Reddit really, really wants to be a chat program, and is pushing extremely hard in that direction. I'm honestly curious how far it'll have to get before all the more in-depth communities realize...
Reddit really, really wants to be a chat program, and is pushing extremely hard in that direction. I'm honestly curious how far it'll have to get before all the more in-depth communities realize that they aren't really wanted any more, and just kind of exist as vestigial remnants of "old reddit" that have to constantly fight an uphill battle against the site's attempts to turn them into chatrooms.
It's really interesting to see how much things have changed in the last 5 years or so. When I was there, we were worried about even adding the count of how many people were online recently in a subreddit, and specifically made it inaccurate at low numbers so that people couldn't possibly get any specific information out of it. Now they're adding an indicator to every individual user and enabling it by default.
What I find most perplexing is that between Discord, ClubHouse, Facebook Groups, etc. Reddit is the worst at being a chat program. Why give up the unique offering you have just to be a really...
What I find most perplexing is that between Discord, ClubHouse, Facebook Groups, etc. Reddit is the worst at being a chat program. Why give up the unique offering you have just to be a really shitty, bootleg version of what everyone else is doing?
I am of the opinion that being a chat program is a feature, not a product. Reddit doesn't seem to have any idea what it's core product is anymore. Stuff that would have been discovered via Reddit I tend to find elsewhere these days. Webcomic artists already shifted to Instagram and Twitter and they're now migrating off that into Patreon and WebToons. Even reddit's one-time core strength as a place to share and find dank memes seems to be better served by Discord groups and Twitter lists now.
The saddest thing of all, I find more stuff worth reading on Digg nowadays than I find on Reddit anymore.
Because the investors probably don't really understand the market or the concept of product differentiation. They just hear that Discord is more popular with the kids these days, so they want to...
Because the investors probably don't really understand the market or the concept of product differentiation. They just hear that Discord is more popular with the kids these days, so they want to make Reddit more like Discord.
Reddit’s product (from their perspective) is the number “engaged” users they have. Chat is a way to up their engagement numbers for their clients (advertisers, investors, etc) You could say it...
Reddit’s product (from their perspective) is the number “engaged” users they have. Chat is a way to up their engagement numbers for their clients (advertisers, investors, etc)
You could say it adds little value for the end users, but a lot will likely use it.
I don't think they have much of a choice. Reddit is the de facto place for niche sub-community forums. With the near death of the old, vbulletin forum, when someone wants to join a niche...
I don't think they have much of a choice. Reddit is the de facto place for niche sub-community forums. With the near death of the old, vbulletin forum, when someone wants to join a niche community, they look for a subreddit. If you move it off reddit at the moment, you'll have extremely limited user growth.
It's true, but I think there's also a conflict here that doesn't seem to be getting much recognition from communities yet. A lot of the moderators and users have been around for a long time and...
Exemplary
It's true, but I think there's also a conflict here that doesn't seem to be getting much recognition from communities yet.
A lot of the moderators and users have been around for a long time and use the site through the old web interface or third-party apps, often with many of the site's features disabled, and using browser extensions like RES to add or disable even more. The way they see their subreddits is completely different from how newer users are being shown them now. The official Reddit app and the redesign look very different and encourage different types of interaction. Comment replies are hidden, long posts are collapsed, there are flashy avatars and awards all over the place now, users are heavily encouraged to use the chat system, etc.
It's very strange to have users seeing the same content through such wildly different interfaces, and I don't think the effects are really understood. Moderators should be installing the official app, staying logged-out or creating a new account, and looking at their subreddits through the same lens that the large majority of new users are. I don't think they'd be very happy with what they see.
I mod a relatively big sub (180k subs) and I refuse to use new reddit. Luckily we have one or two other mods who do exclusively use new reddit so he handles all of the stuff on that side, but the...
I mod a relatively big sub (180k subs) and I refuse to use new reddit. Luckily we have one or two other mods who do exclusively use new reddit so he handles all of the stuff on that side, but the majority of us don't like the new changes.
Same here. I find new reddit very inferior to old reddit + toolbox + RES for moderating on my large subreddits. I tried using the redesign when it first came out but I just found it so much harder...
Same here. I find new reddit very inferior to old reddit + toolbox + RES for moderating on my large subreddits. I tried using the redesign when it first came out but I just found it so much harder to mod on it.
As someone who exclusively uses the desktop old site with RES and even the old desktop site on mobile...it's hard to disagree with you there. The new normal Reddit experience is nigh...
As someone who exclusively uses the desktop old site with RES and even the old desktop site on mobile...it's hard to disagree with you there. The new normal Reddit experience is nigh unrecognizable from what I see it as everyday.
Indeed, many moderators who have done that have done things like stop moderating and leave. Myself, for the most part, included. Reddit is broken, and it's getting worse, and they're just making...
Indeed, many moderators who have done that have done things like stop moderating and leave. Myself, for the most part, included.
Reddit is broken, and it's getting worse, and they're just making more and more features that antithetical to what reddit used to be. It's sad because old reddit was pretty awesome.
Somewhat off topic, and I'm having a hard time putting it into words - but do you have a point of time in mind for when Reddit's peak "old redditness" was? Like the ideal set of vanilla Reddit...
Somewhat off topic, and I'm having a hard time putting it into words - but do you have a point of time in mind for when Reddit's peak "old redditness" was? Like the ideal set of vanilla Reddit features, without bloat or new features that feel "forced" to the old reddit crowd?
Hmm, that's an interesting question. I'd go even earlier than @aphoenix did. He's saying early 2015, but I think I'd pick somewhere in 2011-2012. That was when Reddit had just become an...
Hmm, that's an interesting question. I'd go even earlier than @aphoenix did. He's saying early 2015, but I think I'd pick somewhere in 2011-2012.
That was when Reddit had just become an independent company (instead of a subsidiary of Condé Nast), and hadn't started down the venture capital death-spiral yet. They had limited resources and a very small team, but everyone that worked there was smart and passionate about the site. They had finally stabilized the site and fixed most of the major technical issues and downtime, were building some interesting new stuff, and there were a lot of good communities (and, to be fair, also a lot of bad ones).
That was the Reddit that I was most excited about and really wanted to work for. After that point, I think there have been a long series of decisions that took the site in a different direction than I wish it would have gone.
Edit: After @Deimos' comment, I realized that what I'm describing isn't peak reddit, but actually the last time I thought reddit could still go in the right direction. For me, in the middle of...
Edit: After @Deimos' comment, I realized that what I'm describing isn't peak reddit, but actually the last time I thought reddit could still go in the right direction.
For me, "peak reddit" was in the middle of Ellen Pao's leadership. Communities were growing, admins would actually listen to communities sometimes, the features seemed to be aimed at "what do people using the site want" and not "what can make us more cashmoney". Lots of people were coming up with scripts and bots for reddit, there were some hilarious "vanity accounts" that just had some commenting schtick or posting schtick, link aggregation seemed to be the focus, very few subreddits were overwhelmingly huge, and it was relatively easy to find what you wanted to find.
There were still obvious problems, but it seemed like they were correctable, and there were some example of things going in the right direction, but then Ellen left and Steve returned.
I'm pretty sure Ellen was glass cliffed (she's actually on the Wikipedia page for glass cliff, interestingly enough). So that they could change course of the company without taking on as much...
I'm pretty sure Ellen was glass cliffed (she's actually on the Wikipedia page for glass cliff, interestingly enough). So that they could change course of the company without taking on as much blame and to satisfy VC investors who didn't like the direction it was headed (not profitable enough).
From my interactions with other mods I can say that this does happen a bunch. Though I do think you paint a little bit too much of a dire picture in how wildly different the experiences are for...
Moderators should be installing the official app, staying logged-out or creating a new account, and looking at their subreddits through the same lens that the large majority of new users are. I don't think they'd be very happy with what they see.
From my interactions with other mods I can say that this does happen a bunch. Though I do think you paint a little bit too much of a dire picture in how wildly different the experiences are for many people. What is wild to me though is how much is missing in the official reddit mobile apps.
Most mods are very much aware of the different reddit versions out there and frankly I would even use redesigned reddit if I could expect for the fact that they never really finished building the modtools.
/r/dredmorbius is hardly a large sub, but yeah, I'm done, and have been for years. "Nothing at all" is literally a better alternative than "New Reddit".
/r/dredmorbius is hardly a large sub, but yeah, I'm done, and have been for years.
"Nothing at all" is literally a better alternative than "New Reddit".
The good ol' days. Are there any surviving forums these days? Something Awful is the only one I know of. Side note: I sometimes wonder what effect non-threaded sequential comments with no voting...
With the near death of the old, vbulletin forum
The good ol' days. Are there any surviving forums these days? Something Awful is the only one I know of.
Side note: I sometimes wonder what effect non-threaded sequential comments with no voting had on productive/cordial discussion vs what we have now.
It's a double edged sword. For large communities, where you can be sure there's plenty of bad actors, imo voting hierarchies are important, despite all the bad they cause with respect to things...
Side note: I sometimes wonder what effect non-threaded sequential comments with no voting had on productive/cordial discussion vs what we have now.
It's a double edged sword. For large communities, where you can be sure there's plenty of bad actors, imo voting hierarchies are important, despite all the bad they cause with respect to things like circlejerks, and so forth.
A flat thread gives equal voice to all posters, which is good in a smaller community with good faith members, but it means that someone who writes something despicable, or is just actively trolling, is given far more visibility than they deserve.
Although the one thing I really don't miss from vbulletin is the styling. You'd get like 5 forum posts per page because everyone would have these giant signature banners that took up waaaay too much space.
Yea, they definitely require active moderators much more so than the community-curated approach of downvoting/flagging. Both a blessing and a curse. I do remember being quite fond of nested...
Yea, they definitely require active moderators much more so than the community-curated approach of downvoting/flagging. Both a blessing and a curse.
I do remember being quite fond of nested comments and voting when they first appeared on the scene, so perhaps its just my rose coloured glasses looking back.
Threaded conversations are good. You have them anyway, since the first person to respond to a given post is unlikely to be the only person with a response, and they're much harder to follow when...
Threaded conversations are good. You have them anyway, since the first person to respond to a given post is unlikely to be the only person with a response, and they're much harder to follow when the relationships have to be inferred from cross-reference, quotes, or just context.
Voting is highly dependent on the community, trending to uniformly bad as it grows. In ironic contradiction to the common wisdom that downvotes are problematic but upvotes are okay, I think that upvotes fail to distinguish high-quality from easy-to-consume content, while downvotes are useful for identifying bad actors; but both weaken as principled voting is swamped by pile-on behavior.
I think you’re probably right — they are better most of the time. To try and play devil’s advocate though, discussions on Reddit-likes past the top two levels can feel like two person discussions...
Threaded conversations are goo.
I think you’re probably right — they are better most of the time. To try and play devil’s advocate though, discussions on Reddit-likes past the top two levels can feel like two person discussions a lot of the time and a popular thread splinters into hundreds of these. In a traditional forum people generally weren’t trying to have tons of one-to-one side conversations all jammed into a singular thread — instead the conversation was a bit more limited to the most recent replies. I think the Reddit model is probably more organic however.
What threaded chats with voting ended up doing was lowering barriers to entry by preventing the formation of power-user cliques. In the old days you would have to lurk for a bit and work your way...
What threaded chats with voting ended up doing was lowering barriers to entry by preventing the formation of power-user cliques. In the old days you would have to lurk for a bit and work your way up the forum pecking order before anything you said was taken seriously. Lots of forums would shit on you for having a low post-count no matter what you said.
Reddit killed the old forums by being designed so that couldn't happen. It did "democratize" participation that way, but ended up being an object lesson in the perils of mob rule and too much democracy.
Just not the clique of power moderators squatting on subreddit names :P But sarcasm aside yes you're correct. Like many things the solution to some problems just brings different problems to the...
by preventing the formation of power-user cliques
Just not the clique of power moderators squatting on subreddit names :P
But sarcasm aside yes you're correct. Like many things the solution to some problems just brings different problems to the limelight.
This brings to mind something that happened to a very small forum-based community I'm a part of. We spun off of GameFAQs' Star Wars forum like 15+ years ago and we signed up on a free Invision...
This brings to mind something that happened to a very small forum-based community I'm a part of. We spun off of GameFAQs' Star Wars forum like 15+ years ago and we signed up on a free Invision Power Board forum provider. Over the years the forums was upgraded to zetaboards and then finally to tapatalk.
Tapatalk is god-awful and it's very clearly the direction reddit seems to be heading. Every day I log in to check the forum and I'm hounded with popups urging me to buy "coins" I can use to improve the forum. The top and sidebar of the site are plastered with prompts to buy these coins. And what can I do with those coins? Decorate my avatar with hats (sound familiar?)! And then there's a premium feature we can pay for that gives us coins and unlocks certain moderation and customization features. It's terrible and they've managed to pervert and micro-transaction something as old and simple as a forum. And that seems like where reddit is ultimately heading.
It's all for free, so I understand that we have little say in what happens and that's fair, I suppose. If it bothers us that much we can just self-host for cheap. But that's really only a viable option for small groups like ours. There are maybe 15 of us who regularly post, so we wouldn't likely lose anyone. But for big communities like subreddits? I just don't think it'll be a viable option to simply move. So communities will die off to make way for a micro-transaction-filled website plastered with ads to funnel money to a bunch of investors who threw money at a unprofitable site.
There are specialized forums like the one for Teensy. Also, PriusChat still seems to be the place for Prius owners? The modern solution to this seems to be Discourse. Here is the forum for VCV...
There are specialized forums like the one for Teensy. Also, PriusChat still seems to be the place for Prius owners?
The modern solution to this seems to be Discourse. Here is the forum for VCV Rack. I don't know if you'd call it chat or not? To me it looks like a forum.
Forums are still very active in car communities. Yeah, facebook and instagram have largely taken over for "show off" sort of stuff (and I'm not upset about it moving there), but for actual...
Also, PriusChat still seems to be the place for Prius owners?
Forums are still very active in car communities. Yeah, facebook and instagram have largely taken over for "show off" sort of stuff (and I'm not upset about it moving there), but for actual information, builds, and the like forums are where it's going on and never really stopped.
I actually don't hate that forum style. It seems to strike a balance between the old-school single thread forum syle and threaded replies, and it's not nearly as cluttered as old-school forums...
I actually don't hate that forum style. It seems to strike a balance between the old-school single thread forum syle and threaded replies, and it's not nearly as cluttered as old-school forums got, with all the signatures and stuff. I'm not 100% sure I love how it makes use of horizontal space, though.
Is it running on some kind of forum software or is it custom made for VCV?
Resetera / Neogaf ? I also known of a french retrogaming forum (grospixels) that for a long time ran phpBB 1.x (at least until 2008) and is still alive and kicking today.
Are there any surviving forums these days? Something Awful is the only one I know of.
Resetera / Neogaf ?
I also known of a french retrogaming forum (grospixels) that for a long time ran phpBB 1.x (at least until 2008) and is still alive and kicking today.
The chat thing is weird. I was using old.reddit to avoid the redesign and got some "chat" notification, which I clicked out of fear and panic. It was a spam bot (I think?) and I exited the chat...
The chat thing is weird. I was using old.reddit to avoid the redesign and got some "chat" notification, which I clicked out of fear and panic. It was a spam bot (I think?) and I exited the chat but somehow the chat window didn't close and kept re-opening even between logouts! Apparently, the little "x" to exit the window can disappear sometime (thankfully, you can still click it by clicking the empty space where it sits), so I guess it's just some CSS error or something. Still, it was weird how aggressive it got. Who wants to chat with redditors? How's that an alluring thought to anyone, lol?
I hear a lot of people talk about this kind of VC goosing, but are they really so blind as to not understand these metrics are nothing but fluff? I'd imagine being in the space that VC investors...
I hear a lot of people talk about this kind of VC goosing, but are they really so blind as to not understand these metrics are nothing but fluff? I'd imagine being in the space that VC investors would learn that these metrics don't really indicate much of anything, but I guess I need more familiarity to really know.
VCs seem to occupy a weird space in common discourse where they are simultaneously portrayed as idiots with loose wallets but also as an exclusive and lucrative source of wealth that only...
VCs seem to occupy a weird space in common discourse where they are simultaneously portrayed as idiots with loose wallets but also as an exclusive and lucrative source of wealth that only institutional investors have access to.
In general, no. VCs can have... unintuitive things they look for (like how early stage startups that are breakeven are not preferred), but they have more than enough money to have a competent finance and modeling department.
I'd argue it isn't even VC related, working in IT consultancy having seen a variety of companies from the inside many times management falls for the easy statistics that aren't portraying the full...
I'd argue it isn't even VC related, working in IT consultancy having seen a variety of companies from the inside many times management falls for the easy statistics that aren't portraying the full picture. It then really depends on the company culture and structure if that actually becomes a problem or not.
I get the feeling that with reddit you have a lot of different scrum teams with independent product owners effectively trying to up the metrics for their little island they are responsible for. Without anyone coordinating this sort of stuff properly you effectively get a reality where each team is just interested in their thing and not what the greater impact is on the entire platform.
And ironically some of them are popular in part because they are not chat rooms. freenode is probably a better place to ask c++ questions but /r/cpp_questions is nice for people who may want to...
that have to constantly fight an uphill battle against the site's attempts to turn them into chatrooms.
And ironically some of them are popular in part because they are not chat rooms. freenode is probably a better place to ask c++ questions but /r/cpp_questions is nice for people who may want to ask a question as they're going to bed and wake up the next day with a few answers.
Yup, noticed that conspicuous green dot by my username and immediately turned that off. I'm not sure why they want to dismantle their success with unnecessary changes, but good luck to them.
Yup, noticed that conspicuous green dot by my username and immediately turned that off.
I'm not sure why they want to dismantle their success with unnecessary changes, but good luck to them.
I've basically given up on my sub at this point. We tried to create a high quality, civil subreddit for music, and it worked for a while. The main issue for me now is the rampant toxicity...
I'm honestly curious how far it'll have to get before all the more in-depth communities realize that they aren't really wanted any more, and just kind of exist as vestigial remnants of "old reddit" that have to constantly fight an uphill battle against the site's attempts to turn them into chatrooms.
I've basically given up on my sub at this point. We tried to create a high quality, civil subreddit for music, and it worked for a while. The main issue for me now is the rampant toxicity throughout the site. We've been attacked by brigades of trolls sporadically for the past year probably because of our vocal anti-racism. Lately it seems to have ramped up, between that and the mods of other music subreddits actively platforming bigotry and censoring dissenting views; the admins general neglect of mod support; and even being temporarily banned from the whole site based on false reports -- I'm just over it.
I think the other really in-depth subreddits have either been mostly dead for a while, basically gone to crap, or are badly infested with concern trolls. If you just take a glance at the top comments you might think it's same as usual but dig into the details, there's a LOT of poisoning the well going on even in the best subreddits.
So I don't think it's chat that's killing it really. (I'm not privy to the issues facing mods of the massive subreddits though. Maybe to them it is an issue.)
*Oh shit, I just realized who I was replying to sorry. Hope I'm cool here...heh.
Frankly most of them are already at that point, at least speaking from a moderator perspective. At the same time you can easily argue that we have passed that point years ago. The problem is that...
I'm honestly curious how far it'll have to get before all the more in-depth communities realize that they aren't really wanted any more, and just kind of exist as vestigial remnants of "old reddit" that have to constantly fight an uphill battle against the site's attempts to turn them into chatrooms.
Frankly most of them are already at that point, at least speaking from a moderator perspective. At the same time you can easily argue that we have passed that point years ago. The problem is that as far as those communities go there really aren't good easily accessible alternatives. Which I realize might be odd as I am writing this out on tildes but I think is very much true as tildes doesn't provide a framework for specific communities and the individualization subreddits offer there.
From a moderator perspective it is just a bit of touch call, for me personally it comes down to the fact that /r/history is still one if not the biggest history communities online. As I do care about history as a subject and have seen what happens with history related communities when they are not moderated I simply can't bring myself to abandon it at this point.
Having said that, we have arrived at a point a while ago where we are effectively mostly keeping the subreddit from turning into a hot mess of political slap-fighting, neo-nazis trying to use it as a platform while maintaining a bare minimum in quality. It has been a long time since our team was dedicated to growing the subreddit, trying out different approaches to a better community, etc. Exactly because reddit as a platform clearly is moving full steam ahead with engagement as the only metric and that can most easily be done through low effort fluff like content.
Is it full of people worth talking to though? I've found many of the bigger hobbyist subs I used to frequent are basically full of noobs who don't know much past the entry level stuff. I can't...
is still one if not the biggest history communities online.
Is it full of people worth talking to though? I've found many of the bigger hobbyist subs I used to frequent are basically full of noobs who don't know much past the entry level stuff.
I can't speak for /r/History, but /r/Hinduism is just total garbage. Anyone who knew what they were talking about left ages ago and at this point the only content on there is people asking "I need help on a term paper" level questions or fundamentalists posting vaguely dog-whistling content to skirt a ban. And the mods are basically AFK.
At this point any useful questions I check a Hinduism stack exchange because it at least has people who have read the relevant material.
Well you won't find term paper questions in /r/history as homework help questions in the broadest sense aren't allowed. Frankly I am not sure if it is a community worth actively seeking out if you...
Well you won't find term paper questions in /r/history as homework help questions in the broadest sense aren't allowed. Frankly I am not sure if it is a community worth actively seeking out if you are looking for it at this point. However it is still the biggest community people will encounter and it is from that perspective I wrote my comment.
This has been going on for a long while though. Remember all the TrueX reddits when RES led to the takeover of many subreddits without strict moderation by memes? Sadly the track record implies...
This has been going on for a long while though. Remember all the TrueX reddits when RES led to the takeover of many subreddits without strict moderation by memes? Sadly the track record implies that the bulk of the userbase and the communities will stay, just a little unhappier, and a few people will set out on their own to places like here or HN. Voat and the likes will be held up as the alternatives to scare people into staying.
Mind, it doesn't transfer between the two. You set your status to "hidden" on the old design, but the redesign won't follow suit. If you do ever find yourself over there you'll suddenly become...
Mind, it doesn't transfer between the two. You set your status to "hidden" on the old design, but the redesign won't follow suit. If you do ever find yourself over there you'll suddenly become online again til you shut it off there, too.
I think what really bothers me is that opting out doesn't set you to Offline, it shows you as “Hiding”. The implication being you're a paranoid outlier while everybody else gets along fine....
I think what really bothers me is that opting out doesn't set you to Offline, it shows you as “Hiding”. The implication being you're a paranoid outlier while everybody else gets along fine.
Reddit's constant drive towards further "engagement" stats doesn't surprise me anymore, but I do feel more and more ostracized with every change. The site is almost unrecognizable compared to the quirky place it used to be.
For what it's worth, they changed it to "online status: off", at least on the app.
I think what really bothers me is that opting out doesn't set you to Offline, it shows you as “Hiding”. The implication being you're a paranoid outlier while everybody else gets along fine.
For what it's worth, they changed it to "online status: off", at least on the app.
I'm just gonna repost this comment that someone posted there:
I'm just gonna repost this comment that someone posted there:
I have a question:
Those of us who are chronically harassed and stalked -- how do we opt out of this manner of broadcasting telemetry altogether?
Those of us who moderate communities where literal hundreds and thousands of accounts join and wait for "the mods are asleep" to attempt to deluge the community with shock porn, hateful image macros, rape threats, death threats, ASCII image art depicting pornography and scatological acts -- How do we opt out of this manner of broadcasting telemetry altogether?
Those of us who have been unlucky enough to have been doxxed, and for whom this manner of telemetry broadcast will alert the people who want to rape and murder us that we are home -- or out of the house -- or asleep -- how do we opt out of this manner of broadcast telemetry?
What will this broadcast telemetry do to make Reddit safer to use for women and gender / sexual minorities?
Will this be turned on by default for everyone? >Will it be turned off by default for everyone?
Can the "Hiding" status indicator label be changed to something that doesn't convey an active intent and agency?
I do not want this feature on my account. I don't want "Online", I don't want "Not Online". I don't want "Available" or "Not Available". I don't want "Away" or "AFK" or anything like that.
I want -- when people retrieve the .JSON that describes my account's metadata, for this field to not be filled by NULL as a value, but to be entirely absent from the dictionary.
I do not want to expose this aspect of my existence to the world via Reddit.
It will be answered (if ever; there's a good chance it's ignored) with a "we take this seriously, we'll look into this" with no followup because the management has decided they'll do whatever they...
It will be answered (if ever; there's a good chance it's ignored) with a "we take this seriously, we'll look into this" with no followup because the management has decided they'll do whatever they want anyway
Happens a lot with companies. Lip service, and ONLY lip service
You don't need to speculate, here's their answer in this comment The comment, copypasted here in case you don't wanna go there
You don't need to speculate, here's their answer in this comment
The comment, copypasted here in case you don't wanna go there
Thanks for sharing your understandable concerns. I’m happy to share more about how we’re approaching many of the things you’ve raised.
“Those of us who are chronically harassed and stalked -- how do we opt out of this manner of broadcasting telemetry altogether?”
You can disable this feature entirely by toggling your presence indicator to “Hidden.” You can do this on both old and new Reddit, and it will not change regardless of what device you use to browse Reddit. When your indicator is toggled to “Hiding” no other user can see your online status.
“Those of us who moderate communities where literal hundreds and thousands of accounts join and wait for "the mods are asleep" to attempt to deluge the community with shock porn, hateful image macros, rape threats, death threats, ASCII image art depicting pornography and scatological acts -- How do we opt out of this manner of broadcasting telemetry altogether?”
This is an important call-out and is something that we’ve thought about and discussed further during broader discussions with moderators. These indicators are currently not planned to show within the mod list, so users will not be able to see at a glance if all mods are online.
Those of us who have been unlucky enough to have been doxxed, and for whom this manner of telemetry broadcast will alert the people who want to rape and murder us that we are home -- or out of the house -- or asleep -- how do we opt out of this manner of broadcast telemetry?
What will this broadcast telemetry do to make Reddit safer to use for women and gender / sexual minorities?
We’re building out several safety features that we’re aiming to have ready for the general audience launch that we hope will address several of the things you called out. One of these features is making it so that users who are banned from a subreddit will not be able to see the online status of users within that specific subreddit.
Will this be turned on by default for everyone? Will it be turned off by default for everyone?
Yes - this will be turned on by default and that’s a large part of the reason why we’re announcing this in advance and why we made the opt-out process so easy. We want to give everyone the chance to opt-out of this feature before we make the presence indicator public-facing.
Can the "Hiding" status indicator label be changed to something that doesn't convey an active intent and agency?
This is something we went back and forth on, and we should have been more clear about our reasoning in the post. We chose the word "Hiding" because if a user has switched the toggle to disable this feature they're still technically online even though it would not be viewable to anyone else. We didn't want there to be any confusion in the broader sense of the term.
We will have a Help Center article explaining all of this before we go live with our general audience launch.
This goes well with their new policy of no longer letting you opt out of outbound clicks: https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lqtecn/update_to_user_preferences/goihj7a/?context=10000
Instructions to hide the indicator with uBlock Origin. I don't recall the specific rule, but it's trivial to add interactively: right-click the indicator, and select "<uBlock logo> Block element…"...
Instructions to hide the indicator with uBlock Origin. I don't recall the specific rule, but it's trivial to add interactively: right-click the indicator, and select "<uBlock logo> Block element…" from the context menu. The default generated rule is appropriate (and any other will catch obviously-wrong elements).
This works reasonably well on most of the old Reddit interface, e.g. I've element-filtered away any sign of chat.
I'm honestly glad I've made a move to reddit alternative like teddit or libreddit. These alternatives are focussed on being a privacy front-end to reddit, but the unintended benefit to this is...
I'm honestly glad I've made a move to reddit alternative like teddit or libreddit. These alternatives are focussed on being a privacy front-end to reddit, but the unintended benefit to this is that these alternatives do not get subjected to the same crap as reddit itself while both support different visual styles of reddit (teddit resembles old reddit while libreddit resembles new mobile-friendly reddit).
Yes, Reddit dear. Let's give the trolls you keep on your platform an even more effective way to harass actual people. That sounds like a spiffy idea, nevermind the fact you already messed around...
Yes, Reddit dear. Let's give the trolls you keep on your platform an even more effective way to harass actual people. That sounds like a spiffy idea, nevermind the fact you already messed around with the report modal so it's twice as slower and thrice as painful to use.
Once upon a time I welcomed the addition of chat, in the form of interoperable Jabber. It was cool when LiveJournal added Jabber chat which could communicate with Google etc., it gave me a way of...
Once upon a time I welcomed the addition of chat, in the form of interoperable Jabber. It was cool when LiveJournal added Jabber chat which could communicate with Google etc., it gave me a way of interacting with friends elsewhere without signing into a proprietary network myself.
Adding proprietary features to walled gardens I read as a continued attack on the open internet. Use interoperable standards and make the web stronger, rather than forcing everyone into your app. I still don't like proprietary sites/apps when they use open standards and would prefer open source alternatives, but so long as they are committed to working together with others, I can consider them friendly competition rather than an opponent who must be defeated.
Reddit really, really wants to be a chat program, and is pushing extremely hard in that direction. I'm honestly curious how far it'll have to get before all the more in-depth communities realize that they aren't really wanted any more, and just kind of exist as vestigial remnants of "old reddit" that have to constantly fight an uphill battle against the site's attempts to turn them into chatrooms.
It's really interesting to see how much things have changed in the last 5 years or so. When I was there, we were worried about even adding the count of how many people were online recently in a subreddit, and specifically made it inaccurate at low numbers so that people couldn't possibly get any specific information out of it. Now they're adding an indicator to every individual user and enabling it by default.
What I find most perplexing is that between Discord, ClubHouse, Facebook Groups, etc. Reddit is the worst at being a chat program. Why give up the unique offering you have just to be a really shitty, bootleg version of what everyone else is doing?
I am of the opinion that being a chat program is a feature, not a product. Reddit doesn't seem to have any idea what it's core product is anymore. Stuff that would have been discovered via Reddit I tend to find elsewhere these days. Webcomic artists already shifted to Instagram and Twitter and they're now migrating off that into Patreon and WebToons. Even reddit's one-time core strength as a place to share and find dank memes seems to be better served by Discord groups and Twitter lists now.
The saddest thing of all, I find more stuff worth reading on Digg nowadays than I find on Reddit anymore.
Because the investors probably don't really understand the market or the concept of product differentiation. They just hear that Discord is more popular with the kids these days, so they want to make Reddit more like Discord.
Reddit’s product (from their perspective) is the number “engaged” users they have. Chat is a way to up their engagement numbers for their clients (advertisers, investors, etc)
You could say it adds little value for the end users, but a lot will likely use it.
I don't think they have much of a choice. Reddit is the de facto place for niche sub-community forums. With the near death of the old, vbulletin forum, when someone wants to join a niche community, they look for a subreddit. If you move it off reddit at the moment, you'll have extremely limited user growth.
It's true, but I think there's also a conflict here that doesn't seem to be getting much recognition from communities yet.
A lot of the moderators and users have been around for a long time and use the site through the old web interface or third-party apps, often with many of the site's features disabled, and using browser extensions like RES to add or disable even more. The way they see their subreddits is completely different from how newer users are being shown them now. The official Reddit app and the redesign look very different and encourage different types of interaction. Comment replies are hidden, long posts are collapsed, there are flashy avatars and awards all over the place now, users are heavily encouraged to use the chat system, etc.
It's very strange to have users seeing the same content through such wildly different interfaces, and I don't think the effects are really understood. Moderators should be installing the official app, staying logged-out or creating a new account, and looking at their subreddits through the same lens that the large majority of new users are. I don't think they'd be very happy with what they see.
I mod a relatively big sub (180k subs) and I refuse to use new reddit. Luckily we have one or two other mods who do exclusively use new reddit so he handles all of the stuff on that side, but the majority of us don't like the new changes.
Same here. I find new reddit very inferior to old reddit + toolbox + RES for moderating on my large subreddits. I tried using the redesign when it first came out but I just found it so much harder to mod on it.
As someone who exclusively uses the desktop old site with RES and even the old desktop site on mobile...it's hard to disagree with you there. The new normal Reddit experience is nigh unrecognizable from what I see it as everyday.
Indeed, many moderators who have done that have done things like stop moderating and leave. Myself, for the most part, included.
Reddit is broken, and it's getting worse, and they're just making more and more features that antithetical to what reddit used to be. It's sad because old reddit was pretty awesome.
Somewhat off topic, and I'm having a hard time putting it into words - but do you have a point of time in mind for when Reddit's peak "old redditness" was? Like the ideal set of vanilla Reddit features, without bloat or new features that feel "forced" to the old reddit crowd?
Hmm, that's an interesting question. I'd go even earlier than @aphoenix did. He's saying early 2015, but I think I'd pick somewhere in 2011-2012.
That was when Reddit had just become an independent company (instead of a subsidiary of Condé Nast), and hadn't started down the venture capital death-spiral yet. They had limited resources and a very small team, but everyone that worked there was smart and passionate about the site. They had finally stabilized the site and fixed most of the major technical issues and downtime, were building some interesting new stuff, and there were a lot of good communities (and, to be fair, also a lot of bad ones).
That was the Reddit that I was most excited about and really wanted to work for. After that point, I think there have been a long series of decisions that took the site in a different direction than I wish it would have gone.
I think that's a better answer than mine. I think my answer is really the last time I felt good about reddit; it certainly wasn't the peak.
Edit: After @Deimos' comment, I realized that what I'm describing isn't peak reddit, but actually the last time I thought reddit could still go in the right direction.
For me,
"peak reddit" wasin the middle of Ellen Pao's leadership. Communities were growing, admins would actually listen to communities sometimes, the features seemed to be aimed at "what do people using the site want" and not "what can make us more cashmoney". Lots of people were coming up with scripts and bots for reddit, there were some hilarious "vanity accounts" that just had some commenting schtick or posting schtick, link aggregation seemed to be the focus, very few subreddits were overwhelmingly huge, and it was relatively easy to find what you wanted to find.There were still obvious problems, but it seemed like they were correctable, and there were some example of things going in the right direction, but then Ellen left and Steve returned.
I'm pretty sure Ellen was glass cliffed (she's actually on the Wikipedia page for glass cliff, interestingly enough). So that they could change course of the company without taking on as much blame and to satisfy VC investors who didn't like the direction it was headed (not profitable enough).
The old reddit is also starting to break, e.g. image galleries are very buggy on old.
Some of the videos hosted on Reddit also can't be played without going to source.
Yea. This new bug has driven me off reddit. It's so unpleasant to use
From my interactions with other mods I can say that this does happen a bunch. Though I do think you paint a little bit too much of a dire picture in how wildly different the experiences are for many people. What is wild to me though is how much is missing in the official reddit mobile apps.
Most mods are very much aware of the different reddit versions out there and frankly I would even use redesigned reddit if I could expect for the fact that they never really finished building the modtools.
/r/dredmorbius is hardly a large sub, but yeah, I'm done, and have been for years.
"Nothing at all" is literally a better alternative than "New Reddit".
The good ol' days. Are there any surviving forums these days? Something Awful is the only one I know of.
Side note: I sometimes wonder what effect non-threaded sequential comments with no voting had on productive/cordial discussion vs what we have now.
It's a double edged sword. For large communities, where you can be sure there's plenty of bad actors, imo voting hierarchies are important, despite all the bad they cause with respect to things like circlejerks, and so forth.
A flat thread gives equal voice to all posters, which is good in a smaller community with good faith members, but it means that someone who writes something despicable, or is just actively trolling, is given far more visibility than they deserve.
Although the one thing I really don't miss from vbulletin is the styling. You'd get like 5 forum posts per page because everyone would have these giant signature banners that took up waaaay too much space.
Yea, they definitely require active moderators much more so than the community-curated approach of downvoting/flagging. Both a blessing and a curse.
I do remember being quite fond of nested comments and voting when they first appeared on the scene, so perhaps its just my rose coloured glasses looking back.
Threaded conversations are good. You have them anyway, since the first person to respond to a given post is unlikely to be the only person with a response, and they're much harder to follow when the relationships have to be inferred from cross-reference, quotes, or just context.
Voting is highly dependent on the community, trending to uniformly bad as it grows. In ironic contradiction to the common wisdom that downvotes are problematic but upvotes are okay, I think that upvotes fail to distinguish high-quality from easy-to-consume content, while downvotes are useful for identifying bad actors; but both weaken as principled voting is swamped by pile-on behavior.
I think you’re probably right — they are better most of the time. To try and play devil’s advocate though, discussions on Reddit-likes past the top two levels can feel like two person discussions a lot of the time and a popular thread splinters into hundreds of these. In a traditional forum people generally weren’t trying to have tons of one-to-one side conversations all jammed into a singular thread — instead the conversation was a bit more limited to the most recent replies. I think the Reddit model is probably more organic however.
What threaded chats with voting ended up doing was lowering barriers to entry by preventing the formation of power-user cliques. In the old days you would have to lurk for a bit and work your way up the forum pecking order before anything you said was taken seriously. Lots of forums would shit on you for having a low post-count no matter what you said.
Reddit killed the old forums by being designed so that couldn't happen. It did "democratize" participation that way, but ended up being an object lesson in the perils of mob rule and too much democracy.
Just not the clique of power moderators squatting on subreddit names :P
But sarcasm aside yes you're correct. Like many things the solution to some problems just brings different problems to the limelight.
Power-moderator cliques was truly the Tyranny of Structurelessness in action.
This brings to mind something that happened to a very small forum-based community I'm a part of. We spun off of GameFAQs' Star Wars forum like 15+ years ago and we signed up on a free Invision Power Board forum provider. Over the years the forums was upgraded to zetaboards and then finally to tapatalk.
Tapatalk is god-awful and it's very clearly the direction reddit seems to be heading. Every day I log in to check the forum and I'm hounded with popups urging me to buy "coins" I can use to improve the forum. The top and sidebar of the site are plastered with prompts to buy these coins. And what can I do with those coins? Decorate my avatar with hats (sound familiar?)! And then there's a premium feature we can pay for that gives us coins and unlocks certain moderation and customization features. It's terrible and they've managed to pervert and micro-transaction something as old and simple as a forum. And that seems like where reddit is ultimately heading.
It's all for free, so I understand that we have little say in what happens and that's fair, I suppose. If it bothers us that much we can just self-host for cheap. But that's really only a viable option for small groups like ours. There are maybe 15 of us who regularly post, so we wouldn't likely lose anyone. But for big communities like subreddits? I just don't think it'll be a viable option to simply move. So communities will die off to make way for a micro-transaction-filled website plastered with ads to funnel money to a bunch of investors who threw money at a unprofitable site.
There are specialized forums like the one for Teensy. Also, PriusChat still seems to be the place for Prius owners?
The modern solution to this seems to be Discourse. Here is the forum for VCV Rack. I don't know if you'd call it chat or not? To me it looks like a forum.
Forums are still very active in car communities. Yeah, facebook and instagram have largely taken over for "show off" sort of stuff (and I'm not upset about it moving there), but for actual information, builds, and the like forums are where it's going on and never really stopped.
I actually don't hate that forum style. It seems to strike a balance between the old-school single thread forum syle and threaded replies, and it's not nearly as cluttered as old-school forums got, with all the signatures and stuff. I'm not 100% sure I love how it makes use of horizontal space, though.
Is it running on some kind of forum software or is it custom made for VCV?
Discourse is open source. Here is a description.
I've seen the same or similar on the Funcom forums for Conan Exiles, so I don't believe it is entirely unique.
Resetera / Neogaf ?
I also known of a french retrogaming forum (grospixels) that for a long time ran phpBB 1.x (at least until 2008) and is still alive and kicking today.
The chat thing is weird. I was using old.reddit to avoid the redesign and got some "chat" notification, which I clicked out of fear and panic. It was a spam bot (I think?) and I exited the chat but somehow the chat window didn't close and kept re-opening even between logouts! Apparently, the little "x" to exit the window can disappear sometime (thankfully, you can still click it by clicking the empty space where it sits), so I guess it's just some CSS error or something. Still, it was weird how aggressive it got. Who wants to chat with redditors? How's that an alluring thought to anyone, lol?
This happened to me too! I was going crazy!
It's very strange to me why there's such a strong push to it being a chat platform. It's not designed to be one.
I hear a lot of people talk about this kind of VC goosing, but are they really so blind as to not understand these metrics are nothing but fluff? I'd imagine being in the space that VC investors would learn that these metrics don't really indicate much of anything, but I guess I need more familiarity to really know.
VCs seem to occupy a weird space in common discourse where they are simultaneously portrayed as idiots with loose wallets but also as an exclusive and lucrative source of wealth that only institutional investors have access to.
In general, no. VCs can have... unintuitive things they look for (like how early stage startups that are breakeven are not preferred), but they have more than enough money to have a competent finance and modeling department.
I'd argue it isn't even VC related, working in IT consultancy having seen a variety of companies from the inside many times management falls for the easy statistics that aren't portraying the full picture. It then really depends on the company culture and structure if that actually becomes a problem or not.
I get the feeling that with reddit you have a lot of different scrum teams with independent product owners effectively trying to up the metrics for their little island they are responsible for. Without anyone coordinating this sort of stuff properly you effectively get a reality where each team is just interested in their thing and not what the greater impact is on the entire platform.
And ironically some of them are popular in part because they are not chat rooms. freenode is probably a better place to ask c++ questions but /r/cpp_questions is nice for people who may want to ask a question as they're going to bed and wake up the next day with a few answers.
Yup, noticed that conspicuous green dot by my username and immediately turned that off.
I'm not sure why they want to dismantle their success with unnecessary changes, but good luck to them.
I've basically given up on my sub at this point. We tried to create a high quality, civil subreddit for music, and it worked for a while. The main issue for me now is the rampant toxicity throughout the site. We've been attacked by brigades of trolls sporadically for the past year probably because of our vocal anti-racism. Lately it seems to have ramped up, between that and the mods of other music subreddits actively platforming bigotry and censoring dissenting views; the admins general neglect of mod support; and even being temporarily banned from the whole site based on false reports -- I'm just over it.
I think the other really in-depth subreddits have either been mostly dead for a while, basically gone to crap, or are badly infested with concern trolls. If you just take a glance at the top comments you might think it's same as usual but dig into the details, there's a LOT of poisoning the well going on even in the best subreddits.
So I don't think it's chat that's killing it really. (I'm not privy to the issues facing mods of the massive subreddits though. Maybe to them it is an issue.)
*Oh shit, I just realized who I was replying to sorry. Hope I'm cool here...heh.
Frankly most of them are already at that point, at least speaking from a moderator perspective. At the same time you can easily argue that we have passed that point years ago. The problem is that as far as those communities go there really aren't good easily accessible alternatives. Which I realize might be odd as I am writing this out on tildes but I think is very much true as tildes doesn't provide a framework for specific communities and the individualization subreddits offer there.
From a moderator perspective it is just a bit of touch call, for me personally it comes down to the fact that /r/history is still one if not the biggest history communities online. As I do care about history as a subject and have seen what happens with history related communities when they are not moderated I simply can't bring myself to abandon it at this point.
Having said that, we have arrived at a point a while ago where we are effectively mostly keeping the subreddit from turning into a hot mess of political slap-fighting, neo-nazis trying to use it as a platform while maintaining a bare minimum in quality. It has been a long time since our team was dedicated to growing the subreddit, trying out different approaches to a better community, etc. Exactly because reddit as a platform clearly is moving full steam ahead with engagement as the only metric and that can most easily be done through low effort fluff like content.
Is it full of people worth talking to though? I've found many of the bigger hobbyist subs I used to frequent are basically full of noobs who don't know much past the entry level stuff.
I can't speak for /r/History, but /r/Hinduism is just total garbage. Anyone who knew what they were talking about left ages ago and at this point the only content on there is people asking "I need help on a term paper" level questions or fundamentalists posting vaguely dog-whistling content to skirt a ban. And the mods are basically AFK.
At this point any useful questions I check a Hinduism stack exchange because it at least has people who have read the relevant material.
Well you won't find term paper questions in /r/history as homework help questions in the broadest sense aren't allowed. Frankly I am not sure if it is a community worth actively seeking out if you are looking for it at this point. However it is still the biggest community people will encounter and it is from that perspective I wrote my comment.
This has been going on for a long while though. Remember all the TrueX reddits when RES led to the takeover of many subreddits without strict moderation by memes? Sadly the track record implies that the bulk of the userbase and the communities will stay, just a little unhappier, and a few people will set out on their own to places like here or HN. Voat and the likes will be held up as the alternatives to scare people into staying.
Just FYI, Voat no longer exists. They shut down a few months ago.
https://tildes.net/~tech/u47/voat_is_shutting_down_on_december_25
When logged on to you Reddit account,
https://old.reddit.com/prefs
then search for
let other users see my online status.Thank you. I avoid the redesign as much as I can.
Mind, it doesn't transfer between the two. You set your status to "hidden" on the old design, but the redesign won't follow suit. If you do ever find yourself over there you'll suddenly become online again til you shut it off there, too.
Well that doesn't seem sketchy at all... Good to know!
Probably just a glitch/bug/growing pain then.
I think what really bothers me is that opting out doesn't set you to Offline, it shows you as “Hiding”. The implication being you're a paranoid outlier while everybody else gets along fine.
Reddit's constant drive towards further "engagement" stats doesn't surprise me anymore, but I do feel more and more ostracized with every change. The site is almost unrecognizable compared to the quirky place it used to be.
For what it's worth, they changed it to "online status: off", at least on the app.
I'm just gonna repost this comment that someone posted there:
It will be answered (if ever; there's a good chance it's ignored) with a "we take this seriously, we'll look into this" with no followup because the management has decided they'll do whatever they want anyway
Happens a lot with companies. Lip service, and ONLY lip service
You don't need to speculate, here's their answer in this comment
The comment, copypasted here in case you don't wanna go there
Fair enough
This goes well with their new policy of no longer letting you opt out of outbound clicks: https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lqtecn/update_to_user_preferences/goihj7a/?context=10000
That thread is how I found out about this place :)
Of course they are enabled by default
It was not enabled by default for me.
it was enabled for me on multiple accounts, all enabled by defaults but maybe they are doing A/B testing.
Love that there's already a way to make it go away. Thx!
the comment was deleted. what did it say?
Instructions to hide the indicator with uBlock Origin. I don't recall the specific rule, but it's trivial to add interactively: right-click the indicator, and select "<uBlock logo> Block element…" from the context menu. The default generated rule is appropriate (and any other will catch obviously-wrong elements).
This works reasonably well on most of the old Reddit interface, e.g. I've element-filtered away any sign of chat.
I'm honestly glad I've made a move to reddit alternative like teddit or libreddit. These alternatives are focussed on being a privacy front-end to reddit, but the unintended benefit to this is that these alternatives do not get subjected to the same crap as reddit itself while both support different visual styles of reddit (teddit resembles old reddit while libreddit resembles new mobile-friendly reddit).
Yes, Reddit dear. Let's give the trolls you keep on your platform an even more effective way to harass actual people. That sounds like a spiffy idea, nevermind the fact you already messed around with the report modal so it's twice as slower and thrice as painful to use.
Guess its time to decide if I care more about being a part of a community for a niche game or my own stances on internet privacy. Thanks Reddit.
Once upon a time I welcomed the addition of chat, in the form of interoperable Jabber. It was cool when LiveJournal added Jabber chat which could communicate with Google etc., it gave me a way of interacting with friends elsewhere without signing into a proprietary network myself.
Adding proprietary features to walled gardens I read as a continued attack on the open internet. Use interoperable standards and make the web stronger, rather than forcing everyone into your app. I still don't like proprietary sites/apps when they use open standards and would prefer open source alternatives, but so long as they are committed to working together with others, I can consider them friendly competition rather than an opponent who must be defeated.