I was mostly a reddit user as I moved away from those others earlier. But now that my RIF app doesn't work anymore, I don't go there. It weird as I haven't deleted the app and a few times I've...
I was mostly a reddit user as I moved away from those others earlier. But now that my RIF app doesn't work anymore, I don't go there.
It weird as I haven't deleted the app and a few times I've opened it without even thinking. It's funny how programed we can become. But I'm happy now. I get my news and information from a few places now instead of one but I don't mindlessly scroll as much as I used it. I've enjoyed the discussion on this site as well. Overall, slightly painful change but for the better.
Oddly enough, RiF works fine for me if you logout. Sucks for those who use their curated list of subs, but since I just browse r/all and individual subs, it fits my needs still. Though I still l...
Oddly enough, RiF works fine for me if you logout. Sucks for those who use their curated list of subs, but since I just browse r/all and individual subs, it fits my needs still. Though I still l don't use it a 1/10th as much these days.
I'm the opposite, I hadn't looked at /r/all for many years until a few days ago (also because of the RIF workaround.) It's striking how different the experience of reddit is. For example I had no...
I'm the opposite, I hadn't looked at /r/all for many years until a few days ago (also because of the RIF workaround.) It's striking how different the experience of reddit is. For example I had no idea people were still posting a lot on cringe subs like /r/amiugly, had no idea there was a whole sub for shitposting, and while I did know that sports must be popular, it was weird seeing it all over the front page since I haven't seen anything about sports on reddit for years. It's just bizarre how differently we all experienced reddit over the years.
Probably goes without saying, but my usage has gone down to something like 5% of what it used to be. I really just go to check on the subs that were used to discuss the API disaster, to see how mods are faring and things like that.
Regarding the r/amiugly situation, it's pretty interesting coming from an r/all addict. When the various subs went dark in protest, there was a very clear attempt to reshuffle what gets on r/all....
Regarding the r/amiugly situation, it's pretty interesting coming from an r/all addict. When the various subs went dark in protest, there was a very clear attempt to reshuffle what gets on r/all. The non-default subs that came back don't make it on r/all much now, and other subs have often flooded r/all with weird stuff, like amiugly, doordash, and nonpoliticaltwitter. It's hard to say anything for sure— but something I very much noticed the day the subs went dark, and still exists now. Just seems more than a coincidence imo
I have such an ingrained muscle memory that I still keep tapping the spot where the Sync app was and open the Google maps app every time. The only thing I seek out now is r/worldnews and r/news in...
I have such an ingrained muscle memory that I still keep tapping the spot where the Sync app was and open the Google maps app every time.
The only thing I seek out now is r/worldnews and r/news in the browser, but now that I'm not on reddit all the time my stress levels have decreased dramatically.
And I am glad to be on tildes as the community here seems to be full of intelligent people who take time to think and respond to things instead of just meming.
For me it's not the lack of a single place for content. It's the lack of discussion. Reddit's motto was front page for the Internet, but it should have been water-cooler for the Internet: the...
For me it's not the lack of a single place for content. It's the lack of discussion. Reddit's motto was front page for the Internet, but it should have been water-cooler for the Internet: the place you go to hear what others are saying about the news, to see the fact checking, the competing views, and other discussion about articles. On every article I open both the article and the reddit comments because the latter is usually the more valuable.
I think that can still happen, regardless of where you go. There's always going to be lines you can't cross in different parts of the web. I suspect that those lines are largely the same on Tildes...
I think that can still happen, regardless of where you go. There's always going to be lines you can't cross in different parts of the web. I suspect that those lines are largely the same on Tildes as they are on Reddit, though I agree that people there at least seemed quicker to try to attack people for just stating opinions. As much as I don't like right wing mindless subservience to their god-emperor, the left-wing also seems quick to assume the worst of people if they don't declare their total and undying loyalty to certain groups. Questioning anything about them means that you're obviously a bigot, regardless if you're generally supportive of those groups. It's almost similar to how it used to be with questioning anything about Israel's policies automatically got you labeled anti-Semitic.
That's an interesting point to conclude on, as I was with you right up until there, and was thinking of almost exactly the opposite situation. As a Jew, being called a "nazi" for being a zionist...
That's an interesting point to conclude on, as I was with you right up until there, and was thinking of almost exactly the opposite situation. As a Jew, being called a "nazi" for being a zionist has happened many times online, and feels like exactly what you described.
They can both be true. I've certainly seen both at various times online. I think it boils down to the fact that one of the easiest and most effective ways to get attention is to present people...
They can both be true. I've certainly seen both at various times online.
I think it boils down to the fact that one of the easiest and most effective ways to get attention is to present people with the semblance of an existential threat. Once people are convinced that their existence is threatened, there's simply no room for dissension or criticism, no matter how valid.
And this trick works no matter what political beliefs you hold. Zionists are convinced they're under existential threat for obvious reasons, but it shouldn't come as a surprise that many Palestinians feel similarly, and not without some cause. QAnon types have been convinced that they are threatened by a satanic conspiracy to eat babies, which somehow slots together with the "Great Replacement" nonsense that white supremacists have been pushing for decades. Leftists are perpetually under threat from reactionaries in law enforcement, government, and business, so there's always a perceived need to circle wagons and limit dissent. It has been famously noted that "the left eats its own," and I think this is why.
Up until recently, the primary mission of social media has been to gather users and drive engagement, with the expectation that revenue will follow. At the same time, news media has been undergoing crisis, as old modes of distribution and business models have fallen with new media. How to get eyeballs cheaply and with a minimum of effort? Scare the everliving shit out of people, of course! It seemed to work great, if you didn't examine it too closely.
When you add in the ability that social media has given us to curate our perceptions of the world and cloister us together with people who feel as we do, what you get are many different groups with widely differing perceptions of reality, all of whom have been convinced they're under existential threat at all times. It should be no surprise that intolerance in many forms should arise out of such conditions.
I found moreso that it just became people rushing to make the same useless jokes rather than actually talking about things. You'd see something on r/interestingasfuck and people used to tell you...
I found moreso that it just became people rushing to make the same useless jokes rather than actually talking about things. You'd see something on r/interestingasfuck and people used to tell you more about what was on display. For the last few years it's just been people making jokes and no actual discussion any more. Threads about movies/books just became one word answers, whereas they used to be longer comments about why people felt that way about the book/film.
Part of me thinks that being disconnected from Reddit will benefit me in the long run. I found myself getting grumpy or angry at people on there more often than not, so I'm going to try and use this as an opportunity to not try and be glued to an app that makes me feel this way.
God I hated scrolling for miles through of all the same, deeply unfunny jokes to try and find any actual meaningful commentary on the content! Tildes moves a lot slower than Reddit but it feels...
God I hated scrolling for miles through of all the same, deeply unfunny jokes to try and find any actual meaningful commentary on the content! Tildes moves a lot slower than Reddit but it feels like there are actual discussions taking place here and the comments are a lot more thoughtful and considered. The pace probably means you're not inclined to waste hours of the day on it too, it's definitely been a positive change for me.
One really good, but subtle, difference here is that the comment box is at the very bottom. It encourages scrolling and reading before adding your input rather than just typing whatever you think...
One really good, but subtle, difference here is that the comment box is at the very bottom. It encourages scrolling and reading before adding your input rather than just typing whatever you think of first. The comments here have been excellent so far.
100% I used to work with a big drop shipping operation before Reddit was a thing. When I saw interestingasfuck, didntknowiwantedthat, and similar subs, I was thinking oh my goodness I wish these...
100%
I used to work with a big drop shipping operation before Reddit was a thing.
When I saw interestingasfuck, didntknowiwantedthat, and similar subs, I was thinking oh my goodness I wish these existed when I was into selling.
I came to reddit for highlights and discussions since I get my news mostly from RSS anyway. Currently I'm trying out Lemmy (and Tildes obviously) and while Lemmy can look barren it looks like...
I came to reddit for highlights and discussions since I get my news mostly from RSS anyway.
Currently I'm trying out Lemmy (and Tildes obviously) and while Lemmy can look barren it looks like there are plenty of people starved for commenting and maybe they don't know where to get news from? I posted a couple of articles, this one being one of them which attracted plenty of discussion.
I don't have that much free time so I don't want to spam Tildes without contributing to discussion but it looks like Lemmy is mostly fine reddit replacement in this regard, just needs a little push.
I struggle with Lemmy, it's a lot of shit posting and crappy reddit bad memes. I want it to work and hope it settles down but I haven't really found any active communities in interested in. Maybe...
I struggle with Lemmy, it's a lot of shit posting and crappy reddit bad memes. I want it to work and hope it settles down but I haven't really found any active communities in interested in. Maybe they are just harder to find.
Probably the biggest problem with Lemmy and Fediverse right now is finding relevant communities. There is a lack of good search capability. Tildes is great for some higher level discussion, but by...
Probably the biggest problem with Lemmy and Fediverse right now is finding relevant communities. There is a lack of good search capability. Tildes is great for some higher level discussion, but by nature of its design has limited scope - it's not really meant to have an area to handle every subniche of every hobby. However, there are some things where that kind of discussion can be useful, and there's not a good way to find it on Fediverse right now outside word of mouth.
I think a good way for communities on Lemmy to succeed would be to congregate on servers focused around their specific interests, kind of like forums but with the ability to see other communities...
I think a good way for communities on Lemmy to succeed would be to congregate on servers focused around their specific interests, kind of like forums but with the ability to see other communities elsewhere through federation. That may happen organically if enough people get on there to start with, but for now it seems like a lot of people are frantically trying to get set up on whatever instance they can find, leading to serious overloading on the big generalist servers.
Yeah, it's becoming very reddit-like in terms of meme content. I have blocked a bunch of communities so that they don't appear in "All" feed which I use to explore active communities. So far I...
Yeah, it's becoming very reddit-like in terms of meme content. I have blocked a bunch of communities so that they don't appear in "All" feed which I use to explore active communities.
So far I don't see a spill of noisy comments but it's becoming a risk so I definitely hope Tildes grows as well since the way it's designed is more resilient.
If you haven't used Lemmy in a couple of days you might want to take a peek. It's bursting with activity (relatively) and some of the more niche communities are becoming viable.
Exactly. I went to reddit to see what people were thinking about the news and other stuff. I mean I also got some news from it too, but I valued it more for seeing people's thoughts.
Exactly. I went to reddit to see what people were thinking about the news and other stuff. I mean I also got some news from it too, but I valued it more for seeing people's thoughts.
This is exactly how I feel. Not having that singular place for news and updates makes me feel a bit disconnected (for better or worse). Alternatives are not quite the same but I am very interested...
This is exactly how I feel. Not having that singular place for news and updates makes me feel a bit disconnected (for better or worse). Alternatives are not quite the same but I am very interested to see how all of this plays out.
It's a similar feeling to how things felt after Google Reader ended. It's like there was a golden era of following blogs and other news, and then that disappeared. I really worry that there will...
It's a similar feeling to how things felt after Google Reader ended. It's like there was a golden era of following blogs and other news, and then that disappeared.
I really worry that there will become a series of walled gardens for podcasts now, where you have to use that network's podcast app.
And how they'll end after our next corporate overlords decide to shaft us. I'm a capitalist, but capital has no place in human connection. We shall, never, let capital become the means or the...
It's a similar feeling to how things felt after Google Reader ended.
And how they'll end after our next corporate overlords decide to shaft us. I'm a capitalist, but capital has no place in human connection. We shall, never, let capital become the means or the motivation behind human interaction, and yet that's what we do, every time, over and over again.
It's like there was a golden era of following blogs and other news, and then that disappeared.
There was and there can be once again, there just isn't because we've become a bit lazy, but that doesn't mean we can't bring it back.
I really worry that there will become a series of walled gardens for podcasts now, where you have to use that network's podcast app.
I've seen a general feeling of powerlessness among folk on Reddit and here, but I don't think it's really warranted. Heck, I even started blogging again about my favorite topics, following other Blogs as well, curating my Feedly, stopped posting my poems and technical tutorials to walled Gardens as now I'm linking to them instead; my point is simply that we can be the change we want to see on the internet! It will take effort, though , but that's fine IMHO because all valuable things do !
Fyi, there are still a few good ways to have the google reader experience. Feedly as a service is pretty decent and if you don't mind self hosting there are quite a few decent options out there...
Fyi, there are still a few good ways to have the google reader experience. Feedly as a service is pretty decent and if you don't mind self hosting there are quite a few decent options out there like freshRSS.
As we've seen from the past centuries of humanity, education doesn't pay the bills in the short term. And that didn't change much even with the advent of the internet. Arguably it was made worse...
As we've seen from the past centuries of humanity, education doesn't pay the bills in the short term. And that didn't change much even with the advent of the internet. Arguably it was made worse because it turns out servers started becoming really expensive to host but also were hosting hard to monetize content.
But if there's one thing people always paid for, it's mindspace. So ads will be inevitable until (if ever) people become used to paying for every piece of media they consume.
In my own situation, I see that as a good thing. For a long time I've felt like Reddit was taking up too much of my time and I was finding it hard to break away, it was just so tempting to look...
In my own situation, I see that as a good thing. For a long time I've felt like Reddit was taking up too much of my time and I was finding it hard to break away, it was just so tempting to look for new content whenever I was bored and just keep scrolling. And given how easy it was to just delete everything, posts, comments, accounts, none of it really meant anything, 12+ years passed reading an endlessly scrolling mega newspaper, subreddit drama, memes of the week or month, shitposting, whatever. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
So now, I have a chance to go back to the internet that used to be, where I actually actively lurked around multiple sites or explored new places and went down some weird tangents. And when it was clear that I'd seen everything, I switched it off and did something else instead of scrolling some more.
Yeah I totally agree. I spent so much time on Reddit using Apollo, it’s weird by habit going to check Reddit, and just not having it there any more. Feels like the death of a social media empire...
Yeah I totally agree. I spent so much time on Reddit using Apollo, it’s weird by habit going to check Reddit, and just not having it there any more.
Feels like the death of a social media empire to me. Kinda like when MySpace died and Facebook took over.
I just have so much time now, and unsure of what to fill it with.
Two books that might inspire ideas if you are so minded, Flow the Psychology of Optimal Experience by Csikszentmihalyi and Bowling Alone by Putnam. Both are excellent imho.
Two books that might inspire ideas if you are so minded, Flow the Psychology of Optimal Experience by Csikszentmihalyi and Bowling Alone by Putnam. Both are excellent imho.
I found RSS very useful lately, also fediverse and tildes.net. I prefer RSS because it gives me links from the websites I chose, so I can read and share it to others. The latter two give me links...
I found RSS very useful lately, also fediverse and tildes.net. I prefer RSS because it gives me links from the websites I chose, so I can read and share it to others. The latter two give me links from the websites people chose, so I treat it more as a clue on what people are interested and talking about.
I'm still a bit dazed, to be honest. In a month, I left Reddit, my rss Twitter feeds died on me, and YouTube is experimenting with blocking adblockers and third party apps. I know it's companies...
I'm still a bit dazed, to be honest. In a month, I left Reddit, my rss Twitter feeds died on me, and YouTube is experimenting with blocking adblockers and third party apps. I know it's companies individually responding to their own market priorities (aka, monetise and make line go up again), but it's been a hell of a simultaneous broadside for me.
The last 10 years has been "grow at all costs, work out how to make money later". We are now at that later. I guess we will just revert to how it was before, when free things were limited, and...
The last 10 years has been "grow at all costs, work out how to make money later". We are now at that later. I guess we will just revert to how it was before, when free things were limited, and most things cost some amount of money. We have come to expect every platform to include a lot of very expensive things like image and video hosting for free. Old school forums used to make you hotlink images from elsewhere to keep down costs. Originally, gmail giving you 5GB free storage was seen as too good to be true. Now we just expect most services to have free and unlimited storage. Services like discord allowing file uploads with no quotas.
Personally I see myself cutting down on the services I use and paying for the ones that provide value. So far youtube is providing a lot of value so I'm happy to pay for that. Reddit and Twitter are not.
Gather round children, and let me regale you with tales of the golden before times, when governments adequately funded universities, and isps ran usenet and gopher networks…
Gather round children, and let me regale you with tales of the golden before times, when governments adequately funded universities, and isps ran usenet and gopher networks…
I'm familiar with the joke, but for what it's worth I was a child online in the 90s (unaffiliated with the FBI). Most of the adults were very nice, compared to these days!
I'm familiar with the joke, but for what it's worth I was a child online in the 90s (unaffiliated with the FBI). Most of the adults were very nice, compared to these days!
Hm? I was a kid online in the 90s and I wouldn't say it was nice. It was very well-educated WASP though. Discord servers have a lot more folks from the global south than the '90s internet ever did.
Hm? I was a kid online in the 90s and I wouldn't say it was nice. It was very well-educated WASP though. Discord servers have a lot more folks from the global south than the '90s internet ever did.
Gophernet from the local university and the local BBS directory from the library had very normal communities which were generally nice from the late 80s forward. Most were for a single topic such...
Gophernet from the local university and the local BBS directory from the library had very normal communities which were generally nice from the late 80s forward. Most were for a single topic such as a specific hobby, news and gossip for a zip code, or the occasional conspiracy theorists rantings so not much different than subreddits.
BBS were obviously much smaller than online communities now and when someone was being abusive (etc) they were quickly handled by an admin. It kept things much more pleasant due to the smaller scale.
For nostalgia of the old computer communities, we had a local BBS that was all about trading unlocked shareware games.
Basically, you posted what you wanted and what you had and either you would do a direct trade or the occasional convoluted 10 people all trading some intermediary step to swap your game for someone else’s. Then you would drop your trade-off at the library and pick up your exchanged disks.
It felt all cloak and dagger as a child since I knew we were circumventing the shareware concept and had a whole anonymous drop-off system.
I would never put a disk from some random anonymous person in a computer these days. Nor a random file downloaded from social media.
Yeah the Gopher/BBS/FidoNet days were a different time with a different set of people. I had an older friend who frequented BBSes and also did some stuff on Fido, and I read some of the stuff on...
Yeah the Gopher/BBS/FidoNet days were a different time with a different set of people. I had an older friend who frequented BBSes and also did some stuff on Fido, and I read some of the stuff on those nets through him, and the culture was very different. A lot more local, a lot more down to Earth, though obviously still selecting for the people with the time and money to have computers. The 90s Internet/Web was much more based off the original academic Usenet culture of highly educated, usually WASP-y folks. As an example, the Internet loved heavy metal even though the low income community I grew up in loved rap. It was a difference in peoples, incomes, and values.
ah the good old days. I genuinely miss gopher... being able to get everything you needed in a terminal windows was magical. I still remember having to break out alt.binaries into separate...
ah the good old days. I genuinely miss gopher... being able to get everything you needed in a terminal windows was magical.
I still remember having to break out alt.binaries into separate partitions because it was growing bigger than the 4GB SCSI HDDs (RAID-1) in our 40MHz SPARC II servers could handle... And when we stopped providing alt.binaries completely a little bit later on.
I also remember the regular joy of clearing out porn and warez from our public FTP servers...
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that later came at the same time for many of these apps, not long after the 0 interest rate environment went away. I’d love to read a study in a few years on how...
We are now at that later.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that later came at the same time for many of these apps, not long after the 0 interest rate environment went away.
I’d love to read a study in a few years on how the fed rate hikes impacted and changed social media.
I'm also convinced this is it, combined with a lot of other trends surrounding webside businesses. The primary driver has to be the end of borrowing free money coming to an end. What's surprising...
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that later came at the same time for many of these apps, not long after the 0 interest rate environment went away.
I'm also convinced this is it, combined with a lot of other trends surrounding webside businesses. The primary driver has to be the end of borrowing free money coming to an end.
What's surprising to me thus far, is how resilient the ad economy has been through this. I've been expecting much more of a bubble where companies would seriously cut advertising costs once money becomes more expensive, and so a lot of "you're the product so it's free"-services online would change payment models rather fast rather then continuing to burn through cash.
When the first large moves happen, will we see cascade effects as more pile on, or is the ad-penetration of the economy so entrenched we're not going back?
For what it's worth, as someone who works for a largely-ad-supported internet publisher, the ad market is rough right now. Direct bookings and programmatic rates are both substantially down...
For what it's worth, as someone who works for a largely-ad-supported internet publisher, the ad market is rough right now. Direct bookings and programmatic rates are both substantially down year-over-year.
Even this article makes a brief aside mentioning that. Yeah, all of tech is pulling out, especially after an unprecedented boom from the pandemic pushing people further online. The fall was...
Even this article makes a brief aside mentioning that. Yeah, all of tech is pulling out, especially after an unprecedented boom from the pandemic pushing people further online. The fall was inevitable, but people investing in tech aren't exactly looking at the long term.
Despite that it was probably the right move. We see how hard network effects can be in the 2020's. And we also see how hard it is for these websites to lose their audiences. They have a large captive population to figure out how to monetize, and short of illegalities, there's few things out of scope to try.
Paying for reddit isn't really viable anyway, since it's a link aggregator, and half the news articles linked are also behind paywalls. I'll kick in for tildes since it doesn't run ads and is more...
Paying for reddit isn't really viable anyway, since it's a link aggregator, and half the news articles linked are also behind paywalls.
I'll kick in for tildes since it doesn't run ads and is more discussion-focused, but I don't see myself paying for reddit or any of the sites that strip-mine information about me.
If they charged something reasonable, it might be worth it. Thing is, when you pay for youtube, all the annoying parts go away and you get a pretty good service with minimal anti features....
If they charged something reasonable, it might be worth it. Thing is, when you pay for youtube, all the annoying parts go away and you get a pretty good service with minimal anti features. Meanwhile reddit premium doesn't really do anything to fix the problems.
If I could have paid for Reddit Premium in order to continue using RiF, I would have. Most of the utility I get out of Reddit comes from Reddit itself. I'm there for the comments more than for the...
If I could have paid for Reddit Premium in order to continue using RiF, I would have.
Most of the utility I get out of Reddit comes from Reddit itself. I'm there for the comments more than for the links that it aggregates.
But paying for it in order to get rid of the ads on the official app feels dirty. Like it's rewarding bad behavior.
Trying to kick my reddit addiction with this site. It's still growing so the lack of comparative content is definitely helping. I was actually able to finish a book last week for the first time in...
Trying to kick my reddit addiction with this site.
It's still growing so the lack of comparative content is definitely helping.
I was actually able to finish a book last week for the first time in ages.
Same! I am reading and writing so much more since I deleted my Reddit account. I don't have a like for like replacement, but that was the point. I would rather replace it with reading physical...
Same! I am reading and writing so much more since I deleted my Reddit account. I don't have a like for like replacement, but that was the point. I would rather replace it with reading physical books and knitting and be online a bit less.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in 4th grade and immediately put on Ritalin until I decided to stop taking it my junior year of HS. From my understanding adults that were given Ritalin as I was have...
I was diagnosed with ADHD in 4th grade and immediately put on Ritalin until I decided to stop taking it my junior year of HS. From my understanding adults that were given Ritalin as I was have horrible attention spans as a result...
It's bad enough before you throw in short, quick, never-ending shots of dopamine.
This is untrue, to my knowledge. The consensus on stimulant treatment for children with ADHD is that it helps the child develop healthier habits and coping skills, and improve long term outcomes...
From my understanding adults that were given Ritalin as I was have horrible attention spans as a result...
This is untrue, to my knowledge. The consensus on stimulant treatment for children with ADHD is that it helps the child develop healthier habits and coping skills, and improve long term outcomes in general. Where have you heard this?
Ironically, I am on a waiting list to get tested for ADHD. Never been on meds but struggle with an attention span anyway. So maybe it's just a general ADHD thing?
Ironically, I am on a waiting list to get tested for ADHD. Never been on meds but struggle with an attention span anyway. So maybe it's just a general ADHD thing?
Oh it's definitely an ADHD thing. It's been theorized that it's a hold over from our hunter gatherer days. It's not we don't notice shit, we notice everything and kinda get overloaded
Oh it's definitely an ADHD thing.
It's been theorized that it's a hold over from our hunter gatherer days. It's not we don't notice shit, we notice everything and kinda get overloaded
Same here! It’s been a blessing in disguise I think. I’ve been able to put more time into reading instead of endlessly scrolling. I replaced the position where Apollo used to be with a language...
Same here! It’s been a blessing in disguise I think. I’ve been able to put more time into reading instead of endlessly scrolling. I replaced the position where Apollo used to be with a language learning app. So now when my muscle memory comes into play, I’ll open that up and run through a handful of exercises to progress my Italian.
I’ve been sitting on book 4 of the Stormlight Archives and am happy I finally got around to starting it since they are great. This is time I would have spent on Reddit.
I’ve been sitting on book 4 of the Stormlight Archives and am happy I finally got around to starting it since they are great. This is time I would have spent on Reddit.
Enjoy the book! Just finished it and I’m missing it so much. Can’t wait for the next book to arrive. It is kind of liberating and eye opening to see how much I was addicted to such a dopamine hit...
Enjoy the book! Just finished it and I’m missing it so much. Can’t wait for the next book to arrive.
It is kind of liberating and eye opening to see how much I was addicted to such a dopamine hit with Reddit.
Same really. I really had no idea how bad Reddit was to my other interests. Because of I was not doing anything, I was on Reddit and not reading books. I was able to finish two books last week,...
I was actually able to finish a book last week for the first time in ages.
Same really. I really had no idea how bad Reddit was to my other interests. Because of I was not doing anything, I was on Reddit and not reading books. I was able to finish two books last week, that I was reading for fun this time. And before I had fundamentally quit Reddit, I was lucky to finish a chapter.
It definitely feels like some tectonic movements are happening this year with Twitter and Reddit both crumbling. Facebook was already over for must of us years ago. Even the ability to comment on...
It definitely feels like some tectonic movements are happening this year with Twitter and Reddit both crumbling. Facebook was already over for must of us years ago. Even the ability to comment on my local newspapers articles have been removed. TikTok faces government/privacy issues and is more of a toy IMO. Yeah we’ll see how the rest of the year goes but it definitely seems like the face of the internet is changing to a new era.
edit: forgot all the other tantrums and adware happening with other sites like youtube, netflix and so on
What's going on with Reddit seems to be a symptom of the monopolization of the Internet and the free sharing of information. It feels like everything we interact with now has systems to extract...
What's going on with Reddit seems to be a symptom of the monopolization of the Internet and the free sharing of information. It feels like everything we interact with now has systems to extract our data, our browsing habits, even the way we converse with each other, and it's all going to be sold to progress AI. Sometimes I just sit and think about it for a while and it's pretty alarming.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any means, but my tinfoil hat theory is that the "powers that be," whoever the hell that is, are just now figuring out how to corale and control the free and open sharing of information on the Internet. Musk buying Twitter and Reddit priming to go public feel like things are moving behind the scenes in an attempt to suppress a new form of communication that, to be honest, is not all that old. Think about it; how long have we really been able to use this technology to massively distribute information in a mainstream sense? 20 years? Maybe? People have barely had time to truly understand it and adapt to the way it affects our lives.
Idk, that's my crackpot theory, really it's just money doing what it does best, running nice things. I'm done rambling now lol
I feel like social media is just exposing it's toxicity. It started out as something to connect with others, but devolved into maximizing clicks and view time. And we've seen how that impacts...
I feel like social media is just exposing it's toxicity. It started out as something to connect with others, but devolved into maximizing clicks and view time. And we've seen how that impacts people falling into rabbit holes of QAnon or whatever misguided bullshit from an innocent interest. Unfortunately I can't remember the podcast, but there was one that did a really good job explaining how YouTube's algorithm ended up sucking in people to QAnon.
But now we are at a point where social media has decided it's users are so addicted they will pay for access. Twitter providing higher limits to those who pay, and Reddit allowing third party access. And they are right people are addicted, sooo many people on reddit were ready to pay prices as high as $10 a month or more.
I would love for this to be the downfall of the current form of social media and replaced with something that makes it easy to connect/gather info on your hobbies and interests but isn't intentionally addictive. But I don't think that will exist while there will always be the push for constantly increasing profits into infinity. That's the real driving force here.
Yeah, it feels like the big general purpose forums went the wayside as big social media websites got popular, but plenty of the more niche forums stuck around relatively unchanged in the past 10+...
Interestingly, there are a few topics where forums still rule the day. The ones I know about and use are cars and motorcycles.
Yeah, it feels like the big general purpose forums went the wayside as big social media websites got popular, but plenty of the more niche forums stuck around relatively unchanged in the past 10+ years. Just some examples:
AVRider is the place I go for adventure bike discussion
Since you mentioned motorcycle forums, for things like that (I am hesitant to call them hobbies!) forums are vastly superior to reddit. Check out /r/motorcycles. It's pretty much garbage, because...
Since you mentioned motorcycle forums, for things like that (I am hesitant to call them hobbies!) forums are vastly superior to reddit.
Check out /r/motorcycles. It's pretty much garbage, because reddit threads move too fast once a subreddit gets big enough. You cannot talk about a new model's release because that thread will be at the bottom of the 5th page within the day.
In forums, the thread sticks, people actively look for discussion on the specific model and end up in that thread and as a result you get lots of actual comments (instead of one-liners), often spanning years. There are "tips and tricks" or "common issues with X" threads that have been going for decades.
In contrast, reddit has almost zero such discussions, it's all focused on the ephemeral and the quick to engage with.
Maybe it has to do with what was in when the hobby really got moving? /Fixmyprint was a place that would give lots of tips and I tried to contribute solutions when I could. I don't know if 3d...
Maybe it has to do with what was in when the hobby really got moving? /Fixmyprint was a place that would give lots of tips and I tried to contribute solutions when I could. I don't know if 3d printing forums would have had as much. Just guessing here?
For me, Reddit was the infite comment section. I didn't need to sign up for some forum to read or discuss something. I already had the place. Over time, I found that Reddit went from helpful and discussion to jokes and one liners. You could also tell a difference from weekend to weekday which showed the corporate involvement. I miss the mornings where I'd wake up early and see the weird NSFW stuff that had gotten to the top of /all while we slept.
I think it's more to do with the nature of the activity. The motorcycle industry for example is moving but is moving slowly. There isn't a new release every week but neither are the models...
I think it's more to do with the nature of the activity. The motorcycle industry for example is moving but is moving slowly. There isn't a new release every week but neither are the models stagnant for decades. There is also A LOT to be said for any given bike.
A thread for a model could span from the announcement of the upcoming model to "common tips and fixes", 10 years later.
It was just better, If I want to know something about the Suzuki DRZ I can try searching reddit and find 20 random threads from "look at my new bike" to "I took a spill on my DRZ" or hit up forums that will have dedicated threads for reviews common mods etc from people that could take one apart and put it back together blindfolded.
Reddit is bad at in-depth over a long term IMHO. I guess the equivalent would be if you were interested in 10,000$ 3rdPrinters you intended to keep for years?
Considering how everything old is new again I'll expect usenet to return, tbh. In a way it has with the Fediverse attempt. I'm not really kidding that much. When my kids were all excited about...
Considering how everything old is new again I'll expect usenet to return, tbh. In a way it has with the Fediverse attempt.
I'm not really kidding that much. When my kids were all excited about Discord and how you can run bots all I saw was IRC and scripts from like 20 years ago.
reef tanks are also also like this. extremely niche and still almost entirely done on old forums. I don’t mind having these one offs for my hobbies but I will miss being able to discover new stuff...
reef tanks are also also like this. extremely niche and still almost entirely done on old forums.
I don’t mind having these one offs for my hobbies but I will miss being able to discover new stuff as easily as i could with reddit.
Or at a point where users who won't pay for access aren't worth keeping. We're watching companies no longer comfortable with the status quo deciding that a chance at large profits is worth the...
But now we are at a point where social media has decided it's users are so addicted they will pay for access
Or at a point where users who won't pay for access aren't worth keeping.
We're watching companies no longer comfortable with the status quo deciding that a chance at large profits is worth the risk of losing a business altogether.
Depends on the service to be honest. YouTube carries so much content and features and even community, and is basically uncontested as a service. It's well worth $10/month for me to keep ads off,...
Depends on the service to be honest. YouTube carries so much content and features and even community, and is basically uncontested as a service. It's well worth $10/month for me to keep ads off, similar to any streaming service.
Meanwhile, Twitter has never felt worth paying for and Reddit's value decreased for me overtime. If I'm directly paying for something I either expect the users to be listened to (as they are now the paying customers) or for the raw value to be that consistently good, and those two sites couldn't be farther from that mark. It's made apparent that the subscriber money is outnumbered by the ad revenue, so guess who gets priority?
With all that said, I am more than happy to invest and out my money where my mouth is when it comes to potential alternatives. I donated to Tildes in the early days and I'm paying for a few new services that have almost no content but potential. It seems the ad driven nature of websites are a slowly eroding poison to a quality community, so if a paywall can help mitigate that issue on two fronts, I'm down to at least try and Jumpstart a different solution.
The book the Chaos Machine by Max Fisher does a good job showing how the algorithms over the last five years and more have led to hatred and even violence.
The book the Chaos Machine by Max Fisher does a good job showing how the algorithms over the last five years and more have led to hatred and even violence.
I definitely feel less connected to the internet with my migration to the fediverse so far. I also miss the big niche communities for some PC games I play. Hope to see other folks migrate over...
I definitely feel less connected to the internet with my migration to the fediverse so far. I also miss the big niche communities for some PC games I play. Hope to see other folks migrate over soon but I'm afraid the vast majority don't care about the changes happening to reddit.
They don't. But I feel like that's fine. It's become full of normies now anyway, every post is a repost and every comment thread is full of the same jokes. I'm starting to settle in at tildes a...
They don't. But I feel like that's fine. It's become full of normies now anyway, every post is a repost and every comment thread is full of the same jokes. I'm starting to settle in at tildes a bit more and I'm enjoying it much more than what Reddit has turned into.
Although, I'm about to buy my first house and I feel a bit anxious I won't have the resource that is Reddit for any DIY projects and gardening. Feels a little dumb too, to be quitting Reddit so staunchly when I could still view the content but it still feels bad to support them in any way right now.
It was a real weird experience when my reddit comments started getting responses like "omg! yer such a nerd!". Like, the fuck are you muggles doing on my internet? I think the iPhone and resulting...
It's become full of normies now anyway
It was a real weird experience when my reddit comments started getting responses like "omg! yer such a nerd!". Like, the fuck are you muggles doing on my internet?
I think the iPhone and resulting changeover to smartphones are what started that trend, and at this point I kinda wish they hadn't been invented yet.
Subreddits are such a fascinating microcosm of this given the seemingly universal experience of users as they grew. Without active mods fighting to hold norms, they devolve. - because the internet...
Subreddits are such a fascinating microcosm of this given the seemingly universal experience of users as they grew. Without active mods fighting to hold norms, they devolve. - because the internet is so low-friction for subreddits.
The rising internet is higher friction, and will have more exclusive communities.
I've had to seriously curate my reddit experience because of the sheer number of racists, fascists, and other conservatives. Prior to Trump, I thought they were a loud but small minority. Finding...
I've had to seriously curate my reddit experience because of the sheer number of racists, fascists, and other conservatives. Prior to Trump, I thought they were a loud but small minority. Finding out they're at least 1/3rd the population of the U.S. has been seriously depressing.
For the home stuff at least, YouTube is a better resource than Reddit anyway. Anything you could possibly need to fix in your home already has multiple surprisingly high-quality videos dedicated...
For the home stuff at least, YouTube is a better resource than Reddit anyway. Anything you could possibly need to fix in your home already has multiple surprisingly high-quality videos dedicated to the entire process, and home renovation stuff really lends itself to the video format.
I'd also recommend Ask This Old House. I've learned so much from just watching Ask This Old House for entertainment, then coming back around to an episode when I need to tackle a particular project myself. I usually pair this with then looking for a deeper dive video on YouTube from a channel like Home Renovision where someone really goes into long, deep detail on every little piece of the project.
That makes sense, even for learning Linux I've found YouTube to be way more beneficial. I've seen some home improvement videos shotty though but they tend to have a certain charm I enjoy.
That makes sense, even for learning Linux I've found YouTube to be way more beneficial. I've seen some home improvement videos shotty though but they tend to have a certain charm I enjoy.
You probably know this already, but make sure you double-check anything chatgpt puts out. I've had it completely fabricate information that sounded reasonable.
You probably know this already, but make sure you double-check anything chatgpt puts out. I've had it completely fabricate information that sounded reasonable.
Yeah I have to correct it all the time, especially when learning code or system administration. As a general guide though for minor questions it seems just as reliable as some random person on the...
Yeah I have to correct it all the time, especially when learning code or system administration.
As a general guide though for minor questions it seems just as reliable as some random person on the internet.
since LLMs can't see what they're writing (atleast that's how I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong), I've gotten into the habit of typing "is the above correct ?" after asking a question,...
since LLMs can't see what they're writing (atleast that's how I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong), I've gotten into the habit of typing "is the above correct ?" after asking a question, atleast 5 out of 10 times it corrects itself; it saves me a bit of time :) of course I still have to verify the information but I can eliminate what it said is wrong
I thought tildes was supposed to a place where we didn't create these types of divisions. Everyone was a "normie" at some point, and that term doesn't really mean anything to begin with. We should...
I thought tildes was supposed to a place where we didn't create these types of divisions. Everyone was a "normie" at some point, and that term doesn't really mean anything to begin with. We should aim to educate and uplift those who express a desire to learn. There's nothing wrong with ignoring people who you don't want to interact with, but you don't need to call them out.
This elitism is one reason people are turned off by a lot of these (currently) niche potential reddit & twitter alternatives.
Thank you for this reminder. You're right, it's not a great mindset to have and in switching platforms like this I should change my mindset as well. But to echo the original OP my response was for...
Thank you for this reminder. You're right, it's not a great mindset to have and in switching platforms like this I should change my mindset as well.
But to echo the original OP my response was for it's just frustrating to see these users who don't care about what made Reddit appealing to us in the first place simply want the protests to end so they don't have to be inconvenienced. They don't express a desire to learn so there's no opportunity for us to teach them. And in all honesty I don't think I want people like that joining us over here at tildes either.
I'm messing around with running large language models on my gaming graphics card. There's several large subreddits to talk about that and with guides on the various tools. One of those subreddits...
It's become full of normies now anyway
I'm messing around with running large language models on my gaming graphics card. There's several large subreddits to talk about that and with guides on the various tools. One of those subreddits had stayed dark permanently, and let me tell you, the community absolutely hates those mods.
Every discussion about that tool that now happens on one of the other subreddits is full of anger and frustration, and calls for the subreddit to come back from blackout.
That's when I personally realized reddit had won, and decisively. Even the nerds don't care about the API.
For me 'winning' was always less about users taking a united stand, and more about hurting Spez. Hitting him where it hurts is about money. And I believe that part worked. I keep seeing ads to...
For me 'winning' was always less about users taking a united stand, and more about hurting Spez. Hitting him where it hurts is about money. And I believe that part worked. I keep seeing ads to advertise on reddit everywhere. On facebook, on my podcast app, on twitter, and Reddit itself is plastered with them.
I don't think Reddit has won while they are still scrambling for advertisers to come back. I think they are hurting a bit more than they would ever admit.
And this here is precisely why the protests failed. People didn't really care about 3rd party apps, they were just annoyed at reddit (and spez in particular) and wanted to hurt him. The protesters...
And this here is precisely why the protests failed. People didn't really care about 3rd party apps, they were just annoyed at reddit (and spez in particular) and wanted to hurt him.
The protesters were posting "fuck spez" and calling him a "little pigboy" in every thread, of course negotiation in good faith is impossible when one side is behaving like 8th grade bullies.
The protesters were behaving like petulant children.
Okay, maybe I should clarify. I classify 'winning' as 'hitting spez where it hurts' because I believe(d) revenue impacts will drive him to make changes. The same way the protests were trying to...
Okay, maybe I should clarify. I classify 'winning' as 'hitting spez where it hurts' because I believe(d) revenue impacts will drive him to make changes. The same way the protests were trying to drive those same changes. It doesn't matter if it's users united or not, there's currently a divide and there has been from the beginning (many subs stayed live during blackout). But the user impact was enough to hurt revenue anyway.
I will say the part where our opinions differ is that I don't think it's the strategy that led to lack of negotiation. I never honestly believed reddits management was open to negotiation in the first place, and what little concessions they were willing to make they did in the beginning, before the blackout even started. And I feel like the current situation we are in only solidifies that. Users have left, more now Apollo and RIF have closed, advertising is clearly impacted, and still Reddit hasn't proven itself willing to negotiate on the topic. I think their plan isn't to listen and compromise, but rather ignore user complaints and power through one way or another.
I went to reddit to digg in '07, during the first digg exodus (before the massive v4 migration)— and it's always been said, and always been true. In '07 I don't remember if subreddits even existed...
I went to reddit to digg in '07, during the first digg exodus (before the massive v4 migration)— and it's always been said, and always been true. In '07 I don't remember if subreddits even existed yet, it was like 50% programming talk and 50% tech talk, and the vibe was a lot like tildes is now.
They didn't, that came out quite a bit later. I remember people were so annoyed about it, complaining "where do I post something if it doesn't fit the available subreddits?!" In retrospect that's...
I don't remember if subreddits even existed yet,
They didn't, that came out quite a bit later. I remember people were so annoyed about it, complaining "where do I post something if it doesn't fit the available subreddits?!"
In retrospect that's quite funny, since subreddits were obviously a good idea.. but people just really hate it when a website changes I guess, even if the change is good
Game communities are a double edged sword. On one hand, you can learn new tricks and keep up with the upcoming changes, on the other, you get blasted with negativity and can come to dislike things...
Game communities are a double edged sword. On one hand, you can learn new tricks and keep up with the upcoming changes, on the other, you get blasted with negativity and can come to dislike things you'd have never noticed on your own.
I feel like we're going back to an older phase of the internet, due to the slow (though recently quite rapid) enshittification of services we've gotten used to having. Hobby forums, a variety of...
I feel like we're going back to an older phase of the internet, due to the slow (though recently quite rapid) enshittification of services we've gotten used to having.
Hobby forums, a variety of sites you'd go to when you wanted to waste some time, multiple ways to contact friends, but your chances of running into somebody IRL that uses any of them is slim. I like it.
Maybe less social media is a good thing? I think it has its benefits, but it's also caused a lot of problems and negative movements. Every time I've left a social media platform, I've been better...
Maybe less social media is a good thing? I think it has its benefits, but it's also caused a lot of problems and negative movements. Every time I've left a social media platform, I've been better off for it.
Since deleting RIF from my phone, I've spent way less time endlessly scrolling through Reddit at stupid hours of the night when I should've been sleeping, or during the day when I should've been doing something productive.
Since stopping Facebook usage, I no longer have to deal with people's passive aggressive or self-loathing posts, or political bullshit.
I really feel like I haven't lost anything of value since deleting my Twitter account.
I never used Instagram, but the whole "influencers" thing and the concept of Instagram models is really annoying to me. I love to live in the moment when I travel, and see sights in person, not through a phone screen.
Maybe the people who reallllly care about social media will continue to use the big sites. But I'm perfectly content on here with a handful of daily topics and high-quality discussions where we can all speak our minds without having to worry about fake internet points.
Depends on the person. I'd love to be able to go out and chat with friends on the daily, or even weekly. I'm currently seeing some friends for lunch today and it's great. The last time we met?...
Depends on the person. I'd love to be able to go out and chat with friends on the daily, or even weekly. I'm currently seeing some friends for lunch today and it's great. The last time we met? April for a movie. Before that? October for a concert.
So yeah, meeting my friends 3 times in 9 months can sort of create a void for the other 98% of the year. Social media is more like a coping mechanism for that need to socialize than a simple time waster. I've tried meetups for years, even pre-pandemic, and I've yet to make a steady friend there. Maybe meetings are infrequent, or people that are interesting are one offs, or I'm simply not memorable. Whatever it is, it's been a blocker. And it only got worse even after physical meetups resumed. I'm guessing people are simply used to or content connecting online.
So ofc I default back to a community of like minded individuals talking about topics I'm passionate with. I couldn't find that in 6 years in my town, but can find it in 6 seconds online, on demand. I'm not giving up, but I think solving the physical problem is even harder than finding a reddit alternative (and I've also spent years on the latter)
That's kind of a double edge sword though. I think people nowadays are less social in person because they get their fill of being social virtually. Why meet up and catch each other up when you...
That's kind of a double edge sword though. I think people nowadays are less social in person because they get their fill of being social virtually. Why meet up and catch each other up when you already blast your life (or at least the parts you want everyone to know) online?
I too much prefer in-person meetups, or at least 1-on-1 virtually via Zoom/Facetime if distance is an issue. Thankfully I have a few friends who aren't big social media people and like to meet up in person.
They aren't in my local town anymore, but also not "far" in the context of living in a big city. 2 are still local (10 minute drive), 2 others are in a nearby local town (20 minutes), and 2 more...
They aren't in my local town anymore, but also not "far" in the context of living in a big city. 2 are still local (10 minute drive), 2 others are in a nearby local town (20 minutes), and 2 more are downtown proper (anywhere from 40-70 minutes depending on traffic).
I just started self hosting an RSS feed and have basically built my "own" reddit. I can't really interact with it unless I go and log in to tildes/lemmy/any other feed I have that has a comment...
I just started self hosting an RSS feed and have basically built my "own" reddit. I can't really interact with it unless I go and log in to tildes/lemmy/any other feed I have that has a comment section, but that's not too big of a deal. It's actually really nice and I feel like I'm actually more productive since there isn't an infinite well of content for me to go through.
Using Inoreader and it has definitely helped to get straight to articles and sites. Highly recommend to others, even the free version gives a fair amount of utility starting out.
Using Inoreader and it has definitely helped to get straight to articles and sites. Highly recommend to others, even the free version gives a fair amount of utility starting out.
I'm running Tiny Tiny RSS and it's working pretty great so far. My own little bubble of content that I don't have to leave the webpage for. I'm honestly surprised it took me so long to get this...
I'm running Tiny Tiny RSS and it's working pretty great so far. My own little bubble of content that I don't have to leave the webpage for. I'm honestly surprised it took me so long to get this all set up.
I use 'Offline RSS Reader' on my Android. I don't really know what's offline about it, but I suppose once the feed is loaded you could technically read it offline.
I use 'Offline RSS Reader' on my Android.
I don't really know what's offline about it, but I suppose once the feed is loaded you could technically read it offline.
I just connect to my TTRSS instance through the web browser on my phone, and I have a separate account set up for mobile that has some more mobile-friendly settings. It works quite well.
I just connect to my TTRSS instance through the web browser on my phone, and I have a separate account set up for mobile that has some more mobile-friendly settings. It works quite well.
I've wondered a lot if the pandemic really caused a lot of these sites to skyrocket in usage and value, and now that it's finally starting to really decline, companies want to maintain those...
I've wondered a lot if the pandemic really caused a lot of these sites to skyrocket in usage and value, and now that it's finally starting to really decline, companies want to maintain those values despite the fact that the situation that enabled them no longer exists to the same extent. Thus all these attempts to further monetize and put profits first. The fetish for endless growth at all costs will truly destroy pretty much every consumer product imo
I have a nitpick with the 'everyone was there' mentality. None of these places were ever a place where 'everyone' was. Everyone was not on reddit, or on twitter, or any other site one can name....
I have a nitpick with the 'everyone was there' mentality. None of these places were ever a place where 'everyone' was. Everyone was not on reddit, or on twitter, or any other site one can name. The size for the page loading alone blocked large swaths of people from participating on many of these sites - broadband is a first world luxury. Some sites had a bigger audience than others, however many sites also siloed everything and were... less than honest about how many people see something on their 'front page'. It was marketing, not reality. It was an illusion.
The website where 'everyone' is there has never been created. That's still in the future.
Yeah, there's a similar illusion of comprehensiveness for a lot of things. It's not true that every song is on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, or YouTube. It feels like you could find any song you want...
Yeah, there's a similar illusion of comprehensiveness for a lot of things. It's not true that every song is on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, or YouTube. It feels like you could find any song you want on any one of them, but they have different songs, and there are obscure recordings you won't find at all.
This thread made me realize how much I already value Tildes despite only using it for three weeks. Suddenly, I felt the urge to donate some money... but I could not find any link to do that. Maybe...
This thread made me realize how much I already value Tildes despite only using it for three weeks. Suddenly, I felt the urge to donate some money... but I could not find any link to do that. Maybe it's just me being blind. I am sure I will find it eventually... but I think Tildes should place that link in some prominent place right at the top to capture that fleeting moment when cheapskates like me are in the mood to give up some money.
This was not a take I had considered, and I think it more than the state of the economy or the whims of maniacal management figures explains why the walls have been raised so high and so quickly....
The rise of AI is also sending all these companies into a tizzy. Large language models from companies like OpenAI and Google are built on top of data collected from the open web. Suddenly, having all your users and content publicly available and easily found has gone from a growth hack to capitalistic suicide; companies around the industry are closing their walls, because they’re hoping to sell their data to AI providers rather than have it all scraped for free. Much of Reddit’s current chaos started with CEO Steve Huffman saying that the company realized that the platform is filled with good information, and “we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” On Saturday, Elon Musk introduced Twitter’s new login gate and view count restrictions “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.”
This was not a take I had considered, and I think it more than the state of the economy or the whims of maniacal management figures explains why the walls have been raised so high and so quickly. There is very much a "these are our users and data to exploit for profit, not yours!" kind of mentality to the decision to lower the portcullis, and it makes me feel dirty all over.
This boils my blood. The users gave you that content for free, to give away for free, it's not yours to profit off of just because you created the platform. So many volunteers' blood sweat and...
CEO Steve Huffman saying that the company realized that the platform is filled with good information, and “we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
This boils my blood. The users gave you that content for free, to give away for free, it's not yours to profit off of just because you created the platform. So many volunteers' blood sweat and tears, so much time given to the platform - all just to get kicked to the curb for a buck. I don't like that extremely entitled /u/spez guy at all.
The problem with the social web is that for most of it, it was doomed to fail from the start. The "business model" of most social media companies works like this: Make a cool free app. Collect a...
The problem with the social web is that for most of it, it was doomed to fail from the start.
The "business model" of most social media companies works like this:
Make a cool free app.
Collect a large number of users who use the cool free app.
Take away all the features that people enjoy about the app and put them behind a paywall, hoping that the users will pay to get the features they want to use back.
For many of them, they never even got to step 3. Meta is probably the only company that actually figured out profiting off of social media.
If you want to see that business model happen at warp speed, look at any of the large dating apps (Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Match, Okcupid, etc.). When they first started out, pretty much everything...
If you want to see that business model happen at warp speed, look at any of the large dating apps (Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Match, Okcupid, etc.). When they first started out, pretty much everything was free, filters, unlimited 'likes' or messages, etc. Wasn't bad. Get people hooked and talking how great it was. Nowadays, if you even want your profile shown to anyone you have to pay. Want to filter on people as the same religion or background as you? Pay. Send more than 5-6 likes per day? Pay. It is not a sustainable business model. Just runs the app into the ground, they keep it operating at a bare bones level for the few fools who will pay, thinking there's a great selection on there when in reality it is a desolate user base.
You missed a few steps: Decide against allowing people to pay for it (Facebook, Google, Twitter never even allowed it in the past) Extract all of the information you possibly can from users, even...
You missed a few steps:
Decide against allowing people to pay for it (Facebook, Google, Twitter never even allowed it in the past)
Extract all of the information you possibly can from users, even at the expense of brand image or usability.
Abuse that information any way you can to make a buck or just to see what sticks. Train facial recognition, sell it to data brokers, saturate users' digital world with ads... Just really milk it for all it's got, now or in the future.
We're going to keep doing the above, but also [what you describe in your step 3]
I think this happens a lot with any app now. I used MyFitnessPal for calorie counting for almost 10 years and the main feature I used was their barcode scanner, it made logging food really easy...
I think this happens a lot with any app now. I used MyFitnessPal for calorie counting for almost 10 years and the main feature I used was their barcode scanner, it made logging food really easy and they had a huge database since they had been around for so long. Last year they decided to move the barcode scanner to a premium feature so I stopped using the app. It was very apparent a lot of people were only there because MFP had the best barcode scanner and the company was hoping people would pay for it.
Companies seem more comfortable making unpopular changes for more money, and they don't care about complaints as long as there are people staying and paying. There are a lot of other people like me who are mad at MyFitnessPal and deleting the app, but it doesn't change anything because more people stayed than left. MFP has also been around a good while and are intergrated into a lot of other apps (like Garmin, various smart scales, etc..) which makes it even more inconvenient for people looking to switch.
It's the same with Reddit, nothing will change because more people stay than leave. Reddit's been around long enough that there's a lot of good information there and communities that you can't find anywhere else. I left Facebook but a lot of people I know haven't because so many companies and local groups use it to post information.
They know most people won't want to start over or try to find something new. I wish more people could be comfortable with moving on when things get bad, but change is scary and it's not always easy to find replacements.
We all have fond memories of social media and the enshittification is a pity, but it's worth remembering that we're partially going to miss it the way an addict misses the high. Some aspects of it...
We all have fond memories of social media and the enshittification is a pity, but it's worth remembering that we're partially going to miss it the way an addict misses the high. Some aspects of it were truly bad for you and you should have a long think before looking to replicate your experience.
I've seen a lot of people saying Mastodon just doesn't draw them in the way Twitter did. Yeah! Twitter is designed like a slot machine and Mastodon respects you enough to just show you chronological posts from your friends and then stop. You're comparing a bowl of salad to heroin, obviously the healthier thing isn't going to give you the same dopamine rush.
The wording of your comment seems to beat around the bush. Is there something more straightforward that you'd like to say? How do you interpret the passage?
The wording of your comment seems to beat around the bush. Is there something more straightforward that you'd like to say?
I'm genuinely glad that you've never had to encounter how being non-white or not a man could negatively impact one's experience on a site like reddit. But yeah it could get pretty racist and...
I also don't see how a non-white person would have a poorer experience on a site like reddit than a white person would.
I'm genuinely glad that you've never had to encounter how being non-white or not a man could negatively impact one's experience on a site like reddit. But yeah it could get pretty racist and sexist there at times, and obviously someone who's not a white man is going to be confronted with that bs more often and be more affected by it when they do encounter it.
Reddit also had a general culture of "everyone's a white cis dude" that could get... grating. Granted, this place has that vibe a little bit too, bur reddit had it in spades.
I'm not talking about "identity politics". Honestly I have a strong negative reaction to that phrase because it's so often bandied about by the "discrimination doesn't exist" types. The comment I...
Exemplary
Very few people in the real world obsess over identity politics.
I'm not talking about "identity politics". Honestly I have a strong negative reaction to that phrase because it's so often bandied about by the "discrimination doesn't exist" types.
The comment I replied to asked why a white man would have a different experience on places like reddit than someone who isn't a white man. I'm glad you personally never experienced racism or sexism or homo/transphobia on reddit, but it was absolutely there. How much any given individual encountered it would vary a lot based on a ton of factors -- which subreddits they frequented, what minority groups they were a part of, how much they could stand "edgy" humor and dogwhistles, etc. But when it exists in any appreciable quantity (and on a website with plenty of subs like TheDonald and redpill, you can't deny it definitely existed), it inevitably impacts the experiences of those in marginalized groups who are targeted by that rhetoric more than it does the experiences of white men.
I'm not sure why you attribute our different experiences to "a psychological principle" rather than just encountering different parts of reddit or perhaps being in different marginalized groups. I'll confess that you wording it that way makes it sound like you're accusing me of being hysterical or imagining slights, especially given your prior sentence. I'm going to assume the best, though, and assume that you didn't intend it that way.
the point is that imagining what it's like for other groups of people is kind of part of the problem
I think there's a difference between imagining what it's like for other groups of people and acknowledging that being part of the least marginalized group might have impacted how positively you experienced some online spaces, which is how I interpreted the author of the article's statement. As a white guy he can't imagine other people's experiences on reddit, so he's acknowledging that his perspective can only speak for the experiences that he had.
It's basically the same rhetoric as saying something is "woke culture", "woke agenda", etc. It reduces structural racism to something that is on the mind of the individual and basically calls...
I'm not talking about "identity politics". Honestly I have a strong negative reaction to that phrase because it's so often bandied about by the "discrimination doesn't exist" types.
It's basically the same rhetoric as saying something is "woke culture", "woke agenda", etc.
It reduces structural racism to something that is on the mind of the individual and basically calls people "sensitive" when denouncing racism.
This did not used to happen here on Tildes, but i guess receiving influx from reddit brings the malice too.
Unfortunately I can't assume the best, because I've seen enough of this to see it for what it is.
Yesh I'm trying to take tildes culture to heart and not jump to negative conclusions when I can avoid it but like... when it's a dogwhistle like that, it's hard. Hopefully redditors who play into...
Yesh I'm trying to take tildes culture to heart and not jump to negative conclusions when I can avoid it but like... when it's a dogwhistle like that, it's hard. Hopefully redditors who play into that rhetoric will either change their minds due to conversations here or leave due to not getting traction...
Could that be a result of what I've previously described as the "abused puppy" syndrome? Are your peers fighting back at imagined slights, because they've been attacked so often, that they just...
my peers making (let's face it) jackasses of themselves by yelling at people all the time over perceived (in most cases, I thought imagined) slights.
Could that be a result of what I've previously described as the "abused puppy" syndrome? Are your peers fighting back at imagined slights, because they've been attacked so often, that they just expect to be attacked because that's all they've ever known?
I simply avoid those communities. Politics has never worked on Reddit, even in the supposed glory days. I'm not going to waste my time entertaining people who just at best want to be edgy...
But yeah it could get pretty racist and sexist there at times, and obviously someone who's not a white man is going to be confronted with that bs more often and be more affected by it when they do encounter it.
I simply avoid those communities. Politics has never worked on Reddit, even in the supposed glory days. I'm not going to waste my time entertaining people who just at best want to be edgy teenagers and at worst try to espouse thoughts they are too cowardly to say with their person behind it
Reddit also had a general culture of "everyone's a white cis dude" that could get... grating
It's a bit inevitable when statistically speaking it's some 70% accurate (using some 6yo reddit statistics, so take with a hand of salt). I'm not interested in revealing my identity in my internet profile, so people will inevitably make assumptions about me.
Granted that is one major issue with modern (c. 2016) Reddit. People sure did start to have short fuses and normalize prowling through profiles to commit personal attacks. I was talking about video games and other media 99% of the time, my favorite genre should have no bearing on how good I am at Smash Bros.(to use one of the tamest real examples of ad hominem thrown after a pretty inoffensive advice comment).
See that same attitude was applied to a lot of stuff beyond just taste in videogames, though. There were some good subs dedicated to specific games, but the larger and more mainstream the gaming...
. I was talking about video games and other media 99% of the time, my favorite genre should have no bearing on how good I am at Smash Bros.(to use one of the tamest real examples of ad hominem thrown after a pretty inoffensive advice comment).
See that same attitude was applied to a lot of stuff beyond just taste in videogames, though. There were some good subs dedicated to specific games, but the larger and more mainstream the gaming sub the more likely it'd be full of sexist twats. Sometimes you'd just learn which subs to avoid, other times you'd just develop a thick skin so as to tolerate the bullshit, but either way it makes the place feel a lot less generally positive when you have to filter out shit like that before participating in your hobbies.
But yeah also shit like what you mention too tbh, "you like X so you're a casual gamer" bs was so dumb
Thanks for responding in good faith, I appreciate it. To be completely honest, when you said "is it racism," I assumed you were claiming that the author even mentioning his race and privilege was...
Thanks for responding in good faith, I appreciate it.
To be completely honest, when you said "is it racism," I assumed you were claiming that the author even mentioning his race and privilege was an instance of racism in itself, a la "reverse racism." I now see that you were asking "is the author claiming that non-white people experience online platforms differently due to racism?" Which is a much more reasonable question. A fair question, if asked in good faith, as you have.
I am white, but I feel pretty confident in stating that non-white people do experience online platforms differently because they encounter racism there, yes. I could get into my experience on reddit as a woman, which has been interesting, but it's probably best to discuss one thing at a time.
Genuinely, have you ever seen racism occur on reddit, either in posts or comments? (This is a complex topic, so it's probably best to start with some shared opinions that we both have. And I imagine that you've at least witnessed some instances of racism on reddit, correct?)
You don't? With all due respect... what rock have you been hiding under? Everyone knows that racism and misogyny (and every other form of bigotry or hatred) is rampant on the internet. I'm a white...
I also don't see how a non-white person would have a poorer experience on a site like reddit than a white person would.
You don't? With all due respect... what rock have you been hiding under?
Everyone knows that racism and misogyny (and every other form of bigotry or hatred) is rampant on the internet. I'm a white man, and I know that, by reading what women and people of colour have to say about their experiences on the internet. You don't have to experience internet hatred yourself to be aware that other people experience it.
Anyone on the internet who isn't a straight white man from the Anglosphere (mainly the USA) will inevitably encounter some form of "othering", from the merely annoying to the outright hateful.
(And that's even without considering that, as a gay man, I've been on the receiving side of some internet hatred myself.)
Women are either subject to unfiltered misogyny, have to hide their gender, or keep to certain "safe" (private or heavily moderated) parts of the internet. He's had, largely because of his "lucky...
Women are either subject to unfiltered misogyny, have to hide their gender, or keep to certain "safe" (private or heavily moderated) parts of the internet.
He's had, largely because of his "lucky hand", the leisure time and education to spend browsing the internet, interacting with people, reading news stories, etc, rather than only using it for, say, looking up shelters and bus schedules, social services, email, etc - things that you need the internet for but aren't idly being part of some global chatroom.
His Internet isn't heavily censored and filled with lies and propaganda in the same way that Russia's is (yes, America's got issues too, but...)
You can probably think of more examples but that's a starter pack for why a platform made by (and maintained by) affluent white men is most comfortable for affluent white men.
Perhaps that internet communities may provide more value as an alternative to real-world ones for people who are marginalised in real life. Edit: no, this was not his point; I took the quote out...
Perhaps that internet communities may provide more value as an alternative to real-world ones for people who are marginalised in real life.
Edit: no, this was not his point; I took the quote out of context. I assumed he was talking about the bad aspects of the platforms' deaths, but he was talking about the bad aspects of the platforms themselves.
I bet the author originally wrote this, keeping the 'mass-harass' and 'as a white guy' together so it's clear he's saying that people get harassed, but he's not personally experienced the worst of...
I bet the author originally wrote this, keeping the 'mass-harass' and 'as a white guy' together so it's clear he's saying that people get harassed, but he's not personally experienced the worst of it:
Retweets and quote tweets made it easy for good content to travel, but also made it easy to mass-harass anyone on Twitter. (As a white guy in America, I also experience the bad far less than many users, and I suspect I’d feel differently about the end of this era if I weren’t quite so privileged here.)
And then he stuffed this in the middle, which muddies the original meaning and makes it seem like the 'as a white guy' is about tracking for advertisers:
Meta’s knowledge of its users makes your Explore page more interesting, and only extends the dossier on you available to advertisers. I’m not sure it’s possible to have the good without the bad, and I think the bad might outweigh the good.
The writer needed to take another pass at the paragraph.
You're welcome, and I'm glad you asked. As you saw from the responses, most people on the Internet have been hurt by the casual hatred that's been allowed to fester on social media, even if that...
You're welcome, and I'm glad you asked. As you saw from the responses, most people on the Internet have been hurt by the casual hatred that's been allowed to fester on social media, even if that hatred was mostly concealed from them in real life. I was sure you knew that... the writer just didn't do a clean job when adding a few sentences.
My race, gender, sexuality, etc has never stopped anyone online from being awful. Internet trolls are awful to everyone and they don’t care if their insults and vitriol are even factually...
My race, gender, sexuality, etc has never stopped anyone online from being awful. Internet trolls are awful to everyone and they don’t care if their insults and vitriol are even factually applicable to their target.
I’m not sure where the myth that somehow certain groups have all the fun on the internet and never are the target of hate comes from.
honestly, I didn't realize how much I relied on reddit for seeking information, I only realized it after I kept stumbling upon closed subreddits from search results. there were so many useless...
honestly, I didn't realize how much I relied on reddit for seeking information, I only realized it after I kept stumbling upon closed subreddits from search results. there were so many useless search results that I was really frustrated. and twitter too, I often looked up twitter when I wanted to see some announcement from some company or similar (although I used it way less than reddit) but now I can't access it... it's not just twitter/reddit/youtube either, internet in general seems to be declining, blog posts and news articles used to be actually informative now are stuffed with words and are inaccurate often, and everything's moving to subscriptions and "cloud". the captchas are getting worse by the day; before I could just select some traffic lights and be done with it. now, I have to solve puzzles (and I it's only a matter of time before AIs can solve those too...). and as much as I'd like to be optimistic, I can't sed how it'll get better, with AI, it might get much worse but nonetheless I hope there will be some solution.
I admit that I still have and use my reddit account, but using this website and the fediverse has allowed me to slowly reclaim some of my lost attention span, which was slowly eroded as my brain...
I admit that I still have and use my reddit account, but using this website and the fediverse has allowed me to slowly reclaim some of my lost attention span, which was slowly eroded as my brain rotted from excessive usage of these sites. YouTube implementing its 'shorts' feature certainly didn't help matters either. Honestly, I want to see things burn even though the next thing may be worse as I'm not exactly optimistic about the future.
I've been using a home-brew tool to read feeds. So any of these "social" sites with content streams have always fed into my system, my OnePlace. So, I can see what's happening across Reddit,...
I've been using a home-brew tool to read feeds. So any of these "social" sites with content streams have always fed into my system, my OnePlace. So, I can see what's happening across Reddit, Insta, FB, LinkedIn - anything with an API or RSS/Atom works.
What I really like is that I can consume headlines and top-level posts one own terms. If I want to see comments (rare) or post (more rare) I simply click into that conversation (like I did for this one).
When Twitter closed the API I lost that access - oh well. But the Reddit changes haven't affected me at all - I can still 99% lurk and keep up w/news.
I use Inoreader myself. Discover, curate, and organize RSS feeds. Has a nice app and plenty of usage. I have a little over 30 feeds going now, still a lot of tweaking to do. Just taking my time so...
I use Inoreader myself. Discover, curate, and organize RSS feeds. Has a nice app and plenty of usage. I have a little over 30 feeds going now, still a lot of tweaking to do. Just taking my time so far. Here's a few screens from my phone as an example.
Its just a little PHP webapp I hacked out years ago that's been chugging along. Its not released anywhere...yet. no guarantees but if I'm publishing I'll post to the programming threads here first.
Its just a little PHP webapp I hacked out years ago that's been chugging along. Its not released anywhere...yet. no guarantees but if I'm publishing I'll post to the programming threads here first.
Honestly, I'm kinda happy. I've missed the days of localized, small forum communities. I still remember fondly being a part of close knit online group stemming from a fansite of a, like, 10k subs...
Honestly, I'm kinda happy. I've missed the days of localized, small forum communities. I still remember fondly being a part of close knit online group stemming from a fansite of a, like, 10k subs videogame reviewer back in the 2000s. There were, like, 30 regulars, and you knew where everyone was from, what pets they had, what were they doing for a living. Like a digital neighborhood.
It wasn't unusual to design you own website for a blog, posting art, news, reviews. Personal link aggregators were a thing. Better times, I feel.
And now you're just create a reddit account and are thrown into thousands of discussions where you can act like a fool, because no one will even bother remembering your username, where popular topics drown in thousands of comments across thousands of post and the most upvoted thing is a pun or a reference or a joke. The more people there are on the platform, the less individual input matters.
Honestly I was never really that into social media to begin with. I have an instagram that I hardly use but that’s just about it. I never saw Reddit as social media but more so as a new generation...
Honestly I was never really that into social media to begin with. I have an instagram that I hardly use but that’s just about it. I never saw Reddit as social media but more so as a new generation of forums. Am I the only one that has seen it as so?
I won’t get rid of my Reddit account. I’ve never used the main subreddits but more so more local or obscure metal/outdoors subreddits.
I agree on the point of Reddit, I never looked at it as social media. I was actually reminded of, when I first got on in 2012, the old gamefaqs forums, except for more than just games. I wanted to...
I agree on the point of Reddit, I never looked at it as social media. I was actually reminded of, when I first got on in 2012, the old gamefaqs forums, except for more than just games. I wanted to waste my time on Reddit finding good info on my interests, not spend all my life on the site. That's probably why j almost never used r/all or r/popular. I just wanted what I wanted, not what was being "pushed" or fed to me.
I see. Then, why would the latter be appealing and the former not? It seems to me that the differences are prone to be of degree rather than kind, in any event. (Nominally directed at the...
I see. Then, why would the latter be appealing and the former not? It seems to me that the differences are prone to be of degree rather than kind, in any event. (Nominally directed at the grandparent, but if you have opinions I'd like to hear them too.)
A website/app that is based on following people will encourage narcissism and self-promotion. A user has to attain a high number of followers by posting content that will attract views. That might...
Then, why would the latter be appealing and the former not?
A website/app that is based on following people will encourage narcissism and self-promotion. A user has to attain a high number of followers by posting content that will attract views. That might be attractive pictures, or outrageous statements, or whatever - as long as it gets people viewing your page and subscribing to your content.
A website/app that is based on following topics brings together people with a common interest. The people who follow a page about X will generally have a common interest about X. Rather than the focus being one central person who's trying to attract your attention, the focus is the topic that everyone has in common.
Some of us prefer to focus on subjects we can discuss with other people, rather than being followers of an egotist.
I think this is an overly absolutist argument—like I said, I think the differences are principally of degree, not kind. Something centred around people will not encourage those people to post...
I think this is an overly absolutist argument—like I said, I think the differences are principally of degree, not kind.
Something centred around people will not encourage those people to post anything; rather, it encourages coherent personas, identities, and themes, devoted to a single code and language game. To give a concrete example of the incentive structures at play: if you are interested in X and Y, and I am interested in Y and Z, I will be more likely to 'follow' you if you post only about Y than if you post about both X and Y, since I don't care about X. One prominent example of this is youtube, which encourages users to make multiple 'channels' if they want to publish videos with markedly different form or subject matter.
On the flip side—I can speak only for myself, but there are multiple places on the internet which are nominally devoted to a particular subject, but to which I in fact only go because there is a particular individual (or multiple of them) with whom I enjoy talking.
More strongly topic-oriented fora are not immune to perverse incentive structures; I would say they are just as bad, and I would say the pathologies are isomorphic to the ones found in more strongly person-oriented fora. On reddit, some people were referred to as 'karma whores' or 'karma farmers' (this was before corporate interest in fake accounts completely took over—or at least, before it was quite as prominent).
In both cases, the pathology is the same: a lack of genuine personability—in the one case, a relationship which is only parasocial, and in the other, a lack of relationship altogether (perceived or otherwise). In either case, being oriented around people or topics does not seem to be the principal issue. (Here, I give some discussion of my views on the scaling of what others in this thread have called topic-oriented fora. Also some nice discussion by others of voting systems.) As usual, kant had the right of it—people should be treated only as ends unto themselves.
Can you give examples or explain this? My only "social media" was Reddit. I couldn't tell you a single username of another Reddit user. The subs I subscribed to were full of people discussing a...
there are multiple places on the internet which are nominally devoted to a particular subject, but to which I in fact only go because there is a particular individual (or multiple of them) with whom I enjoy talking.
Can you give examples or explain this?
My only "social media" was Reddit. I couldn't tell you a single username of another Reddit user. The subs I subscribed to were full of people discussing a common topic. I do understand the general appeal of following people, but I don't know of anyone on Reddit that was worth following.
For example I know the late Peter Mayhew used to pop in to various Star Wars threads and leave a nice little comment, which was nice, but that isn't why I was reading Star Wars comments. I didn't follow Peter to see when he posted. I always appreciated it since it was always clearly coming from a place of love, but that isn't why I was there.
In fact for me personally I prefer not knowing who people are. I think of Dave Chappelle's joke, "Where's Ja at?", would this discussion improve if we brought in a random celebrity and got their opinion on the topic? If we're discussing writing books, it makes sense to get Stephen King's opinion. If we're discussing the latest Android update features, Stephen King is welcome to provide his opinion but I don't really care unless he has something insightful to say.
They are mostly fairly small technical fora or chatrooms—such that you can know (or at least recognise) nearly everybody. This would obviously not work on /r/starwars, which appears to have nearly...
They are mostly fairly small technical fora or chatrooms—such that you can know (or at least recognise) nearly everybody. This would obviously not work on /r/starwars, which appears to have nearly 3 million subscribers; see again the comment I linked for my views on such scale.
It was both, the later you go in its lifespan. Reddit went out of its way to add everything and the kitchen sink that is unthinkable for a forum: chat, customizable user profiles, a redesign...
I never saw Reddit as social media but more so as a new generation of forums. Am I the only one that has seen it as so?
It was both, the later you go in its lifespan. Reddit went out of its way to add everything and the kitchen sink that is unthinkable for a forum: chat, customizable user profiles, a redesign optimized for image submissions, user profiles being their own subreddit, a built in video player, the list goes on.
I may have used it as a gen 2 forum, but it was clear reddit did not want to optimize for that experience; I can't even subscribe to a threadm/post to see when it updates without extentions. Becsuse to Reddit the comments are this ephemeral burst of emotion instead of a way to engage in long form communication.
I don't mind, social media hasn't felt truly social in a while. I found my way back to the slow web a few years back, now most of my online socializing is through personal sites and forums. I hope...
I don't mind, social media hasn't felt truly social in a while. I found my way back to the slow web a few years back, now most of my online socializing is through personal sites and forums. I hope more folks will realize that the "old web" never died.
I will say though, Twitter has been great for getting relevant & timely local information in crises and protests. I worry about this, actually. We had some pretty intense storms early this year, people died just because they went down the wrong road at the wrong time. Radio was useless, like all the local broadcasts were replaced with the same stuff iheartradio sends around the country, local news gave a few updates but mostly "follow us on twitter".
I did this with email and CAD software some time ago and started doing it with social media - there are multiple overlapping services providing similar things, spend some time getting used to it...
I did this with email and CAD software some time ago and started doing it with social media - there are multiple overlapping services providing similar things, spend some time getting used to it and if a platform ends their service, you still have the others. Don’t be afraid to try out new things. If there is an open source solution with a strong community like Thunderbird or Tildes, even better - it may be more resilient.
I'm curious, do we have a downloadable text backup of Reddit as a whole before the blackouts? It's such a trove of information and having that on a hard drive would be handy.
I'm curious, do we have a downloadable text backup of Reddit as a whole before the blackouts? It's such a trove of information and having that on a hard drive would be handy.
You question is a suspected part of why these sites are doing this. They don't want people to have backups on their hard drive. Not without paying. But to answer your question: your best and very...
You question is a suspected part of why these sites are doing this. They don't want people to have backups on their hard drive. Not without paying.
But to answer your question: your best and very flimsy bet is archive.org on your favorite old conversations. There are also several websites for viewing deleted/removed comments that was powered by Pushshift. But it was hit right before the 3rd party apps and won't work on comments newer than 4/2023.
Nowhere near this scale, but I've thought about collecting some of the best information as a web repository. Even something super basic, an old school directory of static standalone pages. I say...
Nowhere near this scale, but I've thought about collecting some of the best information as a web repository. Even something super basic, an old school directory of static standalone pages. I say static, that way it could be easily downloaded or mirrored and future-proof.
Ideally it would be a collaborative effort, to account for the wide range of communities & interests. Of course there's the issue of getting permission from post authors and some of this content is old or from abandoned accounts, not sure what to do about that.
I was mostly a reddit user as I moved away from those others earlier. But now that my RIF app doesn't work anymore, I don't go there.
It weird as I haven't deleted the app and a few times I've opened it without even thinking. It's funny how programed we can become. But I'm happy now. I get my news and information from a few places now instead of one but I don't mindlessly scroll as much as I used it. I've enjoyed the discussion on this site as well. Overall, slightly painful change but for the better.
Oddly enough, RiF works fine for me if you logout. Sucks for those who use their curated list of subs, but since I just browse r/all and individual subs, it fits my needs still. Though I still l don't use it a 1/10th as much these days.
I'm the opposite, I hadn't looked at /r/all for many years until a few days ago (also because of the RIF workaround.) It's striking how different the experience of reddit is. For example I had no idea people were still posting a lot on cringe subs like /r/amiugly, had no idea there was a whole sub for shitposting, and while I did know that sports must be popular, it was weird seeing it all over the front page since I haven't seen anything about sports on reddit for years. It's just bizarre how differently we all experienced reddit over the years.
Probably goes without saying, but my usage has gone down to something like 5% of what it used to be. I really just go to check on the subs that were used to discuss the API disaster, to see how mods are faring and things like that.
Regarding the r/amiugly situation, it's pretty interesting coming from an r/all addict. When the various subs went dark in protest, there was a very clear attempt to reshuffle what gets on r/all. The non-default subs that came back don't make it on r/all much now, and other subs have often flooded r/all with weird stuff, like amiugly, doordash, and nonpoliticaltwitter. It's hard to say anything for sure— but something I very much noticed the day the subs went dark, and still exists now. Just seems more than a coincidence imo
BaconReader also works while logged out.
I have such an ingrained muscle memory that I still keep tapping the spot where the Sync app was and open the Google maps app every time.
The only thing I seek out now is r/worldnews and r/news in the browser, but now that I'm not on reddit all the time my stress levels have decreased dramatically.
And I am glad to be on tildes as the community here seems to be full of intelligent people who take time to think and respond to things instead of just meming.
I've been doing the same thing, but moved a link to tildes into the spot where RiF was.
For me it's not the lack of a single place for content. It's the lack of discussion. Reddit's motto was front page for the Internet, but it should have been water-cooler for the Internet: the place you go to hear what others are saying about the news, to see the fact checking, the competing views, and other discussion about articles. On every article I open both the article and the reddit comments because the latter is usually the more valuable.
I think that can still happen, regardless of where you go. There's always going to be lines you can't cross in different parts of the web. I suspect that those lines are largely the same on Tildes as they are on Reddit, though I agree that people there at least seemed quicker to try to attack people for just stating opinions. As much as I don't like right wing mindless subservience to their god-emperor, the left-wing also seems quick to assume the worst of people if they don't declare their total and undying loyalty to certain groups. Questioning anything about them means that you're obviously a bigot, regardless if you're generally supportive of those groups. It's almost similar to how it used to be with questioning anything about Israel's policies automatically got you labeled anti-Semitic.
That's an interesting point to conclude on, as I was with you right up until there, and was thinking of almost exactly the opposite situation. As a Jew, being called a "nazi" for being a zionist has happened many times online, and feels like exactly what you described.
They can both be true. I've certainly seen both at various times online.
I think it boils down to the fact that one of the easiest and most effective ways to get attention is to present people with the semblance of an existential threat. Once people are convinced that their existence is threatened, there's simply no room for dissension or criticism, no matter how valid.
And this trick works no matter what political beliefs you hold. Zionists are convinced they're under existential threat for obvious reasons, but it shouldn't come as a surprise that many Palestinians feel similarly, and not without some cause. QAnon types have been convinced that they are threatened by a satanic conspiracy to eat babies, which somehow slots together with the "Great Replacement" nonsense that white supremacists have been pushing for decades. Leftists are perpetually under threat from reactionaries in law enforcement, government, and business, so there's always a perceived need to circle wagons and limit dissent. It has been famously noted that "the left eats its own," and I think this is why.
Up until recently, the primary mission of social media has been to gather users and drive engagement, with the expectation that revenue will follow. At the same time, news media has been undergoing crisis, as old modes of distribution and business models have fallen with new media. How to get eyeballs cheaply and with a minimum of effort? Scare the everliving shit out of people, of course! It seemed to work great, if you didn't examine it too closely.
When you add in the ability that social media has given us to curate our perceptions of the world and cloister us together with people who feel as we do, what you get are many different groups with widely differing perceptions of reality, all of whom have been convinced they're under existential threat at all times. It should be no surprise that intolerance in many forms should arise out of such conditions.
I found moreso that it just became people rushing to make the same useless jokes rather than actually talking about things. You'd see something on r/interestingasfuck and people used to tell you more about what was on display. For the last few years it's just been people making jokes and no actual discussion any more. Threads about movies/books just became one word answers, whereas they used to be longer comments about why people felt that way about the book/film.
Part of me thinks that being disconnected from Reddit will benefit me in the long run. I found myself getting grumpy or angry at people on there more often than not, so I'm going to try and use this as an opportunity to not try and be glued to an app that makes me feel this way.
God I hated scrolling for miles through of all the same, deeply unfunny jokes to try and find any actual meaningful commentary on the content! Tildes moves a lot slower than Reddit but it feels like there are actual discussions taking place here and the comments are a lot more thoughtful and considered. The pace probably means you're not inclined to waste hours of the day on it too, it's definitely been a positive change for me.
One really good, but subtle, difference here is that the comment box is at the very bottom. It encourages scrolling and reading before adding your input rather than just typing whatever you think of first. The comments here have been excellent so far.
I've (somehow) never heard of this operation, but it sounds like an interesting story. I'd love to hear more about it!
I would like to hear more about this.
100%
I used to work with a big drop shipping operation before Reddit was a thing.
When I saw interestingasfuck, didntknowiwantedthat, and similar subs, I was thinking oh my goodness I wish these existed when I was into selling.
I came to reddit for highlights and discussions since I get my news mostly from RSS anyway.
Currently I'm trying out Lemmy (and Tildes obviously) and while Lemmy can look barren it looks like there are plenty of people starved for commenting and maybe they don't know where to get news from? I posted a couple of articles, this one being one of them which attracted plenty of discussion.
I don't have that much free time so I don't want to spam Tildes without contributing to discussion but it looks like Lemmy is mostly fine reddit replacement in this regard, just needs a little push.
I struggle with Lemmy, it's a lot of shit posting and crappy reddit bad memes. I want it to work and hope it settles down but I haven't really found any active communities in interested in. Maybe they are just harder to find.
Probably the biggest problem with Lemmy and Fediverse right now is finding relevant communities. There is a lack of good search capability. Tildes is great for some higher level discussion, but by nature of its design has limited scope - it's not really meant to have an area to handle every subniche of every hobby. However, there are some things where that kind of discussion can be useful, and there's not a good way to find it on Fediverse right now outside word of mouth.
I think a good way for communities on Lemmy to succeed would be to congregate on servers focused around their specific interests, kind of like forums but with the ability to see other communities elsewhere through federation. That may happen organically if enough people get on there to start with, but for now it seems like a lot of people are frantically trying to get set up on whatever instance they can find, leading to serious overloading on the big generalist servers.
Yeah, it's becoming very reddit-like in terms of meme content. I have blocked a bunch of communities so that they don't appear in "All" feed which I use to explore active communities.
So far I don't see a spill of noisy comments but it's becoming a risk so I definitely hope Tildes grows as well since the way it's designed is more resilient.
If you haven't used Lemmy in a couple of days you might want to take a peek. It's bursting with activity (relatively) and some of the more niche communities are becoming viable.
Exactly. I went to reddit to see what people were thinking about the news and other stuff. I mean I also got some news from it too, but I valued it more for seeing people's thoughts.
This is exactly how I feel. Not having that singular place for news and updates makes me feel a bit disconnected (for better or worse). Alternatives are not quite the same but I am very interested to see how all of this plays out.
It's a similar feeling to how things felt after Google Reader ended. It's like there was a golden era of following blogs and other news, and then that disappeared.
I really worry that there will become a series of walled gardens for podcasts now, where you have to use that network's podcast app.
And how they'll end after our next corporate overlords decide to shaft us. I'm a capitalist, but capital has no place in human connection. We shall, never, let capital become the means or the motivation behind human interaction, and yet that's what we do, every time, over and over again.
There was and there can be once again, there just isn't because we've become a bit lazy, but that doesn't mean we can't bring it back.
I've seen a general feeling of powerlessness among folk on Reddit and here, but I don't think it's really warranted. Heck, I even started blogging again about my favorite topics, following other Blogs as well, curating my Feedly, stopped posting my poems and technical tutorials to walled Gardens as now I'm linking to them instead; my point is simply that we can be the change we want to see on the internet! It will take effort, though , but that's fine IMHO because all valuable things do !
Buckle up buckaroo and create !
Fyi, there are still a few good ways to have the google reader experience. Feedly as a service is pretty decent and if you don't mind self hosting there are quite a few decent options out there like freshRSS.
TheOldReader is great too.
I've thought about finding the old planetplanet source code and setting something like that up.
For podcasts you can use AntennaPod app, which gets podcasts from various places.
And of course, tip your favourite podcasters, they also need to eat.
Social media sucks, the internet needs to be bigger than whatever the hell it turned into.
I think of it like TV. Potentially the greatest teaching and learning tool ever created by humanity and we used it to sell stuff.
As we've seen from the past centuries of humanity, education doesn't pay the bills in the short term. And that didn't change much even with the advent of the internet. Arguably it was made worse because it turns out servers started becoming really expensive to host but also were hosting hard to monetize content.
But if there's one thing people always paid for, it's mindspace. So ads will be inevitable until (if ever) people become used to paying for every piece of media they consume.
In my own situation, I see that as a good thing. For a long time I've felt like Reddit was taking up too much of my time and I was finding it hard to break away, it was just so tempting to look for new content whenever I was bored and just keep scrolling. And given how easy it was to just delete everything, posts, comments, accounts, none of it really meant anything, 12+ years passed reading an endlessly scrolling mega newspaper, subreddit drama, memes of the week or month, shitposting, whatever. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
So now, I have a chance to go back to the internet that used to be, where I actually actively lurked around multiple sites or explored new places and went down some weird tangents. And when it was clear that I'd seen everything, I switched it off and did something else instead of scrolling some more.
Yeah I totally agree. I spent so much time on Reddit using Apollo, it’s weird by habit going to check Reddit, and just not having it there any more.
Feels like the death of a social media empire to me. Kinda like when MySpace died and Facebook took over.
I just have so much time now, and unsure of what to fill it with.
Two books that might inspire ideas if you are so minded, Flow the Psychology of Optimal Experience by Csikszentmihalyi and Bowling Alone by Putnam. Both are excellent imho.
The internet is just getting started.
I found RSS very useful lately, also fediverse and tildes.net. I prefer RSS because it gives me links from the websites I chose, so I can read and share it to others. The latter two give me links from the websites people chose, so I treat it more as a clue on what people are interested and talking about.
I’m confused; I’m still browsing reddit with libreddit and teddit just fine. Granted, you can’t login, but I just lurk.
I'm still a bit dazed, to be honest. In a month, I left Reddit, my rss Twitter feeds died on me, and YouTube is experimenting with blocking adblockers and third party apps. I know it's companies individually responding to their own market priorities (aka, monetise and make line go up again), but it's been a hell of a simultaneous broadside for me.
The last 10 years has been "grow at all costs, work out how to make money later". We are now at that later. I guess we will just revert to how it was before, when free things were limited, and most things cost some amount of money. We have come to expect every platform to include a lot of very expensive things like image and video hosting for free. Old school forums used to make you hotlink images from elsewhere to keep down costs. Originally, gmail giving you 5GB free storage was seen as too good to be true. Now we just expect most services to have free and unlimited storage. Services like discord allowing file uploads with no quotas.
Personally I see myself cutting down on the services I use and paying for the ones that provide value. So far youtube is providing a lot of value so I'm happy to pay for that. Reddit and Twitter are not.
Gather round children, and let me regale you with tales of the golden before times, when governments adequately funded universities, and isps ran usenet and gopher networks…
the good old days of the internet! when men were men, women were men and children were FBI agents.
I'm familiar with the joke, but for what it's worth I was a child online in the 90s (unaffiliated with the FBI). Most of the adults were very nice, compared to these days!
Hm? I was a kid online in the 90s and I wouldn't say it was nice. It was very well-educated WASP though. Discord servers have a lot more folks from the global south than the '90s internet ever did.
Gophernet from the local university and the local BBS directory from the library had very normal communities which were generally nice from the late 80s forward. Most were for a single topic such as a specific hobby, news and gossip for a zip code, or the occasional conspiracy theorists rantings so not much different than subreddits.
BBS were obviously much smaller than online communities now and when someone was being abusive (etc) they were quickly handled by an admin. It kept things much more pleasant due to the smaller scale.
For nostalgia of the old computer communities, we had a local BBS that was all about trading unlocked shareware games.
Basically, you posted what you wanted and what you had and either you would do a direct trade or the occasional convoluted 10 people all trading some intermediary step to swap your game for someone else’s. Then you would drop your trade-off at the library and pick up your exchanged disks.
It felt all cloak and dagger as a child since I knew we were circumventing the shareware concept and had a whole anonymous drop-off system.
I would never put a disk from some random anonymous person in a computer these days. Nor a random file downloaded from social media.
Yeah the Gopher/BBS/FidoNet days were a different time with a different set of people. I had an older friend who frequented BBSes and also did some stuff on Fido, and I read some of the stuff on those nets through him, and the culture was very different. A lot more local, a lot more down to Earth, though obviously still selecting for the people with the time and money to have computers. The 90s Internet/Web was much more based off the original academic Usenet culture of highly educated, usually WASP-y folks. As an example, the Internet loved heavy metal even though the low income community I grew up in loved rap. It was a difference in peoples, incomes, and values.
ah the good old days. I genuinely miss gopher... being able to get everything you needed in a terminal windows was magical.
I still remember having to break out alt.binaries into separate partitions because it was growing bigger than the 4GB SCSI HDDs (RAID-1) in our 40MHz SPARC II servers could handle... And when we stopped providing alt.binaries completely a little bit later on.
I also remember the regular joy of clearing out porn and warez from our public FTP servers...
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that later came at the same time for many of these apps, not long after the 0 interest rate environment went away.
I’d love to read a study in a few years on how the fed rate hikes impacted and changed social media.
I'm also convinced this is it, combined with a lot of other trends surrounding webside businesses. The primary driver has to be the end of borrowing free money coming to an end.
What's surprising to me thus far, is how resilient the ad economy has been through this. I've been expecting much more of a bubble where companies would seriously cut advertising costs once money becomes more expensive, and so a lot of "you're the product so it's free"-services online would change payment models rather fast rather then continuing to burn through cash.
When the first large moves happen, will we see cascade effects as more pile on, or is the ad-penetration of the economy so entrenched we're not going back?
Interesting times ahead.
For what it's worth, as someone who works for a largely-ad-supported internet publisher, the ad market is rough right now. Direct bookings and programmatic rates are both substantially down year-over-year.
Even this article makes a brief aside mentioning that. Yeah, all of tech is pulling out, especially after an unprecedented boom from the pandemic pushing people further online. The fall was inevitable, but people investing in tech aren't exactly looking at the long term.
Despite that it was probably the right move. We see how hard network effects can be in the 2020's. And we also see how hard it is for these websites to lose their audiences. They have a large captive population to figure out how to monetize, and short of illegalities, there's few things out of scope to try.
Paying for reddit isn't really viable anyway, since it's a link aggregator, and half the news articles linked are also behind paywalls.
I'll kick in for tildes since it doesn't run ads and is more discussion-focused, but I don't see myself paying for reddit or any of the sites that strip-mine information about me.
If they charged something reasonable, it might be worth it. Thing is, when you pay for youtube, all the annoying parts go away and you get a pretty good service with minimal anti features. Meanwhile reddit premium doesn't really do anything to fix the problems.
If I could have paid for Reddit Premium in order to continue using RiF, I would have.
Most of the utility I get out of Reddit comes from Reddit itself. I'm there for the comments more than for the links that it aggregates.
But paying for it in order to get rid of the ads on the official app feels dirty. Like it's rewarding bad behavior.
Trying to kick my reddit addiction with this site.
It's still growing so the lack of comparative content is definitely helping.
I was actually able to finish a book last week for the first time in ages.
Same! I am reading and writing so much more since I deleted my Reddit account. I don't have a like for like replacement, but that was the point. I would rather replace it with reading physical books and knitting and be online a bit less.
My brain is still calming down, but it's nice to be able to read again as I get some of my attention span back.
Oh same, my attention span is terrible but I have been re-training it!
I was diagnosed with ADHD in 4th grade and immediately put on Ritalin until I decided to stop taking it my junior year of HS. From my understanding adults that were given Ritalin as I was have horrible attention spans as a result...
It's bad enough before you throw in short, quick, never-ending shots of dopamine.
This is untrue, to my knowledge. The consensus on stimulant treatment for children with ADHD is that it helps the child develop healthier habits and coping skills, and improve long term outcomes in general. Where have you heard this?
Ironically, I am on a waiting list to get tested for ADHD. Never been on meds but struggle with an attention span anyway. So maybe it's just a general ADHD thing?
Oh it's definitely an ADHD thing.
It's been theorized that it's a hold over from our hunter gatherer days. It's not we don't notice shit, we notice everything and kinda get overloaded
I started doing stretches, sports, running, and studying chess
Same here! It’s been a blessing in disguise I think. I’ve been able to put more time into reading instead of endlessly scrolling. I replaced the position where Apollo used to be with a language learning app. So now when my muscle memory comes into play, I’ll open that up and run through a handful of exercises to progress my Italian.
My only problem is I just surfed old/desktop so I open up my phone, url, "o".
Yup! That's what I wanted!
I’ve been sitting on book 4 of the Stormlight Archives and am happy I finally got around to starting it since they are great. This is time I would have spent on Reddit.
I couldn't even finish a movie because I'd just pause at random moments and doom scroll reddit...
Enjoy the book! Just finished it and I’m missing it so much. Can’t wait for the next book to arrive.
It is kind of liberating and eye opening to see how much I was addicted to such a dopamine hit with Reddit.
Same really. I really had no idea how bad Reddit was to my other interests. Because of I was not doing anything, I was on Reddit and not reading books. I was able to finish two books last week, that I was reading for fun this time. And before I had fundamentally quit Reddit, I was lucky to finish a chapter.
It definitely feels like some tectonic movements are happening this year with Twitter and Reddit both crumbling. Facebook was already over for must of us years ago. Even the ability to comment on my local newspapers articles have been removed. TikTok faces government/privacy issues and is more of a toy IMO. Yeah we’ll see how the rest of the year goes but it definitely seems like the face of the internet is changing to a new era.
edit: forgot all the other tantrums and adware happening with other sites like youtube, netflix and so on
What's going on with Reddit seems to be a symptom of the monopolization of the Internet and the free sharing of information. It feels like everything we interact with now has systems to extract our data, our browsing habits, even the way we converse with each other, and it's all going to be sold to progress AI. Sometimes I just sit and think about it for a while and it's pretty alarming.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any means, but my tinfoil hat theory is that the "powers that be," whoever the hell that is, are just now figuring out how to corale and control the free and open sharing of information on the Internet. Musk buying Twitter and Reddit priming to go public feel like things are moving behind the scenes in an attempt to suppress a new form of communication that, to be honest, is not all that old. Think about it; how long have we really been able to use this technology to massively distribute information in a mainstream sense? 20 years? Maybe? People have barely had time to truly understand it and adapt to the way it affects our lives.
Idk, that's my crackpot theory, really it's just money doing what it does best, running nice things. I'm done rambling now lol
I feel like social media is just exposing it's toxicity. It started out as something to connect with others, but devolved into maximizing clicks and view time. And we've seen how that impacts people falling into rabbit holes of QAnon or whatever misguided bullshit from an innocent interest. Unfortunately I can't remember the podcast, but there was one that did a really good job explaining how YouTube's algorithm ended up sucking in people to QAnon.
But now we are at a point where social media has decided it's users are so addicted they will pay for access. Twitter providing higher limits to those who pay, and Reddit allowing third party access. And they are right people are addicted, sooo many people on reddit were ready to pay prices as high as $10 a month or more.
I would love for this to be the downfall of the current form of social media and replaced with something that makes it easy to connect/gather info on your hobbies and interests but isn't intentionally addictive. But I don't think that will exist while there will always be the push for constantly increasing profits into infinity. That's the real driving force here.
Yeah, it feels like the big general purpose forums went the wayside as big social media websites got popular, but plenty of the more niche forums stuck around relatively unchanged in the past 10+ years. Just some examples:
AVRider is the place I go for adventure bike discussion
Cloudy Nights for amateur astronomers
ModWiggler for synthesizers and music gear
Weird how these kinds of places endure and having staying power despite the dramatic ways the internet has evolved over the years.
Since you mentioned motorcycle forums, for things like that (I am hesitant to call them hobbies!) forums are vastly superior to reddit.
Check out /r/motorcycles. It's pretty much garbage, because reddit threads move too fast once a subreddit gets big enough. You cannot talk about a new model's release because that thread will be at the bottom of the 5th page within the day.
In forums, the thread sticks, people actively look for discussion on the specific model and end up in that thread and as a result you get lots of actual comments (instead of one-liners), often spanning years. There are "tips and tricks" or "common issues with X" threads that have been going for decades.
In contrast, reddit has almost zero such discussions, it's all focused on the ephemeral and the quick to engage with.
Maybe it has to do with what was in when the hobby really got moving? /Fixmyprint was a place that would give lots of tips and I tried to contribute solutions when I could. I don't know if 3d printing forums would have had as much. Just guessing here?
For me, Reddit was the infite comment section. I didn't need to sign up for some forum to read or discuss something. I already had the place. Over time, I found that Reddit went from helpful and discussion to jokes and one liners. You could also tell a difference from weekend to weekday which showed the corporate involvement. I miss the mornings where I'd wake up early and see the weird NSFW stuff that had gotten to the top of /all while we slept.
I think it's more to do with the nature of the activity. The motorcycle industry for example is moving but is moving slowly. There isn't a new release every week but neither are the models stagnant for decades. There is also A LOT to be said for any given bike.
A thread for a model could span from the announcement of the upcoming model to "common tips and fixes", 10 years later.
It was just better, If I want to know something about the Suzuki DRZ I can try searching reddit and find 20 random threads from "look at my new bike" to "I took a spill on my DRZ" or hit up forums that will have dedicated threads for reviews common mods etc from people that could take one apart and put it back together blindfolded.
Reddit is bad at in-depth over a long term IMHO. I guess the equivalent would be if you were interested in 10,000$ 3rdPrinters you intended to keep for years?
Considering how everything old is new again I'll expect usenet to return, tbh. In a way it has with the Fediverse attempt.
I'm not really kidding that much. When my kids were all excited about Discord and how you can run bots all I saw was IRC and scripts from like 20 years ago.
reef tanks are also also like this. extremely niche and still almost entirely done on old forums.
I don’t mind having these one offs for my hobbies but I will miss being able to discover new stuff as easily as i could with reddit.
Or at a point where users who won't pay for access aren't worth keeping.
We're watching companies no longer comfortable with the status quo deciding that a chance at large profits is worth the risk of losing a business altogether.
Depends on the service to be honest. YouTube carries so much content and features and even community, and is basically uncontested as a service. It's well worth $10/month for me to keep ads off, similar to any streaming service.
Meanwhile, Twitter has never felt worth paying for and Reddit's value decreased for me overtime. If I'm directly paying for something I either expect the users to be listened to (as they are now the paying customers) or for the raw value to be that consistently good, and those two sites couldn't be farther from that mark. It's made apparent that the subscriber money is outnumbered by the ad revenue, so guess who gets priority?
With all that said, I am more than happy to invest and out my money where my mouth is when it comes to potential alternatives. I donated to Tildes in the early days and I'm paying for a few new services that have almost no content but potential. It seems the ad driven nature of websites are a slowly eroding poison to a quality community, so if a paywall can help mitigate that issue on two fronts, I'm down to at least try and Jumpstart a different solution.
The book the Chaos Machine by Max Fisher does a good job showing how the algorithms over the last five years and more have led to hatred and even violence.
I definitely feel less connected to the internet with my migration to the fediverse so far. I also miss the big niche communities for some PC games I play. Hope to see other folks migrate over soon but I'm afraid the vast majority don't care about the changes happening to reddit.
They don't. But I feel like that's fine. It's become full of normies now anyway, every post is a repost and every comment thread is full of the same jokes. I'm starting to settle in at tildes a bit more and I'm enjoying it much more than what Reddit has turned into.
Although, I'm about to buy my first house and I feel a bit anxious I won't have the resource that is Reddit for any DIY projects and gardening. Feels a little dumb too, to be quitting Reddit so staunchly when I could still view the content but it still feels bad to support them in any way right now.
It was a real weird experience when my reddit comments started getting responses like "omg! yer such a nerd!". Like, the fuck are you muggles doing on my internet?
I think the iPhone and resulting changeover to smartphones are what started that trend, and at this point I kinda wish they hadn't been invented yet.
Subreddits are such a fascinating microcosm of this given the seemingly universal experience of users as they grew. Without active mods fighting to hold norms, they devolve. - because the internet is so low-friction for subreddits.
The rising internet is higher friction, and will have more exclusive communities.
I've had to seriously curate my reddit experience because of the sheer number of racists, fascists, and other conservatives. Prior to Trump, I thought they were a loud but small minority. Finding out they're at least 1/3rd the population of the U.S. has been seriously depressing.
When I found a good Reddit app I definitely transitioned from web to mobile viewing. But once my dad joined I knew it was all downhill.
For the home stuff at least, YouTube is a better resource than Reddit anyway. Anything you could possibly need to fix in your home already has multiple surprisingly high-quality videos dedicated to the entire process, and home renovation stuff really lends itself to the video format.
I'd also recommend Ask This Old House. I've learned so much from just watching Ask This Old House for entertainment, then coming back around to an episode when I need to tackle a particular project myself. I usually pair this with then looking for a deeper dive video on YouTube from a channel like Home Renovision where someone really goes into long, deep detail on every little piece of the project.
That makes sense, even for learning Linux I've found YouTube to be way more beneficial. I've seen some home improvement videos shotty though but they tend to have a certain charm I enjoy.
Even before the third party app stuff I started asking chatgpt my dumb questions I previously would have posted on Reddit and it gave solid advice.
You probably know this already, but make sure you double-check anything chatgpt puts out. I've had it completely fabricate information that sounded reasonable.
Yeah I have to correct it all the time, especially when learning code or system administration.
As a general guide though for minor questions it seems just as reliable as some random person on the internet.
since LLMs can't see what they're writing (atleast that's how I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong), I've gotten into the habit of typing "is the above correct ?" after asking a question, atleast 5 out of 10 times it corrects itself; it saves me a bit of time :) of course I still have to verify the information but I can eliminate what it said is wrong
Yes, that definitely happens. Got a couple of lawyers into serious trouble recently. https://www.legaldive.com/news/chatgpt-lawyer-fake-cases-lawyer-uses-chatgpt-sanctions-generative-ai/653925/#:~:text=The%20judge%20levied%20a%20%245%2C000,improperly%20attributed%20the%20fake%20decisions.
I thought tildes was supposed to a place where we didn't create these types of divisions. Everyone was a "normie" at some point, and that term doesn't really mean anything to begin with. We should aim to educate and uplift those who express a desire to learn. There's nothing wrong with ignoring people who you don't want to interact with, but you don't need to call them out.
This elitism is one reason people are turned off by a lot of these (currently) niche potential reddit & twitter alternatives.
Thank you for this reminder. You're right, it's not a great mindset to have and in switching platforms like this I should change my mindset as well.
But to echo the original OP my response was for it's just frustrating to see these users who don't care about what made Reddit appealing to us in the first place simply want the protests to end so they don't have to be inconvenienced. They don't express a desire to learn so there's no opportunity for us to teach them. And in all honesty I don't think I want people like that joining us over here at tildes either.
I'm messing around with running large language models on my gaming graphics card. There's several large subreddits to talk about that and with guides on the various tools. One of those subreddits had stayed dark permanently, and let me tell you, the community absolutely hates those mods.
Every discussion about that tool that now happens on one of the other subreddits is full of anger and frustration, and calls for the subreddit to come back from blackout.
That's when I personally realized reddit had won, and decisively. Even the nerds don't care about the API.
For me 'winning' was always less about users taking a united stand, and more about hurting Spez. Hitting him where it hurts is about money. And I believe that part worked. I keep seeing ads to advertise on reddit everywhere. On facebook, on my podcast app, on twitter, and Reddit itself is plastered with them.
I don't think Reddit has won while they are still scrambling for advertisers to come back. I think they are hurting a bit more than they would ever admit.
And this here is precisely why the protests failed. People didn't really care about 3rd party apps, they were just annoyed at reddit (and spez in particular) and wanted to hurt him.
The protesters were posting "fuck spez" and calling him a "little pigboy" in every thread, of course negotiation in good faith is impossible when one side is behaving like 8th grade bullies.
The protesters were behaving like petulant children.
Okay, maybe I should clarify. I classify 'winning' as 'hitting spez where it hurts' because I believe(d) revenue impacts will drive him to make changes. The same way the protests were trying to drive those same changes. It doesn't matter if it's users united or not, there's currently a divide and there has been from the beginning (many subs stayed live during blackout). But the user impact was enough to hurt revenue anyway.
I will say the part where our opinions differ is that I don't think it's the strategy that led to lack of negotiation. I never honestly believed reddits management was open to negotiation in the first place, and what little concessions they were willing to make they did in the beginning, before the blackout even started. And I feel like the current situation we are in only solidifies that. Users have left, more now Apollo and RIF have closed, advertising is clearly impacted, and still Reddit hasn't proven itself willing to negotiate on the topic. I think their plan isn't to listen and compromise, but rather ignore user complaints and power through one way or another.
Wow yeah that's a nail in the coffin. I saw this in some of my photo subreddits too. What a shame
People were saying this on Reddit when we moved over from digg. It’s just a never ending September.
I went to reddit to digg in '07, during the first digg exodus (before the massive v4 migration)— and it's always been said, and always been true. In '07 I don't remember if subreddits even existed yet, it was like 50% programming talk and 50% tech talk, and the vibe was a lot like tildes is now.
They didn't, that came out quite a bit later. I remember people were so annoyed about it, complaining "where do I post something if it doesn't fit the available subreddits?!"
In retrospect that's quite funny, since subreddits were obviously a good idea.. but people just really hate it when a website changes I guess, even if the change is good
Haha that's right! There was some weird catchall subreddit like r/reddit.com for a while that took all the non sub stuff
That's what I also remember from the early days of Reddit. Hackernews always retained that vibe.
Game communities are a double edged sword. On one hand, you can learn new tricks and keep up with the upcoming changes, on the other, you get blasted with negativity and can come to dislike things you'd have never noticed on your own.
I feel like we're going back to an older phase of the internet, due to the slow (though recently quite rapid) enshittification of services we've gotten used to having.
Hobby forums, a variety of sites you'd go to when you wanted to waste some time, multiple ways to contact friends, but your chances of running into somebody IRL that uses any of them is slim. I like it.
Maybe less social media is a good thing? I think it has its benefits, but it's also caused a lot of problems and negative movements. Every time I've left a social media platform, I've been better off for it.
Maybe the people who reallllly care about social media will continue to use the big sites. But I'm perfectly content on here with a handful of daily topics and high-quality discussions where we can all speak our minds without having to worry about fake internet points.
Depends on the person. I'd love to be able to go out and chat with friends on the daily, or even weekly. I'm currently seeing some friends for lunch today and it's great. The last time we met? April for a movie. Before that? October for a concert.
So yeah, meeting my friends 3 times in 9 months can sort of create a void for the other 98% of the year. Social media is more like a coping mechanism for that need to socialize than a simple time waster. I've tried meetups for years, even pre-pandemic, and I've yet to make a steady friend there. Maybe meetings are infrequent, or people that are interesting are one offs, or I'm simply not memorable. Whatever it is, it's been a blocker. And it only got worse even after physical meetups resumed. I'm guessing people are simply used to or content connecting online.
So ofc I default back to a community of like minded individuals talking about topics I'm passionate with. I couldn't find that in 6 years in my town, but can find it in 6 seconds online, on demand. I'm not giving up, but I think solving the physical problem is even harder than finding a reddit alternative (and I've also spent years on the latter)
That's kind of a double edge sword though. I think people nowadays are less social in person because they get their fill of being social virtually. Why meet up and catch each other up when you already blast your life (or at least the parts you want everyone to know) online?
I too much prefer in-person meetups, or at least 1-on-1 virtually via Zoom/Facetime if distance is an issue. Thankfully I have a few friends who aren't big social media people and like to meet up in person.
How far away are the friends that you see in person?
They aren't in my local town anymore, but also not "far" in the context of living in a big city. 2 are still local (10 minute drive), 2 others are in a nearby local town (20 minutes), and 2 more are downtown proper (anywhere from 40-70 minutes depending on traffic).
I just started self hosting an RSS feed and have basically built my "own" reddit. I can't really interact with it unless I go and log in to tildes/lemmy/any other feed I have that has a comment section, but that's not too big of a deal. It's actually really nice and I feel like I'm actually more productive since there isn't an infinite well of content for me to go through.
Using Inoreader and it has definitely helped to get straight to articles and sites. Highly recommend to others, even the free version gives a fair amount of utility starting out.
I'm running Tiny Tiny RSS and it's working pretty great so far. My own little bubble of content that I don't have to leave the webpage for. I'm honestly surprised it took me so long to get this all set up.
What do you use for mobile RSS reading?
I use 'Offline RSS Reader' on my Android.
I don't really know what's offline about it, but I suppose once the feed is loaded you could technically read it offline.
I just connect to my TTRSS instance through the web browser on my phone, and I have a separate account set up for mobile that has some more mobile-friendly settings. It works quite well.
I've wondered a lot if the pandemic really caused a lot of these sites to skyrocket in usage and value, and now that it's finally starting to really decline, companies want to maintain those values despite the fact that the situation that enabled them no longer exists to the same extent. Thus all these attempts to further monetize and put profits first. The fetish for endless growth at all costs will truly destroy pretty much every consumer product imo
I have a nitpick with the 'everyone was there' mentality. None of these places were ever a place where 'everyone' was. Everyone was not on reddit, or on twitter, or any other site one can name. The size for the page loading alone blocked large swaths of people from participating on many of these sites - broadband is a first world luxury. Some sites had a bigger audience than others, however many sites also siloed everything and were... less than honest about how many people see something on their 'front page'. It was marketing, not reality. It was an illusion.
The website where 'everyone' is there has never been created. That's still in the future.
Yeah, there's a similar illusion of comprehensiveness for a lot of things. It's not true that every song is on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, or YouTube. It feels like you could find any song you want on any one of them, but they have different songs, and there are obscure recordings you won't find at all.
This thread made me realize how much I already value Tildes despite only using it for three weeks. Suddenly, I felt the urge to donate some money... but I could not find any link to do that. Maybe it's just me being blind. I am sure I will find it eventually... but I think Tildes should place that link in some prominent place right at the top to capture that fleeting moment when cheapskates like me are in the mood to give up some money.
Here is a lovely link detailing all the ways you can donate and support!
https://docs.tildes.net/donate
This was not a take I had considered, and I think it more than the state of the economy or the whims of maniacal management figures explains why the walls have been raised so high and so quickly. There is very much a "these are our users and data to exploit for profit, not yours!" kind of mentality to the decision to lower the portcullis, and it makes me feel dirty all over.
This boils my blood. The users gave you that content for free, to give away for free, it's not yours to profit off of just because you created the platform. So many volunteers' blood sweat and tears, so much time given to the platform - all just to get kicked to the curb for a buck. I don't like that extremely entitled /u/spez guy at all.
Reddit's more recent exploits are a perfect example of what you've described.
The problem with the social web is that for most of it, it was doomed to fail from the start.
The "business model" of most social media companies works like this:
For many of them, they never even got to step 3. Meta is probably the only company that actually figured out profiting off of social media.
If you want to see that business model happen at warp speed, look at any of the large dating apps (Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Match, Okcupid, etc.). When they first started out, pretty much everything was free, filters, unlimited 'likes' or messages, etc. Wasn't bad. Get people hooked and talking how great it was. Nowadays, if you even want your profile shown to anyone you have to pay. Want to filter on people as the same religion or background as you? Pay. Send more than 5-6 likes per day? Pay. It is not a sustainable business model. Just runs the app into the ground, they keep it operating at a bare bones level for the few fools who will pay, thinking there's a great selection on there when in reality it is a desolate user base.
You missed a few steps:
I think this happens a lot with any app now. I used MyFitnessPal for calorie counting for almost 10 years and the main feature I used was their barcode scanner, it made logging food really easy and they had a huge database since they had been around for so long. Last year they decided to move the barcode scanner to a premium feature so I stopped using the app. It was very apparent a lot of people were only there because MFP had the best barcode scanner and the company was hoping people would pay for it.
Companies seem more comfortable making unpopular changes for more money, and they don't care about complaints as long as there are people staying and paying. There are a lot of other people like me who are mad at MyFitnessPal and deleting the app, but it doesn't change anything because more people stayed than left. MFP has also been around a good while and are intergrated into a lot of other apps (like Garmin, various smart scales, etc..) which makes it even more inconvenient for people looking to switch.
It's the same with Reddit, nothing will change because more people stay than leave. Reddit's been around long enough that there's a lot of good information there and communities that you can't find anywhere else. I left Facebook but a lot of people I know haven't because so many companies and local groups use it to post information.
They know most people won't want to start over or try to find something new. I wish more people could be comfortable with moving on when things get bad, but change is scary and it's not always easy to find replacements.
We all have fond memories of social media and the enshittification is a pity, but it's worth remembering that we're partially going to miss it the way an addict misses the high. Some aspects of it were truly bad for you and you should have a long think before looking to replicate your experience.
I've seen a lot of people saying Mastodon just doesn't draw them in the way Twitter did. Yeah! Twitter is designed like a slot machine and Mastodon respects you enough to just show you chronological posts from your friends and then stop. You're comparing a bowl of salad to heroin, obviously the healthier thing isn't going to give you the same dopamine rush.
The wording of your comment seems to beat around the bush. Is there something more straightforward that you'd like to say?
How do you interpret the passage?
I'm genuinely glad that you've never had to encounter how being non-white or not a man could negatively impact one's experience on a site like reddit. But yeah it could get pretty racist and sexist there at times, and obviously someone who's not a white man is going to be confronted with that bs more often and be more affected by it when they do encounter it.
Reddit also had a general culture of "everyone's a white cis dude" that could get... grating. Granted, this place has that vibe a little bit too, bur reddit had it in spades.
I'm not talking about "identity politics". Honestly I have a strong negative reaction to that phrase because it's so often bandied about by the "discrimination doesn't exist" types.
The comment I replied to asked why a white man would have a different experience on places like reddit than someone who isn't a white man. I'm glad you personally never experienced racism or sexism or homo/transphobia on reddit, but it was absolutely there. How much any given individual encountered it would vary a lot based on a ton of factors -- which subreddits they frequented, what minority groups they were a part of, how much they could stand "edgy" humor and dogwhistles, etc. But when it exists in any appreciable quantity (and on a website with plenty of subs like TheDonald and redpill, you can't deny it definitely existed), it inevitably impacts the experiences of those in marginalized groups who are targeted by that rhetoric more than it does the experiences of white men.
I'm not sure why you attribute our different experiences to "a psychological principle" rather than just encountering different parts of reddit or perhaps being in different marginalized groups. I'll confess that you wording it that way makes it sound like you're accusing me of being hysterical or imagining slights, especially given your prior sentence. I'm going to assume the best, though, and assume that you didn't intend it that way.
I think there's a difference between imagining what it's like for other groups of people and acknowledging that being part of the least marginalized group might have impacted how positively you experienced some online spaces, which is how I interpreted the author of the article's statement. As a white guy he can't imagine other people's experiences on reddit, so he's acknowledging that his perspective can only speak for the experiences that he had.
It's basically the same rhetoric as saying something is "woke culture", "woke agenda", etc.
It reduces structural racism to something that is on the mind of the individual and basically calls people "sensitive" when denouncing racism.
This did not used to happen here on Tildes, but i guess receiving influx from reddit brings the malice too.
Unfortunately I can't assume the best, because I've seen enough of this to see it for what it is.
Yesh I'm trying to take tildes culture to heart and not jump to negative conclusions when I can avoid it but like... when it's a dogwhistle like that, it's hard. Hopefully redditors who play into that rhetoric will either change their minds due to conversations here or leave due to not getting traction...
Could that be a result of what I've previously described as the "abused puppy" syndrome? Are your peers fighting back at imagined slights, because they've been attacked so often, that they just expect to be attacked because that's all they've ever known?
I simply avoid those communities. Politics has never worked on Reddit, even in the supposed glory days. I'm not going to waste my time entertaining people who just at best want to be edgy teenagers and at worst try to espouse thoughts they are too cowardly to say with their person behind it
It's a bit inevitable when statistically speaking it's some 70% accurate (using some 6yo reddit statistics, so take with a hand of salt). I'm not interested in revealing my identity in my internet profile, so people will inevitably make assumptions about me.
Granted that is one major issue with modern (c. 2016) Reddit. People sure did start to have short fuses and normalize prowling through profiles to commit personal attacks. I was talking about video games and other media 99% of the time, my favorite genre should have no bearing on how good I am at Smash Bros.(to use one of the tamest real examples of ad hominem thrown after a pretty inoffensive advice comment).
See that same attitude was applied to a lot of stuff beyond just taste in videogames, though. There were some good subs dedicated to specific games, but the larger and more mainstream the gaming sub the more likely it'd be full of sexist twats. Sometimes you'd just learn which subs to avoid, other times you'd just develop a thick skin so as to tolerate the bullshit, but either way it makes the place feel a lot less generally positive when you have to filter out shit like that before participating in your hobbies.
But yeah also shit like what you mention too tbh, "you like X so you're a casual gamer" bs was so dumb
Thanks for responding in good faith, I appreciate it.
To be completely honest, when you said "is it racism," I assumed you were claiming that the author even mentioning his race and privilege was an instance of racism in itself, a la "reverse racism." I now see that you were asking "is the author claiming that non-white people experience online platforms differently due to racism?" Which is a much more reasonable question. A fair question, if asked in good faith, as you have.
I am white, but I feel pretty confident in stating that non-white people do experience online platforms differently because they encounter racism there, yes. I could get into my experience on reddit as a woman, which has been interesting, but it's probably best to discuss one thing at a time.
Genuinely, have you ever seen racism occur on reddit, either in posts or comments? (This is a complex topic, so it's probably best to start with some shared opinions that we both have. And I imagine that you've at least witnessed some instances of racism on reddit, correct?)
You don't? With all due respect... what rock have you been hiding under?
Everyone knows that racism and misogyny (and every other form of bigotry or hatred) is rampant on the internet. I'm a white man, and I know that, by reading what women and people of colour have to say about their experiences on the internet. You don't have to experience internet hatred yourself to be aware that other people experience it.
Anyone on the internet who isn't a straight white man from the Anglosphere (mainly the USA) will inevitably encounter some form of "othering", from the merely annoying to the outright hateful.
(And that's even without considering that, as a gay man, I've been on the receiving side of some internet hatred myself.)
Women are either subject to unfiltered misogyny, have to hide their gender, or keep to certain "safe" (private or heavily moderated) parts of the internet.
He's had, largely because of his "lucky hand", the leisure time and education to spend browsing the internet, interacting with people, reading news stories, etc, rather than only using it for, say, looking up shelters and bus schedules, social services, email, etc - things that you need the internet for but aren't idly being part of some global chatroom.
His Internet isn't heavily censored and filled with lies and propaganda in the same way that Russia's is (yes, America's got issues too, but...)
You can probably think of more examples but that's a starter pack for why a platform made by (and maintained by) affluent white men is most comfortable for affluent white men.
Perhaps that internet communities may provide more value as an alternative to real-world ones for people who are marginalised in real life.
Edit: no, this was not his point; I took the quote out of context. I assumed he was talking about the bad aspects of the platforms' deaths, but he was talking about the bad aspects of the platforms themselves.
I bet the author originally wrote this, keeping the 'mass-harass' and 'as a white guy' together so it's clear he's saying that people get harassed, but he's not personally experienced the worst of it:
And then he stuffed this in the middle, which muddies the original meaning and makes it seem like the 'as a white guy' is about tracking for advertisers:
The writer needed to take another pass at the paragraph.
You're welcome, and I'm glad you asked. As you saw from the responses, most people on the Internet have been hurt by the casual hatred that's been allowed to fester on social media, even if that hatred was mostly concealed from them in real life. I was sure you knew that... the writer just didn't do a clean job when adding a few sentences.
Minorities will get harassed online by racists who are angry they exist and are allowed to have and express opinions.
My race, gender, sexuality, etc has never stopped anyone online from being awful. Internet trolls are awful to everyone and they don’t care if their insults and vitriol are even factually applicable to their target.
I’m not sure where the myth that somehow certain groups have all the fun on the internet and never are the target of hate comes from.
Do you receive harassing and threatening DMs regularly? Because I sure don't.
honestly, I didn't realize how much I relied on reddit for seeking information, I only realized it after I kept stumbling upon closed subreddits from search results. there were so many useless search results that I was really frustrated. and twitter too, I often looked up twitter when I wanted to see some announcement from some company or similar (although I used it way less than reddit) but now I can't access it... it's not just twitter/reddit/youtube either, internet in general seems to be declining, blog posts and news articles used to be actually informative now are stuffed with words and are inaccurate often, and everything's moving to subscriptions and "cloud". the captchas are getting worse by the day; before I could just select some traffic lights and be done with it. now, I have to solve puzzles (and I it's only a matter of time before AIs can solve those too...). and as much as I'd like to be optimistic, I can't sed how it'll get better, with AI, it might get much worse but nonetheless I hope there will be some solution.
I admit that I still have and use my reddit account, but using this website and the fediverse has allowed me to slowly reclaim some of my lost attention span, which was slowly eroded as my brain rotted from excessive usage of these sites. YouTube implementing its 'shorts' feature certainly didn't help matters either. Honestly, I want to see things burn even though the next thing may be worse as I'm not exactly optimistic about the future.
I've been using a home-brew tool to read feeds. So any of these "social" sites with content streams have always fed into my system, my OnePlace. So, I can see what's happening across Reddit, Insta, FB, LinkedIn - anything with an API or RSS/Atom works.
What I really like is that I can consume headlines and top-level posts one own terms. If I want to see comments (rare) or post (more rare) I simply click into that conversation (like I did for this one).
When Twitter closed the API I lost that access - oh well. But the Reddit changes haven't affected me at all - I can still 99% lurk and keep up w/news.
Can you elaborate a bit about your tool? Is it open sourced somewhere or something totally custom you have created? Sounds interesting
I use Inoreader myself. Discover, curate, and organize RSS feeds. Has a nice app and plenty of usage. I have a little over 30 feeds going now, still a lot of tweaking to do. Just taking my time so far. Here's a few screens from my phone as an example.
https://imgur.com/a/UrxhyMp
Its just a little PHP webapp I hacked out years ago that's been chugging along. Its not released anywhere...yet. no guarantees but if I'm publishing I'll post to the programming threads here first.
Honestly, I'm kinda happy. I've missed the days of localized, small forum communities. I still remember fondly being a part of close knit online group stemming from a fansite of a, like, 10k subs videogame reviewer back in the 2000s. There were, like, 30 regulars, and you knew where everyone was from, what pets they had, what were they doing for a living. Like a digital neighborhood.
It wasn't unusual to design you own website for a blog, posting art, news, reviews. Personal link aggregators were a thing. Better times, I feel.
And now you're just create a reddit account and are thrown into thousands of discussions where you can act like a fool, because no one will even bother remembering your username, where popular topics drown in thousands of comments across thousands of post and the most upvoted thing is a pun or a reference or a joke. The more people there are on the platform, the less individual input matters.
Hell yeah. More online communities, fewer online mobs.
Honestly I was never really that into social media to begin with. I have an instagram that I hardly use but that’s just about it. I never saw Reddit as social media but more so as a new generation of forums. Am I the only one that has seen it as so?
I won’t get rid of my Reddit account. I’ve never used the main subreddits but more so more local or obscure metal/outdoors subreddits.
I agree on the point of Reddit, I never looked at it as social media. I was actually reminded of, when I first got on in 2012, the old gamefaqs forums, except for more than just games. I wanted to waste my time on Reddit finding good info on my interests, not spend all my life on the site. That's probably why j almost never used r/all or r/popular. I just wanted what I wanted, not what was being "pushed" or fed to me.
What do you think is the difference between a social medium and a forum?
Social media is about following people. Forums are about following topics
I see. Then, why would the latter be appealing and the former not? It seems to me that the differences are prone to be of degree rather than kind, in any event. (Nominally directed at the grandparent, but if you have opinions I'd like to hear them too.)
A website/app that is based on following people will encourage narcissism and self-promotion. A user has to attain a high number of followers by posting content that will attract views. That might be attractive pictures, or outrageous statements, or whatever - as long as it gets people viewing your page and subscribing to your content.
A website/app that is based on following topics brings together people with a common interest. The people who follow a page about X will generally have a common interest about X. Rather than the focus being one central person who's trying to attract your attention, the focus is the topic that everyone has in common.
Some of us prefer to focus on subjects we can discuss with other people, rather than being followers of an egotist.
I think this is an overly absolutist argument—like I said, I think the differences are principally of degree, not kind.
Something centred around people will not encourage those people to post anything; rather, it encourages coherent personas, identities, and themes, devoted to a single code and language game. To give a concrete example of the incentive structures at play: if you are interested in X and Y, and I am interested in Y and Z, I will be more likely to 'follow' you if you post only about Y than if you post about both X and Y, since I don't care about X. One prominent example of this is youtube, which encourages users to make multiple 'channels' if they want to publish videos with markedly different form or subject matter.
On the flip side—I can speak only for myself, but there are multiple places on the internet which are nominally devoted to a particular subject, but to which I in fact only go because there is a particular individual (or multiple of them) with whom I enjoy talking.
More strongly topic-oriented fora are not immune to perverse incentive structures; I would say they are just as bad, and I would say the pathologies are isomorphic to the ones found in more strongly person-oriented fora. On reddit, some people were referred to as 'karma whores' or 'karma farmers' (this was before corporate interest in fake accounts completely took over—or at least, before it was quite as prominent).
In both cases, the pathology is the same: a lack of genuine personability—in the one case, a relationship which is only parasocial, and in the other, a lack of relationship altogether (perceived or otherwise). In either case, being oriented around people or topics does not seem to be the principal issue. (Here, I give some discussion of my views on the scaling of what others in this thread have called topic-oriented fora. Also some nice discussion by others of voting systems.) As usual, kant had the right of it—people should be treated only as ends unto themselves.
Can you give examples or explain this?
My only "social media" was Reddit. I couldn't tell you a single username of another Reddit user. The subs I subscribed to were full of people discussing a common topic. I do understand the general appeal of following people, but I don't know of anyone on Reddit that was worth following.
For example I know the late Peter Mayhew used to pop in to various Star Wars threads and leave a nice little comment, which was nice, but that isn't why I was reading Star Wars comments. I didn't follow Peter to see when he posted. I always appreciated it since it was always clearly coming from a place of love, but that isn't why I was there.
In fact for me personally I prefer not knowing who people are. I think of Dave Chappelle's joke, "Where's Ja at?", would this discussion improve if we brought in a random celebrity and got their opinion on the topic? If we're discussing writing books, it makes sense to get Stephen King's opinion. If we're discussing the latest Android update features, Stephen King is welcome to provide his opinion but I don't really care unless he has something insightful to say.
They are mostly fairly small technical fora or chatrooms—such that you can know (or at least recognise) nearly everybody. This would obviously not work on /r/starwars, which appears to have nearly 3 million subscribers; see again the comment I linked for my views on such scale.
It was both, the later you go in its lifespan. Reddit went out of its way to add everything and the kitchen sink that is unthinkable for a forum: chat, customizable user profiles, a redesign optimized for image submissions, user profiles being their own subreddit, a built in video player, the list goes on.
I may have used it as a gen 2 forum, but it was clear reddit did not want to optimize for that experience; I can't even subscribe to a threadm/post to see when it updates without extentions. Becsuse to Reddit the comments are this ephemeral burst of emotion instead of a way to engage in long form communication.
I don't mind, social media hasn't felt truly social in a while. I found my way back to the slow web a few years back, now most of my online socializing is through personal sites and forums. I hope more folks will realize that the "old web" never died.
I will say though, Twitter has been great for getting relevant & timely local information in crises and protests. I worry about this, actually. We had some pretty intense storms early this year, people died just because they went down the wrong road at the wrong time. Radio was useless, like all the local broadcasts were replaced with the same stuff iheartradio sends around the country, local news gave a few updates but mostly "follow us on twitter".
I did this with email and CAD software some time ago and started doing it with social media - there are multiple overlapping services providing similar things, spend some time getting used to it and if a platform ends their service, you still have the others. Don’t be afraid to try out new things. If there is an open source solution with a strong community like Thunderbird or Tildes, even better - it may be more resilient.
I'm curious, do we have a downloadable text backup of Reddit as a whole before the blackouts? It's such a trove of information and having that on a hard drive would be handy.
You question is a suspected part of why these sites are doing this. They don't want people to have backups on their hard drive. Not without paying.
But to answer your question: your best and very flimsy bet is archive.org on your favorite old conversations. There are also several websites for viewing deleted/removed comments that was powered by Pushshift. But it was hit right before the 3rd party apps and won't work on comments newer than 4/2023.
Nowhere near this scale, but I've thought about collecting some of the best information as a web repository. Even something super basic, an old school directory of static standalone pages. I say static, that way it could be easily downloaded or mirrored and future-proof.
Ideally it would be a collaborative effort, to account for the wide range of communities & interests. Of course there's the issue of getting permission from post authors and some of this content is old or from abandoned accounts, not sure what to do about that.