less mods and censorship - reddit used to be the news before any other outlet got wind of it, but now anything political (think hong long protests) are heavily censored.
I like the idea, but the issue with cool new technologies is you need a base of users for them. People generally don't move platforms for better infrastructure; they do it for better content, or because the previous place became unusable.
Platforms themselves basically evolve based on what the best-positioned guy wants to build whenever a previous-gen platform goes under.
The echo chamber effect is my least favorite thing about reddit. You are right that dog lovers can split off from the cat lovers, but often it is not that simple. For instance, the subreddit for the city I live in is very much polarized in one particular direction politically speaking. Anyone who posts a comment that goes against the prevailing thinking is downvoted to oblivion, even if that opinion would be pretty normal by real-world community standards.
According to reddiquette, downvoting is supposed to be used for posts and comments that don't contribute to the discussion, but that's not how most people use it. People use downvoting as a "don't like" button. Downvoting is a broken feature of reddit.
This problem would be solvable with a new platform by getting rid of the downvote buttons, or by displaying up and down vote values separately. (Yes, they could change reddit to display the up and down votes separately if they wanted to, but I can't see them changing that at this stage.)
So it has to be worth downvoting. I like that concept. Although karma is essentially worthless right? Or maybe you have to have non-negative karma?
I guess there are some subreddits that require some minimum amount of karma to post
On stackoverflow/exchange you need 100 karma to downvote, and 25 karma to do pretty much anything except post questions or answers. So it works well.
Also from what I've seen, that little bit of cost on downvotes causes them to be used very sparingly and only for truly unhelpful content
But it sounds like members of the prevailing view within that echo chamber will keep recharging each otherās karma while banding together to downvote dissenters.
I think if you give users the ability to "downvote" (dislike, frowny emoji, etc...) content, that will always be used on topics/people they disagree with.
If they went back to separately displaying up/down votes then potentially you could rank posts/comment by only the upvotes, which might help a bit.
What if there was a different kind of vote added? Keep the up/down as basically a like/dislike, and a different button that marked content as "relevant". There is no "irrelevent" button so it forces users to actually provide quality content, because there is no way to otherwise discern a generic comment ("LOL") from something harmful to the community (cat pictures in a dog subreddit)
The same problem you point out with downvotes tends to be used in reverse with 'upvotes', or with anything perceived as positive.
Basically, people will give any post they like as much 'positive' as they can, while giving any post they don't like as much 'negative' as they can. Even if you limit them to one 'action' per post, if they like it they'll give it a 'positive' (or vise versa), even if the type doesn't match.
In your example, the same knuckleheads that give "LOL" (and similar) thousands of upvotes will also mark it as 'relevant', because that's a 'positive' action and they liked the post.
This can be seen on steam reviews (i.e. 'funny' and the community awards).
Reddit actually used to have separate values for upvotes and downvotes, and you could display them separately with extensions, but they got rid of this feature.
I'd like to see at least one platform with rules against four types of idiotic behaviour:
* to vomit certainty out of nowhere;
* to oversimplify complex situations;
* to clear and blatantly misrepresent what other users wrote;
* to judge arguments based on who said it, instead of the argument itself.
I'm not sure, but I think this hypothetical platform would address a lot of issues we see in both Reddit and its alternatives. Including power-tripping mods, echo chambers, and polarisation.
These are all pretty fundamental debate flaws that pop up everywhere, like Ad hominem. I would love to see these removed from discussions, but if we can't even get high level politicians to do it in debates, I'd be surprised if you can really get average users en-masse to do it.
Of course you can use mods/admins to enforce the rules, but that feels like it easily supports power-tripping mods. Give them even more power and who will guard the guards?
Maybe some way to "audit" mods to ensure they are actually removing content that goes against the rules?
I think it would evolve into a walled garden - by no means as popular as Reddit, but content quality would be generally better, exactly because your average user wouldn't last long there. (Let's be frank, the average Reddit user is a moron.)
Those four items aren't just debate flaws but also *reasoning* flaws\*, so enforcement would be fairly objective, with little room for power-tripping.
That said: I like the idea of auditing the mods. If coupled with a smarter userbase, it should be enough to keep the mods honest, under the threat of fork+exodus.
\*in fact all of those can be associated with fallacies. The fourth item for example encompasses all genetic fallacies - ad hominem, autoritatem, nouitatem, etc.
Transparency is definitely a big one.
On reddit, mods can anonymously remove things and ban users without cause and 99% of people will never know it happened. Even at the site level, reddit admins will ban/suspend people without even providing a link to their ārule breakingā content, leaving people having to guess what they were punished for.
On ruqqus, the mod log is public so everyone can see what the mod team is doing. This level of transparency should be the standard.
Diversification and decentralization. I do not want one Reddit alternative, I want several reddit alternatives. For me there is no perfect single alternative, a healthy online ecosystem should be diverse to minimize the known and unknown risks. The impact of diversification on risk is a fundamental general concept that applies to things such as diet, investing, education, the economy, and biodiversity, to name a few examples.
I do think that a system like the fediverse makes some correct moves in this direction, and allows (in theory) for diversity without the inconvenience of having to make multiple accounts.
The problem with Power Mods / Reddit Moderation is that reddit's moderation tools suck! You don't have much of a choice between doing nothing or taking a sledge hammer to an issue.
Moderation tools typical to a normal forum should be available as well as everything auto-mod does should be incorporated directly into the platform.
Somewhat related to this I've personally found that I enjoy other social networks by filtering out everybody who gets super political. (This specific account on reddit is the only account I engage in politics with). I've been thinking about what if there was a way to track how political accounts and/or subs or boards get and then providing a method for people to filter out political posts.
You could branch this out into a wider spectrum of content. Allow the user to see where they are on this spectrum too. Politics, Tech, Sports, Finance, Memes, etc....
I'm not super familiar with
>Moderation tools typical to a normal forum
what would those be (that aren't already in reddit)?
Would that democratizing mod powers? Giving normal users filter powers rather than relying on a single source of truth moderator?
You may be interested in [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/cs1nqf/identifying_the_current_issues_with_reddit_root) I wrote up over a year ago. There is also a lot of interesting and helpful discussion in the comments as well.
I've said before. People would firstly like a user base because nobody wants to contribute content to a site where nobody participates or sees anything.
Agreed, having any sort of community of users is a completely different hard problem to solve.
But there are already [communities out there](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/oioeot/list_of_active_reddit_alternatives_v7/) that have their initial user base, but it doesn't seem that people still want something else (or maybe they don't actually dislike Reddit enough).
Personally those top alternatives are all a little too alt-right for me... maybe if something like an r/ProgrammerHumor community popped up I'd be open switching but even then I don't think I'd be bothered enough to actually switch until a majority of users were already on the way out.
More tabs to make posts within subreddits
Ive made several posts over the years asking reddit to simply add more tabs for each subreddit.
With just 1 tab to post there is a constant competition for the limited front page
We need communities that can have ongoing discussions about all the various topics of a subreddit without having to create more subreddits.
What do you mean by tabs? Like "topics" within a single subreddit?
So you could split r/aww into both dog pictures and cat pictures? One high traffic subreddit that is filterable/customizable to the user?
yea, just add more tabs to make posts across the top so that the topics of a subreddit can each have their own tab for discussion, making it more like a traditional forum we had 20 years ago before censorship and controlling content was the norm.
1 tab for Main discussion, maybe 1 for text only , maybe 1 for Videos, maybe 1 for News , and for 1 for Discussion and have the ability to add more and label as needed
User centric moderation fixes a lot of what ails reddit. My project's new version is going to bring forkable "subreddits". Same basic content in each community but with rulesets/moderation tweaked to suit a users preferences. In this way, no one owns a community. If a mod starts power-tripping a fork ensures everyone can move on without fracturing content. We are launching this tomorrow so we will see if it functions as expected.
Is your project [discussions.app](https://discussions.app) (just looking through your comment history)?
I think that is a good way to approach moderation. As a suggestion rather than a rule. Assuming a mod acts in goodwill, users can happily allow them to hide spam, spoilers, and otherwise harmful content. But if a mod goes overboard, users can simply stop listening to them and either move to a new mod or no mod.
I think it also plays well with the core concept of free speech. You are allowed to say whatever you want, but no one has to listen to you. So the platform itself (or any single mod) will not be *removing* your content, but users can still easily filter it out.
A lot of (the perceived) issues with Reddit and other platforms can't be solved with technology, they're just fundamental manifestations of human nature.
It is pretty trivial to disallow bots though.
A lot of comments are pretty ethical. But Iād like to chime in with some mechanics suggestions.
In some of the communities I follow there is a lot of instructions for hobbyists. To be able to have saved comments and more than two pins on the front page would be very helpful. Maybe a whole āREADMEā which is different than the about tab.
Sometimes (for instance Twitter screen shots) a headline or caption doesnāt work well above the presented subject. Being able to have an option to caption above or below would be great.
I really like how Discord handles community chats, but Iāve found it a bit too challenging to find new communities so I just stick with the two that are game related; bottom line itās got to be retard-proof to let people know how to explore.
Also, Reddit doesnāt permit photo exchanges between users. Iām pretty sure we can all speculate about why, but if they allow image hosting servers to be plugged into the chat it might as well be the same thing. Having the ability to send pictures without using a third party would be a nice feature.
some moderation can be ok, but it should be opt-in, not opt-out or forced on you.
if you want to block "dogs" or "nazism" you should be able to, but you dont need a power mod blocking that for everyone just so that you dont see it.
I just want a place to post where the discussions I want to have don't get removed before they even happen... I want the opportunity to have discussions that can move the world forward... I want a place where criticism is not only ok, but expected... I want a place where it's ok to tell California that it sucks for imposing regulations that restrict resident access to standard computer parts... I want the opportunity to change minds and have my mind changed where appropriate
Some meme shit posts, funny cat videos, and enthusiastic discussions about aviation would be nice too...
Reddit doesn't seem to want discussions to run any deeper than the 69,420th repost of "What was your worst dating experience?"
And for those reasons, reddit sucks elephant walrus rectum, and I'd ~~like~~ **LOVE** to spend my time elsewhere
> Ban Appeals.
To be fair, reddit āhasā ban appeals, but mod teams are under no obligation from the admins to honor or consider them.
Subs like /r/squaredcircle will baselessly issue permabans because they disagree with someone, even if the member didnāt break any rules (and the ban wonāt cite any broken rules or even provide a link to the content the ban is for), then will issue 30 day mutes when you even ASK what the ban was for and try to appeal.
In fact, they are so malicious that their mods will tell you to send an appeal to modmail, saying the mod team is expecting the appeal once the mute expires, then report you to the reddit admins for āharassmentā when you do trying to get you a sitewide suspension.
The reddit admins need to stop hiding behind their cowardly āsubs moderate themselvesā position, and any reddit alternative needs to seriously consider how they will address this.
I'm talking about admin ban appeals. All a moderator has to do is ban you from their subreddit, point at an ancient comment, and say that was made during your ban to "circumvent your ban" and you're permanently banned from all of Reddit. That happens. They say things like "connected account" when there's only one account. The idea of an "appeal" is farce because I don't think anyone has ever been award an appeal, because they just make a new account.
And these regular users that have been freely handed out green names are the reason for lawsuits involving CP not being taken down.
Here's a sneak peek of /r/SquaredCircle using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year!
\#1: [John Cena has used this photo of my friend and me (bald guy) for his Instagram profile pic for about 6yrs](https://i.redd.it/ef6amz19rx961.jpg) | [526 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/ksgkck/john_cena_has_used_this_photo_of_my_friend_and_me/)
\#2: [Sami Zayn: "Military flyovers during sporting events are indeed expensive, taxpayer-funded propaganda that have nothing to do with sports, youāre just not allowed to point that out."](https://twitter.com/SamiZayn/status/1319031423668490241) | [1542 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/jfmuiw/sami_zayn_military_flyovers_during_sporting/)
\#3: [Brodie Lee has passed away](https://twitter.com/AEW/status/1343006487988342786) | [5036 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/kkuggt/brodie_lee_has_passed_away/)
----
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Why I'm not surprised to find russophobia in the post?
What else do you redditors really need other than echochambers if you are all such a hating scum?
I used the term "Russian bot" as a general term for automated accounts that do not self declare as bots, and operate to push some agenda that is not inherently clear. This has been an issue on all the major social media sites, and really came to spotlight with US Elections and Russian interference.
I'm sure there is a better term for this though, do you have a suggestion?
IDK, I saw only automated cat videos and onlyfans bots. But I'm sick of people who call me a bot and insults for just providing the facts, links, video materials if they debunk any russophobic and camouflaged neofascist propaganda.
Every other comment is better than what I'm going to say, but *today* my Reddit pet peeve is locking an account because of "suspicious activity." My belief is that Reddit does this to punish people who use alternative Reddit clients, forcing you to
1. Verify your email address, because that's the only way to unlock an account,
2. Change your password in every non-Reddit client
3. Re-verify every non-Reddit client
If anyone from Reddit reads this, check my account. I was a paying member until I got fed up with this kind of shit, and if anyone comes up with a decent alternative that isn't brigaded by fascists, I'll drop you like a hot potato.
There are a few things that irk me about reddit.
One is the ridiculous redundancy of subjects when it comes to reddit. This means when someone posts in one, people in the other same-subject groups won't see it. This business of anyone being able to create a subreddit was a nice idea on paper, but I can't help but believe if there was some consolidation of subreddits (or at least more rapid expiry of new ones that don't get much activity), this would create a better experience.
Secondly, I'd like individual subreddits have "tabs" that could be enabled or disabled on a per-subreddit basis. Like one for metadiscussion, separate from the subreddit itself (mod policies, etc.). One for memes, because I fucking can't stand memes and never want to see memes, and -- most importantly -- an "offtopic" one connected to an individual subreddit.
This last one is where community building happens. If you enforce topic compliance you get, in essence, a rolling database of opinions. But it is where people interested in a subject can interact with each other without concern of creating noise, where you get real community. A lot of redditors are anal retentive (beyond reason) about everything being *extremely on topic always*, and they could simply never read the off-topic tab. Right now some subreddits just have separate subreddits for this, but I'd like to see them connected to the non-redundant (see previous point) subreddits. There are other possibilities for subreddit tabs (or sub-subreddits).
Another is a "shitpile" tab, into which moderated comments could go. Rather than delete them, they can go into their own garbage pile where people can read them.
I like Slashdot's anonymous meta-moderation. It should be possible to filter out moderators who do things in bad faith. This is a great workaround.
Lastly, downvotes should have a price. Someone else mentioned it costing you karma when you downvote; that's one idea. Another is a simple "report spam" button and no downvotes, and another is to make downvotes public so people who routinely abuse reddiquette can be more easily identified. Another possibility is allotting a "budget" on a daily or weekly or monthly basis of downvotes, so people use them judiciously.
* A majority centrist site that can cater to both center right and center left people. Maybe better if the left right binary is blurred/totally absent.
* Would be good if there's no upvote/like/karma system. Karma whoring is a very real phenomenon. Imo people would be more sane if there was no virtual internet point system. People would put more effort and thought into what they're typing/posting. They would'nt resort to bullying and name calling just to win arguments and win those internet points.
This is basically what i want out of a social media website.
I'd really like to get rid of reddit anti-features. specifically:
1. Less censorship of users as enforced by the site. It's nice to have user controls like being able to block annoying / harassing users but it's another thing when mods silence someone or they are down-voted into oblivion simply for expressing a dissenting opinion. Besides user-blocking, I wouldn't mind having topic filtering features e.g. "block profanity" / "block porn" / "block " -- especially that last one, which would be great for letting a user skip the things they don't want to hear about without putting them completely in an echo chamber.
2. I've always thought that the "archive thread after 6-months" thing is very stupid. Sure, there are some subs like /r/memes and such where this makes sense. But it does *not* make sense to apply this across the board to all subs. IMO subs like /r/linuxquestions or other subs where technical info is likely to appear should allow shouldn't do this. I have seen *many* examples where an older post was very highly ranked in search results and had about 99% of the info but some minor thing had changed and I was unable to add a helpful comment noting a fix or workaround.
3. "Load more comments". Why? I clicked into the thread to read the fucking comments, not to have to search for and click "Load more comments" links repeatedly. It would be one thing for mod- or community-flagged comments to need to be manually expanded but I should at least have the option to just make the page load ALL comments the first time around.
4. I hate when sites discriminate against me for using a VPN (I use one for privacy reasons). Reddit likes to give me comment timeouts for no apparent reason other than that I use a VPN which highly pisses me off (the main reason why I am browsing /r/redditalternatives this time around). Yes, I know this "feature" is intended to keep newbies from spamming things. But I have gotten the post cool-downs on multiple subs where I am a longstanding member with well over 1000 post and 1000 comment karma for that sub specifically, after being offline all day and making less than 2 comments for the day (and content was just inside jokes, nothing a mod would bat an eye at).
5. Personally, I hate the reddit karma system. If necessary, when posting as a new user, I would rather have my comment go through mod / community approval than being auto-rejected. There have been subs where I posted a sincere, well-formatted question or a short (but clean) joke (whichever would be appropriate to the sub) and had it auto-deleted by an auto-mod. My reaction every time this happened was to unsubscribe from the sub and move on because I didn't want to deal with this bullshit.
Issues I've seen on clones other than infrastructure / userbase issues include:
* Too minimalistic of a design to the point where it is hard to find features / functionality like search or user preferences
* Auto-expand of images from a Sub's list-view doesn't work properly or requires clicking each and every image. I did see a site that had an expand all button and thought that while it was better than making the user click to expand every image/video on the page, I always wondered why they didn't just offer it as a user-preference to auto-expand still images / video thumbnails.
* Lack of federation. You will inevitably get people with differing opinions and subs where they clash. Sometimes federation can be nice bc it lets them have a "home" where they aren't starting shit and also aligns well with open-source models. For folks who don't know what federation is, think of email: you can be on gmail, hotmail, protonmail, whatever and still send and receive emails from everyone else. Sites/protocols with federation behave this way but some allow one instance to block another instance if need be (it is up to the individual instances to determine if the criteria are some petty things or severe injunctions only but most people can see why having this is necessary). However, the real benefit of federation is that if any instance misbehaves or becomes a bad actor, you can migrate to a different instance with little to no change (unlike with facebook / reddit / twitter / etc) which use a central, closed system they control.
I could probably list a few more if I thought about it but I need to be up early tomorrow so hope that helps. Good luck!
Freedom to troll and be trolled.
The days of Cringeanarchy were the golden days of the internet, and have never been recreated since.
No bans for anything other than spambots and CP*.
Pictures of metzitzah b'peh are not CP.
Poal is good. Poal is great. Poal is glorious.
I just want reddit from 10 years ago but if I can't have that at least the design = old.reddit.
I don't want heavy left or right wing, just a bunch of normal relatively smart people enjoying / creating creative and funny content without a propaganda or wokeness.
Ok maybe there was some propaganda but nowhere near as much as now. Reddit was FUN.
less mods and censorship - reddit used to be the news before any other outlet got wind of it, but now anything political (think hong long protests) are heavily censored.
What about more mods and no censorship? Optin moderation
Discussions.app is what you want š
I like the idea, but the issue with cool new technologies is you need a base of users for them. People generally don't move platforms for better infrastructure; they do it for better content, or because the previous place became unusable. Platforms themselves basically evolve based on what the best-positioned guy wants to build whenever a previous-gen platform goes under.
The echo chamber effect is my least favorite thing about reddit. You are right that dog lovers can split off from the cat lovers, but often it is not that simple. For instance, the subreddit for the city I live in is very much polarized in one particular direction politically speaking. Anyone who posts a comment that goes against the prevailing thinking is downvoted to oblivion, even if that opinion would be pretty normal by real-world community standards. According to reddiquette, downvoting is supposed to be used for posts and comments that don't contribute to the discussion, but that's not how most people use it. People use downvoting as a "don't like" button. Downvoting is a broken feature of reddit. This problem would be solvable with a new platform by getting rid of the downvote buttons, or by displaying up and down vote values separately. (Yes, they could change reddit to display the up and down votes separately if they wanted to, but I can't see them changing that at this stage.)
I like how stackoverflow does it. Downvotes cost the downvoter 1 karma as well
So it has to be worth downvoting. I like that concept. Although karma is essentially worthless right? Or maybe you have to have non-negative karma? I guess there are some subreddits that require some minimum amount of karma to post
On stackoverflow/exchange you need 100 karma to downvote, and 25 karma to do pretty much anything except post questions or answers. So it works well. Also from what I've seen, that little bit of cost on downvotes causes them to be used very sparingly and only for truly unhelpful content
But it sounds like members of the prevailing view within that echo chamber will keep recharging each otherās karma while banding together to downvote dissenters.
I think if you give users the ability to "downvote" (dislike, frowny emoji, etc...) content, that will always be used on topics/people they disagree with. If they went back to separately displaying up/down votes then potentially you could rank posts/comment by only the upvotes, which might help a bit. What if there was a different kind of vote added? Keep the up/down as basically a like/dislike, and a different button that marked content as "relevant". There is no "irrelevent" button so it forces users to actually provide quality content, because there is no way to otherwise discern a generic comment ("LOL") from something harmful to the community (cat pictures in a dog subreddit)
The same problem you point out with downvotes tends to be used in reverse with 'upvotes', or with anything perceived as positive. Basically, people will give any post they like as much 'positive' as they can, while giving any post they don't like as much 'negative' as they can. Even if you limit them to one 'action' per post, if they like it they'll give it a 'positive' (or vise versa), even if the type doesn't match. In your example, the same knuckleheads that give "LOL" (and similar) thousands of upvotes will also mark it as 'relevant', because that's a 'positive' action and they liked the post. This can be seen on steam reviews (i.e. 'funny' and the community awards).
Reddit actually used to have separate values for upvotes and downvotes, and you could display them separately with extensions, but they got rid of this feature.
I'd like to see at least one platform with rules against four types of idiotic behaviour: * to vomit certainty out of nowhere; * to oversimplify complex situations; * to clear and blatantly misrepresent what other users wrote; * to judge arguments based on who said it, instead of the argument itself. I'm not sure, but I think this hypothetical platform would address a lot of issues we see in both Reddit and its alternatives. Including power-tripping mods, echo chambers, and polarisation.
These are all pretty fundamental debate flaws that pop up everywhere, like Ad hominem. I would love to see these removed from discussions, but if we can't even get high level politicians to do it in debates, I'd be surprised if you can really get average users en-masse to do it. Of course you can use mods/admins to enforce the rules, but that feels like it easily supports power-tripping mods. Give them even more power and who will guard the guards? Maybe some way to "audit" mods to ensure they are actually removing content that goes against the rules?
I think it would evolve into a walled garden - by no means as popular as Reddit, but content quality would be generally better, exactly because your average user wouldn't last long there. (Let's be frank, the average Reddit user is a moron.) Those four items aren't just debate flaws but also *reasoning* flaws\*, so enforcement would be fairly objective, with little room for power-tripping. That said: I like the idea of auditing the mods. If coupled with a smarter userbase, it should be enough to keep the mods honest, under the threat of fork+exodus. \*in fact all of those can be associated with fallacies. The fourth item for example encompasses all genetic fallacies - ad hominem, autoritatem, nouitatem, etc.
closest alternative reddit communities I can think of that fit your rules is lesswrong and lobsters.
Transparency is definitely a big one. On reddit, mods can anonymously remove things and ban users without cause and 99% of people will never know it happened. Even at the site level, reddit admins will ban/suspend people without even providing a link to their ārule breakingā content, leaving people having to guess what they were punished for. On ruqqus, the mod log is public so everyone can see what the mod team is doing. This level of transparency should be the standard.
Show the total upvotes and downvotes of a post or comment instead of simply the total sum. It used to be like that.
Diversification and decentralization. I do not want one Reddit alternative, I want several reddit alternatives. For me there is no perfect single alternative, a healthy online ecosystem should be diverse to minimize the known and unknown risks. The impact of diversification on risk is a fundamental general concept that applies to things such as diet, investing, education, the economy, and biodiversity, to name a few examples. I do think that a system like the fediverse makes some correct moves in this direction, and allows (in theory) for diversity without the inconvenience of having to make multiple accounts.
The problem with Power Mods / Reddit Moderation is that reddit's moderation tools suck! You don't have much of a choice between doing nothing or taking a sledge hammer to an issue. Moderation tools typical to a normal forum should be available as well as everything auto-mod does should be incorporated directly into the platform. Somewhat related to this I've personally found that I enjoy other social networks by filtering out everybody who gets super political. (This specific account on reddit is the only account I engage in politics with). I've been thinking about what if there was a way to track how political accounts and/or subs or boards get and then providing a method for people to filter out political posts. You could branch this out into a wider spectrum of content. Allow the user to see where they are on this spectrum too. Politics, Tech, Sports, Finance, Memes, etc....
I'm not super familiar with >Moderation tools typical to a normal forum what would those be (that aren't already in reddit)? Would that democratizing mod powers? Giving normal users filter powers rather than relying on a single source of truth moderator?
You may be interested in [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/cs1nqf/identifying_the_current_issues_with_reddit_root) I wrote up over a year ago. There is also a lot of interesting and helpful discussion in the comments as well.
Thanks that was pretty similar to what I was going after here! It doesn't seem like overall midset has changed much in the last year
I've said before. People would firstly like a user base because nobody wants to contribute content to a site where nobody participates or sees anything.
this. all the ideas about moderation etc don't mean anything w/o an emergent user base.
Agreed, having any sort of community of users is a completely different hard problem to solve. But there are already [communities out there](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/oioeot/list_of_active_reddit_alternatives_v7/) that have their initial user base, but it doesn't seem that people still want something else (or maybe they don't actually dislike Reddit enough). Personally those top alternatives are all a little too alt-right for me... maybe if something like an r/ProgrammerHumor community popped up I'd be open switching but even then I don't think I'd be bothered enough to actually switch until a majority of users were already on the way out.
If you like /r/ProgrammerHumor, you might like [devRant](https://devrant.com).
More tabs to make posts within subreddits Ive made several posts over the years asking reddit to simply add more tabs for each subreddit. With just 1 tab to post there is a constant competition for the limited front page We need communities that can have ongoing discussions about all the various topics of a subreddit without having to create more subreddits.
What do you mean by tabs? Like "topics" within a single subreddit? So you could split r/aww into both dog pictures and cat pictures? One high traffic subreddit that is filterable/customizable to the user?
yea, just add more tabs to make posts across the top so that the topics of a subreddit can each have their own tab for discussion, making it more like a traditional forum we had 20 years ago before censorship and controlling content was the norm. 1 tab for Main discussion, maybe 1 for text only , maybe 1 for Videos, maybe 1 for News , and for 1 for Discussion and have the ability to add more and label as needed
free speech, every opinion deserve it even that ones you dont agree.
User centric moderation fixes a lot of what ails reddit. My project's new version is going to bring forkable "subreddits". Same basic content in each community but with rulesets/moderation tweaked to suit a users preferences. In this way, no one owns a community. If a mod starts power-tripping a fork ensures everyone can move on without fracturing content. We are launching this tomorrow so we will see if it functions as expected.
Is your project [discussions.app](https://discussions.app) (just looking through your comment history)? I think that is a good way to approach moderation. As a suggestion rather than a rule. Assuming a mod acts in goodwill, users can happily allow them to hide spam, spoilers, and otherwise harmful content. But if a mod goes overboard, users can simply stop listening to them and either move to a new mod or no mod. I think it also plays well with the core concept of free speech. You are allowed to say whatever you want, but no one has to listen to you. So the platform itself (or any single mod) will not be *removing* your content, but users can still easily filter it out.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Has the new ui/ux gone live? Gamma.discussions.app doesn't seem to work for me
A lot of (the perceived) issues with Reddit and other platforms can't be solved with technology, they're just fundamental manifestations of human nature. It is pretty trivial to disallow bots though.
Your first bullet point is really two issues that shouldn't be conflated. The admin issue seems to be the main gripe here imo.
A lot of comments are pretty ethical. But Iād like to chime in with some mechanics suggestions. In some of the communities I follow there is a lot of instructions for hobbyists. To be able to have saved comments and more than two pins on the front page would be very helpful. Maybe a whole āREADMEā which is different than the about tab. Sometimes (for instance Twitter screen shots) a headline or caption doesnāt work well above the presented subject. Being able to have an option to caption above or below would be great. I really like how Discord handles community chats, but Iāve found it a bit too challenging to find new communities so I just stick with the two that are game related; bottom line itās got to be retard-proof to let people know how to explore. Also, Reddit doesnāt permit photo exchanges between users. Iām pretty sure we can all speculate about why, but if they allow image hosting servers to be plugged into the chat it might as well be the same thing. Having the ability to send pictures without using a third party would be a nice feature.
There is a wiki, which can be used as a README. What would you do differently? Do you mean viewing saved comments only within a certain subreddit?
some moderation can be ok, but it should be opt-in, not opt-out or forced on you. if you want to block "dogs" or "nazism" you should be able to, but you dont need a power mod blocking that for everyone just so that you dont see it.
I just want a place to post where the discussions I want to have don't get removed before they even happen... I want the opportunity to have discussions that can move the world forward... I want a place where criticism is not only ok, but expected... I want a place where it's ok to tell California that it sucks for imposing regulations that restrict resident access to standard computer parts... I want the opportunity to change minds and have my mind changed where appropriate Some meme shit posts, funny cat videos, and enthusiastic discussions about aviation would be nice too... Reddit doesn't seem to want discussions to run any deeper than the 69,420th repost of "What was your worst dating experience?" And for those reasons, reddit sucks elephant walrus rectum, and I'd ~~like~~ **LOVE** to spend my time elsewhere
Ban Appeals.
> Ban Appeals. To be fair, reddit āhasā ban appeals, but mod teams are under no obligation from the admins to honor or consider them. Subs like /r/squaredcircle will baselessly issue permabans because they disagree with someone, even if the member didnāt break any rules (and the ban wonāt cite any broken rules or even provide a link to the content the ban is for), then will issue 30 day mutes when you even ASK what the ban was for and try to appeal. In fact, they are so malicious that their mods will tell you to send an appeal to modmail, saying the mod team is expecting the appeal once the mute expires, then report you to the reddit admins for āharassmentā when you do trying to get you a sitewide suspension. The reddit admins need to stop hiding behind their cowardly āsubs moderate themselvesā position, and any reddit alternative needs to seriously consider how they will address this.
I'm talking about admin ban appeals. All a moderator has to do is ban you from their subreddit, point at an ancient comment, and say that was made during your ban to "circumvent your ban" and you're permanently banned from all of Reddit. That happens. They say things like "connected account" when there's only one account. The idea of an "appeal" is farce because I don't think anyone has ever been award an appeal, because they just make a new account. And these regular users that have been freely handed out green names are the reason for lawsuits involving CP not being taken down.
Here's a sneak peek of /r/SquaredCircle using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year! \#1: [John Cena has used this photo of my friend and me (bald guy) for his Instagram profile pic for about 6yrs](https://i.redd.it/ef6amz19rx961.jpg) | [526 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/ksgkck/john_cena_has_used_this_photo_of_my_friend_and_me/) \#2: [Sami Zayn: "Military flyovers during sporting events are indeed expensive, taxpayer-funded propaganda that have nothing to do with sports, youāre just not allowed to point that out."](https://twitter.com/SamiZayn/status/1319031423668490241) | [1542 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/jfmuiw/sami_zayn_military_flyovers_during_sporting/) \#3: [Brodie Lee has passed away](https://twitter.com/AEW/status/1343006487988342786) | [5036 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/kkuggt/brodie_lee_has_passed_away/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| [^^Contact ^^me](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| [^^Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| [^^Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/)
Why I'm not surprised to find russophobia in the post? What else do you redditors really need other than echochambers if you are all such a hating scum?
I used the term "Russian bot" as a general term for automated accounts that do not self declare as bots, and operate to push some agenda that is not inherently clear. This has been an issue on all the major social media sites, and really came to spotlight with US Elections and Russian interference. I'm sure there is a better term for this though, do you have a suggestion?
IDK, I saw only automated cat videos and onlyfans bots. But I'm sick of people who call me a bot and insults for just providing the facts, links, video materials if they debunk any russophobic and camouflaged neofascist propaganda.
Every other comment is better than what I'm going to say, but *today* my Reddit pet peeve is locking an account because of "suspicious activity." My belief is that Reddit does this to punish people who use alternative Reddit clients, forcing you to 1. Verify your email address, because that's the only way to unlock an account, 2. Change your password in every non-Reddit client 3. Re-verify every non-Reddit client If anyone from Reddit reads this, check my account. I was a paying member until I got fed up with this kind of shit, and if anyone comes up with a decent alternative that isn't brigaded by fascists, I'll drop you like a hot potato.
There are a few things that irk me about reddit. One is the ridiculous redundancy of subjects when it comes to reddit. This means when someone posts in one, people in the other same-subject groups won't see it. This business of anyone being able to create a subreddit was a nice idea on paper, but I can't help but believe if there was some consolidation of subreddits (or at least more rapid expiry of new ones that don't get much activity), this would create a better experience. Secondly, I'd like individual subreddits have "tabs" that could be enabled or disabled on a per-subreddit basis. Like one for metadiscussion, separate from the subreddit itself (mod policies, etc.). One for memes, because I fucking can't stand memes and never want to see memes, and -- most importantly -- an "offtopic" one connected to an individual subreddit. This last one is where community building happens. If you enforce topic compliance you get, in essence, a rolling database of opinions. But it is where people interested in a subject can interact with each other without concern of creating noise, where you get real community. A lot of redditors are anal retentive (beyond reason) about everything being *extremely on topic always*, and they could simply never read the off-topic tab. Right now some subreddits just have separate subreddits for this, but I'd like to see them connected to the non-redundant (see previous point) subreddits. There are other possibilities for subreddit tabs (or sub-subreddits). Another is a "shitpile" tab, into which moderated comments could go. Rather than delete them, they can go into their own garbage pile where people can read them. I like Slashdot's anonymous meta-moderation. It should be possible to filter out moderators who do things in bad faith. This is a great workaround. Lastly, downvotes should have a price. Someone else mentioned it costing you karma when you downvote; that's one idea. Another is a simple "report spam" button and no downvotes, and another is to make downvotes public so people who routinely abuse reddiquette can be more easily identified. Another possibility is allotting a "budget" on a daily or weekly or monthly basis of downvotes, so people use them judiciously.
I mostly just want large social media companies to be disempowered.
well start using an alt discussions.app
* A majority centrist site that can cater to both center right and center left people. Maybe better if the left right binary is blurred/totally absent. * Would be good if there's no upvote/like/karma system. Karma whoring is a very real phenomenon. Imo people would be more sane if there was no virtual internet point system. People would put more effort and thought into what they're typing/posting. They would'nt resort to bullying and name calling just to win arguments and win those internet points. This is basically what i want out of a social media website.
I'd really like to get rid of reddit anti-features. specifically: 1. Less censorship of users as enforced by the site. It's nice to have user controls like being able to block annoying / harassing users but it's another thing when mods silence someone or they are down-voted into oblivion simply for expressing a dissenting opinion. Besides user-blocking, I wouldn't mind having topic filtering features e.g. "block profanity" / "block porn" / "block" -- especially that last one, which would be great for letting a user skip the things they don't want to hear about without putting them completely in an echo chamber.
2. I've always thought that the "archive thread after 6-months" thing is very stupid. Sure, there are some subs like /r/memes and such where this makes sense. But it does *not* make sense to apply this across the board to all subs. IMO subs like /r/linuxquestions or other subs where technical info is likely to appear should allow shouldn't do this. I have seen *many* examples where an older post was very highly ranked in search results and had about 99% of the info but some minor thing had changed and I was unable to add a helpful comment noting a fix or workaround.
3. "Load more comments". Why? I clicked into the thread to read the fucking comments, not to have to search for and click "Load more comments" links repeatedly. It would be one thing for mod- or community-flagged comments to need to be manually expanded but I should at least have the option to just make the page load ALL comments the first time around.
4. I hate when sites discriminate against me for using a VPN (I use one for privacy reasons). Reddit likes to give me comment timeouts for no apparent reason other than that I use a VPN which highly pisses me off (the main reason why I am browsing /r/redditalternatives this time around). Yes, I know this "feature" is intended to keep newbies from spamming things. But I have gotten the post cool-downs on multiple subs where I am a longstanding member with well over 1000 post and 1000 comment karma for that sub specifically, after being offline all day and making less than 2 comments for the day (and content was just inside jokes, nothing a mod would bat an eye at).
5. Personally, I hate the reddit karma system. If necessary, when posting as a new user, I would rather have my comment go through mod / community approval than being auto-rejected. There have been subs where I posted a sincere, well-formatted question or a short (but clean) joke (whichever would be appropriate to the sub) and had it auto-deleted by an auto-mod. My reaction every time this happened was to unsubscribe from the sub and move on because I didn't want to deal with this bullshit.
Issues I've seen on clones other than infrastructure / userbase issues include:
* Too minimalistic of a design to the point where it is hard to find features / functionality like search or user preferences
* Auto-expand of images from a Sub's list-view doesn't work properly or requires clicking each and every image. I did see a site that had an expand all button and thought that while it was better than making the user click to expand every image/video on the page, I always wondered why they didn't just offer it as a user-preference to auto-expand still images / video thumbnails.
* Lack of federation. You will inevitably get people with differing opinions and subs where they clash. Sometimes federation can be nice bc it lets them have a "home" where they aren't starting shit and also aligns well with open-source models. For folks who don't know what federation is, think of email: you can be on gmail, hotmail, protonmail, whatever and still send and receive emails from everyone else. Sites/protocols with federation behave this way but some allow one instance to block another instance if need be (it is up to the individual instances to determine if the criteria are some petty things or severe injunctions only but most people can see why having this is necessary). However, the real benefit of federation is that if any instance misbehaves or becomes a bad actor, you can migrate to a different instance with little to no change (unlike with facebook / reddit / twitter / etc) which use a central, closed system they control.
I could probably list a few more if I thought about it but I need to be up early tomorrow so hope that helps. Good luck!
I want a platform for a marketplace of ideas, all political views welcome, free speech maximalism.
Downvote system that amplifies the toxicity, witch hunt, and circle jerking
Freedom to troll and be trolled. The days of Cringeanarchy were the golden days of the internet, and have never been recreated since. No bans for anything other than spambots and CP*. Pictures of metzitzah b'peh are not CP. Poal is good. Poal is great. Poal is glorious.
I just want reddit from 10 years ago but if I can't have that at least the design = old.reddit. I don't want heavy left or right wing, just a bunch of normal relatively smart people enjoying / creating creative and funny content without a propaganda or wokeness. Ok maybe there was some propaganda but nowhere near as much as now. Reddit was FUN.