When do you think some third party is going to arise out of the broken cesspool of one-party machine politics in the state of dementia known as California? Please, fill us in.
As long as old.reddit.com still exists for desktop, the site is semi-usable, although the insane moderation policies and narrow ideology makes the site basically useless except for niche reddits. Though I have gone from a daily user years back to maybe once a month. It's that bad.
On mobile, I can still read direct links to reddit posts that crop up on HN using Firefox for Android. Can't say same for the Twitter, which just says, "You need to enable javascript." Well, I won't.
On the contrary, Reddit is one of the most useful sites out there. With Google search nearing total uselessness for local information, using "site:reddit.com" is almost obligatory.
None of the real value of Reddit is coming from the parts of it that resemble Twitter or 4Chan.
Count me as another person who frequently adds site:reddit.com to my google searches. I realize there's a lot of astroturfing that goes on there, but it's still useful when I want to get a pulse from real people.
Also count me as another person who abhors the "new" UI. Every once in a while I get bounced out of the old UI and I don't know how people do it. The old UI isn't my perfect UI but it's darn near close to it.
Astroturfing is the least of the problems; most threads are filled with fake experts (of a very specific demographic - usually very young, american, male, etc) projecting.
This is fine if you consciously remember this while browsing, but when you start to believe that you can get a pulse from "real people" on Reddit, you've already lost the game. Remember: to even post a comment on Reddit already puts you in a niche group of people who use Reddit.
This becomes self-reinforcing as well, everyone else will feel alienated even if they do get over the hurdle of commenting, while those who fit the aforementioned mold will feel at home. Can't get much of a pulse, unless you specifically want to know what a very certain demographic feels once you filter out all the fanboyism and astroturfing.
Yes, HN also shares those problems. The upside is I don't see many people proclaiming to add HN to their google searches to find the pulse or whatever it may be, on the contrary it seems many come here just to debate.
Which is the bigger problem, someone coming to a niche place to debate, or someone who believes adding reddit to their google searches is going to provide them with better insight? I'd say the latter: they aren't conscious of the BS being pushed onto them.
Also kind of funny your comment is an exact demonstration of what I mean, that self-reinforcing style of "comedy" coupled with a nonsensical assumption.
What grew Reddit for me was the informed comments that were generally related to the discussion and often brought more light to a topic than the posted article.
With voices leaving Reddit the point or appeal of it is gone. For me at least.
I've been on Reddit for over 10 years. It's a search engine for me now, I've simply aged out of most of the discussions on there. I'm fine with that, because it's still useful for search queries like "Things to do in [city_name]".
On mobile you can’t read reddit comment threads unless you install their official app. I hate that Google surfaces reddit threads since the site itself often doesn’t contain the information indexed by the search.
Check the settings of your Reddit client app. I set mine to open links from reddit.com and old.reddit.com. So when I click on a search result, it pulls up the page in the app.
Reddit conveniently unchecks the “redirect me to old Reddit” button every ~6 months. Quite annoying. I’ve been using Reddit for ~8-9 years and it’s gotten palpably worse. I knew it was dying the first time I saw an emoji on there. Seems they want to go the way Digg did.
Interesting. I don’t think it’s a big enough annoyance for me to install yet another extension. Moreover, since I use old Reddit on my phone, I’d still have to change it back.
Yes. It’s in the preferences section only when you’re logged in. I notice it as I use multiple accounts somewhat sporadically and it seems like when I log into one after a while it’s almost always back on new Reddit. I’m not alone in complaining about this - plenty of threads on Reddit mentioning this.
My biggest gripe with the Reddit UI is having to continually click expand to see nested/additional comments. It makes it difficult to read comments on a topic. I much prefer the HN approach of open by default with a collapse/expand button.
It used to be that clicking outside the central border of comments would navigate you back to the subreddit, but it looks like they have fixed that.
Be warned, either new reddit or the mobile apps (not sure which) deliberately insert extraneous slashes or underscores into links, so many links are broken when viewing on old reddit / need manual editing.
I'm pretty sure they're going to kill off old reddit, which will 100% certainly mark the end of my 15 years there.
New and old reddit use different markdown rendering engines. New reddit is able to handle the slashes introduced by the new reddit WYSIWYG editor, it also supports fenced code blocks.
Old reddit supports neither resulting in broken links and broken code blocks.
What, did you prefer the site in the days of the Chimpire? Jailbait? Reddit's history has been the perfect case-study in the downsides of a libertarian approach to moderation. They've come to where they are now because every other approach resulted in horrifying racism, sexual exploitation, disinformation, and abuse.
They're arguably popular because of the moderation, not in spite of it. You're free to follow whatever subreddit you'd like or create your own, which is the benefit of Reddit as a platform.
I do wish there was much more transparency around "power-moderators" though.
HN has very opinionated mods, it's just that what they're opinionated about is primarily a matter of tone rather than a matter of content. I mean it's their site, I might disagree but it's their site.
Just some racism as long as you don't say the bad words, and light thought policing? It sounds like you want the HN mod policy, which makes sense bc that's where we are. Other sites can have different approaches though.
This isn’t the GP’s point; you’re being unfair to them and not reading their comment in good faith (which ironically is against the HN rules here).
I had a topic about the speed of light on askscience get deleted because the mods weren’t in the right mood that day. There is indeed a middle ground and we aren’t there.
Reddit’s model doesn’t work with what they want to do with the site. And things that worked when it had 1M, 10M users no longer do.
What's with the anti-human attitude? Sounds like a lot of the commenters here would rather kill 1000 humans (but of course not you or your family or your friends, maybe just some Spanish fishermen?) than the same number of orcas.
What’s with the human centric attitude? Do we own this planet or are we one mammal species on it currently driving the other species towards mass extinction?
The fiat currency is just as valuable as the lithium deposits because the fiat currency is backed by the most powerful force of military might the world has ever seen. When you trade for a dollar you're trading for that. Better than them just taking the lithium, as was the old way.
Empires that over-expand and seize too much sow the seeds of their own military destruction. Economic empires backed by ever-increasing military become overwhelming and then define any pushback as terrorism. What you end up with is a planetary-scale protection racket. Please do not construe this as an endorsement of other would-be hegemonies.
I was behind a woman today on an escalator. I wasn't shoulder-surfing, she held her phone up so high I couldn't help but see it. She was on Tik-Tok. She watched like twenty videos in one minute. One second, click. One second, click. What good this does anybody at all, anywhere, is beyond me. It was all trash.
Agreed. She didn't necessarily decide to click through 20 small clips of lazy cheerleading. She was probably hoping to find a good hit but is satisfied with useless crap because it's better than being present.
Raises an interesting question: is something only trash if there are better options available? I'd say no, personally. Something can just be bad in isolation, it doesn't have to be worse than something else to qualify.
But at the very least, maybe it was just trash compared to the experience of not watching a short video on your phone while riding on an escalator. Trash compared to just looking around. Would staring at your shoes, or the head of person in front of you, or the environment surrounding you have been a better experience than those short videos.
As a recovered TikTok addict, I can supply that it was the jokes for me. There was a lot of content that got delivered to me that hit my sense of humor just right. I’m sure you could track increased oxytocin in active users just like with narcotics.
Throat cancer, too. Friend of mine smoked cigars regularly for much of his life. Once they diagnosed the cancer in his upper throat, he lived about 10 months.
i'll pile on: my dad had jaw cancer. cut a few chunks of his jaw out, basically lost all of the molars on the bottom left. probably going to have to take more out before too long.
also turned into a few skin cancer issues in there.
How is that any different from other social media feeds? Users familiar with a content platform will skim through content faster. That has been the case since the TV era.
It's not just the viewers either. I guess they need to be there for someone to bother creating content, but on one short stroll through London I saw multiple "content creators" filming themselves. That wasn't something that one often saw when I was younger, now the whole city is crawling in people who are making videos.
I also noticed the quality of the filters. They really make ordinary people look quite a lot better than they do in real life.
> What good this does anybody at all, anywhere, is beyond me. It was all trash.
It's TV 2.0, but caters to ADHD types or people with borderline ADHD. If you use The Internet in any extreme way, you already have an ADHD brain. It's the only logical way to handle information overload and deal with the vastness of the web IMHO. ADHD as a term is normalized because of The Internet. It's not a scary thing to have anymore. It's the new normal.
The entire Western empire as it's run today is a subsidy for rich people by poor people and the rest of world. But as Eurasia unites against it and dollar hegemony breaks, these technocrats just double-down on their ideology and failed ideas.
