I'm boycotting reddit this week, and I will never use their app, but I just don't know where else to go for communities related to niche non-tech interests, and state & local stuff. I guess Facebook groups, but FB is practically unusable these days.
Just a few weeks ago I went through the exercise of closing my FB account because I was getting all of my local NYC discussion from subreddits, instead. Poor timing I guess.
If reddit bungles this whole thing, the loss of /r/asknyc will be truly tragic. Such a great way to crowdsource local recommendations without the extra veneer of tourist feedback on top.
I'm in a much smaller city than NYC and /r/<mycity> is a very reliable place to find out what is going on around town, chat about the best place to go for <cuisine>, etc.
What's wrong with FB groups? It's almost as good at surfacing good stuff as Reddit for my niche interests and it has a lot of buy/sell/trade activity that never makes it to eBay or Reddit.
Did the same, but I took a step further and deleted my account. I had been using the site for over a decade, I knew that if I didn't cut off the path behind me I'd be tempted to linger.
I'll miss my local and hobby subreddits. I hope I find something to replace them.
When you see "Hacker News Hug" on here (recently due to Cloudflare's issues) or Reddit's "Hug of Death", the original was "Slashdotted", when tech people hosted personal sites on their _own_ home DSL (even Dial-up via Dynamic DNS!) connections. These asynchronous connections had terrible upload speed by design.
If their webpage hit the front news of Slashdot, their upload bandwidth very quickly ran out due to the torrent of traffic!
My brother writes xkcd. In 2006 I was living at home while attending community college. At the time, his site was still hosted on the old HP desktop that used to sit in our family room and now sat in his old bedroom. One day I was playing in an unofficial Counter-Strike tournament when one of his comics (possibly "Pi Equals"[1]) got posted to either Slashdot or Boing Boing. My ping immediately went from probably ~25 ms to over 300, and then I timed out completely. I think it took us a couple hours to get our connection back, which I assume involved getting a new IP address.
This strip had a profound effect on my life after I read it for the first time. To this day it still means a lot to me. Thank you for sharing your story and to your brother for sharing his art.
Not really. For example cable internet (and ADSL) goes thru cable (shocking knowledge, I know). Cable have limited bandwidth, and as it is just a single cable, not RX/TX pair as it is for ethernet and it has limited bandwidth
Which essentially means you have X bandwidth to distribute between upstream and downstream. And it's far more profitable to sell X 40/10 Mbit connections vs selling a bunch of 25/25 Mbit ones, where most people there won't be using upload all that much.
I feel like no, trying it out (though on my Mac using zsh and not a 25 year old Linux box) the slash being first makes it reference the root directory.
"Hey check out this website I discovered - it's called Slashdot"
"It's called what!?"
"Slashdot"
"How do you spell that?"
"http://slashdot.org"
"Hang on, what? How many slashes and dots?"
There's also tildes.net (like early Reddit set up as non profit, invite only, but not hard to get an invite) and also open source distributed https://join-lemmy.org/
Nah, floods of new users have come before. The lack of images, politics, and drama, combined with the "boring" design drives the undesirables away, leaving behind people who like talking about tech and other interests.
HN will always retain some of the new comers. I was first reddit user then HN.
HN instantly brought me "old" internet nostalgia. Geeks just talking about things in a mostly open minded way. Lack of memes, politics and "boring" design will be all positives for some.
It's thinly veiled behind more passive aggressively written prose than reddit, but it's here. No images, I'll grant, but as someone mistaken for conservative by liberals and liberal by conservatives I can assure you it's very much political.
It seems pleasant at first, then you realize that 90% of comments on every post are cynical negativity and I'm not entirely sure if spending much time around here is a good thing because it'm starting to absorb it.
Yes, HN is a very cynical and negative place, and it's interesting how quickly I stop noticing that if I visit a few days in a row. But if I don't visit for a week and then come back, it's starkly obvious.
It's also not exclusively negative and cynical, of course, and there are some great insights to be found here. I think you're being unfair with 90%. Maybe more like 70%?
Is there any tech-oriented forum that isn't largely cynical and negative?
Is there any social media that isn't largely cynical and negative?
I also notice how my mindset changes when I don't visit, which really just makes me think I should stop engaging in 90% of online discourse and discussion.
> Is there any tech-oriented forum that isn't largely cynical and negative
Maybe no? I only know of two (not including subreddits): HN and Slashdot. And of the two, Slashdot is far, far, more negative, with the weird addition of American style republican political views. Which, as a European reader, makes it feel like a very right wing place.
Exactly! Lots of people treating internet traffic like a on/off switch for each website. But ultimately the traffic is people, and people act like a liquid in large enough quantities. They flow in other directions.
I think you're being facetious here, but HN does have a more than passing resemblance to early Reddit.
I remember reading Joel Spolsky's blog when he promoted Reddit. I jumped over for look and stayed. Threads and discussion were heavily tech focused. The format was a nice departure from slashdot, and there was a lack of digital "turf" wars. (Subreddits came along years later.)
16(?) years on - Reddit has metastisized into something different. I still enjoy parts of it, but it's definitely not the same beast it was in the beginning.
