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Comment by rcfox | Hacker News Reader

It's disappointing that Reddit is now the go-to for answers. The language subreddits get flooded with questions akin to "where am I missing a semicolon?" and any interesting discussion or articles get drowned out.

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Reddit has it's own moderation problems. I've been banned from more sub-reddits in the last 6 months than the proceeding 14 years I've used the website.

The internet is fast becoming a collection of digital-fiefdoms.

Because a huge amount of traffic on the internet is spam and trolling garbage. Humans really don't work well in the context of anyone anywhere can show up and start causing problems. We generally start putting up castle walls because we tire of the bullshit.

That said, Reddit has become very ban happy.

I found out you can be banned by proxy. Post a comment on one sub that the moderator or another sub doesn't like and your get instantly banned off that other sub. I posted some comment on a covid related sub about a year ago and got instantly banned from 50+ subreddits, most I've never interacted with before.

more and more you have to treat "reddit" as if it were an "internet" and have a separate account for every subreddit or group thereof.

Careful. I did this more or less by accident, with a main account, a porn account, and a goof off account. I didn't maintain a list of which ones had been banned from where and there were subscription overlaps.

One morning all of them - including the one that was 9 years old and had awards from participating in the first ever reddit gifts - got banned for "ban evasion".

Now I just make a new one every few months and distrust any account that can survive for more than a few years without getting banned.

So they encourage throwaways, but also ban you for using them.

meanwhile, there are tons of people who are relentlessly ban evading, posting threats and harassing material where reddit won't do anything about about.

Worst of all worlds.

And yea, that's why read-only on reddit this days and feel no desire to contribute.

I thought about 'sub based accounts' where a user name only posted in a particular sub and didn't care about what happened in the other ones. Then I thought "I don't give this much of a shit about reddit to do all that work".

>I posted some comment on a covid related sub about a year ago and got instantly banned from 50+ subreddits

Trust me, you aren't missing out on anything by not being able to post on r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/Chonkers, or r/FunkoPops

> Humans really don't work well in the context of anyone anywhere can show up and start causing problems.

I'm not sure that's true, I think it is just an artifact of western society, and in particular our acceptance of mass marketing.

What ruined mail? Marketing. What ruined TV? Marketing. What ruined phones? Marketing. What ruined the web? Marketing. Twice. What ruined search? You get the picture.

Marketing is all about creating a need so that people will buy your shit, and it does that by making you feel insecure, yet entitled. The psychological damage from having our attention constantly hijacked by this shit has caused severe damage to society as a whole over time.

Marketing is a contributor to ruining things, but so is "shitty little edgelords who just want to start trouble, break things, troll people, 'shitpost', or some combination of the above."

And that's before you even get to the semi-related issue of "Nazis and other scum will use any slightly-popular medium without iron-clad moderation to spread their filth."

Thing is, if it weren't for marketing I'm not sure this idea of "spreading filth" would even be much a thing, but marketing is such a social contagion that it has destroyed our ability to relate to people in a way other than as a means to promote something.

I posted a story which provided unique background from a reputed web site on staffing decisions in one political party. It got pulled with two formal reasons both obviously wrong e.g. me having headline edited which was not the case and it also did not change in between. I took it up and wrote a polite request even providing reasoning why it was a good fit (which was not the reason it was pulled). Next thing happened was a two word message: "off topic"..

I feel the discussions are becoming narrower and diversity of topics and thoughts is lost. Sometimes I think there is a bullying dynamic at work - unable to stem the tide of astroturfing and being flooded by the story of the day moderators are working on the boundaries of their communities where the quieter voices sometimes speak up. And moderators have to watch those - that is their role - but most stories are just small stories with only little life in them. Why squash them - time will rank them down - so why?

I'm not sure if there wasn't a time it was a collection of fiefdoms honestly, at least for the social web.

My reference point is mostly 2000s era internet forums, and that was certainly a time of admins of forums going on power trips over their little meaningless slice of the internet.

it’s pretty much the other extreme to SO. reddit is highly resistant to communal knowledge accumulation. everything is temporary, everything decays, and the continual churn of participants combined with a crap search engine ensures that ephemerality reigns eternally. Stack Overflow has spent most of its lifespan trying to do the opposite, and what we’re left with is this. antibodies attacking the host

I don't know what kinda person actually considers Reddit a go-to for answers. It's absolutely abysmal for that sort of thing. SO isn't perfect but it's leagues above any subreddit I've ever used. Almost all subreddits succumb to getting too popular (if they're good to start with) and eventually the amount of actual help you get from them becomes exceedingly rare in my experience.

People complain about those questions being off topic on SO, and also complain when they have to endure them other places. You can't win, heh.

Reddit is targeting late 2023 for an IPO. The end quality end is nigh for them as well.

Those can be answered by ChatGPT. Only question is where to integrate it into peoples' workflows. Maybe into the post-creation interface? Maybe into the SO question-creation dialog.

Interesting... I wonder if this is where knowledge sites gravitate to? Of course if the AI isn't smart enough to answer the question without it's training not having covered it, I'm not sure it would work...

What would be really cool is an AI interview. "So this looks like the same problem, do the answers here help?" "Oh, why not?" "I see, so what else have you tried?" "I see we still haven't resolved the issue, so I'm going to rewrite this discussion in our standard format and post it for our expert community to solve."

Something like that. Especially when the Chatbot then corrects the small usual mistakes it already knows by itself (as ChatGPT can).

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