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Comment by iamnothere | Hacker News Reader

Sample size of one: this decision has resulted in me accessing Reddit exactly zero times since the implementation. And no I will not use the “new” UI.

This has actually been a time saver, and I haven’t missed it even for research. In fact it’s made me realize just how bad Reddit was as a source for research, these days. It’s all bots and activists with an axe to grind.

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I'm in the same boat. Not using reddit has resulted in time savings, but it comes also at a cost of losing a window into the world of people & their thoughts that I really valued. I have not yet found any place that acts as a front page of the internet, anywhere. I wonder if its even possible to get back to that in today's post-organic internet era, given the widely understood second order effects of using a platform as an instrument for dissemination of ideas/brands vs. organic content, and the suspicions that that awareness entails.

Even now, there are people running SMM account networks that simply take top or trending content on one platform, reformat it with AI, and post it in the same conversation on a separate platform-- effectively recreating the partial utility of a front page of the internet but only at the cost of inserting themselves as middle men who over time accrue gatekeeping power that is completely opaque from the outside. Not a new idea. Arguably an inevitable idea. It still sucks, though.

A new one will erupt eventually.

As someone who spends way too much time on reddit, before that I was someone who spent way too much time on twitter. And before that it was usenet.

Each time there may have been a rough patch when I didn't have a ready replacement, but eventually something grew to take its place in my heart.

Lemmy is OK, definitely a smaller and more select crowd though. Tildes is also decent but fairly low volume.

I think there may no longer be such a place as “the front page of the internet” given the divergence in ideologies over the years and the overall decrease in civility. You have to pick a tribe. Even within the Lemmyverse different instances defederate with each other over differences in opinion and policy.

Amatuer radio is interesting. It does remind me of the earlier wild west days of the internet. There are no bots, nothing commercial, and you can just “rag chew” with real people or do contesting where you try to reach further distances or make contacts in certain areas. Most of it is only as hard as you want to be but it’s such a vast and complex environment (licensed and unlicensed stuff). All of it is fun. Far enough away from computers that it’s all mostly (and technically always should be) a real person at the other end talking — but that will change soon enough I’m sure.

I probably use Reddit 1/10 as much as I used to as well. Kind of sad seeing Reddit going down the enshitification path that seems like most software and apps tend to do.

Same here. Went cold turkey when they blocked old.reddit. Surprisingly, even though I get my once in a while "fix" now from 9gag (warning: right-wing - racist, antisemite etc.) instead, overall, I too now waste less time on such things. I think they did us all a favour with their stupidity ...

The thing about 9gag is that 90% of the people on there are literal 14-year-old boys or have stopped developing mentally since that point. Even if you put aside the stuff that’s just disgusting: the misogyny, the racism, the antisemitism etc., the comments are full of people who are just intellectually or educationally incapable of proper arguments, yet who insist that the one thing they heard on TikTok about a topic is a universal truth.

I find it hard to stay away from a voyeuristic perspective, but I wish someone would take the damn site offline.

Yeah, I guess one of the thing I find interesting about that echo chamber is, "how much can it challenge my belief" (as it is in the opposite political spectrum to Reddit)? Can I really be brainwashed? I found that it indeed can subtly influence your thinking, and that was enlightening. Like you point out, it's a cesspool of things we won't talk about publicly because it is hurtful and violent. That "forbidden" fruit aspect is what makes it attractive to some, but also acts as a restraint for those of us not attracted to such stuff. Apart from that, a lot of popular content from Reddit is copy pasted there too, which Reddit should have anticipated - when an open society increases societal restrictions, many will move naturally try to find alternates, if not for social acceptance than to to practice their social freedom. Maybe if enough people migrate, it may change the the social nature of 9gag?

I also think the site is dumb, but when are we going to end this idea that everything we dislike needs to be removed from the internet? Is that permanent now? Because it wasn’t always like that.

I think Reddit is a cesspool of idiocy and propaganda too, but I don’t think it needs to be “taken offline”.

I can’t remember what this is called but there’s a name for it, where you subtly change the meaning of what I said so you can argue with it better.

“I wish someone would” is not the same as “it needs to be”. Racism, misogyny and antisemitism are not “idiocy and propaganda”. The fact you don’t think Reddit “needs to be ‘taken offline’” has no bearing on 9gag.

Reddit still has plenty of those things as well. As does HN! It may not be as concentrated as places like 4chan, but it’s there. (9gag is weak sauce compared to 4chan, as well.)

But anyway, I don’t really much of a difference between idle wishes and advocacy. Both empower the people who want to “sanitize” the internet.

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