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Reddit matters, unfortunately.
When reddit came out in 2006, I was instantly enthralled. I loved the branched conversation style over single-threaded forums like PHPBB that dominated the web before. It was a new architecture for conversation, a better one. Plus, it had a smart, techie community that was fun to discuss things with.
Fast forward to today, and the world loves reddit. It's ranked as a top-10 website by traffic. Reddit is the default place to find an intelligent discussion on any niche topic. Whenever I have a medical issue, or I want to explore a new piece of technology, I go to Reddit. When I want product reviews for a pair of leather boots, I go to Google search and type "Best men's leather boots reddit". The cutting edge LLMs are being trained on reddit content. It's an important piece of the foundation of web content.
Which is unfortunate that it's moderated so poorly, and that policy comes from the top down. You know what I mean. themotte.org is one of several diaspora communities that fled reddit due to its heavy-handed, leftist moderation.
It's incredibly frustrating to use. My politics are somewhat esoteric but definitely of the right. On an occasion I'm baited into a conversation with political valence and I'll state a right-wing argument, and more often than not my account gets banned. On X, I saw screenshots of an /r/askReddit post "Republicans, why are you voting for Kamala this time?" and it had had thousands of upvotes and comments. The equivalent self-post "Democrats, why are you voting for Trump?" was banned with zero comments. If a thread is allowed to live for a few hours that draws popular heterodox views, it results in the inevitable thread lock and thousands of deleted comments to prevent "hate"
From my memory, the leftward drift of reddit seems to have occurred over the last 10 years. It hit an inflection point with the election of Trump and the ban of /r/TheDonald. It accelerated again since 2020 with BLM. That was the year that the TERFs were banned en masse (a community that mattered to me, as it helped me get over my own trans-dreaming and be happy with my gender).
Reddit's politics reflect the fact that the company is based in San Francisco. But it is left of center for San Francisco, which puts it far, far to the left of the nation.
And it's a shame! I'd love a higher-quality general purpose discussion forum. The world needs it. When Elon liberated X, that provided an important venue for free speech. But X optimizes for a high-addiction feed of quick information bites. It doesn't allow for as in-depth discussion and community building.
What would such a forum look like? I have some ideas:
It would maintain the threaded format beloved by so many
It would be seeded by a high quality community, such as that found here or on LessWrong
It would have some sort of governance body that would maintain high quality of moderation for the main subs
The easiest, but not cheapest way to liberate Reddit would be to find a billionaire backer to buy it. It's a public company and its marketcap is a hair under $10 billion. The other alternative would be to try to get an alternative off the ground, perhaps building on active and healthy diaspora communities. It would be possible, for example, to give new users credit for karma they have earned on themotte or LessWrong. Selfishly, I would love a forum where I could ask questions to the high-functioning on-the-spectrum folks that populate these places. Reddit without the bottom half of its IQ spectrum would be a superior place for discussing nootropics, health, AI, and similar topics.
I'm a computer programmer. I care about providing community discussion forums. I've spent a good chunk of my life on them. I'm kinda bored at my day job and looking for a new adventure. What do you think?
I think Reddit is a more sophisticated psychological operation than is publicly known. There is compelling evidence that Ghislaine Maxwell ran one of the top moderator accounts. The account MaxwellHill was an influential power-mod on the default subs since Reddit took off and it posted almost nonstop since the early days of Reddit’s acquisition. The account shared common interests with Ghislaine Maxwell, was named after the nickname of Maxwell’s estate (Maxwell Hill), and randomly stopped posting the week Ghislaine was arrested. (Imagine possessing powerful influence over a community for more than a decade, spending about every day on it, and you randomly quit forever without any sign of discontent and no public comment.) Ghislaine on her Twitter (iirc) showed an early interest in forums and I think specifically mentioned Reddit. Ghislaine’s father Robert Maxwell was a media mogul who has been labeled “Israel’s Superspy”, and Ghislaine was partners with Jeffrey Epstein who is theorized to be an Israel-associated intelligence asset rather than a financier.
I also think that the Reddit feed structure betrays its utility as a psychological manipulation operation. There’s a community called “AmITheAsshole” which is inorganic. The top content often follows the same structure: “is [following tradition or conventional wisdom] and [having a special affinity to family] good, or does it make someone an asshole?” The answer is going to be that it makes you an asshole, a status which is to be deterred. This acts as psychological shaping for the Reddit user where he gradually learns that everything he has learned is wrong and can’t be trusted, and that he can only rely on Reddit for what is right. This is accomplished through dramatic and unusual social dilemmas. This cognitive habit is kept when the user consumes the rest of Reddit’s content which is commercial + political slop. Now the user is primed to assent to what is presented on Reddit, because he has previously learned that Reddit overrules everything he has understood before.
There is definitely room for a Reddit competitor and I think making one is one of the greatest moral acts a programmer can do today (unironically). If you’re serious about making one let us know because there’s a lot of psych wisdom that can be implemented to make it take off.
IMO we've reached a point in the technology adoption curve where the hard piece to build such a competitor is not programming. Acquiring and keeping a critical mass of users while dodging politically-charged lawfare (copyrighted content, criminal activity, pornography) seems like the real missing piece. And the users are probably more difficult than the lawfare.
Even people who use Reddit hate Reddit. “Redditor” is synonymous with loser online. Reddit clones have been terrible for a number of psychological reasons which are actually pretty easy to deal with.
Just thinking aloud here… This site is a Reddit clone of sorts. I don’t know if the current codebase would allow users to set up a second “sub” without requiring them to create new accounts, but let’s just say for the sake of argument that it does. From there, don’t you think the biggest obstacle preventing this site from becoming the next Reddit would be the userbase?
Userbase and moderation, yes. The_Donald branched out to be a multi-subreddit diaspora site, with KotakuInAction and the QAnon sub migrating there… along with genuine Nazis, genuine white supremacists, etc.
I know that you're not wrong but it never ceases to amaze me that genuine Nazis support a man who was literally Grand Marshal of the Salute to Israel.
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IIRC, themotte.org is a stripped down version of rdrama.net, and they have
subredditsholes. Creating a Reddit clone isn't a technical challenge anymore.More options
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