The only people I’ve ever known who actually thought Reddit ever really mattered was people in the HN sphere. Anecdata, but still. In terms of value per minute spent, it’s the same tier of slop as TikTok or Instagram, and I think most ordinary people hold that same view.
The organizations/nation states/whatever who astroturf on reddit disagree with you. It definitely matters in shaping opinions. It's not as influential as tiktok of course, but that doesn't mean it's not influential.
For mass shaping tiktok is probably more effective, but Reddit probably shapes people more deeply, since there's actual discussion.
I think people are more critical in this discussion though, so that an apparent consensus may be interpreted by the user as the thread being bot-infested rather than there being a consensus. Thus it may be harder to get a result there, and the really interesting people that you may want to affect might actually be immune because they approach the medium as critically as it should be.
Also r/sverige r/sweden r/italy are very one sided. The right wing governments of those countries are finally now having some useless words about israel, but it will take a long time before the mods adapt.
/r/Sverige is absolutely astroturfed, but if you ignore the obvious astroturfers you can have real discussion there, because you won't be banned.
/r/Sweden bans people, but is less astroturfed and you can still have real discussion there, except when the drug-liberals (for Americans speakers, think drug-libertarians) and other goons come out of their hiding holes.
I don't think either subreddit cares about Israel stuff at all, and they certainly don't care about what any Swedish government thinks. In both, everyone gets to have their say, whether he's Israeli public diplomacy or Qatari public diplomacy, although bots will of course downvote, and Reddit itself will sometimes remove comments.
Look the reality is yes Instagram and TikTok have extremely problematic incentives built into their products. But they're also remarkably useful, entertaining, and fun products too. Both are true.
Do you think multi-billion-user products can exist without "slop"? What do you think the average person wants to consume? The equivalent of salad? Have you met the average person?
I think people have fundamental misconceptions of the average person's desire.
> The only people I’ve ever known who actually thought Reddit ever really mattered was people in the HN sphere.
They said the same thing about Quora and 3d TV.
That being said, TikTok and Instagram matter. Reddit probably matters more because it's so easy for motivated people and corporations to manipulate discussions on it; it's even weaker than Wikipedia.
50x as many people read Reddit than post on Reddit, and 10x as many people as read Reddit have gotten their opinions indirectly from people passing on stuff they (can't remember that they) saw on Reddit (but think they learned somewhere legitimate.)
I find this perspective bizarre. Though I'm not happy about it all being centralized, the closest thing we have these days to the very niche phpBB forums of the 2000s is various subreddits focused on very specific topics. Scrolling through the front page is slop, sure, but whenever I'm looking for perspectives on a niche topic, searching for "<topic> reddit" is the first thing I do. And I know many people without any connection to the software industry who feel the same way.
Major advertisers are trying to figure out Reddit now, but it's a mixed bag and the costs are high compared to other platforms. It's no longer a niche.
> In terms of value per minute spent, it’s the same tier of slop as TikTok or Instagram
Insane take. Reddit hosts deep threaded discussions on almost any topic imaginable. In its prime it was the best forum on the internet. There’s a reason people commonly add “reddit” to the end of their search queries.
Unfortunately it feels like the community has gotten much dumber after they banned third party apps and restricted API access. It’s also lost almost all of its Aaron Swartz style hacktivist culture.
Reddit, in its prime, was incredible and beloved by almost everyone I know (most of which are far outside the HN sphere)
There are still many around - most of them die because admins give up or users leave - if you actually miss them it should be easy to find some for your interests
I would love to have some directory with all kinds of active (PHP) web forums. That was the heyday of the open web for me.
Do you have any tips on how to specifically search for these forums? Without just googling for topics and browsing hours to find some. When I think about it, just googling/searching might be the only way.
I have no idea how anyone could have seriously tried to use reddit and be on HN and come to that conclusion. Yes some of the reddit defaults are slop but many clearly have significantly more value than short form video, and that's before you start discussing the niche communities that live there.
Complete assclown behavior throughout. It would be one thing if this had been going for for a month or two, maybe a quarter or two… but ten years?! They’re clearly fucking you over out of either malice and/or incompetence, and by allowing it to go on, you’re politely enabling them to do this bad behavior to someone else’s business.
If you feed stray dogs, you end up with a neighborhood full of dogshit everywhere you step. Bill them; if they don’t pay, talk to an attorney.
Most people visit the same half dozen websites over and over anyways. Websites are eventually going to be an artifact of an old medium as we move to like cybernetics and AR glasses and brain implants and whatever else. All that stuff in websites will be forgotten
I have read that some deaf people do not want cochlear implants because their deafness is part of who they are, their identity. They don't want that taken away.
Because we're a post-competence society. Very little useful data will be gained by the operators of these bots. They don't work, and nobody cares they don't work. We're doing everything cargo-cult now. We're building giant machines that do nothing but spew smoke into the air, because that's what they did in the Industrial Revolution and it brought prosperity, didn't it?
I would argue that’s a driver to my point. How many people are never going to visit the source website when Llama can give me a detailed summary of what I need in a few hundred milliseconds? I would consider that in the same category of forgotten. I could’ve been more clear in my other comment.
If a website is not financially dependent on search traffic, they can block all scrapers with a paywall, and their content will be missing from generic LLMs.
If a website is financially dependent on search traffic, they can go out of business due to loss of traffic to LLMs, and their content will disappear everywhere.
If the majority of websites fall into the latter category, LLMs would be left with old/archive longform content, plus micro content from social media.
If social media (e.g. X.AI) takes their data private for vertical integration with payments and internal LLM, their content will be missing from generic LLMs.
Bluesky is riddled with pornography, even with the strictest settings enabled. I genuinely don’t feel comfortable scrolling any of the curated feeds in a public place except for my direct “Following” only feed.
Not sure how big of a priority this is for the team that runs it, but I would probably use it 20x more if it was ran competently.
That hasn't been my experience with it, and I'm curious as to what usage pattern gets that result other than intentionally following accounts that post pornography. My account that follows and posts tech and general interest stuff gets tech stuff and politics in its discover feed. My account that posts bird photography and follows photographers gets photographs of animals and landscapes, and politics in its discover feed.
It's politics I can't avoid there, not pornography.
Yeah, I can confirm that I have to go out of my way to find anything NSFW on any of my feeds (even while following multiple artists who occasionally post some risqué drawings), whereas politics are unavoidable.
Granted, I'm probably part of the problem, since I do post (and repost) some political stuff every once in awhile, but still.
I should also note I have adult content set to allowed and all moderation categories set to warn or show, nothing set to hide. I can't recall seeing any porn at all outside of a couple searches meant to test the moderation settings.
Realistically? Taxes and tax enforcement. That’s really the only consistent and persistent way to change the incentives of the world’s economies. In most developed economies, the ultra wealthy are able to avoid paying their fair share, and the same goes for large corporations as well.
Without fairness, there’s really no easy way to talk about strategy.
I don't get how this phrase has got ao much traction from the people who are in support of various social safety net programs that are specifically designed to benefit those who don't pay their fair share.
If you and I split a pizza and I pay for none but eat half, is that fair? Even if I'm poor and your rich, that's not fair.
It might be right, it might be good but it's certainly not fair.
In the context of politicians rallying their base, it's meant to insinuate the actual antithesis of it's normal meaning. Furthermore, it's a subjective word that means different things to different people so politicians can appeal to everyone's internal definition of fair, which is usually making everyone that makes more money than them pay more.
It's a political slogan. It adds nothing to the actual discourse but it does get people out to vote!
I guess the only "intentionally obtuse" part of my comment was the "I don't get how this phrase has got so much traction..." part.
The "ultra-wealthy" and "corporations" pay plenty of taxes, they just pay it significantly different than you do so that if you want to compare W2s, it looks wrong but that's another disingenuous tool to con you into voting.
Remember: every comment on here is implicitly directed to dang, and every link is implicitly approved of by dang.
This is really his website at this point. The rules are mainly just his tools for shaping the content of discussions and submissions to his liking.
A decade ago it was different. I mean, he was still way overbearing and biased, but I don’t think it really had the same power-steering effect on the shapes of discussions as it does today. Over time, this is where we’ve come to.
dang, we should maybe set aside ONE day where you're allowed to just let loose and blast us all with zero suppression on your end. April 1st ...? :D /s
I happen to know first hand that the thread is not going quite to dang's liking at the moment. I'm hoping it improves, but people are having a hard time sticking to the technical and security aspects.
Actually we specifically re-upped the thread and turned off all the software penalties (such as the flamewar detector) and user flags that were affecting its rank.
In as few words as possible, JIRA, Agile, shareholders.
Most programmers don’t really seem to understand that programming isn’t really their job. It’s an illusion. Their job is to create value to the shareholders. That’s not really that much fun, and once the joy of writing and reading code is slowly squeezed away from their position is when those with sanity still intact start thinking “Man, I ought to get the fuck up out of here and find a real job or something.” The really lucky ones are outdoorsy folks that can afford to do the homesteading thing, or are willing to forego the immense compensation that tech work so often allures them with.
Just my two cents. I was blessed to retire in my thirties, so I could be entirely out of touch, though I hear many things.
I think "back to the land" movements have existed as long as there have been cities. But a job sitting at a desk all day working on a virtual product that probably won't be used in a few years just really ramps up the effect.
