign they will stop pinching users in some way, whether it be their free time, money, or otherwise. We just need a public way to talk to each other about niche topics without the toxic middle man.
Surprised anyone is developing against reddit as a platform at all. Relying on a platform in general is risky...but Reddit?!?
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 was a fun personal project, not a business, and it sounds like they were aware it was going to get shut down the whole time.
Reddit barely generates good user content any more. They killed the golden goose, and their egg business is inevitably collapsing.
> Then I’ve discovered that you could get the whole page in JSON format by adding .json to the end of the URL. That was my big aha moment.
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.
> you get all comments as json
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.
It still supports JSONP [1] too, a little React app I haven't touched for 9 years which used it [2] is still chugging along
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cxh3a/we_just_...
And now this is commented it will be changed. :(
Maybe not. The incident described by the OP happened in Aug. 2023; it has worked since then, despite Reddit being very much aware of it. It's possible there is something in Reddit's architecture that would make it very costly to change...
I unplugged from Reddit when they did this and my life is much better.
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.
Huh... Moved on to where?
Mostly talking to people irl
Good communities are tough to find and you have to constantly build them
I hear Usenet is getting a bit more popular again. Also traditional forums for those niche topics.
It still has good communities I'd say. It depends hugely on the mods. There's nothing else like /r/anime, for example.
> There's nothing else like /r/anime, for example.
/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 community fostered at /r/anime by mods is completely different to the chaos of MAL and /a/.
I'm really not sure those three communities are all that comparable / compatible...
I wouldn't even reply to them.
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.
You can also add .rss to subreddit urls and get rss feeds.
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"?
that's what I do. I suppose the Reddit folks do not care about the rss because either they forgot about it, or because it doesn't serve the full content, so it's not useful for apps.
My trick: subscribe to the "top weekly" feeds for each of your subs, which keeps the fire hose at a very manageable level.
Narrative shaping has become big business globally. That's why Reddit wants to force paying $30k/yr for their API. Twitter/X is doing the same thing for the same reason.
The problem with Reddit is that it was founded by people who care more about money than their users
That’s true of every mainstream social network.
Hopefully, eventually, not
Ironic then, that moderators who work for free get the brunt of the blame when a lot of issues stem from the platform itself.
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.
I have been using Geddit for some time. I don't usually have issues with some video exceptions and showing only a portion of the comments. It beats using the official app or the website.
Man, i just hate the new reddit, but in a way i appreciate the fact that the update literally stopped me from continuing to use it.
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.
> Now it's short form content for me. YouTube mainly
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
What I like about videos is that I can listen to them while doing other things (e.g., dishes, laundry, walking, or gardening). YouTube premium lets you switch the screen off. Annoying that you have to pay for this, but no ads is a nice bonus. Nebula also lets you do this.
Albanian IPs don’t get ads on YT because of a law they passed apparently banning ads on YT.
Videos take much longer to make [well], than equivalent text/image-based content.
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.
I had that realization recently when a younger friend of mine used tiktok as a search engine to find a restaurant in a city....
"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
My last day on Reddit was when RiF died.
It was surprisingly easy to abandon it.
Same here, had trouble controlling the habit before, but was surprisingly easy to drop it when RiF died.
Ironic that they can only ban you on account basis, but you can still continue using it via Geddit because it does not rely on authentication.
I noticed that. It's like Reddit staff delusionally believe that Reddit accounts have any value any more - when they get banned for any random "offense" (e.g. refusal to support Israel) and you just make a new one, they have no value to you. Moderators know this too, which is why they immediately jump to permanent bans - anything less isn't strong enough since you can just make a new account.
The mods who run Reddit are the absolute worst part of it. I was banned permanently for making a negative review about a Marvel movie in the movies sub. The moderators are insanely biased and abuse their power. I think long-term Reddit can't grow because the more you participate in the website, you see how deeply artificial and astroturfed it all is.
To be fair, Reddit started circling the drain a while ago and paywalling the API was their hara-kiri.
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.
I've been banned more times from Reddit than I can count. Reddit used to be good, but now it seems to be destroying itself on purpose (or maybe for bribe money). Just give up on it. All the good information is in the pre-2023 archives anyway.
Reddit bans users for posting pretty much anything and then puts 0 barriers in place to stop them from making new accounts. Reddit recently removed the option to skip entering an email, but they still do nothing to verify the email address of new accounts. I make a new account every time I want to post and use a new as@df.xyz variant each time. Maybe 1/5 of my comments get through the filter though. I get responses from real users so I know it’s true
Another point i would like to discuss, if someone has more knowledge than me:
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?
It's not profitable enough. Investors all expect double digit continuous growth. No one seems happy anymore to "just" make a profit.
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.
Reddit has not yet earned a profit.
Because for the past few years they have never been interested in actually being profitable in a sustainable way. They only worked towards “potential” profitability based on their huge user base as a signal towards potential investors.
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.
Reddit has way less users than it claims. I don't know what percentage are bots, but I'd guess it in the 30 to 40 percent range. It's not uncommon at all to find identical comments, or to reverse search any upvoted post and realize it's a repost, with many identical comments from the last time.
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.
Whatever number of users are or were bots it was and is still one of the most visited sites in the world and it was text based (before the image and video hosting) with the added bonus of the user autotargetting themselves and their interests...how can it NOT be profitable?
Personally, the only people in my circle of friends I know that use it heavily are single, older liberal Millennials. Plenty of others use it for niche topics at times, but not to the same extent. To young people, it might as well be a more boring Facebook.
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?
--- Also, why pay to advertise when you can just make a shill account for free? ---
Because it does not guarantee visibility.
"Why pay for advertising on Facebook when you can have a Facebook page?"
Because the advertising model is very weak on Reddit, it's just a sponsored post with no differentiation most people skip past. No video or image to catch interest.
Plus, the users are self segregated, what a dream.
Imagine you wanted to sell drop shipped backpacks. All you'd need to do is create and prime, or buy, a dozen or so accounts, and start recommending your own brand subtly in every recommendation thread in r/backpacks or whatever the most popular sub for it is.
People trust Reddit because they assume they're other real users. Many advertisers already know and take advantage of this. It's nearly impossible at this point to know who or what is authentic.
> People trust Reddit because they assume they're other real users. Many advertisers already know and take advantage of this. It's nearly impossible at this point to know who or what is authentic.
That's what advertisers would like their customers to believe.
The truth is closer to: advertisers are lazy, Reddit users aren't complete idiots, subreddits are moderated, and spammers are (rightfully) despised. Effective shilling takes more effort in actively moderated environment so I wouldn't be surprise if sponsored posts had a better ROI than the much more dishonest plays.
Many subreddits are moderated by advertisers, who of course don't tell you they represent advertisers.
> 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 view may very much be the answer. Like, if the 18-34 "key demo" (which, incidentally the Millenials you mention are a part of) is "mostly uninterested", it's dumb to chase after them. Reddit had - and surprisingly, still has - its own, large core demographics, which they somehow failed to monetize. Hell, for a good while that demographics was upstream from Facebook, providing content for Facebook users to repost.
I guess the VC rules are that you either shoot for the Moon or get written off, even if you have a perfectly good submarine.
They don't seem to advertise very much. And I'd expect most of the advertising revenue would be going to people cutting out the middle man by posting to Reddit directly. If they aren't making $ per page view, it is not crazy to think that being the most visited site in the world is unprofitable.
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.
If it had the number of real users it says it has, would that really increase the chance of it being profitable?
All dictionary words are reddit usernames with little activity.
One of the founders admitted that they had created thousands of fake accounts to give the appearance of traction.
> The real users probably aren't worth much, advertising wise.
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
Probably combination of not actually being good at generating revenue. And also over hiring and wasting money on things beyond core-platform. You know all of the short lived "events" and features.
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.
That's deliberate. They chose to grow their user base instead and it worked.
Investors invest into future free cash flow.2019 350 million users 2024 504 million users> They chose to grow their user base instead and it worked
"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?
Reddit can turn profitable at any point.
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.
Sure, maybe for some months at max, until people notice they're being squeezed and leave en-masse. I'll believe the common "X can turn profitable at any point" once it's been demonstrated.
Every 16th living human is a Reddit user? I wonder how they count that.
It's pretty clear why it's not profitable now, they've ballooned the company to a huge size and not got any clear revenue or user growth improvements in line with the company size.
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.
They are deliberately unprofitable. The upside is in tax savings, (potential) growth, and any shady side deals the top level can get away with making.
As much as I'd like to perma-ban Reddit from my life, Reddit is, unfortunately, still the best way of getting insights into stuff to do in new cities or quick answers about how to do things.
I know the Berlin subreddit, like a lot of location-based subreddits, is now a far right cesspit. Is it not true for the cities you've been to?
The JSON representation is great for classical web scraping, but I wonder if LLMs are already good at 'seeing' HTML/CSS/js that it's more work to specialize.
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 still don‘t understand why apps like apollo did not add a balance account used to pay the necessary API requests. Combined with heavy caching this should have been easily possible and financially viable. Someone could have even built a cache gateway backend for multiple 3rd party apps…
How many rug pulls do you think are acceptable before you'd stop wasting your time trying to work with a corporation?
I think one is a perfectly sane and acceptable answer.
Would you pay $15/month for access to reddit on a 3rd party app when you can access it for free on the official app?
I wouldn't, but I left reddit when all of this happened anyway.
The prices asked were way too high. Several people tried to make this work but the cost for the most basic usage would be huge. They basically slammed the door shut.
Had to flip back to Boost man (which still works!). Darn shame the gallery was never implemented :-(.
Nice. Things are doing pretty well where people migrated to over on ..the other platform since the API app destruction days, you should join.
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.
It is definitely not a decent app, with the amount of advertisements etc.
I moved on reddit back in Digg exodus days. Been there more than 15 years. Got banned recently mentioning that some Palestinians are terrorists. Mods cursed at me in the PM when I reported them to admins, Admin permanently banned my account. It's just a radical left echo-chamber now, which sucks because there are lot's of interesting niche sub forums.
I wish someone would actually invest in competing product, with less censorship and no braindead mods.
Check out lemmy. Pick an instance: can start with https://lemmy.world or host 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 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
"Pick an instance" is where you lose me already. Same for Mastodon and similar services. "Mods will be different and what they mod will be different" sounds like hell to me.
Not saying it's bad for everyone, just my personal experience. It chases me away.
Does this help?
"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."
Not sure if we're using the same Reddit but I'm sure as hell some subs would benefit from purging the mod team.
Just choose https://lemmy.world and not care then. There's other instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances
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
lol
Most people on Lemmy are leftist and left-biased, in fact there're some pretty big and problematic tankie instances, right-wingers are a rarity and they're ostracized. If anything, people moving to Lemmy are sick of all the neoliberal/right-wing bullshit.
Ah, I've been using it for the tech stuff. My mind kind of just blocks that stuff naturally now or tries to. I use it for the technology aspect.
Well, if it's like that, where's the _decent_ websites? I don't use reddit. I block X, Facebook, everything. All that's left is HackerNews. I just want to enjoy higher level discussions.
I'm not down with neo-nazis though.
There are instances on the Fediverse ranging from actual far-left tankies to actual far-right Nazis. Many of them are banned from interacting with the really big general-purpose instances, but they still exist. If you insist on only touching instances that aren't banned from general-purpose instances, that's on you, and that's not demanding the right to speak, that's demanding the right for others to listen to you.
Lemmy is another propaganda machine, but instead of corporations it's in the hand of some randomers pushing their agenda, I went to say that if you are trans you can feel whatever you want, but still shouldn't compete in other genders categories if you have a leg muscle that is 3 times the one of your opponent, in football, was banned in 2 minutes, it's infested by the lgbt gang
Lemmy is an even worse leftist echo chamber that suffers from the same problems as reddit.
Then why are you looking at "leftist echo chamber" Lemmies? Go and find a rightist echo chamber Lemmy if that's what you're looking for. This is like going to /r/socialism and complaining Reddit is leftist.
There's also Kbin, which for all practical purposes is Lemmy, and interoperates with Lemmy, but is developed by different people.
>Then why are you looking at "leftist echo chamber" Lemmies?
I'm not? Are you replying to the wrong comment?
>Go and find a rightist echo chamber Lemmy if that's what you're looking for.
I don't want that, nor am I looking for one.
>This is like going to /r/socialism and complaining Reddit is leftist.
This doesn't make any sense. Again, are you replying to the wrong person?
>There's also Kbin, which for all practical purposes is Lemmy, and interoperates with Lemmy, but is developed by different people.
Never heard of it.
You definitely misunderstood everything in the parent comment on purpose. Don't be obtuse. It's against the guidelines.
>You definitely misunderstood everything in the parent comment on purpose.
Are you replying to the wrong comment?
>Don't be obtuse. It's against the guidelines.
"Don't be obtuse" is nowhere to be found in the guidelines, where as your shallow dismissal is. Please don't post shallow dismissals. It's against the guidelines.
> Are you replying to the wrong comment?
Why do you always ask this? No, I'm not. And the parent comment was replying correctly to you. The whole thread reads very clearly to anyone but you it seems.
Your response to /u/immibis was very strange and I cannot help but think you're doing it on purpose.
Pretending to misunderstand everything and doing the whole "are you sure you meant to reply to me" bit is cringe. And yes, you wouldn't do this if you followed the spirit of the guidelines.
>Why do you always ask this?
Because these responses are nonsensical non-sequiturs. They read like if you fed ChatGPT reddit comments.
>No, I'm not. And the parent comment was replying correctly to you.
No they weren't, it's nonsensical.
>The whole thread reads very clearly to anyone but you it seems.
Just because you delusionally believe that doesn't make it true.
>Your response to /u/immibis was very strange and I cannot help but think you're doing it on purpose.
How was it strange? Doing what on purpose?
>Pretending to misunderstand everything and doing the whole "are you sure you meant to reply to me"
It's not pretending, the response is just nonsensical. The last part of the GP I understood and responded to, you clearly missed that.
>bit is cringe.
"No one understands my delusions so I'll call him cringy!"
Cope.
>And yes, you wouldn't do this if you followed the spirit of the guidelines.
And yes, you wouldn't do this if you followed the actual guidelines.
Stealth is good android app for browsing reddit without login. You can subscribe to subredits and it is avalible on f-droid.
I think this contextualizes how hard they tried to make their site unusable on web browsers. "Front page of the internet." Thanks glowies.
Obligatory "I stopped using Reddit when they killed Apollo" comment here -- I miss /r/askhistorians, and the joy of someone showing up to comment on something who is an expert in the field.
Reddit? More like Deddit...
I wouldn't respond to their bullshit copy-paste email and definitely wouldn't used apologetic language nor phrases like "Legal Team, I hope this message finds you well".
Enshitification at work, in glorious technicolor.
I am glad decentralized alternatives similar to Mastodon exist like Lemmy, and even better with third-party clients like Voyager or Sync. It will take some time for people to get used to it but we need a better alternative to centralized companies that go to the enshittification route.
This is the second to last phase of 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win'. While these services are still relevant for you - and that is where the 'winning' starts, when their relevance drops below the level that makes it worth putting effort in fighting them - you can use proxies like libreddit for Reddit, Nitter for TwiXXer (it still works for reading single posts, no idea if it works for 'following' because I have never done that), Invidious for Youtube and (while you're at it) SearxNG for search engines. Once you have found or - better still - installed yourself some proxies of choice you can install a browser extension to automatically redirect any request for those sites to the proxies, two examples of such are Privacy Redirect and LibRedirect.
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.
Libreddit is discontinued, but has been forked as redlib.
The original still works fine but good to hear there is a fork.