Reddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade. Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed to hell and back by people with a Shopify storefront and a dream trying to growth hack their way to a hockey stick. The low barrier to entry to each community means that this vapid culture eventually diffuses itself across subreddits that might otherwise be good. It's a postmodern toilet that flushes into its own tank.
I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB and Invision forums. Even those are being bought up by marketing companies to sell ads and transformed with social media features... Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.
> I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB
I'll one-up this: I miss USENET.
I never understood how anyone could like phpBB, compared to USENET news readers, it was a chaotic mess. But USENET, that was great for discussing things.
I remember using some forums, and there'd be pages and pages of idiots just replying "Wow, this is great, thanks OP!", or "Thanks from me too!". How the fuck do you think you're contributing rather than polluting?
And nowadays they can even create Github accounts and do this...
I first got on the Internet in 1991. The older students told me to lurk on Usenet and not post anything for a month or 2 to avoid getting flamed. I did and then I loved it. Once all the @aol.com people started showing up it went downhill. By 2000 it was so full of spam and garbage that I stopped going. I connected to a Usenet server last year for the first time in over 20 years and it was just full of junk.
Funny thing is, if we were to revive it now, it might end up as a pretty nice place, given that all the dumb crowds now have their 4chans, reddits, phpBBs, facebooks, instagrams, etc.
The craziest thing about Reddit for me is how most communities forbid "self-promotion." To me that sounds like a thing only admins would want because it keeps users on the site/app, but this is enforced by moderators for some reason and a lot of drama has occurred over banning creators over these silly rules.
It's a place that originally was a link-sharing platform, where you literally can't share a link to your own website on any subreddit. At least not if you are honest about it. It's okay if you pretend you aren't associated to it.
Reddit has become essentially watermarked videos posted by people pretending they aren't the creator of the video, twitter screenshots with 10 likes posted by people pretending they aren't the user who tweeted the tweet, and links to news websites posted by users whose only activity on reddit seems to be posting the same link to 5 different subreddits as if it was their job, because it probably is.
I'm not a good marketer, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but the only thing I've found that works is replying to relevant comments in popular threads with neutral looking promotional material (e.g. github links). A well placed reply in a hot thread will easily drive 10x the value of a blog post.
I think it's possible to do it ethically, but anything that works is going to get gamed.
It's a pretty dark dystopian future where the only way for anyone to hear about anything is advertising or paid promotion by influencers because we're so aggressive about policing individuals marketing themselves.
The evolution of European history is built upon the evolution of art, specifically in architectural history, music history, and painting history. It has never been reflected in the evolution of technology; even if technology has evolved, it is built upon the evolution of art, such as steampunk, atomic punk, and cyberpunk. All European culture is characterized by its art-driven approach. However, when, as is the case now, cultural evolution is dominated by programmers, geeks, and dictators, it becomes a dystopian phenomenon.
Art-driven approaches represent the correct way of sensory perception and intellectual summarization, much like the correct methodology offered by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Technological dominance, on the other hand, becomes an erroneous approach of abstract mechanics and objective facts, much like mechanical materialism encountering quantum physics.
Remember my words.
Well you wouldn't want independent creators and small start-up businesses getting exposure over large corporate ventures with full marketing departments would you? Think about the pour investor class that has sunk so much money into marketing, and then some chick in a basement hand weaving some silver wire pendant gets a sale and only earns 15% markup instead of the mass produced cheap zinc pendant with a 300% markup.
Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.
Moderators are part of the problem really, there are a handful of moderators holding the reins over all the popular subreddits, and "smaller" (even big ones) subreddits suffer from the same problem.
As an example, r/MistralAI, r/LocalLLaMA, r/ChatGPT, r/OpenAI and r/grok are all run by the same person.
The only survivable places on reddit left are the subreddits with small amount of contributors that aren't trying to gain something by participating and organizing. But they're so few.
Given how many subreddits there, I have to ask if you have statistics to back up this claim.
My intuition is that people have problems with a bunch of popular subreddits, but the vast majority of subreddits are just fine. I have no statistics to back up this intuition.
There’s a whole vibrant industry of people you can pay to market whatever you want on Reddit. They can’t all be competing for the same few popular subreddits. They must be differentiated by targeting niche subreddits.
There are two different "ads" we're discussing here. One is the ads reddit the platform allows you to pay for, and it shows up in the client(s) as ads. Another is the type of ad where a company reaches out to community members and ask them to post about their project/product in exchange for a static sum, which looks like "normal posts" but are actually sponsored content.
The first one sucks for a multitude of reasons, the second one you basically don't notice are ads, yet they're all over reddit.
Can't say I know how it looks everywhere on reddit, as I'm not everywhere on reddit, but the AI subreddits I referenced earlier are filled with it, and I've even received offers myself to get paid to pay about stuff and I'm a nobody, so surely I only know of the surface.
They are targetting whatever has eyeballs. If people are looking for purchasing advice they have probably come from Google. So if Google is indexing the subreddit it is fair game. That means every subreddit that is not 18+, and Reddit also forbids marking a subreddit as 18+ when the contents isn't really 18+ (as this was a form of mod protest a few years ago).
You can advertise on Reddit. If the return/cost ratio of industrialized astroturfing is better than ads then people will use it to promote their products.
There are two problems in computer science, accepting payments and naming things.
Reddit's principal problem is that the first person to take r/foo is often a BDFL for foo for life, and no other subreddit about foo will ever be quite as recognizable. If we instead had subreddits with a numeric ID and a non-unique display name, that problem would be solved.
Payments would also solve the spam problem, but many users who have $1 can't easily get that $1 to Reddit, so that's not really an option either.
Admins actively choose moderators, removing ones they don't like and inserting their favorites. Recently, a mod was removed from r/LivestreamFails and made a public crashout video. In exactly the way you'd expect a Reddit mod to.
I don't necessarily agree, the Rust subreddit is fine (except for all the AI slop posts this year, which the moderators have a hard time keeping up with) and some of the more niche 3D printing subreddits are doing fine, basically it feels like the past few years haven't happened there. The Arch Linux subreddit is a bit chaotic, but the moderation is not really the problem I think.
Maybe all of these fall into your last paragraph and I simply don't frequent the type of subreddit you describe. The thing is, it is hard to tell if it is you or me who have a representative sample here, or if we are both off. Two samples is not statistically significant.
There are over 100,000 subreddits and the vast majority of them (and all of the ones I follow) fall into their last paragraph ... it's not at all "so few". And even if it were, "representative sample" isn't really relevant when you can select and mute subs ... it's really not much different from usenet, which I was very active on in the 80's and 90's.
I remember your story differently. You were consistently trolling /r/programming from multiple accounts for years (shevegen, shevy-ruby, shevy-java). You relied on the fact that /r/programming pretty much wasn't moderated at all.
Yeah the reddit mod system is just ripe for abuse. They have little to no accountability, the people acting as police were the same people you appealed to and who acted as judge, there was a clear reddit mod political class with certain users or groups of users controlling significant swaths of subreddits, and with it judgements in 1 sub might get you banned from other subs. And if someone got enough mod shills in a sub they could oust original or well liked mods. And there is clear financial gains and benefits to doing all of that. Meanwhile regular users that built the site and made it a place people wanted to visit had basically zero say or influence on any of it.
I heartily recommend people volunteer for moderation. There’s tons of subs that need help, and the more diversity of voices in conversations like this, the better.
Modding is a shit show, and being on the other side can be quite the experience.
The more people who can chime in, the better as a society we can figure out what needs to be done.
Right now it’s rough for users, and insane for mods.
Also manages to sustain itself on it's own weird brand of whales, a handful of disgruntled users with enough money to just keep buying accounts using random characters as a username just to get immediately banned after their first post. Some taking a dump in the middle of your living room isn't so bad if they are paying your rent and you can just kick them back out.
Lol, I guess I'm glad I checked-out from reddit before the whole "AI" thing took off. My life is honestly way better without reddit. HN isn't far behind though, honestly. The less time I spend here, the better for everything else going on in my life. HN has at least been somewhat useful for my day-job and employment future.
$1 is far too low to discourage abuse. Spammers and scammers will still make exponential returns. PR agencies are paid tens of thousands to craft narratives for their clients. With institutional actors the sky is the limit. Even just your average basement dwelling troll might consider it worth their while to pay a dollar for a sock puppet account.
Requiring a valid payment method before posting will take out 99.9% of spammers and trolls. Newspapers discovered this when they went behind paywalls. SomethingAwful discovered this 20 years ago when they required $10 to create an account.
As someone who's paid for an Invision Power Board licence before: I remember when they screwed all existing "lifetime/perpetual" licence holders with v3, and once again with v4.
On spacebattles you get infracted for chan-like (or instagram-like) behaviour. It's all about how strict moderation is. They do allow likes (but there's no algo)
phpBB was quite nice, but you must remember that people used phpBB less and less over the years. Many phpBB style webforums are dead, and died before discourse etc... came about.
People's habits changed.
I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.
What really killed phpBB and that generation of boards was mostly the sketchy codebases they ran off.
The code was rife with vulnerabilities, so the boards needed constant patching (which was a non-trivial that sometimes killed the database). If you didn't patch on time, a script inevitably dropped by, exploited the software, dumped all credentials, and nuked the database.
Those old forums were not built with the adversarial nature of the 2010s internet in mind. Boards were dropping like flies a few years there. Most simply never recovered.
Absolutely avoid all the extensions. Supposedly that got tightened up in v3.x but I saw some boards get pwned in 2.x from the extensions. Another issue is that most people were too lazy to harden php.ini yup this is a thing and their servers allowed outbound connections so exploiting some of the core code was much easier. Maybe I am just lucky but I never had a security issue with phpBB. One of my earliest forums using phpBB had over 50k people on it. That may not sound like much but it was a niche community and very early in the Internets existence.
The legal landscape has also changed. 20 years ago I helped run a web forum, but with today's legal landscape - DMCA in the US, various different laws in the EU and other countries - I would never do so. The amount of liability on the host for user-created content is far too high.
It did change a lot but the biggest changes were the ToS/AuP of server/VM providers. What was not even taboo in the early 00's was becoming a problem keeping an account active on clear-web sites. Across the board many providers starting using the vague word "lewd" a word I had never heard of even after running porn sites for a long time.
Many of us moved to .onion despite being incredibly slow at the time. We would keep an unpublished clear-web sub-domain active for the old time users so they had a fast connection. Eventually that was even problematic so many forum operators stopped accepting new users and made their forums private or semi-private. Some still exist and some got married, had kids and real life took too much time and energy to also run such sites.
Europe is more bureaucratic. You have to register with the government to say you host user content and respond to abuse reports, and then respond to abuse reports, and you're shielded.
Compliance certification costs money - lots of it. The laws also require proactive scanning of uploaded material, not just responding to complaints, and require a person to be declared liable for mistakes.
Gone are the says of paying a couple hundred a year for a host and a vBulletin license. The new costs are many thousands plus permanent liability, and no thanks - that's way more than I'm going to do for a group of enthusiasts online.
There's one or two still kicking around that I visit myself, but I'll admit I don't miss not having threaded conversations. Trying to follow a conversation with other people butting in with low effort shit posting is way harder with everything being linear.
I still use it for private and semi-private forums. The access controls make it much easier to stop drive-by spammers or at very least prevent anyone seeing their crap posts.
For phpBB site behavior, access control lists, ranks unless discourse has added that, per board policies, per rank policies. I have not used Discourse in a long time so I have no idea what they have added but that was the difference long ago.
I’ve just set up a forum for up and coming bagpipe makers (not the loud Scottish kind).
It’s been a real breath of fresh air seeing a community coalesce without the feeling of predators on the horizon (eg a hosting provider with misaligned incentives or astroturfers).
I don’t do social media (beyond HN) much at all these days but I’m enjoying seeing it slowly take off.
Using hosted Discourse. I’m glad there’s still a market for it.
Yeah, we all had such forums set up. I personally used Vanilla Forums and phpBB. I remember I did set up Invision once and I felt great about myself. (I was a kid) :D
I still visit regularly (and have since about 2000 or so), but I agree that it is not the same as in those days. I remember feeling like I was gaining actual insight into the topics from the comments, today... much less so. Maybe being older also plays a role, but I think /. has certainly changed as well.
I think it sounds more like "why is the town square covered in ads now , who installed actual mantraps in the town square , why is everything we do in the town square used against us , town squares were fine less than two decades ago and we let the rich parasitize them for profit"
Except you're doing nothing about that besides going "let's keep the town square terrible" and ensuring kids are 100% unprepared for the way the modern world communicates in the 21st century lol
Zealous parents are using this as an opportunity to take phones, computers and means of digital communication away. Hell, by law, you can't even use Discord without verifying your age lol
Imagine if they banned video games and texting 20 years ago because parents were convinced their kids were addicted to Halo and T9Word. They could always roll hoops in the street and send letters to each other with a little planning, too.
Which just begs the question, how much can you really change social media? How much are you really in control of your feed? This is where the "pubic square" analogy breaks down. Besides, there are a lot of communication mediums/messaging apps that are not social media.
Even back in the early 2010s I've been trying to consume social media mindfully. I made sure to follow pages with meaningful content (e.g., The Dalai Lama, The Long Now Foundation, Aeon Magazine, tech-related pages, SpaceX, Elon Musk, indie creators). I don't just add or follow blindly.
Back then I could justify why my selection was "good" but even then, they were drowned out by the tedium of vacations, new restaurants, felt-cute-might-delete-later selfies. Slop/engagement bait is quicker to produce than meaningful thought-provoking content.
I am also pretty sure Facebook's negative signals (unfollow, don't show me this type of content) did not work back then, at least not deterministically. If something I did not like had enough traction, it will still pop up in my feed.
And of course, goes without saying that a lot of my choices aged like milk. Elon Musk turned out to be, well, Elon Musk. Some of the tech pages started shilling out crypto (and nowadays doubtless AI). The indie creators either stopped posting or fell out of favor with the algorithm which meant exodus from the platform. All that goes on top of my pre-existing grievances against my feed recommendations.
I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB and Invision forums. Even those are being bought up by marketing companies to sell ads and transformed with social media features... Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.