I really don’t miss Reddit, I’ve deleted the accounts I had there and am much better off for it. I’m not sure when the real tipping point was but that platform has really lost its way.
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Reddit is very enthusiastic about handing out site wide bans these days. If you say the wrong thing on the wrong topic you can be permanent banned, whereas before you would just be downvoted or argued with.
Same for subreddits being banned. But only when it comes to speech it seems, not picture or video. So, for example, we have the odd case of "truelesbians" subreddit being banned for being trans-exclusive, but "lesbians" subreddit which is also trans-exclusive, but dedicated to pornographic imagery, is allowed to stay.
A better example would be what happened with /r/ukpolitics and Aimee Challenor I think, it was a truly shameless display of how incompetent Reddit has become in recent years. The whole episode was an omnishambles, and a perfect microcosm of everything that's wrong with Reddit at the moment. It featured awful hiring practices, awful moderation practices, awful crisis management, awful PR management, and highlighted the piss-poor relationship that paid Reddit staff have with both the platforms's users and the volunteer moderators running what are in many cases enormous online communities in their own right.
Regardless of where they're at as a company, as a platform from the user's perspective Reddit been on a downhill trajectory for years. They manage to cock up moderation time after time, and every single UI change they make somehow manages to make the site even less usable. They'll double down on their crappy decisions in an enormously user-hostile way until literally the point users are in open revolt against the platform's staff which sometimes triggers a U-turn with all the grace and agility of an oil tanker.
This bad relationship between owners, moderators, and users often seems to kill smaller platforms (anyone remember Yik Yak?) but Reddit has so much inertia it's been taking literal years for this disease to become terminal. It will happen one way or another though, one day they'll make a decision too user-hostile and Reddit will have its very own "Digg V4" moment.
> A better example would be what happened with /r/ukpolitics and Aimee Challenor I think,
Would you mind expanding on this? I don't follow Reddit dramas any more.
> It will happen one way or another though, one day they'll make a decision too user-hostile and Reddit will have its very own "Digg V4" moment.
I highly doubt that. Reddit has far too much non-techie people, which tend to know less alternatives and don't punish bad design as directly as "we" would. More likely it will be a slow fade to unimportance, like MySpace or Facebook (the platform, not the company).
>Would you mind expanding on this? I don't follow Reddit dramas any more.
No worries! Aimee Challenor is a very minor political figure in the UK who's mostly known for the fact she hired her father to act as her election agent after he was charged with (and was later convicted of) truly horrendous crimes against a ten year old child. Later on she left politics entirely and began working for the Reddit Public Access Network, after which she was eventually hired as a site-wide administrator.
On /r/ukpolitics (a fairly large subreddit) a moderator posted an article from the Spectator that mentioned her indirectly, I believe simply naming her as a candidate at the time and not mentioning her background at all. This moderator was banned without warning from Reddit and it became known that Reddit had been systematically censoring any mention of Challenor whatsoever and worse, banning the commenter. It was claimed by Reddit this was through an automated system but it's been alleged that Challenor herself was carrying out the censorship personally*. /r/ukpolitics temporarily closed itself in protest of this behaviour as they (correctly, in my opinion) felt that it was absurd to ban legitimate discussion of a British political figure on a forum dedicated to British politics simply because they're also a Reddit administrator and at any rate they wanted to support their banned fellow moderator.
This started a chain reaction across the site in protest of Reddit's administrator team in which many subreddits with millions of subscribers set themselves to private in solidarity with /r/ukpolitics. I don't have any figures to hand but participation was very wide and I can't imagine it did that day's advertising revenue any favours at all! Eventually the administrators relented after intense criticism from almost all angles, fired Challenor and re-instated the banned /r/ukpolitics mod. The moderators of /r/ukpolitics handled the situation excellently in my opinion, their competence was in stark contrast to the incompetence of the administrators.
It's worth pointing out that it was the censorship on Reddit's part and Challenor's questionable conduct as a political figure that triggered such a strong reaction, not Challenor's political stances. From what I understand her political activism was mostly centred around environmentalism and LGBT rights, both very laudable causes in my opinion! I think the issue everyone had was that while harassment is never okay (and I don't think it's controversial that people often do suffer atrocious harassment on platforms like Reddit, especially transgender people) the reaction to it was extremely disproportionate and further complicated by the fact Challenor is a public figure - even if a very minor one. There were also apparently a lot of complaints around the issue of safeguarding minors on Reddit which followed on from their obviously inept hiring practices, although I don't know enough to comment further on that.
>More likely it will be a slow fade to unimportance, like MySpace or Facebook (the platform, not the company).
This could be a more likely outcome than what I suggested, although given how volatile politics on social media are these days I could definitely see Reddit tearing itself apart over moderation drama. Having said that this isn't always terminal, a good case study would be 4chan which has had several incidences over the years of parts of its userbase starting their own platforms with the same format.
*I'm still not sure about this, as a web developer I can't imagine Reddit with their enormous volume of traffic would seriously follow every outgoing link and scrape the page for mentions of Challenor. I think it could be done, but I don't think it could be done with good value for money! I'd appreciate someone with more experience than me weighing in on this.
You seriously going to gloss over the fact that Aimee Challenor is transgender? Like that has no relevance to their "questionable conduct"? Is this just the massive chilling effect of cancel culture?
You are right, being a moderator is a lot of pain once the subs grow beyond a certain point. Furthermore as a moderator you are almost forced into using new reddit as well as the tools are not all there in old. Painful experience.
You're aware there is a difference between discrimination and categorization, right?
How does it apply in this case?
The "truelesbians" subreddit wanted a place where biological females could discuss lesbian issues with biological females. This was not allowed by Reddit.
The "lesbians" subreddit is a place where exclusively biological females are portrayed in sexually stimulating activity with each other (mostly for male subscribers to ejaculate to). This is allowed by Reddit.
Both of these involve discrimination against so-called 'male lesbians'. The difference seems to be that the male gaze is of more importance to Reddit than female speech.
Please. /r/truelesbians was banned for being transphobic.
Meanwhile, /r/actuallesbians continues unhindered, cause it's not transphobic.
> 'male lesbians'.
Nice dog whistle.
Homosexuality is, by its very definition, same-sex attraction, not same-gender attraction.
Aside from Reddit's double standard when it comes to subreddit bans, the fact that some people wanting to discuss their attraction to a particular sex is considered 'transphobic', is the wider problem here. It's not right that actual lesbians are getting harangued and then banned for not being interested in 'girldick' or whatever nonsense.
> Nice dog whistle.
Not really, just biological reality. People can't actually change their sex (only their gender expression), so 'male lesbian' is a statement of self-contradiction.
How many throways do you get through each day? Can you go attempt to fan the flames of culture war somewhere else?
Will do, bye.
Male lesbian? I unfortunately understand what you’re saying. It’s also very obvious that using such a silly phrase is intentional. The bias and possible bigotry is showing.
You've been rightfully needled for trying to start a culture flame war, but to heap on here, I want to specifically call out your virtue signaling claim that reddit cares more about the male gaze than female speech (speech you yourself care so much about that you misgender intentionally):
Reddit removed all pornographic subreddits from /r/all. If you go to /r/all now, all porn subreddits are gone. You can still see the very rare NSFW post from a non-NSFW community, but for all intents and purposes all pornography has been removed from all public channels.
So much for reddits dedication to the male gaze!
There's a significant difference between removing a subreddits from /r/all and banning it from the site. Besides, you can go to /r/randomnsfw and pretty much only see pornographic subreddits. Or search for them on the subreddits search. They've not gone anywhere, and are still well catered to by the administration.
I don't understand the distinction or how it applies to the example above, can you please explain it to me.
The distinction is that, for example, a 'world foods' (aka 'ethnic'!) aisle in a supermarket categorises stuff efficiently that the local ethnic minority group (predominantly) may be interested in, while more widely consumed (or consumed by local ethnic majority group) foods are distributed elsewhere categorised more according to food type; compared to saying 'you are {local ethnic minority}ian so you are not allowed to purchase {local ethnic majority} foods', which would be discrimination.
Whether it applies to the example above though is I think more debatable.
With respect to how it applies to the above:
r/lesbians is a porn subreddit with content restricted to female same sex porn content. This is just categorisation.
r/truelesbians was supposed to a subreddit for lesbians to aggregate and discuss stuff. What ended up happening was while it was still a lesbian focused subreddit, it became a breeding ground for anti-trans/TERF content/discussions/rhetoric and the moderation of the sub enforced those beliefs. This is what makes r/truelesbians discriminatory instead of just being categorisation. It takes a step from "don't post content that doesn't belong here" to "don't post content that doesn't belong here AND don't post at all here if you match some arbitrary biological definition we don't like or if you support those people".
You also have r/actuallesbians which branched off from r/truelesbians when they got TERFy. r/actuallesbians is inclusive of all people who identify as female but have the same original focus of providing a platform to discuss and aggregate female same sex/lesbian content/discussions. This once again is categorisation and not discrimination because anyone can post there as long as the posts are on topic. Additionally the content of the sub isn't discriminatory in this case because it's focused on a topic (about same sex female relationships) rather than focused against another (against trans individuals).
So r/lesbians and r/actuallesbians both are categorical while r/truelesbians was discriminatory on top of being categorical because of the exclusionary nature of the subreddit.
The niche subreddits are still valuable to me, particularly stuff like r/emacs and r/AskHistorians
Yeah, for all its faults, I'm going to be really sad when "old reddit" dies.
The main pages are garbage, but I'm in some truly great niche communities that are going to be hard to replace. And even if I do, they'll be spread over a dozen websites instead of organized in a single place.
I suppose cobbling together a replacement on discord is the future, which I've really tried to avoid.
Agreed. What Reddit provides is akin to what Medium tried to do for journalism/blogging and what PHPBB used to do for online forums: create a standardized, administratively curated platform for community engagement. The value it provides is the uniformity, not much more, and users will absolutely flee if they're treated too badly for too long.
Just the other day I was having a nice little discussion with a stranger about drive exhaust in The Expanse universe. And it turns out that my initial position was likely very wrong. While there might be other SF boards where this kind of discussion is possible, it is much more convenient for me to join a few smaller communities of interest on reddit instead. I also like hearing about the latest developments on the RISC-V processor architecture. There actually is some discussion of this here on HN, but there's more over on /r/riscv.
One thing that amazes with Reddit is how some subreddits are pure gold and others are basically crap.
Sorry if this sounds obvious, but it’s the people within the subs that make it or break it.
Some subs just don’t have those active people that make it gold.
Bad moderation can also drive away good people and good discussion.
I still tend to keep up with most Android news on /r/android but the mods there went super full crackdown on moderation the past several years, constantly removing threads for minor infractions of the rules, and breaking up good discussion in the comments section of a post because the OP was breaking some rule or another.
This is why I love Reddit. The huge trash subs that drive most of the ad delivery are what fund the smaller subs that are extremely valuable
>and r/AskHistorians
You mean [deleted]
/r/AskHistorians like /r/AskScience are and retain a high quality due to the moderation efforts by the volunteer moderators. Deleting unsourced claims and jokes is for me a good thing.
I've often wondered if AskHistorians wouldn't be better off as their own website?
Most subreddits would be better as things like HN in my opinion, a lot of the negative things to do with Reddit are down the way the platform is run rather than the format itself. A decentralised network where each subreddit is hosted independently and controlled wholly by its volunteer moderators rather than the (grossly incompetent in my opinion) side-wide administrators would solve many of the issues the Reddit format faces in my opinion.
But then you lose the network effect. reddit is so valuable because it brings together so many people from so many walks of life that would have never interacted otherwise.
Yes, I feel they've done that bit, AskHistorians is a brand in it's own right now. Seems like contributors could form a coop, have a subscription model, use it to fund research, etc..
Some youtuber explained the breakdown of Reddit in parts with yahoo banning nsfw from Tumblr and their community suddenly looking for new safe places (hence the big banning on Reddit began at the same time)
I really don't think it's the communities on Reddit that are the problem. I mean, yes, some communities there are problematic, but way more are great.
The problem is the site owners. They are growing increasingly user hostile.
IMO Reddit got a lot more hostile in the small communities I were part of when the PC stuff started and many negative subs got banned without warning. Could be selection bias.
But agreed the websites updates are horrible in every single way. I can't think of one new feature that did not make things worse, the only way I can use Reddit is adding the old. Subdomain manually every time
You can use one of these addons below to always redirect to the old subdomain.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
Every default sub is toxic these days. Toxic in exactly the way tumblr was. Both due to moderators and the people who spend the most time there. I would venture to say any sub with >100k users is also pretty toxic.
I do miss the reddit I joined over 10 years ago.
Shameless self promotion but I'm working on an extension to help filter out crud. I'm only in day 2 of dev work but I plan to have controls to select which categories you want removed so you never have to see political, angry, or controversial content on reddit (or any other major social media or news site):
I still use multi-reddits but the front page is a shit show of violence and outrage, things like /r/publicfreakout etc and other non-wholesome content, which are generally politically divisive.
The multi reddit allows me to browse only subreddits I like, and it's much much better this way. Digg did not have that.
Reddit is still a better forum platform than Facebook Groups.
You have actual moderation tools, you can pin posts etc. People even visit the front page of the sub every now and then.
Actual forums would be the best solution, but alas...
If only the same freedom existed across all platforms. Like say HN. I do find it frustrating that the same freedom isn't accorded to you here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
CTRL+F "delete"
I already know - it's not quite a thing. It would be possible to delete the account and not the content. Frankly, who cares if it guts a thread. Individuals whose opinions change over time, or desire said privacy should have the opportunity to fully eliminate their presence.
We can agree to disagree on that.
Individual opinions may change over time, but if expressed publicly in a community settings, they become a part of history of that community and its discussions. I think disassociating usernames from comments without purging the comments hits the right balance. Different people and communities may choose otherwise.
On that note, I wish websites, in particular and especially HN, were a bit more up-front about this. Here, the information about moderators' approach to account deletion is somewhat buried - it's at the bottom of FAQ, and important clarifications are another link away. In general, I wish all community-hosting websites put information like this front-and-center during registration, not buried in an inscrutable ToS, so that users could make an informed choice before joining (or at least as much of an informed choice as you can make, if the choice will be binding a decade later).
I care if it guts a thread. Maybe add the ability to disconnect an account from a specific comment.
Deleting them on HN does not delete them from the internet. Sites like Ceddit already save/archive deleted comments from Reddit (and make some old threads readable, especially when the poster of the solution deleted his account for unrelated reasons). If HN would bring on this policy, we would get a "CN" within a day; probably even something more complete than ceddit due to the smaller scale. So, in the end, it would only make HN a worse place.