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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44946 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Press S to spit on Reddit's stinking corpse

TheMotte was one of three forums that tied me to that place. The day where two and three go as well are not far off.

Reddit is dying. New reddit is infinite scrolling hell, its rulership hates any remotely provocative conversation and lets not talk about the delightful people we had to share a website with.

I don't know what the future holds for us here. Hopefully enough people come over and Zorba fixes enough of the problems he's inherited.

Do you mind sharing the other two?

Ironically about two months back I got a permanent suspension from Reddit for what I consider shaky reasons on a ten-year-old account, and I didn't feel any sense of loss whatsoever.

Hell, I felt freed from the fresh hell the site has become. Whatever urges I have to participate don't matter. No need to scream into the void.

And since /r/themotte was the only sub I participated in there, anyway, this brings back the one main thing I missed.

Reddit is generally OK, I just wish it was more transparent about banning things. Then again, the opaque banning policy is probably by design to avoid accountability.

It's unfortunate that Reddit and Discord have swallowed up so much of the old-school forums that used to abound.

Who knows, maybe enough subs follow in our wake that single topic discussion forums become a thing again.

Shame they're all modelled on reddit, that format incites poor quality conversation.

I look at this website, and it looks modeled on reddit. Is that what you meant?

Other than AEO, I like reddit. It has great mobile app support, and most of my interests are aggregated in one place for convenient lunch-time viewing. This migration will definitely increase the friction of participation of existing mottizens (at least for me personally) and attracting new ones, but I understand it had to be done, eventually. I hope it succeeds!

old.reddit.com was fine-ish, until they started deliberately crippling it. The app sucks, and I was always using FOSS alternatives, that is until I realized there are literally 3 subreddits I even bother checking up on, and ended up bailing on the whole site.

Thank god we moved.

Yeah so many people complained that the new site was a reason to leave TheMotte, from my perspective it was a reason to leave reddit altogether.

Well, this is awkward.

I don't care for their mobile site always pushing the app.

Other than AEO, I like reddit.

You're not wrong, but I feel like this is one of those times where the old saying applies: "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

Reddit is a good site with awful moderation policies.

Kind of disagree. I don't think the upvote/downvote system for comments specifically is good for the site. Posts, sure...

The mobile apps are great, that's fair. I'll miss RIF. It's hard to give Reddit much credit for that since all the decent apps weren't made by Reddit, but at least they didn't destroy them like Twitter did. old reddit is still a decent design, though it's slowly breaking down due to changes by new reddit.

So that's the good side. On the bad side... I have nothing good to say about new reddit. And the very core of the design, up/downvotes, was probably cursed from the beginning. I honestly think the single big thread is the only reason TheMotte even survived as long as it did, because it largely prevented up and down votes from being meaningful. If sabotaging Reddit's design is necessary like that it's not a great sign for the whole idea.

And on the ugly side: just take a look at /r/popular if you want to see the "true state" of the website... as someone who stayed off of all for a long time I was honestly shocked to see how far the place fell. It's as good a sign as anything that not only is Eternal September still going, there is no bottom.

They destroyed alien lol

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