Literally the only reason I'm still on Reddit is due to r/sysadmin and their Patch Tuesday threads. It's been a lifesaver and getting more and more important with every Patch Tuesday as Microsoft keeps screwing things up even more month after month. Like how they screwed up RDP, domain trust, audio etc this month. If it wasn't for r/sysadmin, we wouldn't have known about all these issues (especially the domain trust issue, there was little mainstream visibility over it until a day or two ago... and MS still haven't acknowledged it btw), and we would've been royally screwed over.
If there was an alternative to r/sysadmin - one that garners the same level of user reports and discussion - I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Reddit userbase is basically virtue signalers with the sole purpose of allowing bullying of various opinions, and paint themselves as the good guys while drowning in upvotes of the same 20 people's accolades. It's a disaster of a platform.
You can say that about any group that exceeds that exceeds dunbars number. Your indictment is about how humans in aggregate do horrible things similar to, you know, all the other aggregates.
no idea what that means. your statement about reddit reads equally across any number of large bodies of individuals acting in whatever manner; at best, you insinuate but never actually describe any concrete actions.
I mean they keep banning people for random shit. I had a huge account, was even invited to the ipo due to my involvement
I mentioned the imprisonment of Christians at seringapatam by Muslim rulers and I was immediately banned for islamophobia.
The content aside ... I would have happily removed my post if someone really thought it was that offensive.
But the thing is when you start immediately banning normal people for something that someone somewhere could find offensive, then the only people left are those whose purpose is profit because then it behooves them to never so much as even begin to offend anyone
Actual people, the sort that make life interesting, sometimes say things others find offensive. If you ban even the slightest hint of that then you will naturally select for bots.
Did the IPO invitations ever actually happen? I did receive an email about it but then it was nothing but crickets, so I assumed it was their attempt to somehow fleece their users with "oh we triiiied to care about our users, it's not our fauuuuult, we're soooorry".
I think Reddit has jumped the shark, but I'm biased. I used to use it, pretty much every day, but I stopped when they turned on "you must be logged in to use oldreddit". I typically was logged in, and I always used old.reddit.com, and you know, that's not the most terrible thing reddit has done, but for me it was the proverbial straw.
So I started thinking. What don't I like about reddit...
- I don't like the flat subreddit structure - I think it makes duplication (which is wasteful) more common, and (unintuitively) makes things harder to find.
- I don't like the tracking, the algorithms, the ad-networks (more tracking), the constant coercion that "Reddit is better in the app" (it's not, it's just more tracked). This is actually my major complaint, I'm made to feel more like the product on reddit than just about anywhere on the net.
- I don't like the 'moderators are gods within their domain', it's easy to piss off a mod and get a ban, and no-one cares. I think there ought to be some right of appeal which goes beyond "message the same mods to appeal", it just doesn't sit right
- I don't like the expressiveness (or rather, the lack thereof) of reddit - I like the fact that it's all text, but there's a lot you can do with text that reddit ... just ... doesn't.
I added up what I don't like, and what I do like, and I thought "they blew it". They took something that was awesome and they enshittified it on the holy quest for money. And then I thought "well, what if there was something like reddit, that didn't do that ?"
I looked. I didn't find it. I decided it'd be a fun project to make it.
So, in a month or two (I'm still knocking out bugs that I'd be embarrassed to launch with) I'm going to launch https://blewit.net/ - blewit because (a) I think they did, and (b) because it's a double pun "blue it" as well as "blew it".
I've tried to fix all the things above, and then some.
- I've made upvotes/downvotes (which are and have always been "I agree with you" or the opposite) and "this is a cool post" into separate axes, with the latter being the important signal. (https://blewit.net/post/83555697458937856),
- I've made moderation always public with a reason, and a right of appeal to someone-who-isn't-the-moderator-who-you-annoyed. (https://blewit.net/post/83987003737112576)
- I've extended the ```code``` fence to allow different types of code, and enabled group-specific supported plugins to the WASM client that mean you can render (and play) music, see (and interact with) chemical structure models in 3D, or animations, or 3D models or graphs, or maps (https://blewit.net/sandbox). I intend to keep on adding these as the platform grows. Since they're plugins, you don't pay an enormous download cost, apart from when you use them.
- I made it have no tracking, no adverts, no hidden algorithms, no dark patterns at all. You get to manipulate your own feed, up/downvotes matter, and no-one is tracking you or selling your data. In fact I only ask for a username and password, not even an email address - we have no data (lol). We set a single, transitory, session-id cookie to stop you from having to log in too often. That's it.
Whether it works, well we'll see. It has to bootstrap first, which is always the hard part. I'm planning on targeting communities and getting things working well, group by group, rather than a pedestrian, mediocre universal experience. Example: the circuit-creation/simulation plugin for science.electronics.* will pretty much do anything ngSPICE will do... Online, in a forum :)
>but I stopped when they turned on "you must be logged in to use oldreddit". I typically was logged in, and I always used old.reddit.com, and you know, that's not the most terrible thing reddit has done, but for me it was the proverbial straw.
I have been a redditor for a long time. It was a single page scroller that was so dead that you could spend 15 minutes reading a linked article and when you hit the back button, the article was still right there on the page a few posts below where it had been.
A couple or three weeks ago I finally ran into the login block for old.reddit.com. I noticed that the login prompt appeared specifically because a user was attempting to browse reddit using old.red.... The redirection was in the URL for the login prompt. That sucked. It was particularly galling because anyone can still browse reddit.com (whatever that slop is) just by typing that URL with no login requirement. There is no obvious path to subreddits, etc if you go that way so it feels a lot like viewing a feed that is pure slop, with no real content.
I did the login for several days since I was actively working with other users on subs I visited regularly, answering questions, pointing to sources for parts or various technical documents, etc. Reddit to me was a place where I could apply some of my accumulated experience to help others who are just getting started understand how everything fits together. Under various active and inactive usernames I have quite a few long posts over the years.
I didn't often do any shit-posting but a couple weeks ago I found a comment that needed a reply on a sub that I rarely visited so I posted a typical reddit-style, near one-liner. As soon as I submitted I had a perma-ban flag appear and was logged out. In under a second. That sub was using an AI-based mod and the mod decided that my post violated part of reddit's ToS so I was immediately perma-banned.
I posted that comment while waiting on a reply in a different thread where I was working through a situation with a different user so from that point on, I could not respond to their updates. They saw the perma-ban and recommended I just make a new account. I decided that the ban was probably the best part of being a redditor today and could be a blessing in disguise.
As part of a perma-ban, you are allowed to file an appeal with meat-space mods. It is a one-time shot supposedly and if you fail, that is all she-wrote. I decided to attempt the perma-ban appeal as a test to see how I fared.
I read up on the process - lots of posts online about how to phrase the appeal so it is more likely to be successful, etc. No one that I can recall mentioned that the perma-ban appeal is limited to 250 characters. I'm a poster who has multiple posts that had to be broken into parts due to exceeding the 10k character/post limit so I had set up my appeal in the usual way, outlining why I posted what I posted, the origins of the post, etc.
I started typing all that in from memory, all flowing so well until suddenly there were no more characters echoed in the box and I saw the character limit. Now that's funny. I found myself needing to condense all that in a way that would convey all the relevant info and so I went back and forth for several minutes cutting straight to the chase. No begging, no contrition, no bullshit. Just a true statement about the comment that I posted with the observation that it did not violate ToS.
I submitted that appeal and went about my business for several days without visiting reddit at all. I was perma-banned and suddenly I had more free time. When I finally logged back in - old.reddit.... - I found a note from meat-space mods that my appeal was successful and the perma-ban had been lifted. I could resume browsing, posting, etc.
The only problem was that I couldn't do any of that under old.reddit... It simply didn't work at all. I can log in and look at all my post history but it is all on new.reddit. As soon as I flip to one of the old subs I am always on reddit.com or new.reddit.com etc. For me old reddit is dead.
That means that for me, reddit is dead. I am finally done with it.
I visited your site - blewit.net. I like what I see. I am deciding whether I would like to make an account. The map post is well executed. I like GIS stuff. I will be watching for a post here about your launch. This could satisfy my need to read daily.
Literally the only reason I'm still on Reddit is due to r/sysadmin and their Patch Tuesday threads. It's been a lifesaver and getting more and more important with every Patch Tuesday as Microsoft keeps screwing things up even more month after month. Like how they screwed up RDP, domain trust, audio etc this month. If it wasn't for r/sysadmin, we wouldn't have known about all these issues (especially the domain trust issue, there was little mainstream visibility over it until a day or two ago... and MS still haven't acknowledged it btw), and we would've been royally screwed over.
If there was an alternative to r/sysadmin - one that garners the same level of user reports and discussion - I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Reddit userbase is basically virtue signalers with the sole purpose of allowing bullying of various opinions, and paint themselves as the good guys while drowning in upvotes of the same 20 people's accolades. It's a disaster of a platform.
This is wrong. Subreddits immediately prove it to be wrong.
You can say that about any group that exceeds that exceeds dunbars number. Your indictment is about how humans in aggregate do horrible things similar to, you know, all the other aggregates.
Strawman is another hallmark. What a surprise.
no idea what that means. your statement about reddit reads equally across any number of large bodies of individuals acting in whatever manner; at best, you insinuate but never actually describe any concrete actions.
good luck llm.
[dead]
I gave up on Reddit when they killed the 3rd party apps. Those were the only things that made it usable for me, left a bad taste in my mouth.
Its never going to get better. The best it can do is not get worse, and that is not likely.
I mean they keep banning people for random shit. I had a huge account, was even invited to the ipo due to my involvement
I mentioned the imprisonment of Christians at seringapatam by Muslim rulers and I was immediately banned for islamophobia.
The content aside ... I would have happily removed my post if someone really thought it was that offensive.
But the thing is when you start immediately banning normal people for something that someone somewhere could find offensive, then the only people left are those whose purpose is profit because then it behooves them to never so much as even begin to offend anyone
Actual people, the sort that make life interesting, sometimes say things others find offensive. If you ban even the slightest hint of that then you will naturally select for bots.
Did the IPO invitations ever actually happen? I did receive an email about it but then it was nothing but crickets, so I assumed it was their attempt to somehow fleece their users with "oh we triiiied to care about our users, it's not our fauuuuult, we're soooorry".
Yes I had an etrade account and made an investment. The schedule was extremely tight
I think Reddit has jumped the shark, but I'm biased. I used to use it, pretty much every day, but I stopped when they turned on "you must be logged in to use oldreddit". I typically was logged in, and I always used old.reddit.com, and you know, that's not the most terrible thing reddit has done, but for me it was the proverbial straw.
So I started thinking. What don't I like about reddit...
- I don't like the flat subreddit structure - I think it makes duplication (which is wasteful) more common, and (unintuitively) makes things harder to find.
- I don't like the tracking, the algorithms, the ad-networks (more tracking), the constant coercion that "Reddit is better in the app" (it's not, it's just more tracked). This is actually my major complaint, I'm made to feel more like the product on reddit than just about anywhere on the net.
- I don't like the 'moderators are gods within their domain', it's easy to piss off a mod and get a ban, and no-one cares. I think there ought to be some right of appeal which goes beyond "message the same mods to appeal", it just doesn't sit right
- I don't like the expressiveness (or rather, the lack thereof) of reddit - I like the fact that it's all text, but there's a lot you can do with text that reddit ... just ... doesn't.
I added up what I don't like, and what I do like, and I thought "they blew it". They took something that was awesome and they enshittified it on the holy quest for money. And then I thought "well, what if there was something like reddit, that didn't do that ?"
I looked. I didn't find it. I decided it'd be a fun project to make it.
So, in a month or two (I'm still knocking out bugs that I'd be embarrassed to launch with) I'm going to launch https://blewit.net/ - blewit because (a) I think they did, and (b) because it's a double pun "blue it" as well as "blew it".
I've tried to fix all the things above, and then some.
- I've made upvotes/downvotes (which are and have always been "I agree with you" or the opposite) and "this is a cool post" into separate axes, with the latter being the important signal. (https://blewit.net/post/83555697458937856),
- I've made moderation always public with a reason, and a right of appeal to someone-who-isn't-the-moderator-who-you-annoyed. (https://blewit.net/post/83987003737112576)
- I've extended the ```code``` fence to allow different types of code, and enabled group-specific supported plugins to the WASM client that mean you can render (and play) music, see (and interact with) chemical structure models in 3D, or animations, or 3D models or graphs, or maps (https://blewit.net/sandbox). I intend to keep on adding these as the platform grows. Since they're plugins, you don't pay an enormous download cost, apart from when you use them.
- I made it have no tracking, no adverts, no hidden algorithms, no dark patterns at all. You get to manipulate your own feed, up/downvotes matter, and no-one is tracking you or selling your data. In fact I only ask for a username and password, not even an email address - we have no data (lol). We set a single, transitory, session-id cookie to stop you from having to log in too often. That's it.
Whether it works, well we'll see. It has to bootstrap first, which is always the hard part. I'm planning on targeting communities and getting things working well, group by group, rather than a pedestrian, mediocre universal experience. Example: the circuit-creation/simulation plugin for science.electronics.* will pretty much do anything ngSPICE will do... Online, in a forum :)
Look for a launch, in 6-8 weeks or so...
>but I stopped when they turned on "you must be logged in to use oldreddit". I typically was logged in, and I always used old.reddit.com, and you know, that's not the most terrible thing reddit has done, but for me it was the proverbial straw.
I have been a redditor for a long time. It was a single page scroller that was so dead that you could spend 15 minutes reading a linked article and when you hit the back button, the article was still right there on the page a few posts below where it had been.
A couple or three weeks ago I finally ran into the login block for old.reddit.com. I noticed that the login prompt appeared specifically because a user was attempting to browse reddit using old.red.... The redirection was in the URL for the login prompt. That sucked. It was particularly galling because anyone can still browse reddit.com (whatever that slop is) just by typing that URL with no login requirement. There is no obvious path to subreddits, etc if you go that way so it feels a lot like viewing a feed that is pure slop, with no real content.
I did the login for several days since I was actively working with other users on subs I visited regularly, answering questions, pointing to sources for parts or various technical documents, etc. Reddit to me was a place where I could apply some of my accumulated experience to help others who are just getting started understand how everything fits together. Under various active and inactive usernames I have quite a few long posts over the years.
I didn't often do any shit-posting but a couple weeks ago I found a comment that needed a reply on a sub that I rarely visited so I posted a typical reddit-style, near one-liner. As soon as I submitted I had a perma-ban flag appear and was logged out. In under a second. That sub was using an AI-based mod and the mod decided that my post violated part of reddit's ToS so I was immediately perma-banned.
I posted that comment while waiting on a reply in a different thread where I was working through a situation with a different user so from that point on, I could not respond to their updates. They saw the perma-ban and recommended I just make a new account. I decided that the ban was probably the best part of being a redditor today and could be a blessing in disguise.
As part of a perma-ban, you are allowed to file an appeal with meat-space mods. It is a one-time shot supposedly and if you fail, that is all she-wrote. I decided to attempt the perma-ban appeal as a test to see how I fared.
I read up on the process - lots of posts online about how to phrase the appeal so it is more likely to be successful, etc. No one that I can recall mentioned that the perma-ban appeal is limited to 250 characters. I'm a poster who has multiple posts that had to be broken into parts due to exceeding the 10k character/post limit so I had set up my appeal in the usual way, outlining why I posted what I posted, the origins of the post, etc.
I started typing all that in from memory, all flowing so well until suddenly there were no more characters echoed in the box and I saw the character limit. Now that's funny. I found myself needing to condense all that in a way that would convey all the relevant info and so I went back and forth for several minutes cutting straight to the chase. No begging, no contrition, no bullshit. Just a true statement about the comment that I posted with the observation that it did not violate ToS.
I submitted that appeal and went about my business for several days without visiting reddit at all. I was perma-banned and suddenly I had more free time. When I finally logged back in - old.reddit.... - I found a note from meat-space mods that my appeal was successful and the perma-ban had been lifted. I could resume browsing, posting, etc.
The only problem was that I couldn't do any of that under old.reddit... It simply didn't work at all. I can log in and look at all my post history but it is all on new.reddit. As soon as I flip to one of the old subs I am always on reddit.com or new.reddit.com etc. For me old reddit is dead.
That means that for me, reddit is dead. I am finally done with it.
I visited your site - blewit.net. I like what I see. I am deciding whether I would like to make an account. The map post is well executed. I like GIS stuff. I will be watching for a post here about your launch. This could satisfy my need to read daily.
Thanks for posting. Sorry for the long reply.
Those code block demos are pretty neat! Good luck with the launch