They've had it coming for some time now and I will have great enjoyment in seeing them finally self-destruct when their time comes.
They've been making mistake after mistake in the public free-speech sphere and nothing more than crumbs is left over from their inital base platform values.
I do get that they need to adhere to the advertisement companies to earn money, but I have to say that I am immensely disgusted by their lack of integrity and virtues.
Aaron Swartz will be happy to see them disappear from the public eye at last. And this will surely be in the right direction in that regard. I left that platform 7 years ago, haven't looked back.
I'm no fan of Reddit's management and the choices they've made in recent times, but I've yet to find anywhere else where I feel a true sense of community and source of knowledge.
Reddit is one of the first places I search for almost anything; if I'm using a search engine, it's almost always to "site:reddit.com <my query>".
I didn't downvote you, but one thing that surprises me that for all of the expert communities I follow and participate in, there are basically never links to Reddit threads. I do hear complaints from a few friends about how misleading/non-factual some of the comments are.
These are very broad categories. For my own interest reddit is not always the best place. For example for owners of Multistrada motorcycles there are some old school European forums where you can find everything. For a distro like openSuse, their matrix channel and their own forums are a lot better. For programming in go, again a 2nd level (not the most popular) matrix channel is fantastic. For the latter too the reddit crowd is mostly newcomers with a lot of opinions but not much of it very useful.
After having tried to make use of reddit by subscribing only to the smaller more focused subs as is usually recommended, I can say that for my own use case the results were meh.
I do keep a mobile client on my phone so reddit links will open there but my engagement is very very low these days. All the better because it's predominantly a very negative place.
I think you need to define "better". If you're not set on having the same amount of people (because network effects are the biggest pain, and if it was as big as reddit presumably you'd have heard of it)
TV/Movies has forums at dslreports.org, and people sort of discuss on mastadon.
Technology as Ars Technica, here, mastadon instances and hashtags, discord, and if you're talking work, stuff on mailing lists via google and others, and maybe teams?
I have mostly given up on politics - I can't imagine having useful discussions in public online anywhere anymore.
Home DYI had the HOYUZZ (??) forums I think. But again, that's mostly web based I think.
I'm not into the other stuff so IDK on those. I could imagine someone trying to build a competitor - I mean there is lemmy I think.
> where I feel a true sense of community and source of knowledge.
To me HN is the closest to a degree. You need a system where users agree on what they want to see, and its not just a select few who enforce the system, but the community self-polices. HN self-polices quite a lot, though I wouldnt be surprised what sorts of mess the mods deal with behind the scenes, having moderated other communities elsewhere online.
I fucking hate these companies that exist solely to take the work and effort of individuals entering data into their systems who then turn around and lock it all up in the name of money.
I’m keeping an eye on Wikipedia but the worst offender next to Reddit is IMBD. They aggregate information and reviews and ratings from users and for like, two decades? Share proper dumps of that information because why not…give back to the community. They wouldn’t exist without them. And then decide to strip those dumps of all useful information and paywall the rest behind some expensive API while what…expecting users to keep contributing?
They’re all scum bags and the whole lot needs to be federated. I’m already paying $30/year for mastodon (as a donation) and I’m sure this can work with Reddit as well. I hear the front runner is Lemmy but haven’t explored it yet. Now I will and I hope it’s good.
Holding data hostage (to a subscription) is such a strong attractor that it has completely obliterated every other model. And I hate it. It makes everything worse, for everybody. I don't know what will replace it, but my clients are all already groaning under the load, and I don't blame them one bit.
//
On a completely different subject, but to end on a happier note, I want to thank you for recommending citrulline a couple weeks ago. It's made a surprisingly large difference for me, and it hadn't been on my radar as something to even try before you mentioned it. So, thanks!
You’re super welcome for the recommendation. Been taking it and it’s been good so far. Another one I came across is Tribulus and it seems like the NIH has good things to say about it but the Wikipedia entry for it has it backwards so I’m making it my homework to go over the NIG studies before suggesting edits.
Now back to IMDB…it really saddens me to see communities build really elaborate software around these websites just to have the rug pulled out from under them and turn their efforts into monoliths of nothing. We’ve had decentralized forums since the days of BBS’ (Usenet), spent 3 decades pouring knowledge into branded communities just to end up locked out of them and are now finally going full circle back into federated platforms.
I hope the momentum sticks because now we have the potential to democratize and open source AI but that’s only possible if the zeitgeist isn’t paywalled. I’ve heard rumors that Reddit execs feel miffed about not turning a profit from the recent wave of LLMs because for a lot of people it really is the front page of the internet and lots of information has been poured into it. If that’s the case, then it’s as the old saying goes “good things are often ruined by the few”.
Don't forget Gracenote, who was founded on this very principle.
It just keep happening and happening, too. https://thetvdb.com/ is the latest one I've seen. User generated content, open API (with request throttling to prevent abuse) for years and now some media company swoops in, buys it and goodbye free API! It's spitting in the face of their entire community and really infuriating.
Got sold to Roku right? Yea, I’m just waiting for the day where they block us out of that one too. I have scripts that download all of their initial data and then daily diffs for a project I gave up on.
Who's presuming? Swartz was remarkably vocal about his aspirations for the internet, and I definitely don't remember hearing him say that the future we ought to fight for is one where APIs wrapping user-generated content are only accessible to institutions with deep pockets.
Banning hate speech and legal grey area porn subs fits pretty well with this item in that they're both things you would do if you wanted to run a business and not have a little unmonetizable niche site.
They've been making mistake after mistake in the public free-speech sphere and nothing more than crumbs is left over from their inital base platform values.
I do get that they need to adhere to the advertisement companies to earn money, but I have to say that I am immensely disgusted by their lack of integrity and virtues.
Aaron Swartz will be happy to see them disappear from the public eye at last. And this will surely be in the right direction in that regard. I left that platform 7 years ago, haven't looked back.