Reddit 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
you get all comments as json, with no need for authentication. So it's probably trivial to develop a client that would use this and have a nice ui and bypass any and all ads. Interesting.
AFAIK, you don't actually get all comments, and it's impossible to enumerate all comments to a post via that method. Give it a try to enumerate based on the data that gets returned, and you'll end up with a way smaller number than the reddit UI shows on the website.
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.
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.
Readit News
I still use Reddit but way less than I used to before, and I no longer use it for fun but just to read niche tech subs.
I refuse to use the official mobile app. I've always used Baconreader and then Relay on Android. Relay survived the API changes and adopted a subscription model.
But thanks to Revanced I was able to patch an old version of Relay to use my own API key for free.
Pretty much sums up every popular social media platform these days.
HN is still a good place to learn about whats going on in the tech world and what not because it's simple and filters out alot of "brainrot", although there is an increasing number of comments that soley react at the headline.
Reddit has become like meta, you either have an account or your user experience will be so horrible that you won't use it.
X simply doesn't allow you to use it, atleast it doesn't pretend.
I think we need more simple websites again, but I am not sure about the incentive structure.
Then go make one. It’s easier now than ever. The social media mistake was trying to make one site everything to everyone but the web is still there.
I only browse old.reddit logged out and log in if I want to to comment before logging out by deleting my cookies. I started doing this after seeing the first "year in review" thing they sent to my account, which creeped me out. Especially not being able to disable this type of data collection, on either of the two sites.
I may be having an easier time of it by using RES though.
Almost every app now degrades quickly after startup capital fades, maybe we should just all quit social apps the minute they show signs of degrading, because right now most of the content, ads, and people on these social apps are now just as uninteractive, repetitive, mundane, and unrewarding as watching TV.
The internet has always had nice discussion forums that were labors of love of generous people. In the case of HN, the generous person running the forum is actually a company managing billions of dollars. In the absence of a better funding model for the internet, maybe that’s the solution: altruistic billionaires finance more discussion forums that don’t exist to be profitable, at least not directly.
The exponential growth required of publicly traded social media companies drives different motives in moderating and promoting the discussions.
Deleted Comment
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
When you comment to complain, you get "Star Trek has always been political", "The Simpsons has always been political".
Yeah... but Star Trek memes hasn't always been. /r/SimpsonsShitposting used to be funny, not just sarcastic eye-rolls about [current-republican-bogey-man/woman strawman].
also any sub related to anything remotely gender specific immediately gets overrun with incel content (or female equivalent)
but I do think niche or regional community oriented subs are worth frequenting
Some stayed, of course, but I feel anecdotally that content on reddit now is mainly posted by casual users and bots.
Reddit is one of those great examples were management and execs all feel like they need to show their impact and justify their salary and just make the platform worse.
Bots and propaganda are literally everywhere. The platform keeps getting worse but I admit it is to some extent addictive.
I am somewhat happy that HN is one of those places where politics are generally avoided.
I am sick of people arguing about geopolitics and national politics like it was some fan battle while not even knowing their mayor candidates programs, hell many don't even know who their mayor is or what their city council is working on.
This stems imho from the dead of traditional newspapers who were often local, in favor of internet media which is in its nature global.
I swear most people in Italy know more about US politics than what's happening in their own backyard, completely backwards.
HN is avoiding it because somebody else pays to run it and there's zero images or videos.
Also re: politics, stuff the federal government does affects me a lot whereas most local governments seem pretty similar and powerless. If the pendulum can swing so broadly ever 4 years I'd better watch it, right?
To be clear, amidst this, reddit was still growing. So from an Excel sheet management perspective, nothing seems wrong. But most of that growth could be found in low effort content that honestly can be found on any social media platform. Where the sort of unique content that did set reddit apart slowly started to decrease in both quantity and quality over the years.
disclaimer: i created it to scratch my own itch for the reason you list
The bigger problem is the amount of lazy comments on the site, which are invariably highly upvoted.
I'm so sick of pun threads, and office references and any other popular culture reference.
They've just about made me start to hate Monty Python, which is quite an accomplishment.
The latest is that everyone is beating Dune references absolutely to death.
If someone wants an AI project idea, then a browser extension which used an LLM to score all the comments in a Reddit thread and filter out all the lazy comments would be useful. If it works, most of the comments on front page articles should disappear.
It would probably eliminate most of the actual bot comments as well.
Actually the genuine content (and votes) seems to be a minority now?
Reddit and X are both very bad, where is the non-video fun these days?
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dont follow the very large subreddits
i mostly follow it for game specific subreddits, and my hobbies such as woodworking etc
lots of great users in there
The project got a (small) grant from NLNet a couple of months ago for me to work on having the functionality built-in into the Voyager client (a PWA Apollo clone). If more people or companies would like to help/support, hit me up.
[0] https://fediverser.io
[1] https://portal.alien.top
Would it be viable to add a setting for your own Fediverse account so that you could click on the communities to redirect them to your own server? For instance, if I search for /r/switzerland, there would be a button by the Fediverser suggestion of switzerland@feddit.ch to open it on my own Fediverse server - like the 'Take me home' button on the Mastodon web client.
If your problem is in discovering the "canonical" community in case there are duplicates, then I'd invite you to take a look at https://fediverser.network
The one thing that I have noticed is that I have been reaching to quite a good number of mods on Reddit to see if they would be interested in migrating their communities, but the absolute majority of them seem to really act like "landed Gentry", they complain about Reddit, but are downright apathetic to any type of change. They keep saying "being a mod is not fun/thankless/source of abuse", yet they refuse to let go of the position.
My shared IP has been network blocked by Reddit and anonymous browsing is disabled. I also see about fifty captchas per day. I really, really miss the old web and plain text too...
Also, they are part of the API much of which is actually restricted behind authorization.
Drug trade, online. The first taste is free. Authenticating it digs into the profits.
It has a single redeeming feature - network effects on good user conent. That's it...literally everything else about it is a dumpsterfire, including how they treat devs.
This is actually still working! Trying on one of the top posts right now, if you change
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my...
to
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my...
you get all comments as json, with no need for authentication. So it's probably trivial to develop a client that would use this and have a nice ui and bypass any and all ads. Interesting.
AFAIK, you don't actually get all comments, and it's impossible to enumerate all comments to a post via that method. Give it a try to enumerate based on the data that gets returned, and you'll end up with a way smaller number than the reddit UI shows on the website.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cxh3a/we_just_...
[2] http://insin.github.io/just-dadjokes/
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.
Good communities are tough to find and you have to constantly build them
/a/? MAL? I think anime discussion is one of the few topics readily abundant elsewhere on the web, it's the other niches that are really hard to find.
The only API you need is HTTP. Those who try to pervert you into thinking that they can decide what user-agent you can use are only trying to control more than what they own.