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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

I agree it's not perfect but we seriously need a reddit alternative. The community there is simply too toxic and I've had to quit it. If there were a HN like community centered around regular news aggregation I would be sooo happy. As is, it's impossible to find a news feed I trust anymore. Google news is infiltrated with fake clickbait nonsense, and I wont even get started on Facebook.

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> The community there is simply too toxic and I've had to quit it.

Which community? There are thousands of subreddits. Are you talking about the people who use the default front-page subreddits?

All of 4chan is one community. All of Twitch is one community. All of reddit is one community.

Youtube sucks because it has videos that pander to kids. Twitter sucks because it because it's because talking about their mundane life. Facebook sucks because it's people sharing fake news.

In social media, whenever you're having a bad time, it's most like your fault. When you say X sucks, You're really saying that your friends / the people you're following / the communities you visit suck.

That's like saying a nation is one community. It's not. It (usually) shares a language and some common values, but otherwise there's greater diversity within a nation than between nations.

Still, there's a lot of truth in "When you say X sucks, You're really saying that your friends / the people you're following / the communities you visit suck". It literally takes seconds to join or leave an on-line community. On the Internet it's more true than anywhere else that you get the communities you deserve.

FYI That's OPs point. They are saying all those social media sites are the same to prove the point that they aren't. As evidenced by their next paragraph.

I use the front page because I'm interested in what's popular. But someone's angry "f--k (politician here)" rant isn't my idea of entertainment, even if I don't like the politician, likewise various violence/creepy stuff that makes the front page. Reddit doesn't let me block subs.

In my experience, you get out of reddit what you put in.

With an account you can unsubscribe from specific subreddits, which I have done to clean up my feed from angry/creepy/violent stuff and I get posts that I am very interested in, primarily from smaller subreddits about hobbies, sports, cool technology, etc.

I have an account, and am unsubscribed from subreddits I do not like. There's no way to visit /r/all without seeing all the political hate, creepypasta, and violence.

Then don't visit /r/all?

I'm not sure what the issue is here.

As mentioned: I'm interested in what's popular.

As mentioned upthread: therein your problem lies.

I've been a frequent Reddit user for 7+ years. I honestly don't remember the last time I've ever been to r/all except when some massive drama hits and I want to see what the fuss is about. I'm subscribed to dozens of subreddits so my default homepage is never wanting for interesting content. Because I've unsubscribed from r/news, r/worldnews, r/politics, I never see Reddit discussions on the news of the day. On the other hand, I greatly enjoy the occasional r/politicaldiscussion and r/neutralpolitics thread that show up on my homepage.

And I'm a user who sometimes seeks drama, that is, r/subredditdrama is one of my guilty pleasures. And I still don't get much of a toxic vibe.

That said, I also don't check r/programming very often. The discussions there seem much more blowhard than their equivalent threads on HN. So in other words, there already is a decent alternative to Reddit: HN. Twitter is also pretty decent.

/r/programming's virtue has definitely faded, but you can almost make up for it by subscribing to the dominant subreddit for all your languages of interest. Reddit's big enough that most of those are pretty active on a day-by-day basis, or hour-by-hour in the biggest cases.

you seek drama and you don't mention r/drama?

Ironically I hadn't even realized that r/drama existed until at some point I noticed it being mentioned in r/subredditdrama threads. I'm not sure what the history between those 2 subs is (r/subredditdrama has 270K subscribers vs. r/drama's 32K). But r/drama seems to involve a lot more shitposting and personal-scale conflicts, e.g. a Prius driver having a history of anal-retentive commentary. Whereas r/subredditdrama is for when an entire forum goes apeshit. Or at least several impassioned commenters.

I think the difference in quality is actually more of a testament to how the mods run the community, even though both r/drama and r/subredditdrama have large overlap. But the latter seems to have instituted a culture of determined understatement, so threads have titles like "A visitor to /r/JapanTravel is adrift after he discovers that Japanese girls don't care about him". Whereas r/drama's current top post points to a Twitter account and has the title, "Orange ameriburger goes full retard...again"

Why do you have to visit r/all ?

Already answered elsewhere.

Look here, you can filter subs from /r/all: http://i.imgur.com/YIEduLP.png

If only reddit allows you to customise what you see... oh wait it does.

I hate Reddit; but what you've brought up is simply a feature not a bug:

> /r/all

It includes all the subreddit potentially; that's the point. Make a metareddit if you want tighter control; or tailor your FP

And once you've spent all of that time making reddit meaningful... there's virtually no new content, because you realize that the site is basically an echo chamber (not that HackerNews is much better in this regard, but eh.)

Reddit was done once they refused to put the jackboot to the hate communities over fears of the Digg-like user revolt, letting them fester and take over other subreddits. It's literally impossible to go a day on reddit without running into some racist diatribe, even if you go to the far-flunged reaches. Even /r/linux is completely unreadable.

We have different opinions, but the same conclusion. I haven't found Reddit relavent in years and they still don't turn a profit.

Nothing against it or regular users, just not for me anymore

Rule #1: don't visit /r/all.

Also, you say you're interested in what's popular. And this is exactly the source of your problem. What's generally popular is what appeals to the widest audience in general population. And that is exactly what you see - "political hate, creepypasta and violence". It's the same in YouTube comments, it's the same in all general-purpose discussion boards. Lowest common denominator.

If you seek sanity, you have to start frequenting domain-specific boards, especially those with actual moderation. Be it Hacker News, topical subreddits, or communities around particular bloggers. People there are still regular human beings, but community focus does wonders to the quality of discourse.

Is all of that sad? Yes. Welcome to the human fucking race.

It does actually. You can exclude subs from /r/all.

There is also the excellent setting "don't show me submissions after I've downvoted them".

Click once to mark something as the sort of thing you don't want to see and to hide it!

Not according to /r/help:

https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/44498b/how_to_hide_or...

> there is no basic Reddit feature which will hide or filter a subreddit from the /r/All page.

Well, the help is wrong then: http://i.imgur.com/YIEduLP.png

That page is out of date. They added filtering for everyone in November.

Everyone has a different front page, and it's up to you to tune it to make it work best for you. A few popular communities on Reddit may be toxic, but I'd say the vast majority isn't.

You realize that you can make your own front page called a multi reddit right?

Yes. I want to see popular shit from all all across reddit. Including subreddits I don't know about. There's no way to do that without seeing all the anger/violence/etc.

Filter those ones out?

Not possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14351421

Reddit is basically NNTP with a special client that offers a "here's top-rated stuff from everything" option. Which for anyone who used NNTP, should be self-evidentally a thing to be avoided. But like NNTP, some of the groups are fantastic.

How does Voten purport to solve those problems? It sounds like less of a Reddit problem, and more of a Gabriel's Theory† problem.

And given that currently you cannot create your own channels on Voten (subreddits), it sounds like the moderation problem is going to be an even bigger nightmare than on Reddit.

† https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

There are thousands of subreddits, sure, but still you end up with an identifiable overarching "reddit" culture. There are subreddits that don't share this, due to strong moderation, small size, or niche/polarizing subject matter. But in most subreddits, mentioning a broken limb, for example, will inevitably generate a low-effort allusion to a certain gross story that is prominent in the collective memory of the site. A positive reference to feminism will likely spur someone to try to start a flame war. Even if you unsubscribe from the defaults, the site-wide zeitgeist stills filter down and influences conversations across individual sub-communities.

Maybe, but isn't that more generally culture's fault and not Reddit's fault?

A site can do something about its users' behavior more easily than they can do something about the larger culture.

I hope you're right, because so far it looks like Voten doesn't have any community moderators at all.

Is it just me or are seemingly random comments getting downvoted heavily as of late? I don't see anything particularly wrong with this one.

I have noticed and I agree. HN is at the top of the list of sites I wish I had log data for. It would be a very interesting week of hacking looking for trends.

This is pretty much dead on why I avoid reddit

Since this is project is coming out of the voat.co community, I expect the community will be more toxic than Reddit's, not less.

EDIT: The article implies a connection, but as cracell pointed out, there is in fact no association, even historical or in personnel.

Lead developer says it has nothing to do with voat here https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/5qhz99/...

'The whole thing is based on voting which is why it has "vote" in it. It has nothing to do with voat.co. I guarantee that'

No thanks.

Ah. The article drew a connection, which is why I assumed that. But googling the founders, it appears you are correct.

Voat has a couple of issues.

First, it took in a lot of people from banned subreddits (/r/coontown, fatpeoplehate, etc.) Unlike the great Digg 4.0 to Reddit migration, they didn't a huge chunk of Reddit. They just got the most controversial.

Second, It tried to be a full Reddit clone with tons of subverses. Reddit started out with just a few categories and slowly expanded out to user generated subreddits. That has to grow slowly over time with your userbase. Since Voat started with that, it has a ton of abandoned subverses that one one posts in anymore.

Voat is a pretty bad cespool of hatred right now. There's occasionally good stuff on there, but a lot of it is conservative garbage. People who have tried to turn it around are so outnumbered that they just leave.

With that said, Voat is open source (written in C# I believe), just like Reddit.

The problem is a "Reddit alternative" will naturally attract the groups that no longer feel at home on Reddit. It seems inevitable that any alternative will be more toxic and/or hyper-moderated.

Scott Alexander recently covered this phenomenon here:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative...

(see in particular section III of the article)

Voat is actually far less moderated, though, and honestly, almost nothing is censored there.

As will almost any site specifically marketed as an alternative to a major one. You market your site as a freer, more fair alternative to another social site, and yes, you'll likely draw in the people that were hated/seen as controversial on the original. See also a lot of Twitter alternatives (like Gab) if you want other examples.

Don't see how this even on the way to being a viable alternative. It appears to have started by already replicating many of the same toxic subs and doesn't appear to be doing anything systematically different which could help prevent build a less toxic community.

I think the problem is that anytime a group gets that large, it's going to have pockets of toxic users. So unless the plan is to forever jump ship from one product to the next, best bet is to find yourself smaller subreddits to make your home.

I have no idea if it's entertaining and they want me to sign up before I can know. No thanks.

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