The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

As someone who was involved with many internet communities long before reddit, it sounds like the author is just experiencing the eternal September[0].<p>Pretty much since the day I found out about reddit in... 2008-ish?, everyone in the online communities I knew thought it was filled with awful pseudointellectual teenagers and college students, that the upvote&#x2F;downvote system was horrible and encouraged people to post low-effort content, the moderators were overzealous and clueless, and in general there was no sense of community due to the size of the site + lack of individual identifiers beyond usernames, like avatars and signatures from a typical internet forum of the day. Basically, reddit is just as bad today as it was a decade ago.<p>But I&#x27;m sure for people who had their first internet-social experiences on reddit, they remember it a lot more fondly.<p>I will concede that objectively speaking, &quot;new Reddit&quot; is an abject failure (and the fact that old.reddit.com continues to exist is a testament to the such) and that it&#x27;s <i>much</i> more heavily astroturfed by major corporations now.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eternal_September" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eternal_September</a>

I have a different take: The main problem with reddit is in how badly it&#x27;s bungled its several different redesigns over the last few years, and how it&#x27;s slowly ruined its users&#x27; experience in misguided attempts to drive mobile traffic to its app.<p>Right now, here&#x27;s the process for browsing a subreddit on mobile without the (ads and tracking loaded) reddit app:<p>1. Navigate to subreddit. Find out which of two (non-NSFW) or three (NSFW) &quot;experiences&quot; reddit decides to give me on mobile.<p>2. Depending on experience, jump through hoops including random &quot;get the app!&quot; prompts, failures to load content, failures to load nested comments, and outright refusal to display all the content in a thread unless I install the app.<p>3. If on an NSFW subreddit, and on about 50% of &quot;unapproved&quot; non-NSFW subreddits: Be blocked from viewing any additional content by an unremovable prompt. (Often, content loads in <i>before</i> the prompt, so you enjoy about 30 seconds of looking at your content before it&#x27;s blocked.)<p>4. Give up, and go to old.reddit.com, which is ugly and not designed for mobile, but at least works okay.<p>Desktop isn&#x27;t much better, but I have long had browser extensions installed that redirect everything to old.reddit.com on most of my browsers, so it becomes less of an issue.<p>If reddit took away my ability to use old.reddit.com, I&#x27;d probably stop browsing the site within weeks.

People complaining about Reddit remind me of that quote from Bjarne Stroustrup about computer languages: “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” A lot of people use Reddit. I&#x27;ve been on since nearly the beginning and seen it go through various phases. They started getting serious about moderation after Gamergate and they&#x27;re still serious about it since they want to attract advertisers. The edgier content has gone to 4chan &#x2F;pol&#x2F; but even that site has moderators called janitors. I really don&#x27;t know where the extreme stuff has gone and I really don&#x27;t care because I&#x27;m glad I don&#x27;t see it anymore.

I hate how many online communities have centralized themselves around reddit and discord. I&#x27;m involved a lot of communities and fandoms where everybody congregates on those two platforms, and those two platforms alone. Things were a lot better in the 00s when these sorts of communities existed primarily on webforums.<p>That said, I&#x27;m not sure how many of the problems are problems with reddit itself vs how many of the problems would still exist on other platforms even if reddit didn&#x27;t. Forum moderators have always had a reputation for being napoleonic idiots who abuse their power for extremely petty purposes. The problem of corporations and wealthy celebrities buying out moderators and admins to push their narratives and silence criticisms of their products[1] could easily have happened on webforums.<p>There&#x27;s an unfortunate drive towards centralization in online communities these days that we&#x27;d all be better without. I personally think fediverse is the best solution to this as it centralizes communities without centralizing the actual platform, but I&#x27;m not so confident it will succeed when it&#x27;s up against well-funded and well-established platforms like facebook, reddit, etc.<p>[1] i don&#x27;t have any real proof there&#x27;s a monetary interest involved, but I&#x27;m perma-banned from &#x2F;r&#x2F;startrek for saying that the creators behind &quot;Star Trek: Picard&quot; and &quot;Star Trek Discovery&quot; probably aren&#x27;t even fans of Star Trek based on the shows&#x27; many discontinuities with their predecessors, and it makes me wonder if the mods are on paramount&#x27;s payroll or something. This should not be a controversial statement after how terrible the most recent season of Picard was.

I cannot buy into a wholesale generalization that mods are power tripping people who deserve our contempt because they are lonely.<p>There’s all kinds of motivations for being a mod. I rarely find a sub where mods aren’t dealing with far more BS than they are putting out.<p>If I don’t agree with how mods handle a channel, I leave.<p>I think it’s important that we question the usefulness of blaming society for the lack of quality in “default” content. Yes, you’re funneled into these channels. Yes, Reddit is seeking to get people to consume them. Yes, the interest of advertisers override all others. Yes, Reddit constantly inserts unwanted subs into my feed.<p>Yet Reddit is still a place I can curate to the subs that align with my interests &amp; values. it’s not dead yet.<p>I don’t expect any social media platform to give me the defaults I want. I’ve accepted that I can take responsibility for the content I consume.<p>What I’d like is to build tools that enable people to more easily filter for that content. I believe we need stronger filtering tools, not weaker.<p>This is where I do wholeheartedly agree with author - the loss of Aaron and RSS feeds was the end of the cyberpunk movement in the browser based web.<p>I don’t know if web3 genuinely offers a second chance, but I do know that I will continue to want the ability to learn from thoughtful people of all walks of life. That requires the ability to filter out everything else. At this point, I’d rather select keywords to filter than to surface &amp; happily pay for the privilege.<p>I’m so tired of being spoon fed the empty calories of outrage.

&gt; <i>What started as a bastion of independent thought, Reddit has slowly devolved into a den of groupthink, censorship, and corporate greed.</i><p>This is revisionist romanticism. Reddit is just a collection of forums like the many hundreds of thousands that came before it, and continue to exist alongside it. Reddit is also so incredibly massive that making sweeping statements about its quality or composition is meaningless, what one consumes on reddit is really more a reflection of the individual rather than the site itself.

I&#x27;m curious what reddit even aspires to be at its greatest.<p>Most of the popular subreddit&#x27;s comment sections have top rated comments being something totally predictable and sarcastic.<p>Right now the top post on r&#x2F;news is [1]<p>Contrasted to the equivalent story on hackernews: [2]<p>There isn&#x27;t anything remotely thought provoking in the top rated comments on reddit as there is on hackernews.<p>It seems to me this isn&#x27;t due to censorship or corporate influence, but purely due to the fact that the reddit post has 100x more upvotes (and therefore more viewership) than the hackernews equivalent.<p>In the pockets of reddit that have a small but active community, I think it&#x27;s easier to argue that the original essence and charm of reddit is still very much alive.<p>I&#x27;m skeptical that even without all the corrupting factors mentioned in this article, that reddit would ever be a place for the masses to engage healthy discourse and speech<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;news&#x2F;comments&#x2F;vjpfbh&#x2F;supreme_court_overturns_roe_v_wade_states_can_ban&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;news&#x2F;comments&#x2F;vjpfbh&#x2F;supreme_court_...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31862258" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31862258</a>

It&#x27;s honestly astonishing to see how poorly the leadership team at Reddit has been executing. People shit on Twitter (Zuck called Twitter &quot;a clown car that fell into a gold mine&quot;) but Reddit is so much worse.<p>The fact that Reddit didn&#x27;t have a decent mobile app until a few years ago is unbelievable. Indie-developers were shipping a better reddit mobile apps than the company.

In a decade this essay will still be available on some web archive, but the author will be fully grown, and the zeitgeist that shaped his adolescence, which is already dying, will be as transparently foolish as is, to contemporary sensibilities, a 1970&#x27;s punk rocker shouting &#x27;The Beatles suck!&#x27;<p>It is true Reddit is a pile of garbage, but it was a worse pile of garbage when its community was posting kiddie porn and creating &#x27;N-chain&#x27; comment threads.

I used reddit for the first time in 2020 and only because a researcher friend told me to ask a question about implementation details of a paper I read. It gave me a good answer and to my surprise had some relatively famous names in the research field in the subreddit.<p>That said, it also seemed to me like it&#x27;s (maybe intentionally?) designed to promote bad faith communication[0]. Combine that with the Eternal September phenomenon it seems like an place of inevitable decay; whatever subreddit there is struggling against entropy.<p>I think I saw an add about &quot;Reddit: the Frontpage of Internet&quot; but I think a more apt catch phrase would be &quot;doormat&quot;; all the rude, dirty people stomp all over it to get to the internet house. The mattress is mud ridden and smells.<p>And the design of it is like a room without any windows with a broken AC making it humid, mold ridden and hot. And it was made right next to a Highschool and gives free entrance vouchers to the students. Some subreddits might try to carve out a space in the room, keeping it clean and everything but when most people coming in is bad faith and the room is so hopelessly inhospitable, it&#x27;s just a matter of time.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;consilienceproject.org&#x2F;endgames-of-bad-communication&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;consilienceproject.org&#x2F;endgames-of-bad-communication...</a>

I thought this was a clever joke at first that parodied how reddit forces their app on mobile users in various insidious ways... but it turns out Medium does the same.<p>You want to know why the web is so bad? Because it&#x27;s slowly become acceptable to treat your users with complete contempt by interrupting and &quot;nudging&quot; them into being surveillance cattle.

Reddit is not so simple to pin down. On the one hand all the &#x27;bad stuff&#x27;. On the other, a huge selection of really interesting niche subs where you can find intelligent, valuable and even expert information and guidance. The big subs are not everything that is Reddit. The real treasure is found in the specialist places which very few people know about, staffed by enthusiast hobbyist mods and devoured by equally passionate readers.

My issue with reddit is the polar opposite. It&#x27;s not moderated remotely aggressively enough!<p>Any interesting subreddit immediately falls to the lowest common denominator without aggressive moderation. &#x2F;r&#x2F;askhistorians is a good example of the level of moderation a subreddit needs to remain sane as it grows.<p>People like to complain about gatekeeping, but societies build gates for a reason. I would like a forum that actively encourages gatekeeping and bans users who consistently post low quality comments.

I didn’t even know about some of the things that the author went over in this article, but it’s undeniable that power-mad mods have ruined anything I ever enjoyed about Reddit over the past ten years. And that there seem to no longer be many interesting voices or fair debate on the site. I found myself logging in less and less over the past four years and when I do, I recognize it less and less also. It just isn’t Reddit at all these days, no matter what logo is on it

The universal problem with all large anthrocentric networks - real life, digital, political, socioeconomic, the planet&#x27;s climate - is it&#x27;s exponentially easier to break things than build them.<p>Bullshit travels twice around the world before the truth gets its boots on.<p>It does not have a side, or an agenda, or rarely even a purpose beyond the exercise of control over others. It&#x27;s trolling, period.<p>So as soon as you decide you wamt to optimize for growth over exclusivity, you are DOA because shortly (in startup time) your platform will become 99.99999% bullshit.<p>You don&#x27;t need a deeper look into why Reddit or any large site that optimizes for growth descends into chaos.

Reddit works fine for me. In R&#x2F;W mode I use only &#x2F;r&#x2F;diypedals and &#x2F;r&#x2F;guitarpedals and for daily dose of doom and gloom in R&#x2F;O mode I use &#x2F;r&#x2F;news and &#x2F;r&#x2F;worldnews. I access it only via RSS reader and it navigates me directly to compact version which loads instantly and works well on mobile.

Reddit is largely garbage. Some bits of it are alright, but it has definitely gone downhill since Swartz passed.<p>At this point the only good forums I am aware of are this one and Bogleheads, apart from a few still-decent parts of reddit that aren&#x27;t completely astroturfed by corporations or packed full of lower-level midwits (i.e. any subreddit with a subscriber count close to or over 500k).<p>Anyone else know of good places to read online?

I disagree with what the article says.<p>If you follow no news or politics related subreddits, its a wholesome and friendly place (mostly) like it always was.<p>The mistake is thinking news and politics make good talking topics on the internet, on massive platforms like that. Headlines are the only thing people read, theres no genuine discussion, just people screaming as loud as they can, hoping their opinion ends up being the loudest.

I think there are 2 major problems at play.<p>First, I have no idea what Reddit the company has been doing since basically every addition to the site in over a decade has been garbage and has made the site worse to use. The site is basically unusable without the old.reddit.com style, their media hosting is worse than imgur or any of the other alternatives, their app and mobile experience is worse than any number of free alternatives, and besides that I don&#x27;t know what else the have done except gamify posts with their awards system.<p>The second problem is how communities on Reddit and the internet as a whole are structured, incentivized and evolve. So many of these communities are unable to check themselves (which generally requires very good moderation), and with incentive structures like upvotes and awards, posting is gamified where people post things they think others will approve of and will reward, which causes communities to become monocultures as everyone else just leaves, is downvoted into oblivion or just banned from the subreddit. These communities basically become filled with people who have the same opinions and circlejerk about them in ways that affirm their opinions and disparage ones that oppose them, causing them to slowly become detached from reality. It creates a community of people who basically become unable to discuss things with people who don&#x27;t share the same opinions, which then carries over to interactions outside of those monocultures. Lots of these people just dont have the ability to even talk to others with differing viewpoints now.<p>The best communities and best conversations I have had online have been those that offer a lot of off topic discussions within interest based communities. Support group&#x2F; identity based communities need very strong moderation because they are much more susceptible to &quot;radicalization&quot; if that is the correct term.

Im going to play devils advocate, when you look at the subreddits banned there are those that are banned for unknown and petty reasons (Tumblrinaction), however at the same time extremely radical or racist subreddits are also included (alt right ones, some extreme left and coontown fat people hate).<p>And if we judge reddit with 4chan the &quot;free&quot; speech platform, you will notice that 4chan is plagued with extremism and anti-social views, which in some ways is because they don&#x27;t censor and is 100% anonymous to each user.<p>Personally some censorship is good to not allow the patients running the asylum, but also make sure you don&#x27;t overreach.

&gt; Shortly after, the FBI began monitoring Aaron Swartz and he was arrested for downloading academic journals from MIT in an attempt to make them freely available online.<p>AFAICT Swartz never said or wrote why he attempted to download all of JSTOR. Even close friends like Lawrence Lessig only speculated as to what he may have been wanting to do with that data.<p>But I suppose this kind of lazy writing and lack of standards is what passes for news these days at the New York Times&#x27; router that could have conceivably forwarded the packets for this medium.com article.

Reddit is still one of the best place to find relevant and accurate information, compared to say Facebook, Twitter or some random website. Depends on the subreddit of course, but at least healthy communities can be created and moderated. Of course you’ll also find terrible and toxic communities and users, like The_Donald, which has fortunately been banned. Why is the author only focusing on bad aspects?<p>What’s the purpose of this article? It doesn’t bring anything constructive, it’s just trying to make it look bad, and discourage people from going there.<p>It doesn’t say what should be done to improve, what healthier site we should visit instead. It’s only negative.<p>&quot;No matter what you believe in, wisdom isn’t achieved living inside a bubble of utopian ideals.&quot;<p>Oh yeah ideals are bad, surely, wisdom is better. I wonder what kind of &quot;wisdom&quot; he has in mind… He won’t tell us either. Sounds like this article has an agenda, which involves convincing people that Reddit and ideals are bad.<p>Reddit is doomed, and will go down into chaos because of ideals, values, mods and corporations. Hmmm that sounds familiar. Replace &quot;Reddit&quot; with anything and that’s your usual anti-system &quot;wisdom&quot;. It didn’t bring me any new information.<p>It looks like Reddit is generally too pro-western values for the tastes of the author… And he had to tell the world about it.

A big issue on reddit is &#x27;powermods&#x27; and how if your sub gets popular enough the admins will install their own mods. Everything ends up feeling incredibly similar.

It might not be possible to create a public forum in a way that it stays thoughtful and interesting even when it becomes popular.<p>The first problem is that thoughtful and interesting content rarely attracts many readers.<p>The second is that <i>if</i> many readers show up, the discussion quality is going down. So there would need to be strong centralized censorship to downvote the low quality posts and prevent accounts that play the populism game to gain traction.

For those of us, needing a VPN from time to time, this platform is unusable. From a decision they took to suspend my oldest over 11.5k karma acct, when I started travel, thus use of diff VPN exit points in Europe, through to almost 20 other accounts I attempted to create, since, whenever I used one with and without VPN within the span of a few hours, I get the dreaded suspension reaction.

Anyone who remembers BBSs would not be surprised by a site that turns in to small fiefdoms but would rather be surprised by a site that is not.

I’ve had an idea for a while on how I would fix or reimplement Reddit. Someone please feel free to steal and implement these ideas, I’ll join!<p>The basic problem with Reddit (and all eternal Septembers) is that new users change the culture that made the site interesting in the first place. The reddiquette and the HN rules might have been followed strictly at first, but they fall to the wayside due to a lack of enforcement. Moderation does not scale.<p>My proposed solution is to assign weights to users such that bad actors cannot come in and exert influence on the site, through a modified ELO-like ranking system. You as the founder set a base set of rules that you <i>know</i> you can follow, like never downvoting substantive comments that you disagree with, and then you just use the site with care to not get sloppy with the rules. Your ELO (and those in your special known-good-actor clique) is held high, at least until you reach a critical mass of users where it becomes unnecessary.<p>The kicker is this: every vote by another user on the site is now a “match” against all users on the site that have a higher ELO that have voted on it, and you treat their vote as a draw if they vote the same, or a loss if they downvote.<p>Powerusers aren’t actually the problem, so long as you have the right powerusers. The problem is that powerusers are able to sell their account and exert influence for profit (ie: astroturfing). But with you as the baseline ideal user, and with your interests always being the longevity of the site, the possibility of corruption goes down.<p>The other change I would make to Reddit is to have a predefined Usenet-like hierarchy with community-provided tags for niche topics that would otherwise fall through the cracks. Opinion-oriented communities (&#x2F;r&#x2F;bluepolitics, &#x2F;r&#x2F;redpolitics) facilitate one-sided boring conversations.

The subreddits are horrible. There is one called “RealTesla” that only allows stories negative towards Tesla. Nothing good, only negative. I was banned for posting an article that wasn’t negative enough.

Its not just awful mods, its awful paid admins. It was a step in the right direction to ban hate speech. The people they hired have decided that being mean to racists is “hate speech”, while ignoring actual hate speech and letting racist spaces thrive. This is not what people meant when they asked reddit to do something about hate speech.

I don&#x27;t get the popularity of the &quot;mobile first&quot; paradigm. I get it as a cost saving measure, but when you try and make UX fit mobile and desktop both will be worse off.<p>&gt; bastion of independent thought was never a thing, nor is it possible for reddit-type platforms.<p>The mechanics of voting and karma organize content as groupthink, and the divisions of subreddits structure grouphink by type of content with mods that enforce their vision of the type. There is very little you can do for independent thought in this content if mods aren&#x27;t actively trying for that (and they never did). What you get is content decided by the average person interested in some field, with added selections of moderation. This can be good for a few things but thought or indepth conversations aren&#x27;t one of those.

My 15y old Gold account just got banned after posting a crypto-critical Wall Street Journal link. Go figure.

Outside of a few subreddits and many smaller ones, quality discussion on reddit at large scale never really existed (or at least not since i joined in 2012) because the type of content that was&#x2F;is upvoted most heavily is quick, low-thought, quippy and usually low-quality.

I think Reddit is fantastic. So much interesting and useful content. It’s amazing to me that it isn’t full of spam if you think about how much of that there is on the internet these days so personally I think the mods are doing a really good job.

Way to bury the lead:<p>&gt; I only recently found out that Ghislaine Maxwell, wife to Jeffery Epstein, ran one of the most powerful Reddit accounts on the website. In fact, it was the eighth-most popular account by karma on Reddit.<p><i>Spooky X-Files music.</i>

Long before Reddit, there were dial-up BBSes in the 1980&#x27;s. You don&#x27;t know what petty online brownshirting is if you had not not experienced that --- and every little of it was corporate in any shape or form.

As far as I know, outside of egregious violations, most subreddits have their own internal rules.<p>Different communities seem to go through various periods of success, and my experience has been that it&#x27;s just as often the fault of a lack of moderation as it is from moderation itself, but MOST often, it&#x27;s the scale of the community.<p>Once a community reaches a certain size, moderation is just impossible for the handful of volunteers who do it.<p>Either way, the article strikes me less as &quot;reddit is declining!&quot; as it is &quot;oh man, things changed and I don&#x27;t like it.&quot;

Reddit critiques in this thread sound more like anger directed at their moderation because the commenters here have apparently been banned, shadow-banned, removed for transgender &quot;jokes&quot; etc.

I&#x27;m sure Aaron was thinking of ridiculing fat people, fascism, revenge porn, jailbait or your right to hate the gays when he said he was concerned about corporate tyranny.

Reddit remains completely a in-the-right-place-right-time thing when Digg fumbled and there was a mass exodus saving the almost-closed Reddit. That&#x27;s it. It is&#x2F;was nothing special. It has been riding the wave ever since (and also why I see no reason to give people like Alexis Ohanian any praise or credibility when he&#x27;s out there talking about all kinds of nonsense, but I digress).<p>Ultimately these days it suffers from massive mainstream adoption and use, and all of the moderation and scale problems that come with that(including the much griped about design problems and struggles to both monetize and maintain usability). But under it all it&#x27;s still just a large collection of forums of all sizes, with some intermixing, but also <i>a lot</i> of non-mixing. If you participate in a handful of niche interest subreddits, and this is all logged into the site (where you can permanently set the old look as your UI complainers!), you will never see all the crap that&#x27;s happening on the oversized main subs and it&#x27;s great. Just a place for basic forum-like functionality and interest sharing.

There are still pockets of sanity here and there, if you know where to look, but otherwise it has become a huge propaganda machine. &#x2F;r&#x2F;worldnews is now basically a continuation of whatever Washington DC holds as true when it comes to US foreign policy, the same goes for &#x2F;politics (when it comes to US domestic politics) and most of the subs related to the current war in Ukraine.

&gt; Reddit is tailored for a better corporate experience, not a better user experience.<p>Yeah, advertisers want &quot;brand safety&quot; and having the most neutral and inoffensive topics possible (and nothing controversial) is what enables that. Censorship arises organically on the advertiser-based web, which many users of this site have had a hand in creating.

places need limits. they really really do. They do in real life, they do in online. Should someone be able to go to a bar and shout insults at the owner. depending on where the bar is this will end with you in an alley. Why should a private company allow things that affects their bottom line?

I think reddit died for me when they more than doubled the price of premium membership (previously called &#x27;gold&#x27;). It&#x27;s just not worth it anymore.<p>I always used to love how open it was. Don&#x27;t communities were toxic sure but there were lots of fringey subreddits with people really enjoying themselves. For example exhibitionism. Conde Nast are trying to clamp down on this a lot to make it more mainstream palatable. IMO this is when such platforms start to decline though I have to admit reddit has so far lasted longer than I expected (especially when considering predecessors like Digg)

I personally hate Reddit, but I think it&#x27;s misleading to talk about their &quot;fall&quot;. Arent they thriving or even excelling by the metrics they (and most other non-users) care about?

Insults != Harassment but they detract from the conversation.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.derailingfordummies.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.derailingfordummies.com&#x2F;</a>

idk I follow only gaming subs and they all seem all right to me. The players just share guides, fan arts, news etc. Sure every sub has some asshole mods but generally it&#x27;s still not as bad as front page subs (&#x2F;r&#x2F;news, &#x2F;r&#x2F;politics&#x2F; etc.) where basically there is only one message accepted

It&#x27;s just another boring scroll hole for 1 minute content bites, like the rest of the internet is becoming.<p>It&#x27;s more of a place to share useless time filler to be scrolled on a phone, and a place to have mostly useless fights(As a time filler).<p>Nobody really likes it enough to call it entertainment, it&#x27;s just a pacifier.

I don&#x27;t frequently visit Reddit, but I think in the last year or two it has become more prone to mono-think and feels a bit like high school.<p>I hope it changes direction and becomes a better public forum. We need more of those kinds of environments.

For business&#x2F;finance related social news there&#x27;s a UGC section on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;biztoc.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;biztoc.com</a> — Small but less toxic.

The instant downvoting is a dead giveaway to what they&#x27;re about. It&#x27;s going to be interesting to see what rises from the &quot;web 3.0&quot;.

if going by what the writer wrote about the length of Aron Swartz incarceration is true, then that&#x27;s way too much (35-year sentence). I mean he didn&#x27;t kill someone even though what he did might be illegal. I just feel they just wanted to eliminate him. it&#x27;s also totally unfair that he was erased from the history of reddit without good recognition for his work and contribution.

Reddit isn’t dead until there is a viable alternative.<p>You can’t have an exodus without a destination

chaos? Or authoritarianism? Two opposites on the spectrum? Some might argue that the elites are becoming more authoritarian as time goes on, and as they seek to quash all criticism of their regime...an old story...

Does anyone have a good Reddit alternative, that&#x27;s kindof a niche like HN?

I&#x27;m now getting flagged for anything I comment that goes against the groupthink. HN is worse than reddit at this point.

The issues are so much worse than what is being described in this post. Reddit-appointed moderators are used as a protective layer for all of the company&#x27;s shady, anti-social and sometimes straight up illegal behaviors. The perfect example of this is RPAN, their recently defunct streaming function, where a dozen subreddits were created by the company and populated with moderators, who then spent two years brazenly lying on behalf of the admins at every opportunity and constantly gaslighting the entire community.<p>They lied to advertisers by inflating viewership numbers 35x higher than reality. They sold their top broadcast mechanism to these advertisers, but repeatedly told the viewers that what they were witnessing was community-created content. The &quot;algorithm&quot; had a built-in caste system which was manually manipulated and curated by admins, while they directed mods to convince the community they don&#x27;t even have the ability to manipulate the rankings. They even allowed the sexual proposition of minors to take place on a daily basis, while both mods and admins were fully aware of it -- never mind the reports, they were sometimes in the chat while it was happening. They permanently banned anyone who discussed any of these issues, without hesitation.<p>And this list is just the tip of the iceberg of Reddit&#x27;s Black Mirror-esque methodologies. The moderators are extremely loyal to the admins, because there are significant perks involved, not least of which being that moderators have notably become a hiring pool. It&#x27;s no coincidence that the mods who are the most willing to lie are the same people finding employment within the company.