Today's subreddit strike showed me just how reliant I've become on reddit including my local subreddits and adding site:reddit.com to all my web searches.
Going forward, are there any good comprehensive alternatives to reddit?
Readit NewsReadit NewsGoing forward, are there any good comprehensive alternatives to reddit?
I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere.
But some others have still been the best places to get early information on certain topics. For example /r/stablediffusion had a lot of people posting their novel uses and techniques for image generation. The QR code topic which is now blowing up here was already being talked about on reddit a week ago.
It's incredibly frustrating to discover a potential new hobby, check out the subreddit, and go to the top posts all time, only to find pages on pages of low-effort crossposted memes that are often barely relatable.
It's also super frustrating being in one of those hyperfocused niche hobby subreddits and getting memes, and people treat you like some sort of wet blanket if you voice any opposition to low-effort content.
I moderated a cycling community (r/mtb) that grew to about a quarter million subscribers and I had a really difficult time keeping the low effort content at bay.
When communities grow to a certain size they lose their niche audience, and lowest common denominator posts bubble to the top and drown out quality content.
Even for cycling, there are about 8 subs that I'm on, and one out of the bunch is strictly focused on serious fitness & performance discussions, whereas the rest are sort of free-for-alls loosely based on the subreddit's sub-genre.
If there are no subs within the subs, might just gotta suck it up and scroll past the memes. Or start a discussion and find like-minded folks to branch off.
The easiest solution seems to be to allow filtering of content based on tags. In most cases, the memes were tagged as such. Had I been able to simply say, "Don't show content with the `meme` tag," I probably would have spent a good deal more time on reddit, browsing and contributing.
Something similar happened to me in the bicycle space, which turns out to have a lot of forum activity as well. Seems some of the oldguard never switched to Reddit in the first place in both communities.
One niche hobby sub I’m part of grew over 120x due to the pandemic. The mods cracked down hard but it had the side effect of suppressing quality conversations as well.
I think they found a good balance but you forget how big the sub is now until some meme slips through the cracks, and has 10x the number of upvotes compared to usual posts.
I’d say that Reddit used to be like that, but that they’ve been actively undermining that, because that’s not what they want to be any more. New Reddit (2018, I think) showed that they really don’t care about that aspect.
New Reddit forces post lists to be massive space-wasting and thumbnailed stuff. On my laptop’s screen, it tends to fit about one and a half items per screen, and is clearly oriented around doom scrolling: consuming content. When you view a post, you can see about six comments at once, mostly only top-level ones with occasional second-level ones. Actually, it seems they might have improved it recently: last time I tried it, I think you couldn’t get it to display beyond third-level, and it would only expand one level at a time, whereas now it seems to expand more at once (though it’s still way too aggressive in its collapsing) and go up to fourth-level before going deeper takes you to a single comment thread view with hopelessly bad history management that makes anything but always opening in new tabs just about completely broken. Anyway, they’ve severely hobbled the threaded comments system, because they’re optimising for massive subreddits where comments average vapid. Basically, anti-community.
By contrast, Old Reddit fit about a dozen items per screen, and required action to see an item at anything but a tiny size (70×70 or so), because it cared more about the comments thread. And it tends to fit about a dozen comments on my screen, and you can actually view nested comment threads meaningfully, and it all just works way better. Because it cared more about community.
Communities depend on a much better commenting system than New Reddit wants to let you have. HN and Old Reddit are both way better.
I’m fairly involved in r/rust. If Old Reddit ever disappears, so does my remaining use of Reddit, because I don’t think you can maintain a decent community without it.
Reddit are forsaking their link discovery and community discussion roots, and becoming just mass social media and memes, and they’re making major technical decisions which enforce this, even for the subreddits that want things the way they used to be.
Before I used reddit, I had an account at an Audi forum, a different account at a tennis forum etc.. Reddit is so much better. I'd rather some 'bluesky'-like competitor vs every community going their own way.
I feel like I've seen the opposite, generally- there was always kind of a tension between serious posts and memes, but in the past few years it seems to have become much more common to see subreddits with a counterpart strictly for memes (/r/chess and /r/anarchychess being a recently popular example).
Why should your posts on r/knitting and r/samurai be linked together in the same account? How often are people seeing the same person across Reddit communities and it ends up being helpful?
The orangered inbox and tracking of karma on Reddit provide some encouragement to use a single site for this all, but can we solve that in diffuse communities? Is karma actually a benefit to users, or should it be hidden anyways?
I don't think much thought goes into hosting on reddit or elsewhere. The people who like reddit, setup on reddit, the people who like Discord setup on Discord.
In the absence of reddit, I have no clue where many would go, there's no obvious place I would go.
- I (and/or my community) wants/doesn't mind psuedo-anonymity.
- I want a community that can quickly grow, not bound by region
- It should be easy to share links
- It should be easy to setup a longer form discussion
Discord for example would probably only satisfy 2/4 conditions.
But yes, there is no one glove fit all replacement as of now. If only because most new alternatives can't satisfy item #2 without some major money being put into advertisement.
With that said, I opened up https://communick.news on the weekend to try out Lemmy and I wouldn't mind having a few hundred of you there to help me bootstrap it.
Realistically, most Reddit users don’t want that and won’t migrate to smaller niche communities. Smaller niche communities that currently exist are way better than the Reddit versions 9/10.
I always called it a low effort forum of forums. Low effort because all you need is one account and you can wander about and annoy people in any community. But that was reddits strength - you didn't need to register and keep track of different accounts and sites.
> I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere.
The issue with focused reddits is once all the interesting shit has been posted and questions have been answered, where is the value in the community? At that point the sub has saturated and cant grow and the members are bored so memes and shitposts take over. I mean how many times can the same "n00b here - how do I dive into X" question be answered before users either ignore them, down-vote them or tell them to search the forum for similar answers already posted? Its stagnation that any community will face.
The memes and jokes have gotten so poor they just look plain stupid. A majority of the AskReddit posts are useless questions posted by kids and teens that make no value and only get posted to make the OP's look "cool". That said, it was once a good way to get news, and now with the stupid commercial push by the company it has now lost almost all of its status
The tech focused can move elsewhere, but smaller communities with not so many tech savvy users will probably stick to where it’s more convenient.
New Reddit needs to have a better way to sort this content out. Maybe extra arrows for funny/not funny?
Facebook groups had a really great interface that I thought worked well.
There are still Forums out there running phpBB.
I think the ultimately a replacement if one is found should be easy to use and easy to find information in.
1. Link Discovery 2. Discussion
There are a few options for Link Discovery. I have a bunch of fora and sites hooked up to an rss reader (the old reader, since google shutdown reader) which does pretty well (although I'd like it to do a bit more). The link discovery thing is like the equivalent of having channels on your TV. You can stream any program (website) of a huge number but a channel gives you a reason to think about a specific one right now. I've been looking at https://pinboard.in/popular/, but it doesn't support rss which is a shame.
There's really nothing to compare with reddit for discussion of the links though (and that includes scoring and karma and responses etc). And a big part of that is because of network effects. Reddit is where the discussion is happening, because it's where the people are because it's where the discussion is happening. What's really awkward here is that some of the alternatives have ended up as seeding around communities that were too toxic for mainstream reddit. That toxicity will make it harder for them to grow.
I do find myself wondering what a system that connected my rss feed reader with global comments about webpages might look like.
You see this on subreddits such as /r/IdiotsInCars and /r/Earthporn.
The former allows the user to upload videos while the latter is for images. This helps the user have a more pleasant experience because it reduces/eliminates
- popup fatigue (worldstar, local news sites, etc.), - back button hijacking (CNN, local news sites, etc.), and - walled gardens (NYT, Newyorker, WSJ, etc.).
I think reddit could encourage their users to attribute (some if not most would) by adding an optional source (sauce) link field to post forms. Might be nice to have a way the OP/mod could approve a crowd-sourced source edit.
It got to the point where I don't bother unfolding the video unless it's embedded.
Reddit is a low-effort replacement for traditional forums, solving several problems of traditional forums:
1. One account for all communities. Nobody wants to make 100 accounts, whereas it's really easy to just click "join" and start participating in a new subreddit.
2. Consistent, uniform, familiar interface with Markdown for text. The old PHPBB etc. forums all had different layouts and slightly incompatible markup. And Discourse is just weird.
3. Easy to stay "casually engaged" with the community because of the customized per-user front page and the ability to group communities together with multireddits. Whereas with individual forums, you need to get email notifications or manually check several different sites to stay connected, which is much higher-effort. Also, it's easy to passively follow a low-population subreddit in the hope that it gains more users, while you're much less likely to make a new account on a forum that seems quiet. This helps keep the appearance of a high active population in niche communities, because people are less likely to forget about the community and can easily drop in and out.
4. Easy discovery of new communities and being a name brand makes it easy to attract users: people just assume a subreddit for X exists. The alternative is that they'd have to hunt around for a forum that will probably be low-population anyway.
5. Upvoting and downvoting helps the community moderate spam and bad actors. It also creates incentives to post content, in the hope that you get upvotes. Yes, there are problems with the system, but I think "the market has spoken" to some extent on this: the individual enjoyment of voting outweighs the systemic incentive problems associated with it.
It's easy to say that Reddit is "just" the two things that you mentioned, but that to me is reductionist to the point where it obfuscates why people prefer Reddit for discussion compared to other options.
Note that Discord has many of the same advantages over its alternatives, and I think similar points are relevant for both platforms.
THIS. i have seen so many people put Discord forward the last couple weeks a reddit replacement, and have wondered what they were thinking. Its a totally different format. The two formats can compliment each other but can't replace each other. its like saying sms is replacement for email because they are both text based messaging services.
I never understood this point. Reddit provides zero discoverability.
Newsblur has this. It would probably be fine with more people. Occasionally there's something interesting, but usually there's no much of anything.
But the main problem I've run into for link discovery is the voting system. If you actually want a distributed system counting votes becomes expensive fast.
I don't think replacing Reddit is just about throwing a toolbox at the problem
I don't think they necessarily have to be the same thing, but the voting for links to bring quality ones to the top, and the choosing of which site to be looking at today is very much like having a TV channel.
Lots of people find themselves watching films that are being aired on specific channels, despite the fact that they had access to that film for years on a streaming service and didn't watch it. I think of the link discovery aspect of Reddit as similar to an aggregated DJ or TV channel.
To some extent, this is what Artifact.news is doing though it's mostly mainstream news right now.
They have a neat feature that aggregates comments across different articles covering the same topic.
I think this might be pretty close to what you're looking for. It's an RSS feed reader with a platform for discussions.
Love this.
Dead Comment
Lemmy is the best-known in that list, but Kbin and lotide both look pretty promising, too - making my decision of which to spin up as a personal instance much more challenging :)
I'd encourage anyone to at least check them out.
We can look for and/or build Reddit substitutes, but just my 2c, this is a fine prompt to question not just the instantiation but the concept itself.
I have better luck online. Heck, I had better luck in mobile game guilds. And the pandemic honestly made things even worse, worse in a way that has longer term effects than I ever predicted.
I can have a whole multi-post rant about the fall of social hubs, the futility of Meetups, and simply the difficulties of a late 20's male trying to find a friend group their age, but that's probably too tangential for a post asking about online communities.
This person has been thinking hard about this: https://twitter.com/Prigoose, https://prigoose.substack.com/
I've never been happier having stopped using it!
most of the political/activist/policy-driven discussions on reddit have no impact on the real world and lots of energy is just dissipated into typing that goes in to a db and no further
case in point...most local subs are mobilized against NIMBYs...but NIMBYs tend to voice their concerns at City Council meetings (where it matters), not on the internet...guess who wins?
reddit just takes the energy out of activism and dissipates it
To talk about media, hobbies, and maybe even to foster professional skills. I feel those were the most valuable communities.
1. Public: these would be democratically run forums. The users would actually be able to vote for moderators, and perhaps even rules around them. This would be ideal for things like r/[country] or r/[city].
2. Private: these would be traditional forums run by the people who found them. It should also be possible for the "person" who runs it to be a corporation or similar group.
3. Personal: This would be a users own "twitter" like feed.
Other things I think would be needed are:
1. The owning company be a foundation like wikipedia, run as a non-profit.
2. The data and code should be open, so that if anything happens a clone could be setup.
3. Site wide minimal content rules set by the owning foundation. There are some things that should not be allowed at all.
4. Built in trainable AI agents. Moderation is a huge task and I believe it's on the site to supply appropriate tools. By trainable agents, I mean efficiently integrated machine learning models that moderations can personally update and train per sub to help them enforce the rules.
See how the alt right infiltrates gaming groups. The reasonable voices are outnumbered and taken over.
Goes both ways (if you insist to use the traditional political compass). GCJ is a perfect example of that. I use the "terminally online" word for these people rather.
But also, this could be an excellent platform to experiment and discover systems that DO work. I think it's worth trying in any case, as the status quote already "doesn't work" in an even worse way. Special interest groups grab control and there is no way at all to unseat them.
In my view, terminally online interest groups are responsible for the current protests against Reddit. Several of the smaller low traffic area-specific subs that I frequent have been taken offline (some threatening permanently).
For better or worse, the best moderating schemes on a moderately large group is via a paid position. At least there a mod has a "boss" that you can hope to appeal to should they abuse their power. May not always work but it's more security than hoping an admin pays attention to a subreddit's drama.
I always envisioned some kind of reddit where you could simply appeal moderation actions through a dedicated report system and if some mod goes above and beyond a certain threshold of reports, the community gets to vote on booting them out
So, if that's your thing, check it out. If it's not, probably not a good fit and the "better approach" to moderation probably won't go in your favor.
This is my biggest gripe about Reddit. Unlike hobbies or interests, I can't change my country of birth or (easily change) the city. So when you get banned from a geographical sub, you have no alternative. Some of the moderators have a specific bent of mind, and do not accept any other views. A typical example is /r/india which is totally under the control of radical anti-Modi mods. I got even banned from there for posting in another sub _that had been recommended to me by Reddit's algorithm_ !
Most geographical subs are extremely liberal leaning. I'm from Hungary and in /r/hungary pretty much 99% of the posts are anti-Orban. Same with /r/europe pushing the general federalist EU agenda [0]. Or just /r/politics for the US, good luck going against the MSNBC meta.
0, which ends up funny when the topic is food and suddenly everyone becomes hyper-nationalist
I've been banned from my city reddit for simply stating that crime was becoming a problem. I've been banned for supporting trans rights. I've been banned for explaining stock based compensation. For describing and linking to AI tools.
Reddit's moderation system is authoritarian and capricious.
I'd like to have moderated comments be opt-in. The moderators can exercise their power and label something spam, hateful, or wrong or whatever, and if they do that job well most people will consent to having their perspective limited. But it should always be a choice, and people should be able to choose no censorship at all, or censorship of only the worst content.
Also, the ham radio guys like groups.io, which is where yahoo groups migrated to. There are a lot of groups there on specific things, like Yeasu FT-857D transceiver. Groups.io has per-group file storage, which is handy for this.
Anyway on USENET, you can access it via google groups, but it's a bit non-obvious. Here is an example group:
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.math
But how can you find groups? You click on "all groups and messages" on the top, then enter a search term and hit enter. Then click "outside my org". When I do this for the term "france" it shows "4635 groups outside your organization". Open the list and look for the groups that have "." separators, for example "alt.france".
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.france
The ones without the dot separators are google groups- if you post, the message does not go outside of google. I don't know if you can create a USENET newsgroup through google groups- probably not.
It's kind of crap for discovery, but OK once you have a set of groups you use often.
Edit: actually a better way for discovery is a website like this: http://www.harley.com/usenet/master-list/index.html Once you have the name of the newsgroup, just append it to the groups.google.com/g/ (also the site provides a link).
There are some NNTP servers that are not connected with the wider Usenet that I like (SDF, tildeverse), but of course they suffer from extremely small and niche membership.
How do you browse it, how do you post to it, how is spam prevented?
For USENET, I think I know the answer, but are there other consumption methods that you know of/recommend?
So anyway, on a shell ISP, you read and post news with the "trn" command- "trn" is a text-only newsreader client.
For discovery- well USENET was in the filesystem. So "comp.arch" is located in /usr/spool/news/comp/arch. So you could just "find" and "grep" to discover new groups. Also there was a newsgroups file that had the full list- I forgot the name of this.
For the web today? I know there are for-pay sites, don't know any free ones. Maybe others do. Google groups was kind of good enough if you only frequented a few groups.
You can use https://www.eternal-september.org/ with a newsreader client. See: https://www.maketecheasier.com/best-usenet-newsgroups/
I just tried it with claws-mail. Here is a quick start for Ubuntu (this feels like 1999):
Reddit itself received a massive influx of users from Digg after the unpopular Digg v4 change. For me and many others, it was just like Digg but without the bad thing. Admittedly that’s not how Reddit started - in fact, Reddit had been around for 5 years already at that point - but you could say the same thing about Mastodon, which was started in 2016(!), or Lemmy, which was started in 2019.
it makes sense if you were raised in the early 2000's forums. I don't know what framework it was, but there very much was a feel where many sites had the exact same forum UI/UX, just different theming and color. Only difference was who was hosting the site and who browsed it (which would inevitably have some overlap). So migration was almost seemless.
Reddit technically has some ancient open source part out there, but even if you remade the UI/UX, social media in the 2020's is a completely different landscape.
>If you're initial motivation is "this website is doing something bad, so we need to make a similar site that doesn't do that" then you are motivated by a negative emotion, which will only drive you so far. You'll be driven by anger which might get a bunch of new users, but that emotion will fade, and after a while what will you have left?
The theory is that
1. the site's own qualities stand out and you get enough power users to keep content flowing if you hit a certain critical mass. This is the part I have yet to see under "anger", unless you count Reddit itself after Digg.
2. the people are what make a community, so if those people stay you got a community. Of course, this doesn't take into account that some people may simply just leave social media as a whole if the experience isn't already seamless for them. So you create a power vacuum.
Also keep in mind that users =/= website creators. Faster horses and all that; the user don't generally know what they want, simply what makes them comfortable.
Personally, the biggest platform move I've made was the switch from IGN boards (objectively the top 1% of message boards at the time) to Reddit. During the switch it felt completely wrong and different, but as time passed I saw how much more Reddit offered compared to a traditional message board. I hope there's something out there that would make me feel the same with this next transition, but so far I don't see much for me yet. All I can see in the near-term is (hopefully) more productivity.
If you don't have a blog, then you could try what I do, I promise it's minimal effort and easy to maintain and host and it costs nothing financial (except time you use to write)
Go to GitHub, create a repository and tick the checkbox for including README.md.
Then go to README.md and click the Edit icion in the top right corner.
Write into this README.md file whenever you blog, creating a markdown heading with the blog post's title. You could include a date if you want.
Please do this! It's a low tech solution to content to read.