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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been browsing Reddit’s mobile app in Popular mode just to see how the experience is for average redditors.

Unfortunately there’s enough interesting content that I’m not sure average people will even notice or care. And it’s painful to say that.

By “interesting” I mean interesting to the masses. /r/AITAH, /r/iamatotalpieceofshit, /r/therewasanattempt, /r/news… the list goes on.

Part of Reddit’s strength is that even with only a handful of subs, it still surfaces the most interesting content from those subs. The net effect is that people who aren’t a member of a community gone dark won’t really be affected.

At least they’ll see it, though. I had to scroll past many posts about the blackout, which isn’t nothing.

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Scrolling through the list of subreddits that are participating it became clear to me that a lot of the sort of places that facilitate a kind of repetitive mindless viral content churn stayed open. That's not really all that surprising. So in that way I think you're right, users who like that sort of thing probably won't notice much or care.

So the TikTok part of Reddit is still open for business?

I guess, I don't know much about TikTok beyond the stuff that showed up in subreddits that I wound up filtering.

I gotta say my home view and my popular view are obviously impacted by the protest. I think nearly all of the subreddits I subscribe to participated, so all I see is content in the subreddits I moderate (which are also shut down). Popular looks old & stale to me, so I turned off my filtering... which revealed a bunch of stuff I don't care about.

For me this is turning into a meditation about how new users are frequently impervious to the messages and signs intended to help them and instead often want a real person to spoon feed them the content of those messages and signs. In the future I'd really like improve the experience of new users but I am not sure how to politely encourage them to engage their brains.

I think you've got it. /r/worldnews, /r/news, /r/askreddit, /r/WTF, /r/games, /r/politics, all fairly large subs, all still up and running. Enough for that dopamine hit.

Some subs that didn't go completely dark are understandable, like /r/outoftheloop and /r/explainlikeimfive which have gone read-only so that readers can ask and get explanations of what's up.

But there are some surprising ones, like /r/programming. Maybe because it was created by /u/spez? Somewhat interestingly, he's also a mod of /r/outoftheloop.

r/games not going private is a massive let down. The userbase downvoted the thread saying they were staying open into oblivion.

I actually think this might be a good thing. If the people looking for modern social media (mindless scroll dopamine hits) stay on Reddit that's less noise for the rest of us who are looking for internet community. There's so much discourse about this right now, so many discussions about alternatives, the nature of internet community, etc. I'm hopeful we'll see a resurgence of smaller communities full of people who actually want to talk to each other, not just scroll mindless content.

Let them have Reddit, we can do better.

I'm confident that you are fully correct. I also believe that many of us were just looking for good alternatives and needed the correct motivation. Maybe there's another Orkut out there and we can truly dialogue once again.

Yeah, i just checked it out of curiosity and while some of the subreddits i usually skim aren’t present, there was still a lot of interesting content.

If those subreddits were to die off definitively I’d probably still go on reddit.

Sad to see those subreddits not participate. If things change and I'm back on Reddit, I'd love to get a list of subreddits that didn't participate and perma-block those.

Some are, even though they’re not private. /r/books is restricted but open, for example. Honestly it might have been a better idea for the plan to be open but restricted with an announcement, so that the announcement is all that anyone sees when they load popular.

Some are doing that, which I agree is a better approach. First thing I saw when loading Reddit was a bunch of those protest notices.

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