I was a refugee of the Great Digg Migration to reddit some 14 or so years ago. old.reddit and adblockers as well as very aggressive curation of subreddits have kept it to an overall positive experience over the decade.
I think overall I'm just less enthusiastic about the internet; everytime I come back from a week or two of backpacking without internet connection I realize how overstimulated with inane bullshit we all are.
I was an early refugee from Digg, been on reddit for 17 years now.
Aggressive curation of subreddits did help, but I fear the decent subreddits are slowly dying out. The modern iteration of site (It's more of an app these days) appears to attract the wrong type of users for the healthy conversations that I enjoy.
I am surprised how long reddit lasted, but I get the feeling it might not hold on to me for much longer.
I was thinking about this as an approach for a side project to build in order to (speed up) learn elixir/phoenix for work. While the old-school forums dedicated to specific topics work (why re-invent them?) I was thinking of a "tribal" social network.
You as a person decide you want to create a space with a combination of reddit-like features, maybe video, etc. Only people you invite can discover it (or you can allow them to invite people) It could work for neighborhood groups (similar to nextdoor but with a limited crowd that you like/trust), school groups, family, or specific interests -- although specific interests are the idea's weakest selling point since it lacks easy discoverability.
Yeah, there are forums, discord, etc. etc., but I thought it could potentially be interesting. And yeah, people would abuse it (i.e., share pirated and illegal content), so maybe not really viable.
> Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time.
This is true of all social media platforms. People who have all day to post/reply and figure out how to game the system will always dominate the discussion. This is also why online propaganda works so well, it is literally their day job. People who have a life will always be at a major disadvantage. In some ways Reddit is worse off because those people also become moderators. The only thing that saves it is the ability for users to flee a subreddit if the moderator becomes a tyrant and start a parallel subreddit with hopefully more sane moderation.
The default subreddits are mostly a writeoff at this point. Terminally online people latched on to them and are never letting go. Or they were useless from the start like AITA.
Same here. I (proudly) had my account there banned for posting the AACS key.
Went to reddit and was not unhappy there for many years, but, aside from some targeted subreddits (/r/beagle!) I rarely spend any time on reddit anymore. The new reddit changes just feel user-hostile and they are aggressively pushing users away from old.reddit.com, it feels like a matter of time before they announce that they are killing old reddit.
Perhaps we are getting old but I also find happiness is inversely proportional to my time spent on social media.
> I think overall I'm just less enthusiastic about the internet...
Some of that is a function of age I am sure. When you are young, sites like reddit and digg hold promises of some new and interesting unknown unknown. As you get older, the amount of unknown unknowns fall off a cliff and you are just left with the known knowns and known unknowns... occasionally you are once again interested in the known unknowns, but you certainly didn't need a website to remind you they existed. The novelty is gone.
Funny, it’s actually after I come back from a week of backpacking that my “internet quality time” is highest - there’s a bunch of new, meaningful content for me to go through.
After a few hours of catching up tho, that’s when my internet usage devolves to reading pointless faff and refreshing my timelines in a loop.
I remember Reddit before Digg users invaded it. Reddit used to be good. Digg refugees fucked it up nearly overnight. The comment sections quickly became garbage. It was like a bunch of teenagers decided to take over Reddit.
Agreed. Throwaway account because I’m an internet nomad and I don’t have a long term account here (they get banned anyway).
Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time.
It’s amusing to see the usual HN flex with smug superiority but both Reddit and 4chan even to this today demolish HN in every (good and bad) criteria. Moderation here has stifled honest discussion in favor of safe-harbor, bullshit talking points.
"Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time."
It was even stupider than that. Digg didn't even have a real, working promotion system. It was literally one guy who personally curated the big stories. Google almost bought them but looked under the hood and immediately bailed. The upvotes were all smoke and mirrors.
Every time someone mentions reddit 14 years ago all I can think about are all the admins that allowed r/jailbait on the front page. I honestly wouldn't tell people you used it then
If the only thing that comes to your mind when people talk about the digg migration is the underage jailbait subreddit, that speaks more about you than anyone else.
It was a significant shift in social media and internet history, regardless of what some fringe subreddits had.
Where did you guys get this idea? Back then, reddit had a small whitelist of subs they specifically chosen to display on the frontpage. /r/atheism, /r/news, etc. Basically, the default ones you'd be subscribed to when you created an account.
There weren't any NSFW ones on that list, and it sure didn't include the controversial ones you guys are pointing to. Maybe if you went to /all; but that's definitely not the frontpage/homepage, and even then you'd have to specifically enable NSFW for those to show up.
By the time the frontpage started including popular subs, those subs had long since been expunged from the website.
Nobody here is defending Reddit’s choice to use a poor front page algorithm that allowed for surfacing obscene, fringe or even illegal content over a decade ago.
Some people probably used reddit like me, I never looked at the front page, I just went straight to a sub link directly. I remember always pulling up rage comics. I didn't care about comments, or any other communities.
It’s easy to forget but this is pretty on point IMO. There was so much overlap between HN and /r/programming, tons of industry people would just back to back scroll them and ignore the rest of Reddit.
I think overall I'm just less enthusiastic about the internet; everytime I come back from a week or two of backpacking without internet connection I realize how overstimulated with inane bullshit we all are.