Not entirely sure how to fill the void Reddit has left
With the Reddit blackout, and me deleting my account, I'm not entirely sure how to fill the void that Reddit has left. I'm using Tildes and Kbin as a replacement, and they're amazing for discussing the topics I'm interested in, but I had grown to rely on Reddit for keeping up with the news topics that interest me; gaming, tech, astrophysics, hip hop, fantasy novels, and many more. And while alternative communities exist for each of my examples, they aren't the one-stop-shop that Reddit had become for me. On top of that, my initial reaction to a lot of questions or queries would be to Google "Steam Deck vs ASUS Ally reddit.com" (for example), to get some first hand community opinions. I know that it took Reddit many years to get to such a point, and that I can't expect any new alternative to be at the same level right now. I've thought about trying to get into RSS feeds, which I've never tried, but again my gut reaction would be to look on Reddit as to what are the best sources to add. I don't have much of a point to my ramble, just wanted to vent and lament that I'm kind of lost without Reddit at the moment; it had become such a useful and ingrained tool in my life.
Something that dawned on me the other night was that I used to get bored with being on the internet 10-15 years ago. I would check the sites I would frequent, check some forums for any updates, and then eventually make my way to playing a game or doing something else. Reddit started out that way for me, but then they eventually turned into that endless scroll.
I think so many of us have become accustomed to never hitting that bored level because we were so used to scrolling to eventually find something that entertains us for another moment. I'm guilty of closing Reddit in the past when I feel tired of it, then immediately opening it up again 15 mins later once I'm feeling bored again. It wasn't helping fix that boredom, just abstaining it for a little while longer.
For a lot of us, we're going to have to relearn that it's OK to be bored again. That you don't need a constant feed to avoid boredom, but instead embrace it as normal. Instead use it to find a new site, discover local independent journalism, explore a new hobby, and so much more. The constant scroll was just another way for Reddit to keep you on their platform longer; making you a better product for them without them really offering much in return.
I begrudgingly agree with this. I think the endless scroll is indeed something that was ultimately harmful to me. I found comfort in it, but perhaps that's actually a problem. I don't really use other social media, and I honestly consider reddit (and tildes) a very different form of social media, as I'm not following people, but topics. I'm trying to use mastodon the same way (following popular tags like #Linux, for example), but the format doesn't stick for me.
One thing I can't get from independent sites is user-submitted content, specifically what I would like to call "unexpected discovery." Subreddits like selfhosted are great for finding cool things you might otherwise not think of, but still in an area of interest. Facebook and TikTok and the like try to do this to some degree, but it's mostly ads or astroturf, not actual user-generated content. (And I'm generally not a fan of video, so those are a no-go for me.)
While I should start following smaller sites again (with RSS or similar), those are still managed by a limited number of authors, and less accessible to people new to a hobby.
Tildes has promise, and maybe one day it'll get there. Only time will tell.
Reddit itself (at least for now) still has RSS support, which may be a good compromise for you. I've been trying to quit reddit for years now, and putting subreddits in my RSS reader was honestly the best way to scratch the itch without being tempted by the endless feed.
Random reinforcement schedules are a hell of a drug.
I firmly believe that in the next decade, "tech companies knowingly distributed highly addictive electronic drugs to consumers en masse" will become the new "Exxon knew about climate change back in the 70s". Or at least, I hope it starts to be seen that way. Honestly, part of me can't believe it isn't already treated as some huge scandal.
First of all, I absolutely will not give you crap for using one of the most popular apps/websites on the planet right now. That's just elitism and I try to keep myself from going there.
Maybe I just have different areas of interest, because I didn't find anything that was popping up for me during my brief trial to be interesting at all? I'll watch some TikTok videos that are shared with me, but I don't seem to fit in to the box that "the algorithm" thinks I should, because random videos just feels jarring to me.
I think the majority of reddit was "all gold" for me, with the subreddits I subscribed to. But that was more text than media, and I probably belong in a forum or similar derivative (like tildes!) if that's what I'm looking for.
YES.
There are a lot of bad habits I've become addicted to over the 18 years on Reddit that will take me some time to de-tox:
something that only received a couple "likes" (or 0) means it's bad
wanting to respond to everyone everywhere all the time
mistaking reply threads for actually human community and friendship
chasing that high of being thought to have said something insightful or well liked etc
unlimited cute animal pics/videos
unlimited "hey everybody come ridicule this [thing/person]" feeds
The amount of times I would close reddit on my computer to just open it again on my phone.
I'm doing that exact same thing with tildes and lemmy now
And you made me realize I'm doing the same, oops.
Part of it for me is Reddit had all of those other resources I used to visit individually all in one place.
Popular Youtube videos worth a watch --> r-/videos
Movie news (slashfilm, collider, random magazines) --> r-/movies
Any bands I followed on Facebook, mailing lists --> r-/hiphopheads, r-/indieheads, r-/electronicmusic
Any news site --> r-/Worldnews or the like
etc. etc.
Because I was deleting reddit, I removed Facebook and Instagram off of my phone too. The thing I'm missing the most is that little "hey whats new?" 2 minute pick me up between doing other tasks. I fully understand that this is a void that tildes isn't meant to fill - but I do want to see that picture/gif on NatureIsFuckingLit, that show that someone went to, that painting an art student made...
Anyways I'm sure a break will be good, but I really do hope reddit does pull a 180 - because it will be hard to replace.
Great comment. Boredom is an integral facet in the development and growth of the self/consciousness/personal identity/whatever you want to call it. Even though humankind appears almost infinitely adaptable, that adaptability happens on a time-scale that we blew past decades (centuries?) ago. The infinite scroll, cookie-clickers, 101 (as if) channels and nothing's on, ultra-palatable food, etc... are all just hijacking the feedback loop that allowed the development of a living being that was capable of thriving (not just surviving) in a complex and dangerous world. What are the ramifications of hijacking this system? Maybe this our Great Filter. We are amusing ourselves to death.
Thank you for writing this out. I could not put this into words as well as you have but I came here hoping to say exactly this.
Let's end the scrolling.
The big loss for me is my city’s local subreddit. There’s a guy on it that would always give super in-depth weather forecasts and live updates during storms. Definitely going to miss that.
I think that is one thing that will be really difficult to emulate elsewhere. The regional subreddits were something special.
Same here, but our city sub also uses a discord which works great for a local group like that. (We used freenode before discord too.) Maybe try to start one for yours?
I like Discord and IRC before it but sometimes the asynchronous forum-esque format just works better.
Yes, the rapid-paced chat nature of Discord makes it difficult to hold meaningful conversations with the entire community, rather than just the select few who have time in that moment. I haven't used IRC, but I don't think Discord could ever replace the forum format for me.
Discord is also absolutely horrible for information preservation. Forums can be gold mines of knowledge and the migration to Discord makes it impossible to search for.
At the time, Usenet and IRC co-existed. Usenet was great for longer discussions. IRC for in-the-moment chat. Both served their purposes.
Discord can be great for talking to others at the time. My kids use it to talk with their friends. That said, I don't use Discord much. I chat with one friend on Google chat since it's convenient for both of us but that's about it. I much prefer the style of forums.
You can create threads within a chat to have a more focused discussion. It still get's pretty hectic but it's possible.
I agree, but if the local community isn't massive then at least for us, the new(er) thread feature in discord is doing a pretty good job of that. It's not the same as reddit for sure, but it's not all "just who's here right now and everything in one giant thread" that IRC used to be either.
Yeah absolutely, and that's what really turns me off on a lot of servers, they move way too quick. It seems like a handful of the regulars on many servers are on it 24/7, so it always ends up being the same 5-10 folks talking.
Hard Agree
yea no argument there for sure.
I think it depends. All of the Australian city subreddits are already creating their own new versions over on aussie.zone - so I think replacements will rise up, in their own way, especially if the original subreddits promote these new spaces as replacements.
I definitely have been feeling the loss, though.
I feel like it will be hard to attract the critical mass of people though that reddit does. Reddit has had such an interesting dynamic. It's various communities attract so many different types of people - for cooking, videos, tech, etc, who also happen to live in cities/regions. I don't think I'd go on a website just for $place since I don't have much in common with $place-ians, but I'm happy to talk with them on reddit.
My big losses are:
/r/adhd: people being real about their difficulties and, sometimes, how they're overcoming them.
/r/Washingtondc: re: your comment on local subreddits and hence mine here.
/r/pcgaming
/r/startrekmemes: because 🖖🏻 and humor
/r/vegan and /r/veganrecipes: for regular exposure to healthful and ethical meal options
/r/starcitizen: because, on some level, I hate myself, I guess? I'm getting addicted to this broken incomplete not-quite-yet-of-a-game
Can't we have these here? At least by viewing each by tag within tildes?
Sure would be nice to be able to subscribe to a tag without subscribing to the whole topic!
Check squabbles.io if you don't like the federated model of kbin.social . I don't think tildes invite only system will ever let it get to a place where things like regional and niche subreddits will thrive
I like federation fine! I use Mastodon.
How? I tried to join and never got the confirmation email, even in my junk folder. I've been trying each weekend, searching how to's and so far no luck. What worked for you, I'd like to try it
There are many many instances out there. Mine only has about 400 ppl. There are a few that have tens of thousands (hachyderm.io). No invite needed there!
It wasn't an invite, it was an email confirmation to finish activating my account. I'm looking at other instances to try and I hope those don't have the same issue! I'm currently gravitating to one of the books instances. I wonder if there's a weather themed instance. I'll have to go look!
I'm looking at that. The dev's been taking on a lot of requests, mine included, and is working on those. Curious to see how it goes. The federation is fascinating from a tech perspective but the current implementations aren't very impressive. Federation seems janky. Kbin itself is pretty decent and there's a lot of on-server discussion which is nice.
Tildes is still in alpha so adding more subs will take a while.
Hello fellow DCist!
Technically, Takoma Park but I won't tell if you don't. Shhh....
I’d have probably started looking for a house there to make space for the baby if Jerome Powell hadn’t fucked my shit up. Now I gotta make do with a too-small, too modern infant death trap.
Ouch. Sorry. Yes, the current interest rates are brutal for buyers and the overall economy right now.
I loved r/veganrecipes! I found a lot of good recipes on Reddit, and just like inspiration to try new things that I'm going to miss. I'm genuinely worried about stagnating a bit because of it.
A guy in my city’s subreddit posted important data every single day during the first 18 months of the pandemic. We have someone who also posts severe weather info.
Was this on r/omaha?
I remember that guy too! Do you think anyone from r/omaha would use it if I created a Lemmy instance?
I remember that guy to because he was me!
I would, but I've found Lemmy super difficult to navigate so I imagine that it would take other users a while to figure out how to find it.
Ahhh awesome, those posts were definitely a shot of sanity during those weird times.
I was thinking something like omaha.community, it wouldn't nearly have the same reach, but it might be a nice alternative over time, that or we create a kbin magazine
Edit: registered the domain, I'll tinker with lemmy after work
Well that's really great to hear. I started posting them because data is deceptive. People would look at the real time dashboards and get lost in what the data meant. The moment Ricketts put forth a benchmark number of hospitalizations, I was able to track those two specific data points and tell a simple story that the State dashboards obscured. I work in data and analytics so I had a baseline skill level but I learned a lot about how public health data was collected, collated, and presented. I got a lot out of it too.
I'm just super happy that people found it valuable.
From your name, I'm guessing r/ottawa? If not, r/ottawa had those exact things that I would obsess over.
Haha no, I just love the band.
Same but maybe we could start our own city's sub here?
This website seems to be categorized by topics (~) and tags. I'm still unfamiliar with how it's meant to be organized..
Something analogous to a 'subreddit' doesn't seem to work with this system?
Topics can currently only be added by the admin, and then only rarely. Tagging your posts with a city-specific tag would be one way, but you're right it's not really going to work the same as having a distinct subreddit.
If we could subscribe to individual tags...
I think it's already in the issue tracker.
What I've read on here is that development is basically dormant.
Well the website is open source, and the community can contribute to the project on GitLab! I think the recent bump in users and donations has kick-started development again.
https://gitlab.com/groups/tildes/-/issues
Kinda seems like we need topics and subtopics in addition to tags.
There's a section in the docs about groups that can be found here.
Yeah I thought so, could never find the button to make one 😅
This is a cool concept, especially if intelligently automated.
In the early stages I imagine this approach will help prevent too much fragmentation, which is the correct move until the user base expands.
I get why they devs are restricting creating new groups, but boy would I love the ability to do so.
I understand currently it would cause much fragmentation at this point.
You could have cities.austin, or should it be usa.texas.austin? Maybe groups would be reorganized or undergo balancing retroactively.. it seems difficult to predict?
That's my thoughts as well. If it fragments into smaller groups too soon, everything will be a barren wasteland. Keeping everything tight as they are doing, prompts more discussion from a smaller user base.
Not sure how they'll go about it once we've reached a point where smaller groups.
Individually, I'd also be a little skittish to avoid the same issue Reddit and other sites ran into with overlapping names - for example, the Destiny subreddit being for the streamer and not the game, or if someone took the Austin sub first and wasn't good about moderation, they still got more traffic than the AustinTX sub. Here, with groups, the moderation isn't a problem, but the overlapping topics will likely be a thing to ponder.
So from my basic understanding, you could have ~cites but then you have ~cites.austin for example. Then you effectively have a group just for Austin,TX if needed.
EDIT: If they were to add groups that is. Just showing how this would potentially play out if needed.
I don't live in your city but I would love to read super in depth updates for storms. And to that end, tildes' style of organization makes it possible for me to stumble upon that kind of gem even if I am not part of your local city group.
Maybe when tildes registration re-opens you could send the guy an invite :)
I’ll give it a shot! They really were better than any weather news channel (and often more accurate haha).
Do you mean /u/zebrasrlyingtoyou? If so, hello fellow Columbusite!
If not, guess there are more "weather guys" than I imagined!
Haha yep that's the guy! And good to see other people from Columbus on here, maybe we really should start a Columbus community here like others suggested. Still kinda new to Tildes, not exactly sure how you go about doing that.
From what I've read, Tildes is less focused on building individual, niche communities like that... But I do know of a lemmy instance called midwest.social, which has a lot of people from the Midwest (and thus Ohio). With all of the reddit refugees going to lemmy, it might also be worth checking out :)
Oh nice, thanks for the recommendation, will check that out!
There is a weather guy in my city's subreddit too! (not Columbus)
Pour one out for the city weather guys :( They will be missed.
This is a big one for me too because I learn a lot about what's happening in my city from my cities subreddit. I work from home for a company in a different state so I rarely hear about what's happening in my own city.
Is there a way to create groups on Tildes?
Currently not possible: https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/tildes-groups#creating-groups
Agreed this one stings. I’m moving to a small town that isn’t known for being very progressive or technical. I don’t expect anyone else from there to figure out another site unless/until it’s as easy as Reddit is/was.
On first impression, Lemmy seems to have a pretty solid showing for regional discussion (..at least if you're Canadian).
Lemmy and Kbin are interoperable
Agreed, especially as someone who's moving to a new city (country in fact) in a few weeks. Am keenly feeling the loss of browsing the subreddit for the city I'll be in for suggestions, news, casual chat, meetups etc. I mean I still get a decent amount of that through Facebook groups and people I know, but there's so much knowledge and recommendations through Reddit.
Also with the visa application process, but luckily I had that sorted before Reddit went dark.
Would be great if they added a local group that could be tagged to be more specific.
As a mod of r/Berlin, I’m pretty sure we have users that would join a local city tilde. But they may be more difficult to moderate with this format, people can get very nasty when discussing local politics based on a controversial event for example.
I don't miss Reddit. I miss the internet that Reddit (along with Twitter and Facebook) killed by centralizing it all under a handful of monopolistic platforms that don't bother moderating enough to curate the community they foster and use manipulative dark patterns to foster addictive usage patterns and encourage overheated outrage bait. They took a wondrous tool for human connection where we could be exposed to a variety of new insights and perspectives from all corners of the world by sincere contributors and they turned us all into ads. They've condensed our ability to engage and interact with each other to the point where your typical user is basically indistinguishable from a bot.
And, at this point, an entire generation has been trained to socialize within this context to the point where they are, frankly, broken. Mental health is frayed and thinking about personal and social issues has condensed into cliches. This is why everything is "trauma" and you have a glut of people talking like therapists who are not therapists and dispensing terrible, generic, context-free advice to credulous audiences. This is also why all political discussion is the bottom tier outrage-posting that we used to only see in unmoderated local newspaper comment sections.
Because these platforms are designed to be addictive, they suck peoples' attention away from things that are intellectually healthier. People who, in the past, might have started their own blog now just tweet out what they're thinking. It's less thought out, less well edited, and more exposed to the vagaries of random internet shitheads that they have to spend time caveating against instead of just ignoring the wreckers for being attention-seeking trolls. And the sheer volume of content means for any light-hearted "look at my thing" to feel like anything but shouting into a void, people have to structure it in the most clichéd formats. So you get the classic Reddit "DAE think [popular thing] is good?" "Who remembers le gem?"
I say burn all this shit down. The internet was better when it was based on what were functionally "intentional communities" of people that overlapped with each other. Online culture in aggregate was based on how stuff transmitted between those overlaps between communities. When everyone tried to short-cut through the community based curation mechanism to mainline the viral content directly, through centralized platforms, it cracked open a pandora's box of terrors. There is an appeal to feeling like you're in the center of everything, but people's minds were not built to process that much information so we click into lizard brain, turn off our critical thinking and operat on instincts (like fear or outrage) that are easily hijacked by trolls.
So Reddit can go to hell. Good riddance to bad rubbish I say. The empty feeling from not being on it anymore is, as another new Tildes user said, like quitting cigarettes. It's the withdrawal from an addiction and we'll all be better for kicking it.
So we should go back to web forums? Is there even a more modern counterpart to phbb and vBulletin boards like you used to always see? Someone on Reddit pointed me toward a federated platform based on Lemmy that turned it into more of a your typical web forum, and that sounds appealing to me (moreso than just trying to clone reddit), but I wonder if it could even have a chance of catching on. I miss the much of the message board culture of the early aughts, but I don't know if it's possible to entirely go back to that.
I think I have to admit to myself I might not like interacting with people on the internet anymore. I've been using a combination of Reddit, Discord, and a couple of old school web forums for a while. From niche communities full of elitists, to always having to be "100% on", I'm just kind of exhausted with it.
Heck yes we should!
I find the majority of useful Google results for hobby questions I have come from forums, or Reddit. You never see anything useful from, say, a Discord chat, or a Facebook group, or Twitter.
It's usually a mid-00 through mid-10's phpBB or Invision board that now gets all of 2 posts a month, but the content is archived and super useful. Whirlpool is another one that constantly pops up with great information in a forum format. Reddit is probably the closest modern equivalent.
Perhaps Tildes is the next resource of content? I did a few Google searches for common terms with "site:tildes.net" on the end and it doesn't really return nice neat results as yet. I don't know enough about how returns search results to know if that's something Google is responsible for formatting in search results, or if its because of how Tildes supplies content to Googles crawler.
I mean....in some ways yes. Having a dedicated forum like "Car repair only" keeps out the general populous, and makes moderation way easier than trying to have a forum for everybody about everything.
There are a few modern forums, off the top of my head I can name Flarum, Discourse, nodeBB. Unfortunately none of them really act in a way that I would particularly like to participate on them, as they seem to replace categories with tagging without some serious customization - at least, this is how I remember it when I ran a private nodeBB instance a few years ago, but I could be mistaken.
I really would like dedicated forums to come back though - I think it's a travesty that Reddit killed them all off, as they hold quite a few very fond memories for me and were probably some of the most fun I had on the internet.
I don't know of anything fully built out. Discord is trying to replicate it but it's got issues fundamentally.
I actually think Tildes itself is pretty good underlying technology that someone could fork to be more "forum-like."
I don't understand why people are saying that Discord could replace reddit or be a forum of some sort. It's essentially a bunch of chat rooms. There's no way to actually record a threaded conversation or refer back to it later
I think those people are using Reddit as
a.) A scrolling feed of memes, jokes, random links
b.) A community they can shoot the shit with
In that sense, Discord fills the gap in terms of the social need it fills even if it's a completely different interaction paradigm. It's in the same way that Netflix competes as much with video games and TikTok as it competes with cable TV. It's not about the feature-sets, it's about what space it fills in the finite hours people have in a day.
There is quite literally a void on the bottom right of my phones screen where the Apollo app (and Alien Blue before that) has been for the past 10+ years. I took it off my home screen last night to keep my muscle memory from opening up the app whenever I was bored and I'm disturbed at how often I've been reaching for it the past hour that I've been awake. I need a new app that I can fill the gaps of the day with. Maybe I'll go the productive route and throw something like Rosetta Stone in its place.
It's depressing how often I've instinctively tried to go to reddit in the past hour. If there was any doubt about my phone addiction that has been washed away.
Yeah I was super unimpressed with myself when I woke up this morning, thought about the protest, and simultaneously clicked the Narwhal app on the phone without thinking.
I also want to talk to people about the protest but not sure where to do that because of course the natural place to do it is…….Reddit :(
There's no need to be ashamed of it. I hit Reddit this morning just to see the fallout. A lot of subs have gone private. Those that haven't are filling the front page, which leaves a lot of AskReddit and world news. The funny thing is that except for the image posts, Reddit is essentially like this site now. There may be more users, but a vast majority of the content has ground to a halt.
So feel free to talk about the protests here. It's the reason most of us are here in the first place.
Which was pretty much the goal when they neutered default subs after the 2015 blackout. The front page is still full, albeit with different topics than it would normally be.
The whole things appears to be down as of 10 minutes ago.
I got notified of a reddit incident where the site was failing to load. Would be convenient if someone was doing a DDOS attack during the protest LOL
Thanks, I appreciate that!
I immediately went to my local subreddit to see how people handled some storms we had last night. But it's closed down, so I guess my options are either 1) visit one of the corporate-owned media outlets, or 2) be in the dark. :(
I feel so cut off, too! I tried watching the news last night lmao, literally two sentences of sensationalized headline, zero info, commercial break. Worse than useless.
We had storms here in OH, too
The qithdrawal symptoms were pretty strong the first two days but have faded a bit for me. I'm surprised how much I wanted to open Reddit (and even did a few times before immediately closing). Hard to lose something that was a daily or even hourly driver for almost 15 years and go cold turkey but it's starting to feel better. And it's probably better for me.
Reddit had done wonders to turn into a hub for folks. Shame they had to shoot themselves in the knee
I woke up this morning to my phone alarms. After turning them off, I instinctively opened Apollo even though I could barely see and was still groggy. But I had signed-out last night. So then I closed it and went Tildes and Beehaw in my browser. Eventually settled on the NYT app to get some news while waiting to shower and make some coffee.
In the last hour, I opened Apollo like 3 more times, each time closing it immediately. I moved the app off my homescreen. Didn't delete, just "hid" it.
So far on my PC, I haven't tried to go to reddit (also logged out), but I'm sure it'll happen. Several times, at that.
Edit: Got on my productivity computer a few min ago, which I didn't turn off last Friday...And immediately there was reddit! I hadn't closed out the browser!
It's wild isn't it? First thing after waking up, check RIF. Except it's been my main source for news now for years, so I pop on /r/all. And sure, there's some important news there a lot of the time, but before I know it I'm scrolling, looking at random, mundane shit I don't care about, only filling my brain's pseudo-need for constant information. Then I get mad at some random, mundane thing, or see a horrific accident or crime that the masses have collectedly decided the world should witness. Shit ain't healthy! Reddit has amazing resources for smaller subs and the like, but man overall I think it's a good thing to avoid.
I have been doing the same thing. Open Apollo, see the blackouts, close Apollo, then instinctively open it back up again.
Happy to start making a change to grow a community here.
For me, it's not the phone but my PCs web browser. I'd intrinsically hit the browser window that has Reddit on it and hit F5. Mobile Reddit is mostly when I'm at the gym and doing cardio or between sets.
Yeah, if you've quit reddit I think it's a good opportunity to think about the size of that gap that it's left. If you've got good use patterns then good for you, seriously, aggregate and social media to your hearts' content. But when I quit reddit I was uncomfortable with how bored I was and how much of a habit it had become.
So rather than look for other sites to spent the same amount of time on, I tried to fill out my life in other ways. I got a library card, signed up for the occasional leisure learning class, called my family more. To stay informed I signed up for newsletters on topics I cared about or from orgs that operated local to me.
A lot of what I had to do came down to using the internet as a tool, with intent, rather than letting it be a place I wander around aimlessly until I bump into something interesting. I'm obviously still on forums sometimes but my attitude is different now that I have less space to fill.
I used my productivity app to block for the 48 hours. I am waiting until the rif app is officially dead to delete my account. I feel like I need to taper off like it's an addiction. I'm sure the total number of attempts at opening it are going to be horrific. Maybe this is for the best.
There's a productivity app? Does it work on a desktop?
I use stay focused on Android to block apps during work hours. I like that you can set different lists for different time periods on this one. I use the chrome extension blocksite on my computer, but I'm not sure if there is something similar to block regular computer applications.
I havent deleted my reddit account yet and I think Im going to do something similar as to when I stopped using twitter.
I kind of turned it into a game where every time I visited twitter I unfollowed someone and in the end it made it clear to me that I had just used twitter as a time killer and not to be "informed" or entertained.
Took it off my home screen as well. It was in the default 4 at the bottom, and now I keep clicking in the wrong place because I only have 3 icons down there.
I moved my Apollo app off of my phone homescreen into a subfolder to avoid the muscle memory thing. On my PC, I edited my Reddit browser bookmarks so that they go nowhere for the same reason.
I haven't taken the final step and deleted my Reddit account (yet?). I have nearly 13 years of history and accumulated subreddits of interest. It's going to be a hard to fill the void - hoping either Tildes or maybe Lemmy step up.
I'm in mourning over losing Apollo.
I think I'm in the anger stage.
Yeah I’m a bit sad and angry at the same time. I haven’t deleted my account yet because I have a silly misguided glimmer of hope things might change, but when Apollo stops working I’m done.
Same. I removed RiF from my home screen and I've tapped on that void a few times. It's made me a lot more concious about how much I've been feeding my procrastination and possible ADHD need for dopamine by scrolling on reddit for hours each day.
I've mostly been switching to reading a book on the kindle app or checking out tildes or youtube instead. I've also taken to doing something productive instead if I get bored with the above options like continuing a unity course or putting together a pitch deck for my current startup idea. Overall it's made me much more productive, but sometimes I just want to unwind and mostly turn my brain off a bit.
I wonder how many other people have removed RiF from their homescreens today? Perhaps @talklittle has some stats to share? It would be very interesting to compare login numbers, usage levels, and usage duration to see if the blackout is having an effect. Not sure if that data is actually captured though. Apologies if the ping was inappropriate or it's not something you feel comfortable sharing.
RiF has extremely minimal telemetry, almost of which relate to error and crash logging.
The Google Play Developer Console might have the best insight into total number of active users as well as uninstalls, but I'm not sure it would really give us much insight.
For those on iOS, you can stop yourself from opening it via the Screentime settings. Set the apps to something like 2-5min per day allowance and go about it that way. It’ll even darken the app icon which should give you enough pause to not open it out of sheer habit.
Unfortunately I always just "snooze" it, or if I get bored of that, will ignore it for the day.. But swapping the app's icon with another one's is a great trick -- your brain will be baffled for a few days, but it is crazy when you realize how often were you reaching for a given app.
Unfortunately brains are not dumb, I went as far to remove the icon from the homescreen and now my muscle memory is to pull down and search for 'Apollo', which is not affected by such tricks..
Anyone knows of a way to be more strict in screentime limits on ios?
I deleted my app too and replaced it with my RSS reader. It took a few days but I'm getting used to the change.
Definitely feel you though OP on tagging reddit onto search keys for user opinions, I'm so guilty of this and it will be a hard habit to break.
I believe that, for the foreseeable future, appending "reddit" to the end of searches will still be the best way to get answers on various technical subjects. Unfortunately, right now it's still the best knowledge source because other sites have to build up their back catalogue of user questions and helpful, to-the-point answers.
The closest thing to this I remember in the past was StackOverflow for programming questions, but the site eventually became rather unusable with the infamous "this question has already been answered elsewhere; locked", often without that mod/user providing a link to the answered topic. Even when a link was provided, it was often to a similar-but-different question and leaving me SOL in my highly specific search.
Reddit came in and filled that void as a lot of site communities slowly got inundated with repeats that got ignored and indexed because Reddit had an organic culture of helping provide genuine answers for those who knew what they were doing, helping motivated learners get started, and only really downvoting lazy and/or entitled content. That plus linking users to threads that have been answered and then not locking the thread immediately so OP had a chance to respond and confirm, maybe even ask follow-up questions that were useful, was a godsend.
Apologies, I got carried off there a bit, but maybe there's something we can learn from that culture in fostering what will become replacement Q&A knowledge hubs.
My suggestion for now would probably be to still use Reddit in queries, but visit links through cached pages if your current search engine provides them (Startpage has this feature, I'm pretty sure Google does as well). If there's useful info in the threads, it can still be gathered without directly giving the site traffic, albeit still at the cost of promoting Reddit in the search algorithms.
Depending on how the blackout goes it may end up becoming less useful for search as indexers notice that the content has "gone". I expect at some point popular subs will be forcefully reopened though.
Right, though even if they become technically reopened by force, if all of the high quality, content producing users have left, those communities will become shells of their former selves
Agreed, there's also the question of how they will successfully moderate force-opened subreddits. Lack of good quality submissions plus an increase in spam and low-effort content seems likely.
Do you have any feeds you recommend? Or a good way to find feeds?
I’ve tried in the past to replace Reddit with my RSS reader but.. I miss reading comments by others.
I use Inoreader and it's pretty simple to set up with feeds and interest based topics! Mine are basic, Slashdot, kotaku, rock paper shotgun, ars technica, vice, etc
You are making me miss the old days of google reader. Didn't someone make a replacement for it, called "Old reader" or something?
Haha depending on Google to keep good products alive is a losing game. I use Inoreader.
I might give that a go. I used to use readers all the time, might be a good time to get back into them.
I replaced it with tildes, just used the "add to home screen" feature of chrome.
Me too but with safari. Unfortunately it keeps opening up different private tabs instead of taking me to my last one and I have to sign in again each time. That could be because I'm on the iOS beta though.
Same
Same here, but I think I'll just have to move on and acknowledge that there may not be direct replacements for many of the individual subreddits I've used over the years.
In a way, it's exciting - something new.
Definitely a tough pill to swallow. But you are right, this is now a time to give something new a chance (and in some cases something old - RSS perhaps...) which is exciting. I've found Tildes to be a nice place, so I'm happy to have found it. It doesn't provide the same function, I miss the niche subreddits dearly and it's been less than 24 hours...
This is a big part of the death of a platform that most people forget. The next thing isn’t just a new version of the last one; it’s something new and different. AIM wasn’t IRC which wasn’t Usenet, Reddit wasn’t Digg which wasn’t a BBS forum, Tik Tok isn’t Vine, etc.
We’ll see what comes next, maybe it’s this place, maybe it’s Lemmy, maybe it’s asynchronous topic-specific websites and forums which federate.
Most of my scroll time on reddit was out of sheer boredom, not productive research. The former is what I'm trying to cull. I don't mind if I still type in "random research topic reddit" on Google every now and again and view it on the mobile site. Google is a cesspit of SEO optimization for near useless websites with bad or oversimplified answers. Reddit is a good tool to get straightforward, typically accurate answers from knowledgeable people. I'm not going to cut off my own foot in protest of APIs. That's not sustainable and will likely lead me right back to reddit.
Again, mindless scrolling constituted 95%+ of my previous reddit traffic. If I can cull that, that's going to be felt almost just as much as if I did 100%. I've read 2 books in 3 days and have started on a third one. I'd like to do other productive things with mt time as well, but I'm taking it slow since too much too fast isn't great for creating sustainable habits.
That is my primary concern. In the past forums were one of the best resources for knowledgeable well written solutions to problems. But decentralisation comes at a cost, so many of them are now dead. The process of using the wayback machine just to find out it wasn't the answer you were looking for is horrible.
Reddit has been a fantastic resource in that regard and its popularity means that as circumstances changed there is usually a more up to date answer.
I suppose it is a classic case of "Stallman was right", we let private companies own and control some of our most important human writing. If as always they become bad actors not to be trusted or relied upon suddenly a huge breadth of human knowledge is cut off from easy access.
Ive only been here for a few days, and really enjoying the deeper level of discussions on Tildes. Feels like the 'old' reddit where intelligent discussion was common and memes were nowhere.
One of the things that will make it odd leaving reddit is that there were finally some subs for us old farts. Not just r/menover30 (thats youngish to me) or r/redditforgrownups but there was actually an r/over60 and more entertaining and pretty deeply nostalgic was r/generationjones (my generation between gen X and boomers).
Lately a lot of redditors were posting pics of their parents with comments like "my dad and mom the day they got engaged in 1980" and I had to chuckle because that could easily be me and my wife. Its a bit of reminder of how old Im getting. But it was also nice to meet other older users online and realize we're not all complete luddites.
I hope some of those users find Tildes. Because, unlike the old days when I was a computer teacher, I dont relate to a lot of the content that regularly gets mentioned even here. The meme used to be grandpa's VCR was constantly flashing "12:00" because he didnt know how to set the time. Im not quite that clueless but Im at the stage where I dont really care to learn about RSS feeds, gamedev or discord. Long form writing like this is just fine.
Might feel a bit of an orphan til Tildes has a group for older users. Or hopefully I wont spend 5 hours online every morning and actually get back to some of my old hobbies. I dont really want to go to my grave with "he spent a lot of time online" as my epitaph lol
edit: I did it. 10 years. 396,823 karma. And Im done. Deleted all my posts, all my saved posts (there were only 2 things out of dozens that I copied). And then I took a screenshot of my last login page - Im sure in a few years I'll come across that and think, 'oh yeah I used to spend a lot of time there'. Sayonara, reddit. It was good til it wasn't.
re: 10 years - account deletion
The summer when I was 15, some friends of mine took a summer school class together, so that we can maximize our credits to aid university admission chances. The teacher was a younger guy and clearly the "cool teacher" type, and befriended the "keener" kids in his class (us). On the final day, after we'd all written the final exam and were probably never going to see each other again, he drove the bunch of us to the nearby beach (over-capacity), built a bonfire (without a license), and burned all the graded copies of everyone's exams and homework. It was nice to see things burn, as a symbol of the completion of a (then) significant stage of our lives, as a rite that those of us who underwent a trial together came through the fire to the other side together.
What's in the fire didn't matter: symbolically marking an end of an era for yourself, alongside many other like-minded individuals doing the same, does.
Happy burniversary to us.
That definitely made me smile. Read it to my wife.
Happy burniversary!
This is how I feel. I've been on Tildes for a few years now, but have pretty much only lurked. The influx of people has been nice. I'm finding the conversations more interesting at the moment, much like Reddit of many years ago. The topics have been more in line with things I'm interested in. I have to admit, I stopped even visiting this site for a while when I didn't see much outside of subjects that appeal to the younger generations or just weren't in my areas of interest. I'd peek back in from time to time, but I often didn't even log in. Lately I've been visiting more often, logging in, and enjoying it.
I'm another generation Jones. I loved r/askoldpeople. I loved when the young people talked about old things that even my children remember as being brand new. But I also loved the randomness of coming across subjects I didn't even know I'd be interested in. I'm finding more of that here now than before.
Hello, fellow dinosaur :) Nice to know there's a few of us here. Maybe at some point there will be a place for nostalgia or something akin to r/askoldpeople. I enjoyed that one too (til I got banned for saying something that wasn't quite politically correct enough for the mods, one of the power abuses on reddit that really made it tiresome at times)
One of my daughter in laws likes to collect "cool" furniture. She's starting to bring home couches and chairs that would've been new when I was buying furniture for our house in the 80's. She sees it as really cool retro furniture and inside I'm thinking, 'dear lord, we threw that out years ago because it was so darn ugly' lol. But what goes around comes around and I guess in her circle those styles are great again.
Speaking of old, just this week my 5 yr old tuner/amp died (it was a cheap, used one) so I went out to the garage and unboxed my old Marantz tuner/amp. I believe this one was built in 1975 and when I opened it to clean it, there wasn't a single circuit board in site. Its all soldered individual components. Which is probably why, even after sitting in a dusty garage for the last few years, it still works and sounds perfect. How many electronic things can you buy today that are still going to working like new almost 50 years later?
How my father complained when he couldn't fix things anymore because of components. He was an electrical engineer by trade and not so much a jack-of-all-trades but more of a master-of-many-trades man. He rebuilt car engines, manufacturing some parts when things got so old that they no longer sold the parts. But little by little, newer purchases were unrepairable. He had to stop working on engines when they were more like "spaghetti" as he used to like to say.
I used to chuckle when younger people complained about us luddites. I have nowhere near my father's skills, but the man used to design motherboards. Sometimes he would mosy down to the shops and build them too. He was perfectly comfortable with electronics in general and comfortably used a PC right until the end. And he would have been over 100 this year. It's one of the reasons I love talking with people of all generations. Each one is as varied as can be.
My father said he was a jack of all trades and master of none who came from a farming background so fixing anything was part of his DNA. He didnt know much about electronics but he built one of our first stereos from a HeathKit - they came with all the components but you had to assemble them all onto the motherboard and solder them all together. If you could follow a Paint By Numbers instruction sheet, you could build a Heathkit. Think it was the AR-17 now that I googled it: https://classicreceivers.com/heathkit-ar-17
That looks amazingly familiar. The one my father put together wasn't a heathkit. At least it doesn't have the word heathkit on it, but it looks almost the same. He built the furniture that the speakers became a part of as well. That generation had some fantastic skills.
I think tilde should give user access to create new topics or at least do a survey and create one. There is too much of mixing here and there. Even if a group is small, people can share their specific story and resonate with them.
I think some of it is just quitting social media.
By quitting Reddit, I'm not 100% quitting social media, I'm quitting a lot of the mindless content. I still follow tech news platforms and notice any big non-tech events. Most of the tech-focused subreddits already have alternative forums and the users are more likely to actually care and migrate.
The real gap which I don't think there is any alternative for are the misc. knowledge: subs like r/BuyItForLife, running tips, cooking tips, etc. The things I have to google and then type "reddit" after. Even important tech QAs and knowledge is often posted on tech subreddits and not the GitHub issues or Matrix chat. If I google something and I see the answer on a Reddit post, I'm not just going to ignore it.
So, I think I will still stick to still Reddit for Google searches. Ideally, new knowledge would be posted to other sites, people would stop posting answers to subs and use other forums, and even if there are many such forums, search aggregators like Kagi would filter them all and ignore SEO spam. Nearly all of Reddit's data up to today is archived, which can also be included in the search aggregator. If that all happens I can ignore reddit.com entirely. But, I really don't expect that at least in the short term.
Argh... This feels much like the last days of Google Plus, when there was a scramble to archive everything before lights out. Unfortunately, those archives are not easily searchable, you're still dependent on a search engine's access. Then there's all the link rot everywhere else. We keep building "Libraries of Alexandria" out of flammable materials...
I've had mini nightmares about the day YouTube goes down and all that knowledge is lost, but I guess I should've been more worried about reddit. I took it for granted just how much shit is on there - watching all the subreddits go dark on the feed last night, the communities are so extremely specialized. It's a crime against humanity to threaten so much good for a payday.
oh, god. youtube dying would be pretty terrible for the internet, i think.
Totally with you on mindless content. A lot of it is doom scrolling and it's a bad habit. One that I find hard to snap out of but will try to quit anyway.
Personally I think googling is still fine. Ultimately if users delete their accounts and stop posting Reddit will really feel that, and you can do all of that and still occasionally look at a webpage you found on google. There's a big difference between daily visits and engagement with mindless content, vs occasional information seeking. My aim isn't to never visit reddit if I have a tech problem, but rather to stop commenting my opinions on Logan on the Gilmore Girls sub. I can do that elsewhere.
Part of the challenge for me is that I'm not interested in gaming per se. I'm interested in the three specific games I'm playing. I'm not interested in all hobbies, I'm interested in my specific hobbies.
Tags let's you filter, but it's not the same as being able to jump to a specific topic and only see that.
However, that is how subs grow on Tildes.
I was reading the documentation this morning and @Deimos keeps an eye on tags. If one becomes a little too used then it'll become its own group, or a sub of a group.
Tags are hierarchical to enable searching, sorting and splitting of groups - https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/posting-on-tildes
If you are being specific about baking, you would tag cooking.baking or if about baking cakes you could tag as cooking.baking.cake.
Yes, thank you for the info, but I'm already aware of the restrictions
I want to be able to subscribe to a group with specific tags so I can click a link to just get those tags. Right now, I need to search every time.
RSS is simply a way to get the content of a website without visiting it directly. With Feedly / NetNewsReader it's as easy as going to a site and saving it to the app, which is then saved to the desktop version and so on. Like, if you want news from Complex.com, just visit there and tap "add to feed reader" and you get all the headlines as they are posted.
Feedly in particular is great for discovery, as their recommended feeds are usually pretty close to what you're looking for. Then you just prune the ones that don't fit, drag em into folders for topics, and boom: endless toilet reading on anything you want. And if you want feeds or sites to check out.. ask here on Tildes, the people are suuuuper helpful.
Reddit (mostly / originally) just reposted links to sites / videos etc.... you can get those links from the original source via RSS and never need to read somebody's hot takes or meme "humour" if you don't want. Then, if you find something of value to share, post it here to spark a discussion. If a dozen people did that for say, Hip-Hop, every day, then the music ~ (and the hip-hop tag) would be poppin. I am a Drum & Bass guy myself, so it's sort of up to me to try and foster those discussions here if I want them to grow. And that's kind of awesome.
Shoutout to Inoreader, my preferred reader after using just about all of them (rip Google Reader). It's paid above 150 feeds, but definitely worth checking out if you ever find Feedly lacking (protip: they usually have great Black Friday deals with huge savings).
Thanks for the suggestion. I too miss Google Reader, which is now one of 285 projects in the Google Graveyard. Feedly doesn't cut it. Thunderbird works for RSS but isn't portable.
Yeah if you're not happy with Feedly (as I wasn't, at least as of a few years back), Inoreader is worth a try. RSS use-cases can be so different, but I can guarantee you it's uber reliable (Feedly was all over the place for me), and has every GReader function and a lot more.
Wow, Reader died 10 years ago July 1st! Crazy how that lines up with what we're going through right now. It felt like the end of the world at the time, I relied on RSS so much (and still do). And here we are again, another crucial service pulled out from under us. One that's a lot more complicated to replace...
Do you think you would recommend Feedly or Feedly Classic for an iOS app? I’m also trying to find something to fill the news and updates gap
I actually use both Feedly and NetNewsWire. Here's why.
Feedly Classic just doesn't "do it" for me, since NNW is a better version of the same thing, and Feedly's updates are actually pretty kick ass. I appreciate they keep their "old.feedly" version for curmudgeons but it's not like the Reddit app Vs Apollo in terms of "literal hell" vs "Top 100 Apple Apps" level of difference.
For me, Feedly is best suited for reading 'articles' and longer stuff. The "AI bot" (whatever that means) is actually pretty good at surfacing cool things to read, and, seeing the stats of how often sites update helps keep things organized into 'newsier' stuff (like DaringFireball.net, for example... not 'news' but news...ish?) vs the "once in a while but I don't want to forget it" type of blogs for projects (Like NetNewsWires own blog, for example)
NNW is great for literal news. I use it for local papers, trade stuff etc, and it's super clean, no nonsense design is frictionless for that type of reading. It's a one-two punch that keeps me up to date on the actual world and my loony interests without having unwanted crap shovelled in my feed.
Bonus app: I use Pocket as well, and it's reco engine is pretty sweet to. So I never really run out of stuff to read, from long form investigative stuff to game reviews to music blogs to whatever. Everything cool online is still all there. No spez.
I have trouble finding feeds. One of the things I used Reddit for was game news. I bought Reeder for iOS as I was generally aware of RSS and had the same idea as everyone else, but the feeds I’ve found for game news are very low quality with a lot of garbage it. Where do you find good feeds?
For instance, Feedly offers a hashtag system so you can find what you want. You can drill down as well like #pcgaming or #xboxgaming. Right now I'm.doing tildes, Feedly and have bookmarked some sites that don't have an RSS feed.
You can have up to 3 folders on Feedly and 100 feeds for free. After that there is a charge.
Are Feedly feeds exclusive to Feedly? Are they curated? I found that I like the Reeder app on iOS, the problem is that I’m having trouble finding feeds…
Feedly can aggregate any site that offers an RSS feed. You can get started with some of their popular feeds, or, as I mentioned, you add you favorites. Discovery is as simple as a hashtag, such as #motorcycles in their search box.
Reeder is a very great frontend RSS reader for iOS I can vouch for. It can use as a source most RSS services as well, and syncs between your devices.
The thing that RSS not does is prioritize Posts. If this a pro or contra is dependent on the Feeds you have.
News for example spam my feeds with their 24/7 garbage but otoh quality blog posts can be gems.
Maybe some ML/AI might improve that in the future. Like News Minimalist tries
Yeah unfortunately it's "garbage in garbage out" using RSS, you need to find a delicate balance.
I use Lire for iOS and it allows you to categorize feeds and also has some automatic groupings, one of which is “Calm Feeds”, which helps you find those that post infrequently so that they don’t get buried in the noise.
I started using it a few years ago, in conjunction with fivefilters.org because it can cache full article text and I spend a lot of time in areas without cellular reception.
I have categories for similar reasons too.
But it's irks me that eg.: my tech category has a few hundred unread articles until i inevitably scrub it
Some people use RSS differently but i like slow and zero unread. Less stress that way
Don't shy away from just posting topics. If you can't figure which top-level to drop the post in, throw it in ~misc. The very helpful community can redirect and add more tags if needed.
For yours, I'd just post in ~talk, and tag with
autism.Unlike reddit, the topics are much more fluid.
Groups and tags are kinda what we call a 'stub' - developer speak for a very basic, barely functional feature that is intended to change and grow. The bare minimum you need to get your software rolling. Right now it is fair to say that none of us really know how those are going to work in the future. The best ideas come from the group conversation and experimenting over time, it's pretty rare for a great system to just jump out of someone's head and work right away.
We have some ideas, and we absolutely must hear everyone else's ideas. We will talk about it until people are actually complaining about too many meta posts on the site, that's happened several times before. Then Deimos or some other intrepid developer will improve on the stub and it'll get better. That takes time and lots of conversations, though. It's a process. I sketched out how that all works in this comment if you are curious - with examples.
Like @vord said, a lot of those "janitorial" duties of keeping tags clean and making sure stuff is in the right place is community-driven here. So don't stress too much about where to put stuff or how to tag it, if there's an issue with adherence to conventions long-time users with curation powers will just fix it for you.
It's not like Reddit where some mod will up and delete your post with a vague remonstration to "follow posting guidelines" or "look at the sidebar" or whatever.
I'm also new to Tildes so I'm still figuring the community out. However, I think that people understand that, due to the nature of groups and tags, there will be posts in groups that they might not be interested in. I've also noticed that it helps spread knowledge by putting certain subjects on the radar.
That's all to say, if you want to post something, do it! As someone recovering from ME/CFS I'd participate in that thread :)
Many of these communities have long been established by others whose “shade” they probably are not sitting under. If my analogy doesn’t make sense I apologize in advance, been dealing with brain fog for a while and the possibility of a tumor. Anyhow.
I think it is up to us to establish new communities and hubs and eventually have tildes be the new one stop shop.
I’m not entirely familiar as of yet with how to make a subgroup or a group, however once I figure that out I am interested in getting a couple going, such as a subgroup of sports for Formula 1.
Give it time to grow, I’m confident that there will eventually pop up a new one stop shop for information and knowledge.
Re: how
You make a post on any topic you want, and then you tag it as, say, hobbies.F1. And then other people also make posts as well and tag them hobbies.F1 too. Eventually the community notices and someone adds a top level ~F1 for your already thriving and chatting little group.
So, sort of like in a bigger sub you might find posts with flairs people can sort by or exclude but everyone in that sub still (initially) sees them.
Our creates a specifi topic that his hobbies.F1. I like having the main topic reference so you know what flavor it is.
I do miss Formuladank
I thought I saw something about remaking FormulaDank on the Lemmyverse. There's also the F1 Discord, but obviously they're not as meme-y as FormulaDank.
Maybe instead of "filling the void" it can be a reflection for a lot of people on the fact that they were just mindlessly scrolling. Instead of making meaningful connections with others, they were just getting lost in FOMO and a meaningless dopamine drip.
I was.
Time to touch grass some more and maybe check out my library (or just pirate books) to read instead.
This was me, 100%. I also realized I used it to deal with stress and occasional loneliness. I sadly used it to replace lot of my social interaction (husband and I moved and a lot of our friends are back home). Of course, none of that was real and I never made any actual friends using it. It just hit the same triggers in my brain or whatever to tell me yup, I've been with people just now.
I'm having a similar dilemma. Any time I want to take a dive into a new thing, be that a hobby or a change to my personal life, the first thing I do is look for a subreddit and read through existing discussions and start contributing my own questions when I have a feel for the culture and the language. Exploring trans subreddits were hugely important in me figure out my gender identity; being able to read about how similar my experiences are to other trans folks and whatnot. Similarly when I wanted to start improving my fitness, I sought out subreddits which suited my aims. Reddit was also incredibly useful for technical support for my Linux PC, and my home server environment, as well as just for getting inspiration for applications and configurations to try out with my home lab.
I really don't know how I'm going to fill this niche. I strongly hope that old-school forums make a resurgence. But my gut says that any communities which do decide to leave Reddit (and I am far from convinced that there will be very many which do so), will set up a Discord server and call it a day. This is probably the least optimal solution for my needs, but I recognise that a lot of people (particularly The Youth Of Today) don't mind inhabiting discord servers with hundreds or even thousands of participants.
What I find interesting is that a lot of people on Reddit were not around for the death of Digg so they think that Reddit will survive because it's "too big to fail". Digg was "too big to fail" right up until it did and it failed for the exact same reasons reddit might fail.
For what it's worth as someone also trying to quit Reddit, until those communities end up migrating to whatever is next after Reddit, this still feels valid for research purposes.
There is a distinction between popping in once in a while for some actual human opinion on a topic and the mindless Reddit scrolling a lot of us were enthralled by.
For the first time in over a decade, Reddit noticed my account had a vulnerability and locked it down until I reset my password. Correlation does not equal causation, but I found it quite the coincidence of this happening right before the blackout.
I put Reddit on a 7 day ban for being a dick, and will be seriously reevaluating its presence in my life.
Unsurprisingly, I am finding a LOT of time available. Tilde is my first choice.
Thanks, I just wanted to gripe a bit.
Another poster has mentioned local subreddits, and that is absolutely true. I don't live where I grew up and it's been helpful for me to both keep a finger on the pulse of what's going on where I live and keep an eye on what's going on in my hometown. I used to follow hashtags on Twitter as well, but I deleted my stuff off there in anticipation of the sale earlier this year (or later last year... time is meaningless.)
I will miss my knitting subreddit and the coffee subreddit, and there was a really vibrant Indigenous community there that was so supportive and inclusive, and I'm really not sure what will fill that void. Tildes is great - the quality of conversation is like when Reddit was at its serious-best (although I will miss Reddit at its silly-best too, there has to be room for silliness somewhere!) But it would also be nice to have homes for more specific topics. Maybe with a growth in population that will be possible, but if/when/until then I'm not sure where those conversations can take place.
“A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.”
Another benefit of regional subs for transplants has been getting to learn all the shared cultural things that you only get from growing up in an area or living there for a long time.
Second you on this. A good proportion of my google queries are in the form of "xyz search term site:reddit.com". You almost intuitively know that for some kind of topics, redditors are the most equipped people who must have already explored them at depth in one sub or the other.
Going forward, I think similar other candidate domains will emerge, the internet is already going through that process. It might take a while for those options to evolve though and become what reddit is today.
Yeahh I was just thinking about how much more difficult troubleshooting will be without adding reddit into the search. Subs staying private means that info is gone
The hook that reddit got into me that has been hardest to shake is the mostly-verifiable humans on the other side of the screen.
When it's come to reviews (of appliances, gadgets, books, games, anything) I've gotten so used to being able to find real personal anecdotes on reddit to help me comparison shop that seeking out conventional reviews of stuff feels quaint and unreliable, never mind relying on reviews from Amazon.
But that was possible because reddit was mature enough for all that human anecdotal content to have aggregated by the time I needed to search for it, and Google makes it more or less easily indexable. There's no artificial quick substitute for that accumulation over time.
As for the lack of endless scrolling, I feel you brother/sister, but it can ONLY be good for us to get kicked out of the practice, even if temporarily. :P
This subject is actually what has turned me off from reddit in recent years. I've been finding it harder and harder to trust that a real human is behind any kind of review, rather than some kind of astroturfing. Then, in the case of real humans, they often get the facts wrong, and comments with incorrect facts keep getting upvotes even though someone has posted a source that disproves them (or the comment has posted a source that disproves its own statements, but it seems that none of the upvoters are checking this). It often seems like people are just making things up.
So when looking for an informed opinion, I'm by definition looking for two things: knowledge and genuine experience. I feel like it's hard to get both on reddit these days. If I need to have my BS detector running at full power, I might as well just read conventional reviews and articles.
Very true. The degree to which you really have to parse the actual humans from the spam on reddit at this point is a little maddening, even when it comes to niche product reviews.
I admit that I'm not heartbroken to have been finally compelled to find a replacement for the site, because I've been frustrated by its direction for close to ten years -- but it's been good "enough" to put up with the declining quality.
Good enough has only been possible, though, with third-party tools. The site admins have shown themselves to be totally uninterested in keeping the spam out, so I imagine that by the time the IPO goes live it'll be truly impossible to have a conversation over there with anything but a bot or an astroturfer.
I feel like I may be in the minority for my age (40s)... I have tildes, Mastodon, etc for news/higher quality engagement, but I'm missing the memes from Reddit.
Specifically, the more niche Star Wars and LotR ones. That and the high quality giffing.
I think squabbles.io seems like a good place to fill the hole for memes and shitposts. The only thing i dont like about it is the logo, but i heard they might change it.
I'm accepting that I won't fill that void. I switched over to using an RSS reader (Feedly) to get news from whatever sources I want (which is half the reason I used reddit in the first place) and for my state and local subreddits, which I would actually miss, I may set up feeds for those if they remain active. If they go dark forever (or if Reddit somehow kills RSS on their site in the future), I'll just have to live without.
In the last 2 weeks of me having soft quit reddit, I already feel much better, mentally. I'm not constantly checking it throughout the day and I'm actually doing other stuff instead, like watching youtube, playing some more vidya or, unironically, touching grass.
I'm somewhat glad there was something going on that "forced" me to reduce or stop usage, as I probably wasn't going to be able to do it myself, and I'm thankful that I'm fighting off the addiction now. I'm having a much more pleasant time casually hanging out here or even revisiting some forums I used to follow.
I've been a Reddit user for 17 years. I'm not the oldest account among the old-guard but I'm near or in the first 1000. Reddit has been part of my daily routine for almost all of that time. It was the tool I used to sniff out new stories and keep ahead of breaking news when I did political journalism and the primary way that I've continued to do that after I put that gig down after the birth of my children.
I really love Tildes but the absence of a clear "US News" or "US Politics" section really, really undermines the value of the site for me and, I would argue, for much of the US audience. I don't want to suggest that the United States is the center of the universe or that the politics of other countries aren't important, but, as an American, my domestic politics are the most important to me.
Maybe the intention behind Tildes is to explicitly be an "unimportant" site -- a place where people discuss things which are just-for-fun. If that's the case, fine, but I think Reddit's impending collapse opens a number of significant voids in the social-media ecosystem, among them being places for serious discussion of news, politics, and history. It seems like those would be a good fit for the Tildes community and site, but without a clear place for those discussions to happen, I'm not sure they will.
TBH the site still isn't big enough to where we've needed to subdivide such things by region. It's generally pretty clear from a skim of the headline, and if there is a regional focus it can be handled by tagging.
Tags provide the additional advantage of being able to tag news that occurs in multiple countries. For example, the recent wildfires in Canada created dangerously bad air quality in the Northeastern US. Or there is about to be a major bilateral dialogue between India AND the United States. So you can tag the same article with both and have a discussion with a more complete picture instead of having to post the same article twice and have each discussion be narrowed to just one country's perspective.
Maybe I'm missing something but I'm not yet sure what to do with tags. Like... I can tag stuff, but why? Can I subscribe to tags?
You'll eventually be able to subscribe to tags but it hasn't been implemented yet. Currently you can filter out tags. The tags also make the article more keyword searchable.
To help find content you are interested in. Or to filter out content you aren't interested in.
On any website a general “news” section (which already exists here) invariably becomes “US news” by default due to Americans being the largest demographic on most (probably all) English speaking sites. If you browse ~news you’ll probably find a lot that’s americacentric, though of course fewer total submissions than Reddit due to a much smaller user base.
I think you’re getting the wrong impression about this being a not serious site. To me it feels far more serious than Reddit! It’s nice to read something about politics, for example, without the comments devolving into petty partisan squabbles or overdone jokes
I feel you, and I am in a similar boat. I will be honest, I think reddit has some addictive effects on me. I had to switch it off during work to make sure I was productive, but I did a lot of endless doom scrolling while not at work. It wasn't all productive, more habit, but without it I just feel restless and not sure what to do. Tildes is great but it's like the nicotine patch not the real cigarette. Even today I just had to uninstall the Reddit app to stop myself from going back to it constantly. Under the guise of 'checking the effects of the blackout' but honestly I don't have to be on the app to do that.
For me the answer is to go back to basics. Focus on having more meaningful conversations on forums like these, doing less doom scrolling, reading more books, going out outside more. I genuinely think the switch may be really good for my mental health.
I used Reddit for 13 years. What's replaced it for me is, surprisingly, Tiktok. If you approach it with the knowledge of how it reads your interactions—specifically what you search for, how long you linger on each post, and how you use the comments etc—you can judiciously prune the algorithm to surface some pretty interesting stuff. I've got mine showing me niche audio engineering/music info, drift content, cooking videos, queer content, some very specific gamedevs content, and (of course!) cat videos. Anything else gets either swiped past or marked "Not Interested". That said, I only really let myself open the app when I've got some time that I need to disappear.
Yeah I'm on Tik Tok and after training the algorithm my feed is full of interesting D&D, computer science, music, AI, etc, content. It doesn't quite foster the same community/collaborative feel that Reddit did though.
Not every void must be filled.
I think I'll have to try to get into RSS feeds too. I used them once for a time, then reddit became a thing.
Before Reddit, I used to use Feedly to aggregate RSS feeds on topics that interested me. Before that, I used Google Reader for the same purpose (thanks for killing off that project, Google).
There was actually a Feedly competitor that I was dabbling with, that also was able to surface feeds from Twitter and a few other alternate sources. I've never been a Twitter user, but stumbled across a couple feeds at work that were interesting and topical. I would imagine that functionality is gone these days with Twitter's API being a mess now, too.
Anyway, I plan to spend a little time (hopefully not too much) signing in and checking out those apps, and decide from there if I want to repopulate one or both of them with more current interests.
For what it’s worth, on desktop I use Feedbro for rss and it still seems to work with Twitter so far. The big change I’ve noticed is Twitter manages to push through some kind of sponsored tweet every now and then that wasn’t actually posted by the account, but those are few and far between (like once a week or two) and easy enough to just delete. But otherwise it works great, I use it to follow breaking news accounts and some for projects I keep up with that only post their updates via Twitter.
It can also grab instagram posts, but without being logged in those are a lot more limited lately. The site seems to restrict you to a certain number of views without an account, and once you hit the limit it times out for a while, so those feeds only update once every couple weeks for me. I think adding a login would fix that, or possibly refreshing your IP address, but so far it hasn’t been a big enough deal for me to mess with.
I've been getting by with a combination of rss feeds, discord channels, reviving old forums accounts, and now tildes. To be honest, I don't think I can fully replicate Reddit. That's probably ok though. On the bright side, I've been particularly productive tonight, so it's probably healthier for me to not have one hub consume so much of my free time!
For just passive consumption of new content I have been forced to rely on RSS feeds for news and some Discords for certain hobbies. It's not perfect, but it's OK for now. Tildes has been a nice change of pace with the more focus on in depth discussion, but I also feel like I need some alternative where I can partake in less "formal" content. Posting a Warhammer 40K meme here wouldn't fly, and I am still looking for a place that will fill that void.
The hardest is trying to figure out a way to not rely on Reddit when I search for things, just as OP highlighted. Perhaps in time that will work itself out a bit, but for now it very much shows the lack of competitors to Reddit. When Digg went under there were alternatives ready to flock to, that's not necessarily the case now.
Lemmy is a possibility but too complex for your average user I think.
I think RSS is quite useful and has often been overlooked in the last years. Its just so static and unflashy.
As for the less formal / more visual content: give lemmy / the fediverse a chance. It might in time just hit the sweetspot between the occasional meme and the obnoxious twitter screenshots. As far as I can tell so far, it attracts exactly the right people for a multipurpose link aggregator. And the complexity of it all is sufficiently hidden already so that as an occasional user, you don't really run into problems.
I've tried RSS a few times over the last decade, but I find that the problem these days are just that there are so few good RSS feeds. Most articles are sensationalized or basically ads.
Do you have any suggestions for good feeds outside basic daily news stuff?
Lemmy/Fediverse: I am honestly not sure I fully understand it. Is Kbin part of Lemmy? How do I know what Instance to sign up for? Do you interact with other instances? What happens if the instance I signed up for disappeared?
The secondary problem is that a lot of the content I am looking for just isn't there yet. I did join Kbin and following some Magazines there. I'll just wait and see how it develops.
I do appreciate the tip though.
RSS: Just because it suits me I just set it up as part of a bot in my own discord server. A few different channels with different themes that I check every once in a while for tech news/world news/design etc. Work's rather well!
I'm sure somebody will give you a better deep dive, but in the meantime as a fellow confused fediverse boomer: Yes, you can interact with every other instance. When you search on a Lemmy instance, it does search across the entire Lemmyverse(?) - as long as your instance hasn't banned their instance. And that's one issues for me so far, you never know what you're missing (unless there's an instance ban list that I've missed).
But also, as you pointed out, your account, comments and subscriptions are tied to your specific instance. And if that goes down (and mine - Lemmy.ml - is down right now), you're SOL, and may even have to start all over on another instance.
While I get the advantages of decentralized communities, the fediverse feels pretty volatile and unreliable so far. If the owner of a large instance decides to call it a day (and remember, this shit costs money to host, unlike running a subreddit), all of that content is lost, and all of its users have to build their accounts from scratch again.
So choose wisely! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I still plan to use Reddit as long as old.reddit.com is still up. I use my regional subreddit frequently and there are a few niche communities on Reddit that I like. My main Reddit app is BaconReader and I plan to support it as long as it's still around.
I'll probably get all my work done before noon today.
I like tildes but reddit was my comic/sci-fi/book/tech site more than anything.
I liked having that custom since I'd been around for a while. This site is gaining a lot of traction now, I'm sure it will grow more and more. I don't mind it being all text with just links to pictures for sharing.
I'm having coffee now and will be starting work soon and I'm sure I'll have tildes up on my pc all day :)
r/nursing was a great place to check in nationally with colleagues during the pandemic. I spent my new year 2021 with them because I was in isolation for stupid COVID reasons.
I used RiF r/all as a time waster the last couple of years, the way some people check-out bodily while playing COD/BLOPS. In the last couple years it's been a feed for reposts and outrage though, and I won't miss that.
It is late at night when I can't sleep that I will miss it most: r/liminalspaces, r/midjourney, r/genx, gif subs like r/fullshrimp, r/dogberg, other topical stuff at r/80s, r/neuralblender, r/kidsinthrhall, r/trippinthroughtime, r/AskReddit. You know, low-stakes emotionally but distracting enough to engage with.
Loved to search "creepiest" or "scariest" at 2am. Good stories. I think I will miss my connections to other generations most. How will I know what genZ cares about most now if there isn't a meme to illustrate that for me? I'm kidding, but the shorthand does help.
I'm curious about "fullshrimp" but I don't want to give them traffic. is it like, full scorpion but wimpier (and thus funnier)?
Exactly! It's still slapstick pratfalls but not the kind I can actually feel.
I deleted RIF last night but muscle memory still has me reaching for it. I have found that Tildes scratches that itch at least somewhat. I also created an account on Squabbles. While not as high quality content as here, it does have more categories since you can create your own. Someone had already created one for my city.
It will be a transition to get used to. It will also likely cut down on the amount of time that I spend on social media and that's only a good thing.
I signed up to Squabbles as well, but was really put off when I read they don't allow NSFW content at all.
It sounds like they might consider it in the future. I imagine it's a legal headache and that site is currently run by one guy who has enough on his plate right now.
I deleted my reddit account last week and am going through the same vibe. I set up an RSS app a few weeks ago after the Apollo dev first started talking about the upcoming issues and I felt he was being far too optimistic. While it won't replace my niche subreddits, it is handling the "staying informed" part pretty well and I can knock it out much faster as few of the sources have comment sections. In case you need some RSS friendly sites to get you started, I went with Arstechnica, AP News, Anandtech, Hacker News (which does have comments if I felt so inclined), GamingOnLinux (which has a hefty amount of Steam Deck news), and a local news station's feed.
In perhaps one of the greatest fits of irony I've seen in some time, Reddit is actually down right now.
For me the biggest issue is what you described, the community involvement with solutions. 90% of the fixes I find for things technology wise is reddit. I absolutely miss that already, and I haven't even needed it yet. I finally decided to ditch the built in media streaming on my LG OLED and go to an Apple TV. Took me about 20 seconds to Google an issue with audio sync and have it fixed on Reddit. There were absolutely zero solutions anywhere I could find except on Reddit. Greed is a really shitty thing. Reddit could have absolutely helped themselves, users, mods, and investors in this. Instead all they cared about was investors and themselves.
I'm also feeling the withdrawal symptoms.
I've been pleasantly surprised by the Google news app. It has a similar layout to reddit and the algorithm has been working well for me so far. Half of my reddit feed was news so this has have a pretty good replacement in that aspect so far. I also think I'm better off just reading articles rather than the comments that come with a lot of them on reddit.
Does it let you filter out certain keywords and whatnot? My main use case with apollo was filtering out political news that I don't care for.
Not quite. You can block specific sources but I don't see a way to block specific topics. You can choose the topics you're interested and I would assume that after using it for a little bit it will filter out the other content you're not interested based on your use.
I have an idea if better programmers could tell me if it's feasible:
So reddit is a link aggregate, lemmy is a subreddit aggregate. I'm thinking something in between. Create a standard for an API which allows one website to access the contents of the different boards. The API would be implemented by the boards wanting to join, and the whole point would be to have the content under one layout, and accessible from the same website.
It does feel strange, I know it isn't over just yet. But it does feel like the last days of Digg in some ways too.
I'm the same. The reason I liked reddit was that whenever I got into something, be it a game or a hobby, or needed advice, I could just go to the according sub and enjoy things related to it.
Tildes has ~games but nothing specific, and it's not meant for entertainment, only discussion. That's got value on its own, but it's not what I need primarily; I want somewhere I can nerd out about unimportant stuff with levity, with people into the same thing I like.
kbin looks appropriate for this but it's nowhere near popular enough for niche communities to settle in it yet, and Lemmy... well, I haven't really looked at Lemmy all that much? I'll try, but I have middling hope.
Same here. Loving the very specialized subreddits is what kept me there.
Alas, this is a problem of scale. Less users make this impossible, as these niches would have 3 users per.
For stuff like politics, local news, world news, memes, pictures, videos, there are some alternatives, but for any interest-based communities like sports, e-sports, gaming... there are almost no alternatives.
I follow the bodybuilding scene, smash scene, chess scene, league of legends scene, diablo, wow and speedrun and if I want to get everything at the same place, there is absolutely nothing better than Reddit. I want to leave Reddit because I honestly use 3rd parties most of the time, so Reddit killing them is effectively killing my access to those communities. I feel like I'll still visit them once in a while, but I wish alternatives (like Tildes) would grow towards that end.
I've made an account in 2018 with the drama around Ellen Pao, but I was never able to switch fully. I intend to spend more time here, but considering Tildes in only text based... I feel like it will only partially fill that void.
I'm definitely hoping another site/app or even a few pop up that can fill the void of reddit. Tildes is filling a small amount of the more general things reddit provided, but like others pointed out, it's not at all filling the niche things. Specific sports teams, for example. On reddit, I have /r/ockytop for all things related to the Tennessee Volunteers. College football, basketball, baseball, softball, etc. It was a pretty good community. I could start posting things about them here, but I can tell that it's not going to garner interest. So I'm basically just losing that place. Tildes isn't big enough to have it at this time. The audience isn't here, and me starting to post about it isn't going to suddenly build that audience.
And as much as people seem to very much dislike picture and video posts and such and don't want them in Tildes, I'm not going to pretend that I didn't enjoy them some. /r/me_irl for example was great when I didn't want to think and just wanted to scroll and laugh at weirdly specific memes. My 3rd party app of choice, Relay for Reddit, let me set specific layouts for specific subreddits. Since that one was only pictures, I could make it a two column gallery and be able to scroll through, just taking in the content.
I'm not advocating for Tildes to suddenly shift and add meme boards, but I also don't want to lose them.
Then of course, there's everything NSFW. Pretty much everywhere I look, it's very difficult to find such a collection of highly specific niche subreddits. Reddit had something for almost anything you were wanting to find, and more than likely an active, if small, community around it. That's very hard to replicate.
I see people here on Tildes exaggerating old reddit cliches (DAE le epic gem?) but I haven't seen things like that in like 8 years. Partly because it died off, and partly because I mostly go to "smaller" subreddits (that are still larger than the entire userbase of this site).
It's going to be difficult to replace. Tildes won't be able to fill the void left by Reddit because Reddit filled so many voids. It can fill part of it, but not the whole thing. I'm hoping other places pop up that can fill other pieces of it, and I can just have maybe a couple places to check instead of just one big one.
exercism.org has mostly replaced reddit and tiktok for me. I highly recommend it if you want to learn programming.
I was having similar issues in terms of trying to figure out how to replace the “News” that I got from Reddit, things like retro handhelds or tech news, etc. I ended up using a two pronged approach: I use an RSS reader (Net News Wire) and Artifact, which is an AI powered news app that learns what you’re interested in as you use it, and so far it’s worked out great.
I don’t miss Reddit at all anymore. Now that tons of people have deleted their past content (me included) there’s just a lot less to see on Reddit so I don’t even feel like I’m missing anything.
Hacker News and this site seems to fill the void for me.
Now picture me being mainly a shitposter and now having to engage in meaningful conversation over here
If they kill third party apps, I will not be able to use reddit on mobile, where I did all my scrolling, if theres some thing I need from reddit, I will visit old reddit on my desktop, but they will be few and far between, I bought a supporter count on the shroomery, so I can make a subforum called treasure hunting, I'm going to try and get some traffic like metal detecting, coin roll hunting, geo caching, so far I havnt gotten anyone who isnt already a shroomery member though
I mean the problem is that this change directly affects users. When it was just bad corporate decisions, like letting anti-vaxx subs stay, people were mad but were too lazy to care. But many people use Reddit on mobile devices, and making them have to use the Reddit app seems too annoying and futile to continue. Not to mention that the quality of content is only going to get worse, and spam (and potentially CSAM) is going to go up. Now that I think about it, didn't everyone stop using Craigslist because of how bad everything was?