[WORMS_EAT_WORMS]

This is great and I wish this mentality was pushed earlier on reddit.

There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. Excellent comments, diverse opinions, and really great back and forth being shared of individual's experiences in almost every single subreddit.

Today, it's definitely harder to find good commentary and exchange. It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits (on both sides) to try to influence the general groupthink narrative/consensus. It's so disgustingly obvious but doesn't seem to be an issue for the team.

Maybe I am just getting old. I guess what I'm try to say is nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards to query some super insightful and awesome 5+ year old forum post on whatever the content is.

[thomastjeffery]

> I guess what I'm try to say is nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards to query some super insightful and awesome 5+ year old forum post on whatever the content is.

Better yet, use

    site:reddit.com

Reddit's search really needs some work. It's practically useless for me unless I am using old.reddit.com/.

> There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. Excellent comments, diverse opinions, and really great back and forth being shared of individual's experiences in almost every single subreddit.

That golden era is still happening. It's just hidden under a bunch of signal noise.

It helps to take all of the popular subreddits out of your feed and only join more niche ones.

The reality is that humanity in general is experiencing the same "golden era" hidden behind a high noise to signal ratio. There's only so much we can do to filter through it.

[stingraycharles]

> Reddit's search really needs some work. It's practically useless for me unless I am using old.reddit.com/.

I always thought that “Reddit search is bad” is pretty much as old as Reddit itself. I don’t think they ever seriously invested in that, for whatever reason.

Here’s a post from 8y ago where people were already accepting that it has been like that forever, and it hasn’t changed a lot ever since. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/146gop/why_does_...

[TeMPOraL]

I haven't seen a single social media or messaging platform where search didn't suck. Reddit search was bad, after redesign it's just hot garbage. Messenger search is unreliable and near-useless. Facebook search only worked well for the brief moment when they introduced "graph search", but that got quickly killed due to popular outrage. HN's bolted-on Algolia search is the least bad I've seen. And let's not even talk about Twitter, Instagram or Slack.

I'd go as far as saying that search features are being underdeveloped on purpose - perhaps they allow usage patterns that service owners don't like.

But then, Mastodon's search is even worse than Twitter, and that project has no incentive to disenfranchise their users. So I'm honestly confused about all this.

[stingraycharles]

I think it’s a combination of “search is hard” and “witty comments / titles make it even harder to search for”.

I’d argue most of these sites would be far better off with just using Algolia or Google as their main search engine and calling it a day.

[whatyesaid]

It's not some impossible problem with their resources. I think it's moreso the case that they prioritize newer (but less relevant) stuff you can still engage/social-mediaize with than the actual query even if you don't use the new filter.

[derefr]

Google even has a Custom Search API that allows a site's backend to treat Google Search as (essentially) its own search cluster, ala ElasticSearch.

Oddly, I've never heard of any actually using this API. Sites that integrate with Google only ever seem to do so by having their search box bounce you to a Google Search page.

[obventio56]

We do https://www.thecrimson.com/search/

[tsian2]

This lead me to believe that search must really hard to implement, but then a few days of getting into Sphinx convinced me otherwise. It's kind of like the big sites where you have to load the whole video before it'll start playing (no HTTP partials). They could do better, they just don't.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"It's kind of like the big sites where you have to load the whole video before it'll start playing (no HTTP partials)."

It sounds like this is decribing the so-called "moov atom" begin placed at the end of the file.^1

1. https://www.adobe.com/devnet/video/articles/mp4_movie_atom.h...

If not, can anyone provide some examples of these "big sites". Would like to test.

[medstrom]

Um. Example of sites where you have to load the whole video? I've never seen that in my life (I'm 29).

[na85]

I'm only 35 and I remember this. It was quite common before YouTube.

[mooreds]

As long as we're piling on about search, here are my two least favorite site searches:

   * meetup
   * AWS docs

Going straight to google for both of these nets better results 99% of the time.

It's probably a cycle at this point. More people use google (or other general search), so these sites optimize for them, rather than invest in the site search experience. General search engines are where the users are coming from.

[tshaddox]

Slack’s search is excellent for me. I use it probably at least once a week to find something important for work. Granted, I’m usually searching for things that I know will be an exact substring match of the message I’m looking for, but for that it works great for me.

[tornato7]

There's an independently made Reddit search that is leagues ahead of Reddit's own search:

https://redditsearch.io/

It's made by the guy who runs pushshift.io - he does an incredible public service by archiving terabytes of social media data into a fully searchable ElasticSearch cluster. Plug for his Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pushshift

[abhijat]

I think pushshift is what powers all the reddit undelete websites, because it doesn't register post or comment deletes. So for a true, unrecoverable delete you have to edit your post to empty body or something nonsensical, and then delete it.

[lacksconfidence]

> I don’t think they ever seriously invested in that, for whatever reason.

They have recently invested in it, switching to lucidworks[1] a few years ago. Sadly i don't think it changed anyones opinion of reddit search, but it might have saved them some infrastructure cost.

[1] https://lucidworks.com/customers/reddit/

[epa]

In the past it used to be the Google "discussions" search which would bring up the same content except across all the unique niche vbulletin forums that existed. Once bots started gaming those for SEO it was sadly removed from Google.

[wfawejoiweoif]

"site:reddit.com" is significantly more burdensome to type than "reddit", particularly on phone keyboards.

I use DDG, which simply doesn't handle just putting "reddit" at the end of things very well compared to google, and no mobile keyboard makes typing "site:reddit.com" easy given the punctuation and the auto-inserted spaces, so I typically just end up doing "reddit g!" to deal with it and just use google.

[layer8]

> "site:reddit.com" is significantly more burdensome to type than "reddit", particularly on phone keyboards.

On iOS I use Text Replacement to replace (e.g.) "sr" by "site:reddit.com".

[throaway46546]

Clever... I might have to steal this one.

[zikduruqe]

Or you can search your topic on Reddit using DDG by “topic !r”

[windowojji]

See the grandparent, which rightly asserts that reddit search is bad.

[slazaro]

or use !greddit, which searches on google with site:reddit.com added at the end.

[NaturalPhallacy]

Reddit died when they added post locking to moderator powers. And it only got worse (more authoritarian) from there.

A brief history of reddit:

>We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it.

>— Reddit FAQ 2005

>We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content

>— u/kn0thing 2008

>A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets.

>— u/kn0thing 2012

>We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.

>— u/reddit 2012

>We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse).

>— u/yishan 2012

>Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech

>— u/spez 2015

Utter bait & switch.

[kristiandupont]

I wonder what kind of community you were hoping to find in Reddit if you think lack of free speech is the problem.

To me, the decline is an obvious Eternal September-like effect. The more popular it became, the more it attracted trolls, people with political agendas and other destructive forces. I think that sort of thing is as inevitable as programming languages ending in feature-bloat. I expect the same will happen to HN, even though I think the mods have done an incredible job so far and even though the atmosphere has shifted a bit I still enjoy the discussions here.

[read_if_gay_]

> I wonder what kind of community you were hoping to find in Reddit if you think lack of free speech is the problem.

It doesn't have to be /b/ but in reddit's current form lack of free speech is a problem too. Power tripping mods are banning people for commenting at all in certain other subreddits. Politically inconvenient subs are getting qurantined if not outright banned. Similarly hateful but politically fashionable subreddits have been allowed to stay for years now. Politics permeates almost everything and if you don't share the ingroup opinion then it's not worth commenting. Granted a lot of this has to do with shitty mods and not reddit directly, but they aren't working to fix this either.

[greenwich26]

It's not just mods, reddit itself is at fault. They banned my IP. Now, every time I create a new account, it gets suspended within 24 hours, with a PM from the admins saying "ban evasion". Even if the new account doesn't post anything. This has lasted for around six months, apparently it is permanent.

Obviously I can get around it with a VPN, but it seems most VPN IPs are shadowbanned by default, so you have to wait for every comment to be approved by mods.

The "crime" which earned this sanctioning? Spam, advertising, racism? Nope, I never posted anything like that. It was a sensible and very highly upvoted comment last year in support of the lab leak theory. The initial suspension PM from the admins openly linked to that comment as the reason for the ban.

[newsclues]

Reddit geo blocks a cannabis discussion group for Canadians who don’t buy weed through the government distribution system, in an attempt to coerce them to buy the shitty legal weed.

That’s not free speech or effective censorship.

[Bekwnn]

Power tripping mods/mod dictatorship is definitely a problem on reddit, but really post locking doesn't happen much and isn't responsible for the worsening quality of discussion the top level comment mentions.

The increasingly mobile-browsing user base is by far the biggest reason. I'm not hating on mobile really, but it's just a fact that people on a phone aren't going to be writing comments the way people sitting down at home on a PC are, and they'll also tend towards more content that's easy to browse from their mobile app/on mobile data.

There was an entire thread at the top of r/unpopularopinion (which if you don't know the subreddit at all is really just full of popular opinions) the other day of mobile users bashing threads which link to YouTube and how they downvote/won't click on them.

They likely use chrome mobile which doesn't let you install adblocker.

Which in turn pushes reddit's freebooting-encouraging and self-advertising v.reddit video player.

The site's increasingly resembling some mix of twitter and tiktok.

[PaulRobinson]

Reddit was never going to live up to your expectations. I was an avid Redditor for many years, but left not because of containment of free speech, but because I didn't have the controls to shut some of the nonsense off.

Free speech is a critical component of ensuring democratic government is held to account, and the constitutional protections afforded some citizens of the World from censorship by governments in this regard is superb.

However, it does not mean your favourite website has to grant you or anyone else complete freedom to say or do whatever you want.

It also doesn't follow that free speech can on its own always create environments in which good conversations about complex and nuanced topics can occur. It can in fact mean platforms that would otherwise be powerful political spaces can be co-opted for niche and harmful agendas without consequence.

In simple terms: I don't mind a conspiracy theorist being able to turn up at the town hall and ask questions about why the mayor is keeping things secret. I do mind him insisting on pulling up a chair at my restaurant table and complaining about me trying to silence him when I ask him to go away so I can enjoy my meal.

I am reminded of https://xkcd.com/1357/

There need to be overtly political spaces online. Reddit probably shouldn't be one of them, nor should any other social media platform (including 4chan).

Political spaces online need to be "flat" but with open accountability (known email address albeit possibly forged, IP address albeit possibly VPN'ed, etc. all available in inspectable and open headers), and the ability to self-curate (e.g. like Usenet was with kill files, etc.).

They probably should not be spaces where content created by unknown anon/pseudonym actors is prioritised by algorithms based on engagement or through upvoting, all in order to sell adverts.

In short, social media like Reddit (or Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and even anon spaces like 4chan are utter garbage places for most people, as they will always "fall" to the people who want to co-opt and control them their own purposes.

Free speech online is only going to work if I also have the ability to not listen as a private individual, if I'm able to curate the experience for myself to some extent: content by/with specific people, groups or keywords (of my choosing, not of the platform's, my service provider's or my government's choosing), do not even appear in front of me.

When somebody else is doing all the curating - whether it be algorithms or people "voting up" - it can lead to a quite horrible place to find and engage others on the level you want, or perhaps even need.

[belorn]

> Free speech is a critical component of ensuring democratic government is held to account

Free speech is not a critical component of ensuring democratic government is held to account, but rather ensuring that power is held accountable when used against the powerless. Free speech is the answer to the age old question Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, or Who watches the watchers?

What the xkcd comic completely misses is the fact that government is not the only place where power resides today. The US free speech laws was created at a time when kings ruled absolute and governments had few restrictions, and so you needed fundamental laws written in a constitution in order to hold a newly founded government in check. Today, arguable Google and Facebook wield more power than most governments and so a law that is limited to government is no longer suited to keep the watchers in check.

In contrast, the EU has free speech rights laws written in more modern time and it does not limit itself to governments. This demonstrate quite nicely how the xkcd comic falls into a US-only context. If you are being boycotted, canceled and in general discriminated because of your speech, your free speech rights might be violated under EU law. A lot of it depend on the power dynamic between the watcher and the watched.

[mhuffman]

>Free speech is a critical component of ensuring democratic government is held to account, and the constitutional protections afforded some citizens of the World from censorship by governments in this regard is superb.

>However, it does not mean your favourite website has to grant you or anyone else complete freedom to say or do whatever you want.

You are doing a little bit of a bait and switch here, no?

"Saying" and "doing" (contrary to some more modern political agendas) are two very, very different things.

One (saying) is how ideas (good, bad, conspiratorial, etc) get exchanged.

The other (doing) can quickly run into other people's rights as a human.

It is obvious that physical actions need to be restricted to protect people.

But the idea that words or an ideas need to be restricted, when you can just not listen, or read them, or block them, etc is kind of nonsensical.

It is also implied in the second quoted line above that online speech is different than free speech in general. But in a practical sense because of modern usage and dependence, it is not.

Would you be ok with phone companies scanning your phone calls and blocking people that use "forbidden words or ideas" that they detect from using their phone service or any other phone service? Probably not because you have come to think of phones as a necessary way that people communicate today. You can't really have a job, or relationship, or other social integration without one. And that includes people that you do not agree with or that are legitimately crazy.

Social platforms, due to network effects, are also becoming that way. There is a modern problem of "free speech" that goes something like this:

- One person says something online that others do not like or is not popular at a specific time for a specific reason.

- Others put pressure on the platform to silence that person.

- "Go make your own platform if you want to say those things" ... HN says.

- Except, you can't really.

- Because people will then use social media to get your hosting site to drop you, get your payment processors and banks to drop you, etc. Go make your own hosting platform? Go make your own bank? Go make your own Internet?

It used to be a common refrain in the US, at least, that the proof of how strong our freedom was, was the fact that we let people openly talk about crazy conspiracies, literally preach hate, say disgusting things and our response was to counter them with simple talking points and then as a group shun their ideas or use our speech to make fun of them (or educate them and change their mind!) and things like that. The ACLU famously would protect the speech of Nazis and KKK members.

Now, apparently, we are far too fragile to hear crazy or hateful people say nonsense, even when we have the ability to silence them for ourselves by not clicking on their posts, or blocking them from our view.

No, now we need to make sure that not only do we not hear their speech, but that no one else accidentally hear any speech that we don't like as well.

I am not sure that we are better off this way. Unpalatable speech should be in the open where we can deal with it, not pushed to the edges where the "crazies" need to start innovating ways to communicate out of public view. That seems more dangerous some how.

[grawprog]

>Today, it's definitely harder to find good commentary and exchange. It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits

I've found a lot of hobby specific subreddits or ones on niche topics tend to avoid that. Also, less popular niches or hobbies i've noticed tend to have more people that are actually interested in having decent conversations about said topics or hobbies.

[mdoms]

I have never found a hobby subreddit worth following. If I look at my hobbies like /r/simracing /r/gardening /r/welding /r/motorcycles an overwhelming (in the literal sense) number of posts are just lazy image posts of (in order of listed subs) a sim racing rig, a pile of vegetables, a nice bead and a motorcycle. A picture of an ordinary part of a hobby is not conducive to meaningful conversations on the hobby.

Additionally I have found virtually all hobby subreddits are dominated by newbies to the hobby. This is especially pronounced on /r/motorcycles but appears to be general. Hobby subs are places where newbies hear newbies give advice and then pass that advice on to other newbies as if they were experienced.

I keep seeing people say that niche hobby subs still have worthwhile discussions but I have yet to actually see this.

[chapium]

> Additionally I have found virtually all hobby subreddits are dominated by newbies to the hobby.

Indeed, that is my experience as well. Its mostly show and tell from people new to the hobbies who are in the growing phase. There is also a lot of trend chasing to be "in". I've seen this in all sorts of hobby sub.

[grawprog]

Like i said, less popular topics and hobbies tend to have higher quality discussions. Gardening, welding and motorcycles are pretty popular topics.

I tried looking around for a decent motorcycle sub, you're right that one lacks some alternatives. For gardening, maybe try more specific subs like for your local area or a specific kind of gardening, flowers or vegetables or whatever, just something more specific and niche than just gardening.

For welding again, similar idea, look for more specific less general welding related topics that may have subs devoted to them.

It may not work for all topics but generally i've found, the more specific and niche you get, the. better chance you'll find something decent.

It's still just a chance, you may or may not be able to find what you're looking for, but this is generally what i've found.

[derefr]

If a subreddit is about a visual creative medium, then the image posts won't be lazy, as they will tend to be people's Original Content; and they will frequently spawn good discussions on how to achieve the effects shown. See:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/origami/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/Watercolor/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/MSpaintLikeBobRoss/

DIY hobbies also spawn good subreddits. See e.g.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/

And of course, there's the great and under-explored genre of "hobby X but for old people who aren't interested in the fads of hobby X" subreddits, e.g.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/

[tayo42]

There's never any discussion on watercolor? It's just a dumping ground for some average at best paintings

[derefr]

The few times I've looked at the comments sections it's been pretty good. But then, I don't visit the subreddit (or any subreddit); I just join it and then wait for things from it to show up on my front page. So I only see posts from it when those posts get wildly popular, or at least more popular than posts on such a sub usually get.

[tayo42]

Oh thats interesting, I guess yeah if something actually gets popular enough to bubble up it could be decent content.

I water color paint, in the end I was pretty disappointed with it. I was hoping their might be helpful community but it's non existent

[joshlemer]

Is there a better place you go for your hobbies them, or do you just google "<my hobby> forum" to find the best discussion boards for each topic individually?

[mdoms]

Forums are dead so for modern hobbies like simracing I haven't found anything. I work on old cars so there are still great forums for that stuff, and gardening I have given up on online discussion content - it's mostly crappy sponsored content trying to sell you bullshit. Gardening content is best consumed in books and YouTube and ignore online discussion.

[MattRix]

I just mentioned it in another comment but Discord servers are one of the newest types of communities popping up (especially for younger folks, but they can be for people of any age). For example, here’s one about gardening: https://discord.gg/D2kCbGY

[mdoms]

This is the worst possible outcome for hobby content. At least forum/reddit threads are searchable on the open web and likely to remain available at least for a while.

[MattRix]

Not OP, but one modern option is Discord servers. There are lots of them these days on all kinds of topics.

[ativzzz]

IMO live chat is awful for community building, especially one with deep knowledge bases such as gardening. It's great for troubleshooting problems and asking questions, but it does not do a good job of retaining information, and it excludes people from obtaining information who are not there right now when the conversation is happening

[dentemple]

It probably depends on the hobby.

/r/anime and /r/manga are pretty great when it comes to discussing active releases.

[cpach]

Indeed!

Example: The other day I had a question about Exchange Server client compatibility. I wanted a discussion about pros and cons, i.e. not a good fit for Stack Exchange since there’s no obviously correct answer. So I googled for ⸤exchange server subreddit⸣. And of course, there was an Exchange Server subreddit. Asked the question there and got lots of high-quality answers, zero bullshit. That’s Reddit at it’s best.

PS. In order to save one’s sanity, I encourage all redditors to use https://old.reddit.com/ exclusively.

[salmo]

I think this is the lifecycle of all 'nerd' sites. Slashdot went this way, Digg, Reddit, and we're seeing it here.

It starts with insightful stuff, knowledgeable people, real discourse. Reddit may have been special because at the time the community also prided itself on kindness.

But then 'nerds' go from people who have insight and opinions on esoteric topics, to people that like Marvel universe movies. Basically it gets popular and then it's no longer a niche group.

I think this happens with social media and "the kids" as well. As soon as your mom is on it, it's dead and you move on to the next one.

But we see it now. It's gotten to where most of the time I have to collapse the first few threads because they turn into fanboy arguments (pro/anti-apple, intel vs. AMD, copyleft vs liberal OSS licenses, etc, etc.).

[chakkepolja]

> But then 'nerds' go from people who have insight and opinions on esoteric topics, to people that like Marvel universe movies. Basically it gets popular and then it's no longer a niche group.

I hate how "nerd" came to mean edgy video gamer teens in popular culture.

[salmo]

Yeah. It was like once things that were 'nerdy' became cool (comic books, sci-fi, video games, etc.) all of a sudden everyone was a nerd. I guess that's good and bad.

It does feel weird though. I don't watch comic book movies (or many movies for that matter), because I'm usually teaching myself about something nerdy: history, electronics, math, systems stuff, a new programming language, etc. It kinda goes back to the original idea of someone oblivious to pop culture because they're buried in pursuits most people find boring.

I stared using 'geek' because I liked the sound of it better, but realized it's just a 'nerd' synonym to most.

I just wish we had a word for folks that get annoyed when people don't use Demorgan's to fix their conditional statements to be more readable, or like to read primary sources, or whatever.

[chakkepolja]

> I stared using 'geek' because I liked the sound of it better, but realized it's just a 'nerd' synonym to most.

It seems to refer to video gamer culture even more than "nerd".

[silicon2401]

The politicization and trend towards political correctness on reddit has been a huge part of its decline. It's rare now to find places where one can simply discuss topics with objectivity and curiosity instead of threads revolving around virtue signaling or demonization of the 'other side'

[antris]

Sure, nobody likes political correctness but without any controls on content on a public forum as a part of a ToS, nazis and other people who are desperate to express their hate, and even break the law and recruit others will eventually find it and spam the hell out of it. 4chan is a perfect example of what happens to an actually occasionally funny place that allows any kind of discussion "just for lulz". It's been a cesspool and barely anyone remembers how it was before the nazis came in. It's just how it works when the forum is public and there's no moderation. If you want good discussion without limits, I suggest joining smaller communities that are harder to flood in this way, or talk to people you know in real life.

[armchairhacker]

I completely agree with you, we need content moderation and some political beliefs are just toxic.

But Reddit just takes it to the absurd:

- Automods which remove posts which simply contain certain words (e.g. "coronavirus", apparently because too many covid deniers). I get trying to restrict covid misinformation, but I'm not even exaggerating, they remove anything discussing covid even if it's supporting.

- Mods removing some posts seemingly at random (seem using sites like reveddit.com). These posts really don't involve anything controversial at all and I can't understand why they were removed.

- Automods which ban you simply for posting in certain subreddits. And not radical ones, ones like r/PoliticalCompassMemes or r/watchredditdie. Btw, check out r/watchredditdie yourself to see more issues

Another issue is that Redditors in top subreddits tend to add politics to pretty much anything. Like, there is a highly upvoted post in r/nextfuckinglevel (a subreddit designed for e.g. people running ultra-marathons or doing crazy gymnastics or magic tricks) that is literally just a guy in his 40s ranting about how the U.S. government is fucked. And yeah, I agree the US government is pretty bad, but I don't need to hear about it in every single subreddit or r/AskReddit thread.

[atweiden]

Social bookmarking site moderation is in need of an overhaul. Moderators have turned into gatekeepers who can’t be unseated.

I’m dreaming of an “old Reddit”/HN-esque discussion board where moderation policies are opt-in. E.g. submit a thread to /r/bayarea, users compete to moderate e.g. ban/censor content. Users “follow” moderators to opt-in to their moderation policies. Basically upvoting/downvoting but for moderation itself.

Even better if a user’s moderation policies could be forked and lightly edited. I even think there’s room for a learning curve here, given how thoroughly social bookmarking sites have trounced traditional media.

[handoflixue]

I think the big problem with this is that very few people actually want to be moderators, and the people who do want the position are often least suited for it.

Smaller communities can rely on simple upvote/downvote, possibly with some intelligent logic to notice who you tend to agree with - I think Slashdot was primarily this?

But past a certain scale, just dealing with spam is a huge deal. Plus you need 24/7 coverage, and you want mods to be reasonably responsive. Assuming each person can put in 42 hours/week of moderation that still means you need four moderators.

And of course you need a default for people who have just arrived at the site, so that they're not buried in spam or attacked by trolls on their first post.

[atweiden]

Not to belittle the problem of spam, but spam isn’t really what people are increasingly taking issue with. “Political” moderation or just plain obstinance are the biggest shortcomings of present day moderation policies. It leads to de facto namesquatting of popular topics the moderators of which have unfettered power to control the narrative surrounding it.

I bet fame and karma points could counteract the disincentives to moderate. What if opting in to a particular moderator translated into 1 karma point per week for that moderator? Moderators of popular topics (e.g. topics with 100k+ subscriber counts) would quickly become some of the most highly upvoted users on the site.

And if commenters could “layer” opt-in moderation policies one on top of the other, moderators could specialize then. Much of the specialization could be done by bots. Anti-“flagrant spam” policies would be easy to bot and easy to combine. The moderation policies left to be done by hand would largely amount to narrative control.

> And of course you need a default for people who have just arrived at the site, so that they're not buried in spam or attacked by trolls on their first post.

That choice could be left up to GUI frontend maintainers, assuming the site itself were open source.

Really I just think social bookmarking has the clearest signal for human communications in general, by far — by leaps and bounds in fact. It’s a public service for such a thing to exist in modern pop culture.

[chakkepolja]

Ironnically i find r/PoliticalCompassMemes to be most rational sub among those discussing politics. There are some edgy teenagers but you will know who is that.

[NaturalPhallacy]

I think the fact that you're forced to understand that politics isn't just two sides forces everyone to talk about it in ways that aren't so polarizing because you can't just presume the entire basket of stereotypical behaviors that people who believe in the false dichotomy delude themselves with so they can strawman and ad hominem all over the place in lieu of thinking.

It's a meme sub on the surface, but the discussion there is higher quality than any other political sub.

It's amazing what even a tiny dose of nuance can do for the discussion.

[1337biz]

Reddit has become a long-form of Twitter. An endless circle of pandering to the same claqueurs. It is so tedious.

My time spent on Reddit has dropped massively over the last months. And I moved back to 4chan. It is so refreshing to see raw and uncensored communication. Even if 4chan often borders on insanity, it feels so much more honest and real than the cleansed cliques of sameness.

[AussieWog93]

>barely anyone remembers how it was before the nazis came in.

I remember it. A non-negligible part of the traffic was pedophiles posting LazyTown content, and users of /v/ would keep folders full of transsexual porn on their desktop just to derail threads they didn't like.

[daptaq]

Sounds to me like internet fora inevitably fail, either suffering under over- or under-regulation. People usually act as though one of the two solutions could fix the problem, but having seen both, I cannot prefer either. The medium is broken.

[Mountain_Skies]

The problem with your desire to squelch nazis at all costs is that the tools for squelching nazis quickly get abused by labeling everything those possessing the tools don't like to be nazi content. Even if that weren't the case, you're infantilizing everyone else in the world, assuming that they're morons who will instantly start to genocide Jewish people because they saw some nazi babbling on about whatever it is that nazis babble on about. You're giving tremendous power to nazis and being incredibly insulting to pretty much everybody else.

[antris]

You could replace nazis with any group of people with a specific message that they want to spam all day, every day and it would still be a horrible decision to let them roam free in every public forum. Whichever the group is, not ALL forums on the internet should be about the grievances of that one group. Though, it just happens that nazis are the ones who seem to be the quickest and most common group to take over forums. This is because they need an audience for their crap, and on every forum either the nazis get kicked out or their audience leaves. I never mentioned any real world consequences (although they definitely exist too), but even if you purely talk about discussion quality and ability for people of different kinds to participate, you usually have to be kicking some nazis out eventually, because they tend to become as overbearing of a voice as the moderation lets them.

[hnnnnnnng]

Lmao

[Weebs]

> There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration

I've been longing for this lately. Even the more interest specific subreddits have gotten noticeably worse and borderline toxic. It feels like it's shifted from a culture of sharing and discussing niche topics or current events with some goofy humor to a slightly more dignified YouTube comment section

[godelski]

I think a big issue is inflation. As we have more users a niche forum turns into a more general forum. There's some good and bad to this. This has even happened on HN. But there's another problem. If a forum is too small then it doesn't serve its purpose of connecting the right people. I wonder if anyone knows the optimal size/range, or if such a metric exists (under certain criteria of course).

[caddemon]

This is what makes subreddits such a good idea IMO. Theoretically Reddit can be a massive community, while each subreddit can still remain niche. Then people can be connected to others across a number of topics without "polluting" spaces they are not interested in.

Of course if you are interested in discussing a broad or popular topic like politics or the NBA, you will probably have to actually just find a smaller group to get higher quality discussion. There's not really a way around the inflation issue in those subreddits, as far as I can tell.

The other problem is that Reddit seems to increasingly emphasize the generic popular subreddits in its UI and how the site is marketed/presented. There are still good, active subreddits for certain hobbies and communities, but I do worry that the more Reddit is viewed as just another large social media site, the fewer such subreddits there will be.

[godelski]

I think that the problem is that there's a fractal nature to this though. It then makes discoverability a much more complex problem as inflation continues.

[ItsMonkk]

The core problem with Reddit is that it calls them communities, but for 99% of the subreddits the name of the subreddit is based on the content, not the people. This leads Reddit into these fractal content relationships where you can only really discuss the things that have the goldilocks level of popularity. Looking to get some new headphones and aren't an audiophile? Sorry, headphones are to popular and the niche subreddit is to specific to you.

Hacker News on the other hand is based on Hackers, it's about the people. The topics are broad. When a new thing comes into existence that hackers are interested in, we don't have to move to a new place where maybe most of us don't realize it exists, we discuss it here and introduce it to others here. That's the correct view.

But the cause of the problem that reddit faces is population size. We want a small town community, not a community the size of New York City, where people are aggressive because they know they won't see that random person again. It's about seeing the same name, and treat those names with dignity. It's about caring about the people in the community.

So Hacker News in time will either deal with this problem or run into the same issue that large subreddits face. Once new users start learning behavior from other new users, there's no coming back from that. Eternal September is coming. I hope a resolution is discovered, because I really like it here.

[newman8r]

Dunbar's Number [1] puts a number of 150 as an upper limit for effective groups where everyone knows eachother - but these would presumably be active users, and it's not necessarily directly applicable to internet forums (but from my experience with irc and other communities, it does make some sense). I've been trying to start groups like this myself, but it isn't easy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

[godelski]

Yeah I think this isn't right for these types of communities because you don't actually want to know everyone. So that seems low. I'm wondering if we can find a decent upper bound.

[newman8r]

That's a fair point. I also feel like the numbers of subscribers to a subreddit-style community is deceiving - the real number to be looking at is the number of people participating in the discussion, and the number of regulars. I'd be interested in seeing these stats for individual subreddits.

[tizzy]

> nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards

This is so true and I’m glad I’m not the only one who does this. I also do this with “forum” at the end of each search nowadays. There’s something very truthful about these opinions and discussions that I find hard to describe. I think I trust these opinions more because they tend to speak from their own experience which is not always one of expertise, but rather of someone like me.

When deciding on getting x vs y, a Reddit post from 5 years ago with even just 10 upvotes suggesting x gives me way more confidence than the majority of reviews.

[tyrust]

>It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits (on both sides) to try to influence the general groupthink narrative/consensus. It's so disgustingly obvious but doesn't seem to be an issue for the team.

I've used reddit for 10 years. I heard this claim before and disagree (still [0]). I subscribe to a couple dozen subreddits, some of which are fairly large (/r/cooking, /r/games, /r/programming), and see pretty much nothing off-topic or political (let alone astroturfing). The most I've seen is a sticky or a blackout for a non-related issue. Those are rare enough that I don't think an average user is meaningfully impacted by it, whether or not you agree with the issue being discussed.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27120055

[workethics]

> I've used reddit for 10 years.

I believe that's why you think that. I feel that reddit started to go downhill after 2011, which was 10 years ago. So if that's when you joined you wouldn't have experienced what it was like before to feel that way.

[tyrust]

I mean, the site hasn't been unchanged over that history. I've left many subreddits as they became memed-out messes.

Overall, I find that there are plenty of subreddits with focused discussion and decent moderation.

I'd be interested in what you refer to as the entirety of the site going "downhill". You haven't really given me much to reply to in this comment.

[Jorengarenar]

> I subscribe to a couple dozen subreddits, some of which are fairly large (/r/cooking, /r/games, /r/programming), and see pretty much nothing off-topic or political

Well, that's because those have specific topic. It's hard to make something political about cooking. Bit easier in case of gaming (as games being cultural work can be political commentary), I've seen some political discourses on r/programming as well.

But on r/all you will find post from more political subreddits (r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/BlackPeopleTwitter, r/TwoXChromosomes, r/MurderedByWords, r/PoliticalCompassMemes etc.) regularly. For better of worse the posts consist mostly of content from left-leaning side of political spectrum, although it creates and echo chamber and you will be highly criticized if you try to raise any concerns.

I consider myself to be more on the progressive side, but sometimes when I see some post I have thoughts "wait, this one actually starts to sound like communism again".

[tyrust]

>/r/all

I have no reason to look at /r/all and neither do you if you don't like it. Just subscribe to subreddits you want to see.

The default Reddit experience isn't my cup of tea, either. But if you spend some time looking for communities that you're interested in, you end up with a pretty good thing.

[Jorengarenar]

Indeed, Reddit is great for niche/specific interests.

But it's also true that some subreddits are susceptible to deterioration by inflation. Take r/MurderedByWords for example - I used to like to browse this one in the past, but when posts being tender tantrum (like [1]) can gain 46k upvotes, it sign something has gone wrong. Same with r/technicallythetruth and several others.

Oh, do you perhaps know about the schism of r/animemes? It was a delightful spectacle of miscommunication, overreaction, misunderstandings, positive discrimination and mutual false accusations. That was when I moved playlist History of memes from fun to education directory in my RSS reader.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MurderedByWords/comments/ne6t0h/sta...

[squeaky-clean]

Try spending just 10 minutes browsing r/all

[tyrust]

I have no reason to do that and it's not a required part using Reddit.

[dankwizard]

games leans so far left it's a flat line.

[tyrust]

If the line is flat then how do you know which way it's facing?

Snark aside, I haven't noticed it. Examples would be interesting.

[door101]

> There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration.

People say this, but this is also when Reddit was the largest place for underage "softcore" pornography on the internet. It was one of the first things you saw when you google searched "reddit"

[kart23]

reddit is still like half porn. It was so bad they stopped showing NSFW content on r/all, before the change if you sorted by new, literally half the posts were marked NSFW.

https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_...

[jcims]

Generally avoiding subreddits with more than 100k members is the way to find decent content.

For really slow subreddits, just tack /comments on to the subreddit URL to get a listing of most recent comments instead of posts.

[MeinBlutIstBlau]

I'm in the same thought process of reddit. No forum has ever been easier to read through and parse than a reddit thread. I'm sorry but the forum pages of old just don't cut it anymore. They were acceptable for their time, but now it is so much harder to follow a thread compared to things like HN or Reddit.

Also with the way reddit used to be I wholly agree. There used to be good articles on there, interesting posts, memes kept to a minimum. Heck I remember when something got 1000-2000 upvotes it was a big deal for the day. I mean it just didn't feel as gamified as it does now. Plus there was some absurd and obscure stuff on there that I kinda wish this overly politicalization didn't remove because it went against one worldview. And no I'm talking about the_donald. Just any and everything, modifying policies to remove subreddits that some outrage mob hated on.

But unfortunately reddit just doesn't work well for those more obscure sub groups. I'm look at the Csharp subreddit. Basically a graveyard and you might get one or two responses to a post. Reddit just doesn't have the gravity for the particular niches with healthy activity to make it worthwhile searching there.

[thisissidhant]

I agree. Google Search is much much better. I personally built the list using this way along with other list already created.

My idea is to create a catalogue of a lot of subreddits for people to navigate well

[WORMS_EAT_WORMS]

I love how you laid this out. It's very nicely done.

I think if there was also a way to show and filter by comment activity/frequency/subscribers too (or some other creative metric) beyond the subreddit title it would go miles.

[thisissidhant]

This is a really good idea. I will collect more data points definitely !

[anmb]

I made a Chrome extension a few weekends ago for this purpose:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sitesearchreddit/p...

It appends "site:reddit.com" to the entered query in a new tab. Purely an invention of laziness -- but it's been a great QoL upgrade for myself and a handful of friends.

[permo-w]

Political astroturfing is absolutely nothing compared to the corporate astroturfing going on on there.

I would go as far as to say that there is relatively no political astroturfing going on in comparison to corporate astroturfing

the rise of searching “[product] reddit” in google to find reliable reviews, has hugely incentivised companies to hijack threads and control the narrative, because there’s a direct profit motive

It’s at its absolute worst for VPN companies, which I am hugely suspicious of anyway. Go to r/vpn or a related subreddit and ask for a good VPN to use, and see what replies you get

[philwelch]

> Today, it's definitely harder to find good commentary and exchange. It's also super heavily astroturfed by political groups in all the subreddits (on both sides) to try to influence the general groupthink narrative/consensus. It's so disgustingly obvious but doesn't seem to be an issue for the team.

The only real solution for this is the same as any other social media, or even real life: accept that people live in non-overlapping bubbles and hang out in the bubbles you’re comfortable with or curious about.

[vmception]

Just unfollow all the default subreddits and follow ones tailored to you

Also its all sides astroturfing because there are more than two

[baxuz]

Reddit has become too popular. Web dev subreddits have become infested with self promoting garbage like "I made a blog post about Redux" and "how do I split a string in React".

[sixo]

Less astroturfing than being full of children.

[fnord77]

not to mention marketing all over subreddits and moderators with agendas. it's just so corrupt and greasy