Now Reddit are coming for the individual personal subreddits

See you in Discord.. after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community.. then read through how to join.. which chat room do I type some obscure message into to prove I read the rules in order for a bot to approve me and wait 15 minutes before getting into a welcome chat room where I now need to introduce myself? How do I get access to what it was I was looking for?

God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place.

Wake me up when I can google site:discord.com

This neatly summarizes why anybody should care. I found Reddit to be very like the glory days of Usenet. There were lots of bad places, but then the niche content was excellent.

It would be a pity to lose Reddit. I don't know if that's what must happen: it's not up to me.

I don't think discord is a valid replacement. One of the best parts of reddit was the easily browsable/searchable Forum like threading. Where there are communities for a given theme, and threads branching off of that group. Discord is great for realtime chat, but a significant pain for async conversations. In general for information access I personally don't like to search through chats because the threading is too shallow, and conversations are had at the root, aka group level.

kbin.social and lemmy.world are starting to get traction in the "fediverse". I think they're probably far more viable long term solutions to the reddit problem. That would never have been needed if Reddit didn't insist on shooting their own foot.

> which chat room do I type some obscure message into to prove I read the rules in order for a bot to approve me and wait 15 minutes before getting into a welcome chat room where I now need to introduce myself?

This phase was really irritating, but luckily discord realised that was needed as a feature so made a first-party feature where you accept the rules / TOS for a given server.

The bots also got better, so usually you just need to respond with an emoji for automatic role assignment in discords where that matters too.

I actually believe this is one of the reasons Reddit (and its alternatives) will never reach their peaks again. Too many want to take, not many want to give their valuable information.

What this essentially boils down to, is AI will then process everything easily accessible and "low quality" (your tech purchase recommendations for example), and everything more valuable will be locked behind communities that invest resources into creating barriers to entry.

This isn't new of course, Patreon is an example of this. Discord also has private channels too, to indicate this is a common pattern that will only increase. Reddit knows this as well, hence their rushed attempts at locking down access.

Basically, get used to having to put in work for information you want and can't find through chatbots!

> Wake me up when I can google site:discord.com

I agree. I'm not a huge superfan of Reddit, but it does occasionally have nuggets of great user-generated content. Moving that content over to some site that is walled off from the Internet and un-searchable would be a huge blow for the open Internet.

Reddit is an open sewer, but I can at least stand over an open sewer and look at what's in it. Discord and Facebook and their ilk are underground vaults.

I'm happy it's happening. Putting ownership back in the community's hands is a huge win for the freedom and diversity of the internet.

I agree, but it's a lot more work, and each individual federated instance has a lot of control and data. It's definitely better, but you'd still need to migrate content if your instance owner goes ape.

Too bad we can't (won't?) all just go back to Usenet.

You're right that discord is shit, but the web used to be filled with forums that did everything reddit does just as well, but simply were not as popular.

Consolidating all of those forums in a single place was nice. I'll credit reddit with that. They also eventually implemented their own image/video hosting after imgur became the very evil it was created to put right, and while reddit's image/video presentation is obnoxious in its own ways it was still an improvement and a valuable feature that they shipped with success.

Other than that, reddit didn't bring anything new to the table. Worse, the things it should have improved on the technical side have been largely neglected. Search on reddit has never not been useless. The UI has always been a mess (and the redesign is so much worse), and mod tools were so bad that third parties ended up creating solutions while reddit did nothing.

The best thing reddit had going for it, and the thing that caused it to become popular in the first place, was the freedom it gave users, but after years of increasing censorship, a total lack of integrity in how they enforce rules, and an unwillingness to implement features users and mods have been asking for a whole lot of reddit was hoping an alternative would come along long before any of this most recent drama.

Reddit had a good thing, but neglect and mismanagement ruined it. They're just coasting on inertia and that slows with every act of petty bullshit users run into. A lot of redditors are just looking for a safe place to jump off so they continue their conversations in peace.

>after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community

never had to give them my phone number. Depends on the server, I suppose.

And as someone used to exploring niche communities: TBH, it's not as out of the way to google as I thought. say I want to find the godot discord group (if they have one)... yup first entry, can find a public Godot discord. Maybe not official, but I wouldn't google for an official discord so much as find community link on a website.

>God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place.

TBH Reddit isn't exactly better off here, despite being searchable. People don't search so that's why you get subs asking the same questions every week.

>This neatly summarizes why anybody should care.

if people value it, they would move to a site that cares about it. But it seems people value community the most, and the only options with large community is Discord, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok (maybe a half dozen others, but not many more than what I listed).

You pick your poison. Discord is definitely the best of those alternatives in my eyes. FB/Instagram/Tiktok aren't meant at all for text, and Twitter has never been for long form discussion.

Agreed, people chose once again to centralize instead of diversfy, and as history has shown time and time again: we're paying for it right now.

At this point I blame no one but the users. Clearly the layman just wants a quick place to chat, so I understand why Discord is popular. The masses don't care about searching up info years later.

The one advantadge I can (not so) proudly say I've learned from years of digging through the mucks of the internet for various kinds of NSFW media. You don't get the info easily, no one wants to advertise it even if you wanted to. sometimes the info isn't even for free. You either spend a lot of time finding some truly backwater forums with nuggest of gold, or pay someone who's dug that deep to curate for you.

If people don't want to make the next reddit... well welcome to my world.

Centralization removes a massive barrier though. We want content, and control over that content, distributed and preserved (usually), but we also want everything in one easy to access location. Having to find out about, sign up for, and separately visit 100+ unique websites running phpBB, vBulletin, or something else, then logging into each site with their own usernames and passwords several times a day is a lot of work. Subscribing to 100+ subreddits and hitting the refresh button on one website was easy and mostly worked pretty well. A single interface/client/login for everything is ideal. What we really need is a new usenet.

The bigger issue, UX signup and discoverability issues aside, is that moving from Reddit to Discord is just trading one capricious corporate owner for another.

> Consolidating all of those forums in a single place was nice.

Was it, though?

Sure, I'm not going to minimize the benefits of discoverability, avoiding the need for users to create yet another account, and taking the burden of infra maintenance off of someone who'd otherwise have to stand up a server to host phpBB or whatever.

But ultimately we don't strictly need these things. Isolated/fragmented web forums were doing just fine before Reddit came along. Maybe adding a little friction to the process of a first post to a new forum is a feature, not a bug.

> Reddit had a good thing, but neglect and mismanagement ruined it.

Yes and no. Ultimately, any time you hitch your community to someone else's platform, you incur the large risk that the platform owners will make changes that you don't like. It's not even "neglect and mismanagement": Reddit's owners have been doing what they believe increases the value of Reddit. Whether they're wrong or right about what changes accomplish that ultimately doesn't matter: those changes might not be what makes users and moderators happy, and users and moderators don't have much power to affect change. This protest/blackout may end up achieving the desired effect, but think of the time, energy, and effort wasted around all of it. Better to spend that time working on solutions that allow communities to own their slice of the platform, and have final say as to what happens with it.

> We want content, and control over that content

in context of reddit, we clearly do not value that control at all. these last few weeks have shown how much control we truly have.

>Having to find out about, sign up for, and separately visit 100+ unique websites running phpBB, vBulletin, or something else, then logging into each site with their own usernames and passwords several times a day is a lot of work.

we solved that problem decades ago, though. I think even Reddit has RSS feed support (well, for now. I don't think it's native). I think leaving the centralizing to an underlying format is a better approach than expecting a benevelent dictator to always look into the best interests of the user while also seeking profits (or alternatively, an eccentric billionaire who cares not about profits).

Some inconvenience of signing up with an account is short term, and not exactly a huge barrier to begin with. I made 3 new accounts this week on various alternatives, barely took 10 minutes total.

I’ve tried to use discord a million times and always fail because of this.

> if people value it, they would move to a site that cares about it.

Admins value single login and anti-spam. Plain and simple.

I am perfectly capable of running a foum, bulletin board, Discourse, whatever.

What I am NOT capable of handling are secure logins and anti-spam. Everybody is heading to Discord simply because Discord handles those two problems for you.

The problem is that centralization allows you amortize the cost of handling those two issues. Decentralized systems that don't handle those two things will never catch on.

Then host your own instance. That's actually more work, but worth it if you don't trust whomever is hosting your community. Should become fairly straightforward once you have parties taking care of the technical details (there probably are already some).

Not sure what else is 'a lot more work'?

> > Consolidating all of those forums in a single place was nice.

> Was it, though?

The great thing about Reddit is how it removes almost any friction from creating and joining new „forums“. The less friction or transaction cost you have the better. Without Reddit I’m not sure we’d have dedicated forums of people posting their grilled cheese sandwiches or Babylon 5 GIFs

Indeed.

Plus, I subscribe to about 30 subreddits, most of which pretty niche. Could I replace them with forums? Sure, and I do have fond memories from phpbb forums around the turn of the millenium, even moderating a few as a teen.

But then I'd have to check about 5-10 different forum sites daily, each with subforums for different specific topics. It adds friction.

It's much more convenient just opening reddit whenever I have a few minutes to scroll my feed and see what's up in my niche communities.

Reddit also gives the power to users to create niche communities. R/xbiking comes to mind, which is about a very specific bicycling subculture consisting of using vintage mountain bike frames from the 80s and 90s with a mix of modern and vintage parts to create cool all around bikes... Sort of. Anyways, to my knowledge this subculture did not exist anywhere before Reddit, and I can hardly see how it could have sprung up on bikeforums.net, for example. Petitioning the forums admins for a new subforum for a community that hardly existed would have been difficult, and the sort of posts R/xbiking sees would probably have been closed as offtopic in other subforums. Much easier to create and organically grow a new community on Reddit.

Personally, after being a bit reticent, I am now hopeful for fediverse based solutions (kbin and Lemmy notably) to replace this.