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As of October 2021 what is in your opinion the best Reddit alternative and why? What are its best qualities?
I obviously like Tildes, but i wonder if there are more interesting alternatives i don’t know about.
I would interested in some objective analysis, I doesn’t have to be really popular , it can be just a place to post for some extra quality discussion.
I have found that a good ole forum can satisfy my needs for many things. Just find a forum that covers the niche you're interested in and just follow stuff there. The first one you might find might not be the best, but I'm sure eventually you'll find a good one where it's worth staying and posting. Stuff is just generally slower moving, but you still can get deep discussions and stay informed about everything happening without it being circlejerky.
I've unsubbed from a lot of subreddits on reddit and instead use tildes and some gaming forum more (not era, smaller and chiller) and hackernews/lobste.rs for coding/IT.
Before I went on to tildes, I've literally looked through every reddit alternative in the list and skimmed it, but all had smaller or bigger issues that did not want me to stay. Hence, I'm interested in the other recommendations here and see what people tend to like :)
This is weird. I use the name zonk some places, and this very similarly. You’re not me, are you?
So you're the person who takes my nick on those 5 other pages! :D And no, I don't think I'm you :D But I'm using this nick for 20 years or now or something like that.
I've only used a handful, but Tildes remains the best despite it being a closed garden with a pretty small community. Out of the few I've actually used:
Voat - Was good back in the beginning and was shaping itself to be like Reddit circa-2011. The problem is that Reddit refugees flocked back to Reddit because they were placated by Ellen Pao resigning, even though it was the rest of the board that actually threw her under the bus. Eventually as racist forums and subreddits were shut down, Voat took in those refugees and became Stormfront-lite. The site closed down on 25th December 2020 after private investors pulled out mid-pandemic. The sole admin (PuttItOut) was actually running the site off of his own finances during the pandemic, but eventually even that became unsustainable.
Hubski - The premise was pretty promising. Bypassing the issue of mod-level censorship by adding hashtags instead of subreddits seemed good but the site slowly lost its community, isn't very stable and is pretty much dead.
Ruqqus - Joined during beta, it seemed promising but quickly started to turn toxic when it began taking in undesirables from banned subreddits and from Voat with open arms in the months after I joined. These users created loads and loads of problems for Ruqqus as a platform until eventually, they changed their interpretation of the Brandenburg Test to no longer require a specific place & time before they'd ban a user for inciting violence. Under this test they banned the Incels and MGTOW guilds, sparking major backlash and an exodus of most its users. They've announced that the site will be shut down in the next few days.
Snapzu - Joined during open beta, but they went invite-only for some reason, presumably to avoid the controversy of Reddit's undesirables. Feature-wise it's almost like an amalgamation of Reddit and Digg with a more modern layout. Their biggest mistake was going invite-only because the community on the site is practically nonexistent.
There's a pattern here. Either I stepped away from the sites because they became racist shitholes or they have basically no users.
I think for a Reddit clone to really take off, they need to accomplish five objectives:
Deal with the issue of power users and moderator level censorship. It's rife on Reddit and has made the website a hostile community. It's like you have to be careful with what subreddits you participate in, what you post and even what words you use, to avoid any kind of automated comment deletion, shadowban or actual subreddit ban. This can be done by creating a rigid set of moderator guidelines and (unlike Reddit) actually enforcing them fairly and appropriately.
Avoid pissing off advertisers & payment processers. They are essential to the site's survival and are ultimately where every "free speech" social network has failed. Free speech is a double-edged sword for that very reason. Companies don't want to associate themselves with communities that foster hate speech or violence.
Be more proactive in removing problematic content. Reddit's content policy is shaped almost wholly by controversies and negative press, and some of this is for facilitating content that any other social network platform would have banned without question because it's morally repugnant.
Figure out a way to monetize the site effectively without screwing over the user base.
Effectively deal with online harassment on and off site. One major fear of Reddit is that if you draw the ire of certain users or communities, they will go out of their way to dox you and ruin your life.
It's always interested me the conflict between your points 2 & 3, and to some degree point 5 also. Extremism is bad, but limiting expression can also be bad.
We're at the stage where the concept of free speech is often if not mostly a very thinly veiled desire to be ignorant or racist with impunity. Most people don't really want that, and neither do most advertisers. So what does that leave free speech meaning, and to what degree?
There is never and can never be a perfect answer. That said I think I'd argue that Reddit in its early days was very close to ideal in that users up voted and down voted content based on whether or not it added to the discussion, as opposed to as a measure of agree or disagree. It's just got too big for that now and too big to not have serious problems. The comment by Zonk (no idea how to tag other users) hits the nail on the head; find smaller forums aligned to each interest.
Edit: a word
The best solution is some kind of clear balance between the two. Free speech allows extremism to foster whereas excessive limits to freedom of expression can lead to tyranny.
If I had the programming knowledge and resources to start a Reddit competitior, I'd run it with similar house rules to Reddit, albeit with some differences.
Medically dangerous misinformation would be banned. A clearer definition would be in place on what hate speech is would be put in place. I'd give moderators more power but I'd also give them a code of conduct to abide by, similar to Reddit's moderator guidelines, except actually enforced fairly and consistently. I'd also make it clear that the kind of racist free speech warriors you see on sites like Ruqqus, Poal, Votal, etc would not be welcome.
Another thing I'd tackle is how easy it is to ban evade and how trolls just keep coming back. The approach I'd take would be similar to quarantining, but not as a punishment or "advertiser friendliness" measure. Communities with lots of problematic issues I'd mark as "Protected." To participate in a Protected community, you need to verify your identity with the admins - this is to curb ban evasion.
I'd also be friendlier and less demanding towards what community moderators can do, because they are volunteers after all.
For premium features I'd allow paid users to search beyond 1,000 results, which is the hard-limit of how much you can browse search results, Top, New, Controversial, Rising, etc on Reddit. I'd also add premium-only communities and the ability to post GIFs/images in comments for Premium users.
I mean if we're talking web forums and online communities "tyranny" is a bit of a grandiose way of framing it. More specifically it just leads to places turning into either being boring circle-jerks where everyone just sucks up to the moderators and walks on eggshells around each other, or noxious pits of bullying and constant drama. Which way it goes largely depending on how quickly the moderators go about banning people who step out of line.
Basically what the heavy top-down approach does is it conditions the community into constantly appealing to "the stick" as the way to resolve disputes and disagreements rather than discussing them or learning to live with them.
Of course, this also happens in the absence of moderation except people resort to the "stick" of doxxing, cyberbullying, mass-downvoting, and other similar tactics to punish people who step out of line.
I'm going to tweak the premise of your question a little. When you say "Reddit alternative" I hear "a site that mostly does what Reddit did but better." I think of this as 2 functions.
But I'd depart from the purely functional view and focus more on the role Reddit plays in my life and what alternative ways are to meet those needs. These are
In this sense my "Reddit alternatives" are a lot wider and encompass a basket of different services. Some work better and some worse that Reddit. Primarily I've ended up spending a lot more time on Twitter and Discord once I discarded Reddit.
I don't really post on Twitter much so it's really a passive consumption platform for me. But it keeps me current on items 4, 5, and 6 and a little bit of 3. There are even Twitter bots that repost funny drama on Reddit and TikTok so I don't have to bother with those two sites). I do have to do a lot of curation to keep Twitter good though, and it seems to have a deleterious effect on the mental health of most of the people I follow. I notice I end up doing a fair but of pruning of people on my feed. There's a sort of cycle that seems to happen when people get big where they start to lean too into Twitter drama and trying to cultivate clout on the platform. The tell that this is happening is when they start to give a lot of unsolicited opinions about topics that aren't their area of expertise, they start to lean more and more on "hot takes," getting into fights with CHUDs, and resting on using Twitter cliches (e.g. "I don't know who needs to hear this but. . ." or "Normalize. . . ") Once people start doing that this is a cue for me that the account is starting down the path of saying a lot of stupid shit that will annoy me so I unfollow. I tend to stick to independent journalists and bloggers, since they tend to have more discipline about what they put out attached to their names. Academics are good follows for a while until they start to get a modicum of clout and then they're prone to exhibiting the toxic behaviors I mentioned before.
Discord is a more casual place but I end up having more discussions there and it's pretty good at surfacing memes and funny content too. If Twitter is like a bunch of lecture series I try to sit in on, Discord is more like hanging out at a neighborhood bar and vibing to it. It is pretty good at fulfilling needs 1, 2, 5, and 6. It could also be good at 7, but I think because the culture skews young the recommendations aren't always salient for me. It's a real-time chat, though, so it can move pretty fast and tense things can get heated really easily, so having real debates can be tough. It also skews really young so I sometimes feel out of place in the majority of communities there. And unlike Twitter, you can't just unfollow people when you notice they're going into a weird place. I've noticed one persistent behavior in some corners of it where teens have this tendency to "medicalize" all their normal teenaged angst and then make a point of unloading it on the general chat like it's a therapy session. You can't really tell them "it gets better" because they're in this milieu where these transient low-points in life become integrated as part of their self-conception that they carry around with them. As an expectant father it makes me really worried for raising a kid in this sort of culture because it seems really bad for fostering coping skills. But it is what it is. It's a minority of kids doing this and, when they do get annoying, you can always mute the server for an hour and it'll usually move on.
For 3 and 9, I find Digg and YouTube have been really good. YouTube does tend to get me into recommendation rabbit holes nowadays, but I seem to get enough flavor in from my group chats and from Digg and Discord itself that the filter bubble hasn't come up as thickly for me as it seems to for other people. Digg is just a nice site. It has lots of random interesting stuff. It's a nice place to just check in on once or twice and day and leave it at that. It's a good throwback to times when a website only aspired to be a daily check-in rather than trying to occupy your every moment of waking attention.
Tildes also fills in 3 for me and a little bit of 2, though less-so than in the past just because the site's activity level has gone down a tad. I actually think Tildes could also be really really good at 7, 8 and 9 but the user base would need to get bigger and more diverse first. I kind of wish there was a good alternative for these but I haven't been able to find any yet. This is a function Reddit's design is actually good for, but their poor moderation tools and generally garbo community keeps it from being really effective at it. I also check Hacker News on occasion, but the tech focus limits the scope of topics I can read up on and I find the community there to be kind of a farcical parody of "tech-bro" culture so I'm not really interested in engaging there socially.
There is also my RSS feed, which is my primary means for item 4. But needing to subscribe to bloggers and publications to populate the feed means it's just not so good for anything where serendipity matters, like discovering new media or new hobbies.
I like both lemmy and tildes, but i think lemmy is currently the best "batteries included" alternative, what i like about it:
what i like about tildes:
Stuff they both miss:
advantage they both have (that not all other alternatives seem to have):
I just visited lemmy for the first time. The official instance has comments that are more or less like reddit’s. I don’t think I’d want to stick around reading them.
That's sort of the issue with this sort of site. In order for it to be competitive it needs to be attractive. As it is more attractive, it... attracts, and then the quality will decrease simply because of people being people.
I used to be opposed to federated stuff, but something like Lemmy can be self-perpetuating, and ideally always provide a new spot to go to on the same platform that is higher quality through one's eyes, even if it's a different instance.
Maybe not an alternative, but Discord is pretty much what I use the most nowadays. The community is huge and there are servers for literally anything. It kinda sucks that you can only join 100 servers at a time though.
One major downside to Discord is that it's not as good for archiving so you have to do some extra effort for that (using bots or self bots is one way).
The fact that Discord is not an adequate replacement for interactive user forums has explicitly been posted/discussed on Tildes previously. Link
First, as you say, it's impermanent, and second, which affects all platforms - moderation takes human time and effort.
I think it's still worth mentioning though. There's a reason a lot of subreddits now provide a Discord server to join, heck even Tildes has an unofficial Discord server that is quite active (might even be more active than the main site at times).
For me, a text based forum like Reddit or Tildes vs Discord serve completely different usage cases.
Apparently for others as well. This does not mean that Discord doesn't have a place, but it is not a replacement for a site like Reddit or Tildes, which is the focus of this topic.
No, I don't feel that I'm gatekeeping. Having said that, if someone wants to use Discord, I'm not going to stop them. But this topic is specifically about "a reddit alternative".
Discord objectively does not provide the same or similar functions that Reddit/Tildes does. Discord limits the number of servers you can be on to 100 whereas Reddit does not (unsure of Tildes), it has no built-in archiving or searching of that archive (so no googling something, seeing a Reddit topic/comment that answered your question/etc).
Discord is a first and foremost a chat system, like an updated IRC of older times.
While it can meet a few elements of the requested topic - a "reddit alternative" - it cannot meet them all.
It's like comparing a car to a motorcycle. Will both get you places? Yes. Can both go on the interstate? Yes. However, the motorcycle is significantly less functional when it comes to carrying more than 2 people, or more than a small amount of cargo, among other differences.
Enjoy, but keep your head on a swivel.
Very simple. The title said "reddit alternative". It did not say "reddit-like" or "chat" or "discussion". Since we know what Reddit brings to the table, we can evaluate alternatives on a feature for feature basis. On that metric, Discord fails.
"Reddit alternative" is not a term any more precisely defined than "Reddit-like". Interpreting what constitutes a Reddit alternative is inherently subjective and exemplifies a classic ship of Theseus problem; @hungariantoast struck to the heart of the matter when they asked how many "elements" a proposed Reddit-alternative must satisfy to constitute a reddit-alternative. Probably a reddit alternative should satisfy some of those elements, and given that @Apos has listed the Reddit-comparable features Discord has, this minimal bar has been passed. Your claim that "we can evaluate alternatives on a feature for feature" basis and come to the (objective) conclusion that Discord doesn't qualify as a Reddit alternative is not a claim that can be convincingly made until you resolve the aforementioned ship of Theseus.
Moreover, while you might primarily value Reddit for its "features" (eg, comments, posts, and layout) someone else might primarily value Reddit for its social media value. In that case, Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, and, indeed, Discord are valid alternates to Reddit. In fact, someone else might "value" Reddit as a time-sink; to them, reading a book might be a valid Reddit alternative.
My point here is that when you state that Discord cannot satisfy the requirements of a Reddit alternative, you have made a value judgement as to what those requirements must be. However, other people have made different value judgements. That does not make other people wrong. Hell, that doesn't even make you wrong. It's possible for Discord to serve as a valid Reddit alternative for Apos without serving as a valid Reddit alternative for you.
Finally, and I realize this sounds a bit abrasive, I would encourage you to practice some epistemic modesty. There is a fine line between being opinionated and being stubborn. Presuming to know what constitutes a Reddit alternative without ever defining it feels more like the latter. And while stubbornness isn't necessarily harmful, in this case your response comes across as a put-down of Apos's suggestion.
That was really interesting! Putting this in terms of the ship of Theseus.
4 paragraphs.. That's an unnecessarily long way of saying that everyone's use case is different, and no one's opinion is bad.
That feels a bit too participation trophy-like to me, but in the end, I'm not a gatekeeper in a practical sense, and people can use what they want to use.
As far as not being stubborn, that's not for you to address.
Discord has recently added the ability to do threads. It is text based. Discord does have a search function which is much more powerful than Reddit's. Depending on which servers you are in, people will contribute long posts. It also supports bots to help with moderation or add extra features. It even has an equivalent to RES.
Someone that would want to use Discord as a Reddit alternative could definitely do it.
Based on what OP wrote I think Discord is a fair recommendation.
Edit: Typo
I haven't seen those things personally, but I'm also not big into Discord, only there for limited tech support. If it works just as well for people, then that's their choice to use it.
It feels to me like Discord is trying to become all things to all people, which I hate. It feeds into my dislike of companies trying to become all things to all people, such as Amazon.
It feels like Discord is trying to be a "me too!" when Reddit is already there and has already had a lot more time to work on the formula.
In the years I've used Discord, it has always been, for me, primarily text-based. Yes, it was initially advertised as mainly a voice chat platform to compete with TeamSpeak and the like, but I don't think that's the reason it's thrived.
Rather, it's been adopted as a much more generalized text-based communication platform by, I'd say, the majority of its users.
Everything I might once have used a niche-interest forum for, I can now use Discord for. Even before Discord had the new "thread" functionality, its search function was good enough to be able to pull up any discussion from the past that you'd like.
I understand how it's distasteful to some, and how its closed nature is also a turn-off. Regardless, I can't deny that, for the past few years, Discord has been the place where I've had the most success getting together with others to talk about specific niche interests.
I don't know if it's relevant or an option to you, but since May this year you can join 200 servers if you're paying for Nitro :) I'm not nearly in that many servers for it to be relevant, but maybe you somehow missed that.
I thought it was 150! TIL
I'd reach the 200 limit pretty fast so instead I just curate the servers I'm in harder. ;(
How do you use so many servers effectively? On reddit I was in more subreddits than that but they all showed up on my front page. I can't imagine looking through 100s of discord servers
I put the ones I care the most about at the top. I group those that are similar. Servers that ping too much get muted. Also I tend to mute all the channels I don't care about or the fluff channels for memes (that's one thing that's nice compared to Reddit, I don't need to constantly see the same memes that get reposted all the time. Having said that, Discord's dynamic is different than Reddit so there are almost never any reposts. And between communities there's usually not much overlaps in the members so it's much more diverse).
Some servers are for specific projects for example an indie gamedev that posts about their work in progress, or an indie 2D film animator that streams on twitch so I can get notified when he goes live and we share animation videos that are inspirational.
Some bigger servers for programming projects. Some of them I mod and try to provide tech support.
The less a server is niche, the less often I'll visit it. For example I'm in a server for Mathematics. It has 70k members. I usually only go there when I need math help. Response times are really fast.
There's also a server for piano players with 5.5k members. At any time in the day there are people practicing or giving live performances. Some of them take song requests. I can get help when I compose music. There are many discussions about music theory. They host recitals every few weeks. People can sign-up to get a spot in the schedule. I fade in and out of those types of servers but it's nice to have them around.
There are some servers that are specific to a technology like JavaScript libraries. You can often get in contact with the library creator. The other day I joined one related to a popular library in the vuejs ecosystem. As soon as I joined the creator messaged me one on one. Got to ask my questions directly. That saved me a lot of time.
That's another thing with Discord, beside the communities, it's really common for people to talk privately. On Reddit, people are mostly anonymous, on Discord I feel like there's more of a personal touch.
I'm also in servers for my local community. Before covid we'd organize local meetups. I landed a job through that at some point. Got a bunch of irl friends too.
Get in a few servers of each types and you quickly reach 100 servers.
This is my thought as well as someone who is building a community around Discord and Discourse, Discourse fills the gap or archiving threads and topics and best of all it has integration to Discord. I have seen other communities adding Telegram channels for announcements and discussion threads with groups, i think Telegram is moving to that area of building communities.
Guilded is Discord with more channel types as calendars and forums, but still not popular to use and closed source, not confident what will happen with my threads history if they ban my channel.
My favourite these days is Readup.
The content is articles only. (My favourite type of content, but granted; not for everyone.)
You have to read an article before you're allowed to post it, vote on it, or comment on it. (No hasty upvotes or inflammatory comments purely based on the headline.)
Articles are scored based on length. (Giving long articles with comparatively fewer votes the same chance to rise to the top as short articles with many votes.)
Subscription based, which means no ads or donation drives.
Revenue split with writers. (Readup keeps just 5% of revenue. Payment processors/app stores get their share. The rest goes to writers.)
Oh hey, Readup just launched free trials, if anyone wants to try it out without committing.
HackerNews is a decent alternative if you're more strictly into tech news although it doesn't let you downvote unless you have x amount of karma so if you say anything against the long-term established users there, which tend to be a somewhat homogenous hugbox, you're downvoted and there's nothing you can do about it since younger accounts are looked down upon as deserving of less power so you have the power-user or ruling establishment problem.
In my experience downvotes on HN are often used the way they're intended: for posts that don't add value to the discussion.
But often isn't always, people use them as a disagree button too.
I think requiring some measure of commitment to the site before certain features are enabled is a pretty good way to mitigate some of the problems forums have. Seems to work since all of HN is somehow maintained and moderated by one dude.
I'd rather leave it up to the users to moderate discussion. If a new user shares little of worth, let them downvote. I've generally disliked online moderation unless it's blatant spam; power to the users. We're all big boys and girls here, most of us can handle the power of a downvote button and it's patronizing to deny the same power to the masses just because they're new. As it goes, we fear what we don't know and sometimes the fear is used with great detriment against a populace.
No we are emphatically not. The majority of us are bots and many of the remaining ones who are most active are teenagers or adult NEETs with a surfeit of time on their hands and various emotional or behavioral issues keeping them stuck as NEETs.
Bots count as spam so no argument there. But just because they're teenagers, NEETS or people with behavioral issues doesn't mean they're not deserving of opinion and interaction. This kind of elitist attitude just keeps the other more democratic forums alive and healthy and just alienates people who are probably in more need of help and interaction than the average person. Also when you alienate you dilute friendship potential and have less audience which lessens your own power of word, maybe deservedly so.
Sure but it also doesn’t mean “we’re all big boys and girls who can handle downvote buttons.” Just look at the cesspool that philosophy has turned Reddit into.
I don't browse there, did once before, but I take your word for it. So sure, let's say it is a cesspool but so are human inclinations. You can either take the hard policing approach which is less intellectually taxing and just ban it or the soft approach, which could be psychological, intellectual, spiritual, emotional, etc taxing in those aspects and chronologically as well but you gain a stronger fellowship with your fellow man. The hard approach is eventually just as taxing also, just not immediately, since you can't push these things away forever as they're endemic to human nature.
Also what's the issue with /r/philosophy? It doesn't agree with your philosophy? If so, aren't you being intellectually disingenuous? I went there one time and it just seemed way too restricted which, imo, doesn't nurture a great learning environment, which may be the prevalent philosophy among the mods there. I guess the good lesson here is there's enough irony and hypocrisy to go around for all of us.
No. I don’t gain a stronger fellowship with anything allowing trolls to drag fora down to the lowest common denominator every time and skew all conversation to cater to a very narrow band of people and personalities. There’s a whole rest of the internet for that.
I'm on /r/philosophy and have no idea what OP is talking about. At the very least it's not any worse than Reddit as a whole.
I don't think /r/philosophy was mentioned:
I believe they did so but dropped the /r/, but maybe I'm wrong.
I guess @NaraVara can clarify, but the sentence doesn't make any sense to me if you add the /r/. /r/philosophy certainly isn't driving trends on Reddit in general.
@lou @streblo
Thanks for tagging me I didn't realize there was a further discussion here. I wasn't talking about the philosophy subreddit. "That philosophy" refers to the laissez faire attitude towards moderation that funky_buddha was advocating for.
Try running any sort of (not tiny) public discussion platform without moderation.
Power to the users is a great general concept, but in online discourse it only takes a handful of bad actors, unmoderated, to bring down a community.
You can ask “why the downvotes” and usually someone will try to explain. But usually I just move on.
And sometimes it's just as simple as 'it's not the narrative they want to hear' and maybe you're sure of it so it's just kind of redundant to ask. Also that's kind of a distraction from my original point which is the power differentials between new and old users. But I digress, it's a formula that has positives as well as negatives so generally I'm not that picky about my social media platforms.
I agree with other opinions there are not best Reddit alternatives which fit it all. on r/redditalternatives i usually ignore the alternatives which are not decentralized , open souce or can be hosted. Content protocols will have its place as forums but new generations are moving to chat apps as Discord or Telegram channels.
Discord is especially scary because of how convenient it is. I remember when it started and I would play League of Legends games. I could instantly generate an invite link and get five people in a voice chat. Those games were easy wins.
Then later they added a way to connect to any computer temporarily by scanning a QR code with your phone.
They have so many little things like that. (Bad examples I guess but I'm tired.)
One thing that I'd like to see is a decentralized social network based on the Kademlia protocol (it's what powers torrents without a central tracker, a distributed hash table). It could support the same features as Discord. The Kademlia white paper is my favorite research paper.
Just two:
Tildes, obviously
And lobste.rs
Lobste.rs is exclusivly IT oriented; it probably won't be of interest to non-IT people.
Both are invite-only
I have pretty mixed feelings about Lobste.rs (and honestly this site too, though I don't post often here), but if you're a fan of the current Tildes atmosphere and are interested in IT topics, Lobste.rs isn't a bad place to be.
Let me shamelessly plug my hobby project https://linklonk.com
The main difference from Tildes and Reddit is that it has a peer-to-peer trust system that is based on what you upvote. Instead of popularity based ranking of content, you see more content from people (and RSS feeds) that upvoted content that you also upvoted.
I debuted it on Tildes last December and you can find more details there about how it works in that post. I wrote more about how LinkLonk compares to popularity based systems in: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/mpqnpl/linklonk_a_link_aggregator_with_a_trust_system_an/
We don't have many users so there is not much discussion yet (as you can see: https://linklonk.com/comments). I'm adding more functionality to improve the discussion experience. Just yesterday, I added basic web push notifications when someone responds to your post/comment (post). The push notifications are off by default, of course. If you choose to turn them on you can get instant notifications when someone responds to you.
That sounds like a mixed bag and something other sites have probably played with and not completely gave in to for likely good reason. If I'm shopping, that sounds like a potentially good idea and that's done to death in many online stores. But if I'm just browsing generally, wouldn't that only perpetuate like-minded opinions and the sheltered box that many people don't want to leave that feeds the growing political divides in much of the world?
Reddit has much tribalism also as well as tildes. What I admittedly don't like about tildes is that replies tend to be discouraged if they're not long-form but, imo, if you can make your point with less words I consider that a bonus.
You seem to be concerned that the mechanism of LinkLonk will lead to a filter bubble where people would group by opinions they agree with and they would simply be preaching to their own (often misinformed) choir. That is a concern, but I'm not sure it is an inevitability.
Now that you know how LinkLonk works, what type of content would you personally upvote:
My hypothesis is that you would be more inclined to upvote content (2) on LinkLonk more, than you would in other social systems (Reddit/Facebook/Twitter).
In existing social systems, upvoting content (1) is logical because you are trying to promote your opinion to others. The upvotes are used as a tool to win opinion popularity contests. And you are less likely to post/upvote content (2) because it may be seen as non-conformance to the group. That results in the tribalism you mention.
On LinkLonk:
I'm not saying that LinkLonk will avoid the echo-chamber/filter-bubble problem. I'm saying that LinkLonk has a different system of incentives that it is not fair to apply the behaviour seen in other systems to it. And what kind of system level behaviour LinkLonk will have is impossible to predict just using a thought experiment. That's because this behaviour is emergent. The only way is to run an actual experiment - which is what LinkLonk is.
This sounds like Pinboard but with social engineering. Why abstract users' control of their content feeds? If users are encouraged to self-select for the feed they want, how is this superior to a subscription model?
You've carefully upvoted useful, novel information, but now one of those posts is also wildly popular with anti-vaxers and your feed gradually turns a bit weird. You don't know what post it originates from.
Perhaps you upvoted useful, novel information, but a year down the line you've learned enough about resilient networks and no longer wish to see this much content about graph theory in your feed by association.
In a subscription model, the origin of feed content is transparent. The user has control, too. Simply unsubscribe.
How can LinkLonk provide a better user experience?
Edit: another benefit to subscription is specialization. A specialist probably has a better measure of content than a newly exposed layperson.
This should not be a problem at all. That's because when you upvoted that post you connected only to those who upvoted the post before you. So you won't get connected to people who upvote it after.
If you upvote the post after a lot of anti-vaxers upvoted it, then, true, you will get connected to them. But the more popular an item is the less is your trust increased in each of the users that upvoted it. You see, each your upvote results in 1 point of your attention to be distributed equally among those who upvoted the item before you. Each of the N users gets 1/N credit.
You do know what item the recommendations you see originated from. When you see a recommendation on LinkLonk it tells you who this item comes from at the top of the recommendation. E.g., "from 4 users and 2 feeds". You can expand it and you will see:
If you stop upvoting content from users and feeds that post about a topic you no longer care about then your connections to them will become weaker over time and content from them will rank lower in your recommendations.
If you don't want to wait for the connections to naturally decay, you can downvote content that is not useful to you and it will make your connections to those who upvoted it significantly weaker. This is similar to unsubscribing in a subscription based system, but instead of evaluating a specific subscription you evaluate specific content recommendations. For example, imagine you are connected to 20 users who upvoted content that is no longer relevant to you. If you downvote that content then you will unsubscribe from all of them in one click (as opposed to 20 clicks if you were managing subscriptions manually).
Interesting. Does downvoting also only account for those who have upvoted it before you downvoted? What about the users who are upvoting it but also want to continue seeing your content? Will your downvote remove you from their feeds?
Yes, downvoting disconnects you from those who upvoted the item before you downvoted it. The people who upvoted it are the ones responsible for bringing that item to your attention and therefore they are the ones to be rewarded with more of your attention (if you upvote the item) or to be penalized (if you downvote).
No, your downvote will not remove you from their feed. If you are connected to me and I downvote content that you upvoted then only my connection to you is affected. Your connection to me is not. The connections between users are directed and are not symmetric. Only your upvotes and downvotes directly affect who you are connected to. Others cannot actively change your connections.
The subscription model does indeed give the user maximum control. But the flip-side is that:
LinkLonk is not a direct replacement for the subscription model [1]. It sits somewhere between popularity based systems (Reddit), subscription based systems (RSS, Twitter) and algorithmic systems (Pinterest). So it is meant to address some of the problems of all these systems. I wrote more about this triangle in the Show HN post for LInkLonk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643
[1] - Though, I use LinkLonk mostly as an RSS feed reader (since we have few users right now) and I do enjoy the automatic nature of subscription management and of content prioritization.
You've basically created a content discovery system that could be directly applied to a subscription model.
True, I guess they could be considered serving different niches.
Not needing to fully unsubscribe is an interesting advantage!
You say "usually", so you already know this is dependent on implementation. Also, as with 1, you've effectively provided a solution.
This just doesn't apply. Tags, hierarchies, tabs, groups, whatever. There are a bunch of ways to effortlessly solve this.
If I'm being honest, probably either, depending on mood. Some subjects I'm versed well enough in that I've seen the same arguments over and over. Also even if it's a very nuanced and persuasive opinion, that may make me want to downvote it even more if it has a high factor to manipulate people into being hateful of someone non-deserving. Many political leaders throughout history could be well-read and very persuasive but at some point, no matter the weapon used, if it's used against you and your own, it deserves an online or IRL "downvote".
This I agree. It's a somewhat novel approach and I'm not discouraging it. I may join myself as I'm interested in its emergent effects.
Don't we all want clarity and conciseness? Long comments often make multiple points, or several attempts to convey one point. Discussions online are hard.
I feel like at some point we hit a point of diminishing returns though. If the audience is intelligent enough, they can abstract enough context without you having to use much verbose vernacular. I feel like short form replies shouldn't necessarily be discouraged. Bonus points for more efficient time usage.
I don't think they are discouraged. But I was recently in a comment chain arguing over vocabulary, because someone missed key context.
You might have seen this at work; often in email exchanges, a recipient will miss or misinterpret something.
Relying on a diverse online audience to extract enough context sounds futile. Especially when posts may be read months or years later.
I don't see either as being better. Long-form, you and the reader are taxed more intellectually and chronologically but greater context is gained if needed. Short-form, less taxation, potentially more signal error.
An honest question: why do we need a Reddit alternative? Would it be feasible at all to have the good without the bad? Maybe we need something different instead. And maybe it'd be good if certain things were not online at all. Just saying.
Just bring back usenet already.
Is it actually gone?