What internet discussion sites remain?
I'm using the phrase 'internet discussion site' pretty informally, so I hope my meaning will become clearer as you continue reading.
I got rid of Snapchat around 4 years ago now. At some point in 2023 I noticed a sharp downtick in discussion quality on Twitter, and got rid of it as well. About two years ago, frustrated with the lack of human interaction and the vying for attention, I deleted Instagram. Near the end of 2025, I stopped using Discord. The final nail in the coffin has now arrived, since I'm unfortunately coming to the conclusion that Reddit is no longer worth visiting, leaving me almost entirely cordoned off from internet communication at a time when more humans are using it than ever before.
I won't bother repeating my personal reasons for this exodus since I feel confident that most people on this website have feelings on the matter that at least approximate my own.
Realistically this is a sign that it's time to prioritize interaction in the real world, and that's certainly a worthwhile thing to pursue. But bluntly society has restructured around the internet in a pretty substantial way, and I don't think it's an unreasonable ask to find various forms of forums on which more meaningful discussions can take place.
Here is my personal survey of the current landscape:
- tildes.net: Basically good. I really enjoy this website and I think in a lot of ways the 'bar/pub/cafe' model for a forum, where you can peer through the window but require permission to gain admission, is the only viable model for future online discussion places as the internet becomes ever more saturated with bots and bad actors.
- lobste.rs: Also basically good, for the same reasons as tildes. In some aspects, limited by the fact that it has a particular focus. In other ways, that's a really good thing. Maybe in a perfect world there would be a lobste.rs equivalent for every hobby, and we would return to an early internet forum world.
- Hacker News: Also basically good but perhaps a bit less so than the above two. I think most of the things posted on there are interesting, but a lot of the discussion has lately felt less insightful than it used to. I think a different tildes post noted this as well, but it's very caught up in the AI news cycle, often to an unfortunate degree.
- Rateyourmusic: The core site is enjoyable, and the forums are usually fun to check in on every now and then. Certainly a worthwhile place to visit if you enjoy music.
- Stackexchange networks: This is cheating since this is obviously many sites. I'm a mathematics student and I've found MSE and MathOverflow to be really wonderful places to learn and converse, albeit with some very arcane and strict rules for posting. The philosophy SE seems also generally of a high quality, and there are many other SE sites that I occasionally stumble into and am pleasantly surprised by. Unfortunately I expect its time is finite, since the UX has slowly but surely been degrading and the site traffic dropping.
- Fediverse networks: These sites clearly have potential, but for whatever reason it's still just not there. I drop into lemmy and Mastodon occasionally, but the posts are rarely of high quality. In many ways they just feel like "Reddit/Twitter but with a different name".
Surely these can't be all, right? It's a little soul-crushing to think how many people are online at any given time and how hard it is to find a place not drowning in noise. Maybe this is just my lament.
Sounds about right, minus a lot of the tiny Reddit-alternatives and remaining forums. A lot of topic/issue-specific forums migrated to Reddit/Facebook/Discord in the 2010s.
Yeah, like you say, the only additions I can really think of are those very topic specific communities that manage to keep their own forums (e.g. level1techs), but those only really fit the bill if one exists for your special interest of choice and you’re so into it that you’ll enjoy actually hanging out there rather than just dropping in once every six months to ask a question.
Although I do still love the feeling of running across an ancient but still active phpBB forum for something arcane I’m trying to learn from scratch, because that’s when you know you’re about to get an answer from the literal world expert in whatever topic…
Your example is anchored by a larger platform with their YouTube audience.
Yup! The only ones that immediately sprang to my mind are level1techs and war thunder forums, both of which are attached to larger IP elsewhere, and honestly I didn’t mention the latter because I only really know it from the memes about people leaking classified info.
There are vestiges of the real old internet out there too, but most of them are tiny enough that I wouldn’t know them to name drop, so I went for the first easy example (although now that I think about it, eFestivals is a good non-IP example that’s still got a bit of scale, as long as you don’t count a real world shared interest as an IP. And FlyerTalk just popped into my head as I was about to hit submit, too! There are a few still going now I stop to really think…).
I sorely miss the peak of PHP forums and the absolute wealth of communities built around them before social media has consolidated and went mobile-first. Whoever posted those car and appliance repair manuals on these forums are absolute saints.
I've noticed this as well with some YouTube videos/channels, there's some nuggets of good discussion buried beneath the flood. Basically the delivery is strictly educational/informational in nature (not pop-sci type delivery), is somewhat niche to the viewing public and geared for an older audience.
So this could be from car/appliance repair, credit card churning into frequent flyer points, aviation, Battletech, maybe the less mainstream parts of fitness and outdoor hobbies (think ultramarathons and thru-hiking).
Deviate from that and into more mainstream topics, say tech/gadget reviews, big budget gaming, or anyone who puts an exaggerated facial expression on the thumbnail and you'll get the typical mainstream internet discussion experience.
One place I've consistently found low-noise, text-focused chatting is in piracy communities.
It's not ethical to recommend joining but given the anti-capitalist stance of sharing media and it's legality, there's no marketing or influence-botting to be had and the users willing to jump through all the hoops for entry end up being pretty active and invested.
That's actually how I found out and got onto here, lol.
It's pretty rare to find outspoken religious conservatives but you will stumble across a number of tankie-leaning folk or kids trying to be annoying. For the most part the internal forums and IRC networks are well moderated.
I couldn't disagree more, but I guess we just have different ethical systems for ourselves :)
In my world it is very ethical to recommend "piracy", keeping media on local hardware and everything else that entails.
It might be against the rules of tildes to link to specific sites openly, but that is another matter.
You've got some hints how to join ?
The main entry point is a music-focused community that provides interviews on IRC.
They even have a very handy study prep site https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html
It's not easy stuff and just the tech issues of waiting for 10+ hours in an IRC server (disconnects toss you out of the line) can be too much for most to handle so I'd recommend to only attempt this if you're a serious collector of tunes that you want to have on your own machines.
Funnily that's probably a pretty great recommendation after all. I recall finding my way onto the homepage of a private tracker a few years ago, and being intimidated and vaguely impressed by the fact that to gain membership, you apparently needed to pass some kind of quiz on topics like encoding standards administered over IRC.
I didn't end up going through the trouble at the time, but in the context of this thread that seems like a reliable way to select for genuinely interested people.
The reason is pretty much the same reason Reddit isn't working for you either. Most comment sections just devolve into either jokes or flame wars between the .ml users and everyone else. The few communities that are free of those things are too small to have serious discussions. It's unfortunate, because I like the idea of a decentralized, federated social network like Lemmy, but I think it doesn't quite work.
You mentioned Twitter, so maybe you'd like Bluesky or Threads? I don't personally use them so I can't say for sure if they'd meet your requirements, but I never understood Twitter either.
What is .ml? I gather that it's lemmy.ml but I don't understand what's unique about it.
Yeah, they were definitely referring to lemmy.ml and likely the few other similar instances (lemmygrad, hexbear). I think that they are exaggerating the claim that "Most comment sections just devolve into either jokes or flame wars", but it happens enough on the large communities (i.e. subreddits) that it is annoying. The Fediverse reddit-likes (MBin/Lemmy/Piefed/etc) have a lot of balkanization issues, it isn't just the .ml related instances. I find it easy enough to avoid that stuff on there, but one point I agree with is that they don't have a large enough user base to support good and frequent discussions on niche topics. Reddit, for all its many faults, had a ton of people so that even wacky niche communities could form.
It's referring to two particular Lemmy instances that are on .ml domains. Lemmy.ml (run by Lemmy's developers) and Lemmygrad.ml. Both are basically full of tankies. They were the two biggest instances on Lemmy before the Reddit API protests and subsequent exodus put the fediverse on the map.
The members of Lemmy.ml (and several other associated instances) hold some very pro
IsraelIran, pro-Russia, pro-China views. This tends to lead to very unproductive back and forth "discussions" between them and the Western userbase.This is mostly relegated to political/world news style posts in the larger communities, so if you stay away from those, you'd probably never notice it.
Did you mean to write pro-Iran? The .ml userbase is certainly not pro-Israel, it is largely comprised of leftists who are more critical of Israel than anybody.
Anyway I don't see those unproductive discussions too often, it is more common to see comments mocking the imagined position of .ml users.
Yes, my mistake. I got it mixed up.
There are instances that are pro-Israel/Zionist (e.g. lemmygrad.ml, lemmy.world) and they're also pretty bad about moderation and commenting with regards to Israel.
Metafilter still exists. It's a shadow of its former self for a variety of reasons. Many of those reasons are to do with the broader ecosystem it operates in but many are related to community self sabotage, which is frustrating to watch. The outcome is, to put it politely, that the quality of discussion has gone down enormously, particularly on ask.metafilter. That's part of the reason I'm here and not there.
I'm also curious about this question. I like it here but tildes and other similar places are very tech heavy, both in content and member makeup, and greater diversity would be more where I'm at. Non tech people seem to mostly be happy with Facebook groups though, which, yeah...
I think it's a bit of correlation though. Folks who are interested in tech things find new and niche tech things to engage with... Which tildes kind of is.
I don't disagree, because, well, here we are, but I'm always surprised by this outcome. We don't have to jump through any technical hoops beyond anything you have to do to use tech things like Instagram to use tildes and unlike examples like the fediverse it Just Works. Why this environment seems to self select tech people I actually have little idea.
Could you summarize the reasons for Metafilter’s decline, or point me to an article? I’ve been aware of it for probably 20 years or more, but rarely visited, so I don’t really know much about what it was like in the past or how it might have changed.
Probably not without having other people familiar with the site vehemently disagree with me (which is part of the problem).
Trying to distill my thoughts on this into something coherent is difficult but factors include cack handed moderation and management, a culture that has grown among some users with policing language rather than intent - including assuming others are operating in bad faith if at all possible, the US centric nature of discussion (that's the English language internet, but mefi could be particularly bad at times) and constant appeals for money coupled with no transparency around where it was going. There's also a real concern from a significant cohort regarding Metafilter's standing that leads to an out of proportion amount of energy being spent on discussing Metafilter, defining Metafilter and codifying Metafilter. It's a degree of self obsession and sturm und drang I've never seen from any other site.
To me, the factors above are the ones that won out - 15 years ago some of those voices were there, but so were many others and, for me, it was a more pleasant place to be.
Stats for the site seem to be at https://mefist.at/
Many such cases. Man the Internet post-Gamergate really does feel like it’s in some kind of intellectual post-apocalypse. Some kind of memetic transition happened, certain rhetorical tricks and cognitive traps just got too effective and too addictive to use and the whole ecosystem seems to have collapsed.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up.
…I mean, that seems apropos? ;)
I was never on MeFi (only ever saw the "hits" that escaped onto other discussion sites), so I can't speak to quantity, but qualitatively, a lot of web-2.0-era sites had that problem. Reddit definitely had a decade-long (totally undeserved) superiority complex, now dead mostly because the old self-superior portion of the userbase has been totally diluted by new users only there for the memes.
I recently found out about the indy web revival project. And I was extremely excited by it. There's an actually reasonably large user base creating really awesome late 90's and 00's style websites and all linking to each other.
Seems like the core of these is neocities and nekoweb as hosting platforms and you can discover sites from other sites/web rings just like the old days.
Many of the sites have mailboxes and/or chat rooms, there's lots of forums and activity. I'm really excited to dive in to be honest but I've been kinda busy/stressed recently with work/life to find the time.
Edit: If you're interested, it seems like old school sites kicked off again during covid around 2020, then there was a huge resurgence around 2023 and they've been riding the wave ever since.
Webrings are fun! We made our own one with a few friends and it even got somewhat popular in the Russians-speaking tech space, though it's mostly personal homepages
I’ve been visiting https://recleague.com/ a lot lately. It’s the only non-ad slopped place I’ve found for discussion on non-techy topics with a mostly non-tech crowd. It’s more arts and culture and fashion people but without the heavy advertising focus of Instagram.
I don’t post that much, and it’s not a whole lot of discussion going on. But it does feel more like the old web. Cozy like. My favorite recs are the ones that are experiences rather than products. Things like “dunking an Klondike bar in your coffee to make a gas station affogato.”
Might be of interest to you as well @lostwax
I just checked this out at your recommendation and it feels like it's advertising that I unwittingly stepped into. How do you find more experience-oriented recs?
I mean it is mostly recommendations for tangible stuff you can buy, people just keep it interesting with personal experiences interspersed in. Otherwise you kind of follow people, the parenting and DIY tags tend to be more experience oriented. But the general experience is supposed to be akin to paging through a newsstand magazine which are mostly glossy ad spreads.
A lot of communities around FOSS projects exist as Matrix channels. In practice I think of Matrix as roughly analogous to a decentralized version of Discord or Slack. You can pick a Matrix server (or host your own) to create an account on, and then you can join channels that have been created on any other Matrix server to chat with the users there. I think it's very unlikely to ever gain the kind of momentum or adoption that Discord has since there's a fair amount of friction to sign up and figure out the different server/client options and more obtuse UX.
So far I haven't actually found any active communities aside from a handful of FOSS projects using it as a low-traffic support forum for users to ask questions and help each other figure stuff out, but I imagine it's possible there are more active channels on there somewhere that might be worth hunting down.
In a similar vein, has anyone had any positive experience with closed communities which aren’t accessible without an account? The particular problem with this type of community is it’s hard to know which ones are active because by their nature they are hidden. I do wonder if this is the future though, what with bots crawling the internet at large.
I spend a fair bit of time on Discuit, and still lurk on the near-defunct Hubski. The latter doesn't really qualify, but it once did, and its archives are worth reading. I've gotten the impression there are lots of small discussion communities that don't broadcast their presence much, so it's mostly word-of-mouth to get hooked in, much like here.
I don't mind this state of affairs - I feel like the price of central convenience like large social media sites is... well, everything that's gone wrong with every one that got big, rotted, and either died or has been turned into a value-extracting automated zombie by corporate interests.
What's Hubski about exactly?
It really doesn't have any single thing it's about. Just people really digging deep into discussion about diverse subjects. There were a lot of SMEs posting there for a while, in a couple of fields, but I guess it was mostly a community, bound in time and digital locale. Not for everyone, sure, but a good model for smaller online communities IMO.
Do you have an extra invite? if so I would be grateful if you do me a favour!
Sadly, I do not. The few I got were sent out long ago. I don't think there's been enough activity for the admin the generate and pass out new ones in the last year or two, either.
Not sure if it's entirely what you're looking for but I've had decent luck on automotive discussion forums. bimmerpost.com is one I frequent since I own an M2 and they have vehicle specific subdomains to find focused discussions on your specific model. People sometimes do devolve into memes and nonsense but people are mostly helpful.
Yeah, a lot of people in HN comments with Redditor Syndrome lately. Submissions are still pretty good.
You say you stopped using Discord, but you don't go into any detail. Was Discord as a whole not doing it for you when it comes to communication, or was this more of a principled decision? There is a lot to dislike about the platform and the company, but the "community" is just a million little (or not so little) silos. Surely it is probable that there are a few containing people you would enjoy talking to?
I think Discord is still good in some respects. There are definitely still communities worth interacting with on there. One big reason I left is I'm just not a fan of the messaging format; conversations get lost so easily that it feels like a very ephemeral medium. Small servers often have a slightly exclusive atmosphere, and in larger servers there's too much going on at once. The other reason is seeing the writing on the wall as far as the future goes for the platform; I think pursuant to the IPO it will be a long downward trend in terms of quality.
Unfortunately I don't think the scale of the Internet permits communities exactly like the ones we had 20 years ago anymore. They all must strike a balance between openness and, to be blunt, not sucking. Any open forum will be fighting a relentless, exhausting war against bots, 24h/day, as well as low effort content. Any closed forum is exclusive by nature... Even Tildes is using invites to control access (and certain technological decision, I guess), but more than that, I think Tildes is somewhat protected by its obscurity.
Most of the content I engage with is on Substack. Text-focused discussions on whatever you care about. Maybe someday u/skybrian will pick back up his AI blog. Though my vote is for culture/political writing; I find his perspective to be be uniquely cogent and insightful.
Some of the biggest substacks are big for a reason; if you want a start, I recommend Bentham's Bulldog and Scott Alexander as they should be of interest to the kind of person who frequents here.
Thanks!
I found that finishing a blog post is too much work. My substack has many drafts where I sketched an idea, but I would never feel like going back and finishing them. Sharing links and writing a comment in a few minutes seems to be about all I can manage, so microblogging would be about as much as I can do, and a Substack isn’t really the place for that. On the other hand, Bluesky’s 300 character limit is too short.
There is one skill you have that I am envious of: you seem to know how much we should care about something. How much should I care about Jan 6th? White House UFC stadium? The anti-weaponization fund? (my guess for you is "a lot", "not at all", "some")
I feel like I don't even know where to turn for sober analysis of what's going on, other than following random people online like yourself who seem sane. I just need to know the reasons to care/not care about The Latest Thing™ everyone is worried about.
I usually share a link when there’s something about the news story that makes me feel like I learned something surprising and it changed how I think about the world, at least a little. I don’t think that’s quite the same thing as significance.
Many things the Trump administration does are horrible but no longer surprising. At one time they would have been very surprising.
I also don’t follow the Ukraine war in detail anymore, other than changes in technology.
I pay for a substack (about baseball) and I enjoy the discussion in the comments section more than the equivalent Reddit community. It seems not to be flooded with bots because $. Folks also seem a bit nicer and more positive. Possibly because it’s one guy’s newsletter/community/livelihood.
Groups.io is the only Internet service I find good discussions on these days. It's essentially email reflectors of long ago, with a web interface for those who would rather browse conversations than receive emails or email digests. Much like classic email reflectors, there is ownership and moderators, and most of the bad stuff one sees on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is squashed. Of course this all varies by group, and groups are usually very focused on a specific area, topic, or hobby. However, I still find myself sticking around Facebook for groups for certain hobbies. I really wish I could leave FB for good because it's a cesspool for bots, advertising, manipulation by foreign/enemy states, and political rage bait.
Perhaps I'm just an old guy complaining, but I think the Internet would be a much better place if we went back to the days of email reflectors.
I belong to a group that's on groups.io, and the interface is a nice touch. It's like a more modern majordomo. I wish it had a better chat feature.
It's Australia-specific and mostly related to product reviews and practical advice, but I do enjoy the Whirlpool forums.
I've been gravitating to specific content creators with healthy and mature communities instead. Rather than the mass market appeal of sites like Reddit, you get a much more curated and interest specific group of people that clump up because they share certain values.
This isn't an easy suggestion, it requires you to find and cultivate a relationship within a community that resonates. Plus you always have to keep in mind the parasocial aspect and how groups can turn into a bit of a cult of personality.
I've been fortunate enough to find a community I want to participate in without feeling like I'm imposing on the creator or the community. It may speak for itself I've shared Tildes to that group of people too, as some were looking for healthier browsing habits.
To your point though, this isn't a suggestion that will put you in contact with a lot of people a la Twitter or Reddit. My experience is that smaller communities are much more effective in keeping the quality of communication at a high level so there's a clear trade off. I've been feeling much less frustration online by doing so.
Side note: my personal favourite suggestion in this thread is piracy groups. I can see how those groups automatically filter based on willingness to participate in good faith, as even the concept of sharing more than leeching supports that environment.
ResetEra might be worth a mention too.
This one really surprised me when I first visited it some time ago. It is weirdly active for a classic "old" forum.
New posts and threads come in so quick that it feels close to old, very popular forums. But it's almost a little too active.
The moderation seems fine too. They seem to make little community events from time to time like writing tournaments.
That said, for me, it's almost too active, too much going on to keep up with everything. Whenever you post, be it a new post or a comment, it gets buried quickly. Sometimes just a few minutes later it's already many pages back.
I think it's cool that an old forum is still so active, but I think the slower pace of a discussion page like Tildes makes things more personal, and you as a contributer to a post including your opinion "matter" more.
Edit: Seems like I wasn't aware of the moderation being very bad - was a bit blinded by how an old forum looked so active and maintained, without using it myself. Seems better to avoid in that case.
Hard disagree. I used to like Era, but after awhile it became clear that the mods there are pretty awful -- strongly opinionated, arbitrary/inconsistent in their enforcement patterns, reluctant to own up to or even engage with fair criticism, and regularly violating their own rules with impunity. It's still active enough that this can slip notice if you're not directly affected (plus they restrict all moderation/policy discussion to a single hidden thread and punish any talk outside of it), but there have been multiple "exoduses" of different groups over the years, and any thread more than a year or two old is littered with banned or self-deleted accounts.
For example, the mod staff is virulently anti-AI, but have permabanned multiple people for pointing out that the site's ownership embraces it for site development. I was permanently banned myself when I called out (in the meta thread!) how the mods had ignored reports and taken no action against multiple threads celebrating violent attacks on tech CEOs and politicians and calling for their deaths, which the site rules clearly state will "always result in a permanent ban." All the users clamoring for arson and murder were given a free pass, though (with some continuing to advocate violence in other threads).
There have been countless other such incidents: an admin regularly making "fuck this company and everyone who uses them" comments that regular users get punished for, mods posting ranty or flamebait threads that explicitly violate site rules, the chief mod publicly making a nasty sexual comment towards a subordinate and then simply deleting it rather than taking responsibility or stepping down. Basically, it's fine to read as a news aggregator, and you'll have an okay time if your opinions totally align with the prejudices and whims of the mods, but if not, it's an exercise in frustration.
For reference, Tildes is as close as I get to participating in social media these days, though I've been a longtime user of message boards who has tapered off as I get older and less tolerant of aggressive posters.
Back when I tried posting at ResetEra, I got ran off the site by having nasty accusations like having "blood on my hands" because I chose to share my personal experience with mental health as someone who has and is living with several conditions myself, and I find that those who don't have and don't spend time with those who do can have a warped view of what's going on. Suffice it to say that I stopped going and have a rather negative opinion of moderation there. Others also had issues with moderation and went on to places like MetaCouncil, which seems fine enough but is noticeably less active.
I haven't really found a proper outlet for open discussion myself, Reddit->Discord seems to have cannibalized most of the desire for message boards, and I've deleted my accounts at both places. Reddit is too hiveminded and Discord too fast/FOMO. Tildes is fine, though I find that the culture here varies greatly by topic, and the lack of an ignore user feature keeps me posting less than I might otherwise.
I forgot where I found this site, maybe it was tildes itself, but this site called Surikata looks pretty cool. Seems to be another site that is trying to bring back the 90's/early 2000's era of internet socialising
Surikata is heavily inspired by Cyberspace, so I figured that I would mention the original project.
Wow, seems to be almost a direct copy if anything, was not aware of this project until now, thanks for letting me know! I wonder which one has the more active user base lol.
looks cool. I dig the style it has and i might register to try see whats going on. thanks for the link
In my early years of fighting on the internet (2002ish), I gravitated toward Fark.com and SlashDot.com. Both are still alive, and I tend to visit them once I've exhausted my Tildes queue.
Fark is a news aggregate site, but with a heavy emphasis on humor. Users submit stories, but they're vetted by moderators before they get posted to the site. It's largely shit-posts and shit-comments about real news and current event. The headlines never match the news article linked (e.g. linking to a news story about Mangione's intended psychiatric defense, the Fark headline is "Luigi, you so crazy", and about a story of a one year-old being killed by police, "Mississippi police are sorry that they murdered a 1-year-old child but you have to understand that the car's driver was a Black person who allegedly committed a minor shoplifting offense". Fark is all about the snark. Its early audience was young, cynical liberaltarians, and, failing to capture new users from reddit, Fark's audience is now old, cynical liberaltarians. It's a fine enough place to hang out.
On the other end of the humor spectrum is SlashDot; those guys are super serious. I find it a little less interesting, but I still open it up for tech takes. The discussion is generally good, if a little tin foilly, about topics like surveillance, encryption, corporate overreach, etc., but the userbase is not very different from Fark. Middle-aged dudes that lean very slightly left and think of themselves as technologically savvy. The user interface is much more modern, but with almost too much end-user control. By default comments are hidden if they don't get a single downvote and no upvotes and collapsed until they get three upvotes. If you visit the site, I recommend toying with the slider in the top right of the comments panel so the conversation is a bit more intelligible.
Ultimately, where both sites especially struggle is their user interfaces. Fark's comments aren't nested AT ALL; they're in chronological order. You can quote people far above you in the thread, but it's very clear the site isn't meant for a back-and-forth. Slashdot's user interface is much more modern, but with almost too much end-user control. By default comments are hidden if they get a single downvote and no upvotes, and collapsed until they get three upvotes. If you visit the site, I recommend toying with the slider in the top right of the comments panel so the conversation is a bit more intelligible.
Hacker News was really fun and relatively intimate before Arrington wrote about it for TechCrunch. Even for a few years it felt small.
For the fediverse, small instances like the forkiverse are fun because everybody knows everybody. That always does off as it grows, but instances under 5k tend to have a good feel.
https://discuss.pixls.us is really nice for FOSS photography discussion. (down at the moment)
Since you are a mathematics student I suppose you know of r/math, don't you? it is definetly a decent subreddit.
In the same vein, can someone here send me an invite to lobsters? I hope this isn't against the rules there or here.
I've given the topic a lot of thought as of late. I'm considering creating a website/organization that provides what you're asking for, while avoiding the mistakes of reddit. I believe over-moderation and transforming it into a more traditional social media is what caused its downfall. I miss genuine conversation with people online. I miss being exposed to things that aren't just built for engagement. Echo chambers all over the place. Every viral post designed to make me angry.
One thing that made reddit great back in the day was the reddiquette. I have a strong belief it helped users with Autism, as social rules aren't typically spelled out.
I could go on forever about the good or bad qualities of reddit, but I think I'll just ask this: If there was a spiritual successor to early reddit, what would you want to see? It could be specific features, qualities, things to avoid, etc.
I have a lot of thoughts of my own, but I'm curious to hear what you or others think.
You already know this, but I'll spell it out: The culture of reddit is shot, because power moderators act like they own subreddits and the company also acts like it owns subreddits, in a different but equally harmful way.
I'm generally strongly in favor of subreddits and moderation, for reasons that may change depending on the subject/community (for example, the reason why a politics debate community requires strong moderation is different from the reason a historian Q&A community requires strong moderation, despite the subjects seeming close to each other). But no matter what, there must be a culture of community self-ownership that permeates the platform at every level, by which I mean, the community is its members. A moderator must protect civility, enforce platform rules and guide how the community interfaces with the platform in order to keep the community's space on that platform in comformity with the function of that space - at least until such a time as that community, as a whole, decide that they want that function to evolve. A moderator can also help the community organize to make that kind of decision. In summary, a moderator should be someone who has volunteered to serve their community. They do not own it, and shouldn't be responsible for biasing its content beyond community expectations, or be at odds with its members, including well-intentioned new arrivals.
On reddit, I moderate my town's subreddit. It's not a very active subreddit. In the past, I have been approached by someone who wanted to take it over. I said I'd be happy to accept help with moderation, but they said they needed to own the subreddit before they were willing to risk investing their time (paraphrased). No! Wrong!
I looked into their profile at the time - they founded and ran multiple subreddits which they flooded with the same submissions, including what ended up becoming my country's most progressive and most xenophobic subreddits - yes, they're run by the same person. They frequently insult each other. Nobody seems to notice. Now, here you might dubiously praise Mr. Shallnotbenamed for eventually taking a step back and letting communities decide on their own function, as long as you think xenophobia is OK.
I think that's where reddit themselves come into the equation.
A few years ago (as we all know) reddit became very hostile toward their own users. Many communities asserted their self-ownership, and reddit's response was to massively override community decisions according to their own desires. Reddit has since functioned like other social networks in that they treat their users as information flows, to be mined and enmeshed with advertising and monetization. At no level is user ownership of their own discourse respected. If reddit were only doing this in order to enforce something like the original reddiquette, or more generally to limit certain harmful discourse such as xenophobia, then some degree of direct interference would be expected and desirable (like on tildes!) However, it doesn't look to me like that's when they intervene. They seem to intervene largely to course correct when anything happens that, directly or indirectly, threatens their profitability.
As an aside, reddit introduced at one point in the past the ability for users to post in their own profiles, effectively turning them into one-person subreddits. I think that's a positive feature, because that's the one place where you can reasonably be expected to bias content and dictate rules. If people want to do those things, they can do it there, and at least there's a clear separation of the information on the platform with clear expectations on both sides. Keep that!
So, given all this, here are some ideas and questions that might be worth thinking about while trying to make reddit-but-less-shitty:
You bring up great points, thank you for the input!
Something I didn't make clear: I want to re-create old reddit. As in, pre-digg 2005-2010 era. My idea of this is still evolving, but there won't be a concept of subreddits or self posts. It seems like one of the keys to success is slow growth. Tildes and lobste.rs get around this by being invite only. If you look back in history, a lot of alternatives were crippled by an influx of new users.
I 100% agree with this. When I expressed my concerns about over-moderation, this is what I was referring to. Of course, you have to ban users. I think "don't an asshole" is a good approach.
Honestly, I think most of it boils down to transparency. No one truly knows what is and isn't being censored. I believe a good way to handle this is publicly stating when a user is banned for a comment.
In a similar vein, I consider shadow banning to be a disservice. Humans are naturally social, but when you don't know if your posts are visible, it feels like you're always talking into the void. It also means you're afraid to speak out for fear of being shadow banned.
I think your other ideas/questions could be addressed by limited open sign ups. It would be a lot easier to combat spam if users aren't constantly signing up as you ban them. That being said, I definitely don't have all of the answers. I believe Old School Runescape has a good approach, where big changes are polled - 70% yes votes are required to pass.
I would take a very similar approach to tildes, where everything is open source, funded by donations, and built in a way to minimize hosting costs.
Some other questions I'm still trying to find answers for:
I've wanted a personal blog for a while now, so perhaps I could explore those questions further there.
One thing I've found semi-related to this on reddit is the crowd-control mechanism, or at least that's my understanding of what is behind what I'm about to explain. On several occasions I've noticed that if I post in relatively popular posts, my comment will go through as normal, appears to be there, but if I view it logged out or logged into another account, surprise, it's not there. Am I shadowbanned? Nope, because other comments do go through just fine. I can't recall if that crowd-control mechanism is also a mod approval queue or not, but if it is, pretty sure they never approve them, probably because there are too many to look through. I also think there's some other mod approval queue mechanisms, not entirely sure what controls them exactly, but I've had comments filtered out in some subreddits, again, they appear visible to the account that posted them but they're not visible to anyone else, possibly some word filter system or who knows what since I don't follow all the mod tools or moderate any subreddits.
I think the lack of transparency in these mechanisms and the deception behind them is a knock against the site as a whole.
Even if there was a little banner next to your comment that said pending mod approval would be infinitely better than what they have now. It's just a mess.
YouTube is really similar where it feels like you're wasting your time commenting. It does the same thing with the whole "I can see it but you can't" nonsense.
I suppose you could fork the tildes code base and implement your ideas about moderation transparency and such.
I've been thinking about why I want to create my own instead of forking, and I'm starting to think voting in the comments discourages healthy conversation. If someone has more points than you, you're inclined to think that person is more correct. While I'm sure it's true for less nuanced topics, I feel like it pushes users to think in black and white or right vs wrong.
A lot of websites will simply remove the downvote button - but I'm not sure that's the answer either. When I read a comment that has less votes, I'm predisposed to disagreeing with them.
Do you have any thoughts about comment voting?
I don't subscribe to the "upvote for like/correct" mindset, I'm more of an old-fashioned "upvote for good contribution to the discussion". I like systems that don't have symmetrical downvotes because they are more harmful when misused, effectively functioning as a "censorship" of sorts that mobs use to bury contributions they dislike.
Upvotes on the other hand can reduce noise and facilitate and encourage dialogue. In an ideal world, people comment if and only if they have something to add to the discussion, including opposing viewpoints, and contributions judged valuable are voted up.
Obviously that's not quite what happens even here. But I think Tildes does a good job of mitigating the issues reddit has with upvotes by removing bad incentives such as karma counters and using labels for comment demotion.
If you aren't using votes for comments, how do you solve the sorting problem? The better the culture is, the less it matters, regardless of the design of the platform. But assuming the culture is bad, is there a sorting system that can't be exploited? Because let me tell you, no matter where you are, whatever gets seen first gets seen more, and whatever gets seen more will have compounding approval.
I have some ideas floating around, none of which are a silver bullet. I also want to be careful about having too complex of a system - I think Lemmy suffers from this. It's hard to objectively say comment voting is a problem, I'm going to scour /r/theoryrofreddit to read more opinions about it. In fact, there's a post from today!
No voting: it could be a hybrid style of forums and reddit indentation. Basically just a free-for-all of comments, but the indentation would make it easier to read.
Voting requires a reason: If voting isn't agree/disagree, a list of a reasons could help encourage this concept. Another idea is each reason could be weighted differently when calculating the score.
Sort longer comments to the top: I'm less sure about this, but the thought is longer comments = higher quality.
As you say, the earlier you comment, the more likely it is to be upvoted. I'm not sure there's a way around that.
It'd be cool if you're notified to replies that aren't directly to you. For example, if it's a nested reply under your comment. Perhaps you could also "follow" a comment and be notified if someone replies to it.
Finally, profile karma should not exist!
Were you ever on Slashdot in the early years? That sounds similar to Slashdot's system.
I thought about that when writing my earlier response but I figured in 2026 this would encourage a lot of AI slop as a means of manipulating the system.
I never used slashdot, unfortunately. I started with reddit, maybe in 2013? However, I do intend on researching these various defunct platforms to get some ideas.
You know, another thought I had is sorting comments by new by default. Like, when I open a big thread I'm not usually interested in the deep nested comments. They derail and end up talking about something unrelated to the article. Combined with specific voting reasons over a simple number, it could be interesting.
It could also be interesting to have new comments nudge the post to the top of the front page. Basically what Tildes does.
Out of curiosity, do you have any interest in a website like this? I've seen some other people give it a shot, but they're always dead, vibe coded, or look like ass.
I don't know if I'd have enought time to participate much but you never know! I just think it still sounds similar enough to Tildes at the moment. On Tildes when I open a comment section all branches without new posts that I've read before are collapsed by default (this behavior is configurable). Maybe you can just add a setting for people to have a fixed depth beyond which branches are collapsed by default even when unread? That would solve your problem with keeping comments closer to the root more visible.
That is fair! My goal is to be more "inspired by" instead of a clone. But we'll see what comes from it. I appreciate all the replies - it's been very helpful!
Slashdot is still there and voting looks like it works the same way, or similar at least.
I spent a bit of time there around the late 90s. It worked and was particularly good at rapidly hiding spam or anything else awful but it did otherwise gamify things pretty badly.
No votes is always best, at that point you just get people chatting.
I frequent an old school phpbb forum without voting of any kind, but also without threading.
I think threading is an immense improvement over straight replying.
I kind of like what HackerNews does with their down-voting (that below certain thresholds the comment gets hidden by default), but I'm not a fan of up-voting as a way to bubble comments towards the top.
I think I would like:
I agree.
In my mind, it would be cool if each comment could be upvoted for reasons like insightful, thought-provoking, conversational, etc.
A thread could be sorted new by default, but you could also sort by those reasons. To encourage voting, you could be asked to pick a vote when you reply to someone.
I'm a little torn on displaying the votes. If it's more than a vague number, it could discourage thinking "more votes = more correct".
I think you're correct about hiding downvoted comments. On reddit, it seems like it just hides opinions most people disagree with. Reasons for downvoting could help with this!
Perhaps only because invites are so hard to get. Theoretically you can email invites@tildes but in reality there won't be a reply. Invite codes aren't given to newer users at any stage automatically as far as I can tell. That's all kind of fine really except it must make growth exceptionally slow (or negative, we don't know) and if you are a newer user and want to spread the love, bad luck.
I actually like the lack of angst about tildes that the lack of transparency engenders but there are probably some downsides too.
I got my invite by emailing, and got I think ten codes to hand out, although only ever used one. This was a few years ago, though, have things changed?
I emailed a couple of times, separated by months, last year. No response on them.
Disappointing. I pulled up my email from invites@tildes.net from June 2023, and the reply only took three days. My sidebar has "invite someone" under the Misc section, and that must have appeared pretty quickly because I sent my husband an invite three days after receiving the join link from Deimos. Sorry to learn the invite experience is rockier now, not sure what that means for long term community health.
I also like the idea of alternatives, simply for the sake of choice. Both (and others) can exist separately and respectfully!
I solo mod a sub with 2M subs and it has a decent culture for a higher effort community. I also axe the shitheads quickly and refuse / shutdown anything that will potentially harm the community in the short or longer term.
Some subs have suffered, but the culture of Reddit is still around, it’s just changing as people age.
But you function on a platform that has openly shown their hostility to people like you. You don't ultimately have any control over your discourse, nor do your users. You are tolerated because (I suspect) you and your users generate profitable data for reddit and monetizable engagement.
your interactions with the site have been different than mine, I guess. From my side of things I'm pretty much left alone until I need something and every so often they send me some branded shit I don't necessarily want.
exchanging whatever data they get from photos and recipes of food is a fair trade for what we get out of it. Everything costs somebody something.
I have pretty much full control over the discourse outside of super racist things that are
[removed by reddit].If you hate the site so much, why not leave it and never look back? Move your community to Lemmy or something and spend the rest of your life toiling over server issues and traffic spikes :)
I assume you use old.reddit like normal people. The sh.reddit is to satisfy the investors; spez and co don't even use it.
This is why I'm creating my own! I won't lay out my entire design document, but I have a suspicion you can influence your user base with the right kind of interface.
A prime example is old.reddit vs new (or even Tildes). I feel like you can ward off most users by having a "boring" interface. A lot of websites now (namely, AI generated) are so busy and fluffy. It's hard for me to parse information when there's distracting colors or animations.
Which sub? I'm curious to read through it.
4chan (and I would guess other image boards to a degree) are fading away slowly but are still going quite strong in depending on the board. It's unfortunate that the bump based anonymous discussion isn't used more frequently, I find that it's basically the only way to have messages judged based on their content rather than their upvotes, awards or personalities. Of course it has its own issues, but I still find very interesting people there.
Even tildes isn't so good anymore now that labels are just agree/disagree buttons the same way reddit's upvotes and downvotes were.