tildes score: 61 · tags: —
[Reddit could have been] the antidote to an automated web. AI compresses the internet into summaries. Reddit [could have been the site that] delivers the opposite: deep discussions, passionate debates, and lived experiences. People don’t want a summary of Reddit; they want [what Reddit was before they destroyed it]
score 6 · canonical
Exactly. There’s a good reason some version of the “public forum” exists throughout the ages; the only people who don’t want us talking to each other are the monied elite who are stealing from us and don’t want us comparing notes.
score 4 · canonical
I left reddit when the whole API fiasco happened. It was a complete mask-off event to me and I wanted no part of it. So I deleted all my old comments and user. No doubt they had backups of the data and it was more symbolic than anything.
score 6 · canonical
…a member of the Silicon Valley upper crust, speaking ill of AI?
I would have thought someone like Huffman would have become an unflinching AI sycophant. Interesting to see any of those guys openly complain about how AI is actually making their businesses worse. I guess that adage “no honor among thieves” rings true in this case.
score 5 · canonical
one of my subs is more support oriented for spreadsheets and since all this AI shit got going, its kind of died off. Even the chats have gone quiet. The only people we really ever hear from preface it with ‘I tried chatGPT, but…’
Reddit is great, though. Like it or not, its our current iteration of usenet. It’ll die off one day, but something else will pop up.
There is some evidence of this – it really seems like they have old.reddit for real people and then the sh.reddit stuff to satisfy investors. Spez et al all use old.reddit and often confirm that it isnt going away.
score 15 · canonical
I had to unsub from like all the programming/ software dev subreddits cause for years now its just been new grads totally losing their minds and saying wild doomer shit like we’re all gonna be unemployed in N years
Like even the subs that used to be really good at giving advice or solving architecture issues are all spammed with doomer shit. That entire community has just been gutted, its so sad.
score 13 · canonical
Hmm I think it might take a few villages to create and nudge people to try new alternatives for it to really die off though.
A lot of times its just the people are different, not even the platform. Like most people here, I am I woudl say 70% into discussion and making friends and 30% memes and 2-min videos. Reddit and most social media all optimizes for the latter cuz that’s what most people prefer. So I’m creating a forum thing where hopefully I can find more people like me. /s
score 3 · canonical
sh is new Reddit, old.reddit.com is the good one. You can default to old, though.
score 5 · canonical
None of us likes Reddit or else we wouldn’t be here but I think Reddit will be here for a long time. Unfortunately no one else has created a better forum yet. Don’t get me wrong Tildes is better for text-focused and long discussions or link aggregator + comments. Overall though doesn’t look like Reddit has any competition which is a little well disappointing.
PS: It’s kinda funny how every new social media alternative I see now markets itself as the “new way to connect with humans” and as Reddit still does.
score 33 · canonical
Considering how blatantly evil Google is now, it’s good that it never caught on.
score 2 · canonical
I agree, Google+ was actually pretty good. I think it was destined to fail, but I have a lot of good memories on the platform.
score 2 · canonical
It was so good for building communities. It was a bit like a mix of Discord and Reddit in some ways. Met some really cool people on there.
I don’t think it was destined to fail, they killed it way too fast. They were also pretty heavy handed with pushing it down people’s throats.
score 6 · canonical
Unfortunately no one else has created a better forum yet.
There’s plenty of better forums that aren’t user hostile to its core.
But as we’ve learned the last few decades, you don’t build the most popular communities by being a better or higher quality forum. The only thing that can really kill Reddit is itself (and to its credit, it’s doing a good job so far).
score 8 · canonical
These days, I am very much the type of traffic that the article is referring to. I largely left Reddit after the API controversy like many people here. Ever since I stopped casually browsing Reddit.
However, occasionally I find myself in the situation where I want to read the views and opinions of random people on a certain topic. I then Google the question and Reddit is basically the only result that is worth reading (and on rare occasions quora, but quora is a mess).
I try not the read the AI overview, and go for the actual comments, as the whole point was trying to find input from fellow humans. But I noticed that I don’t always stick to this anymore and catch myself just reading the summary. So I can totally see how AI can hurt this type of traffic.
score 21 · canonical
Google’s your problem. The forums where more representative groups of people are having actual discussions aren’t happening on Reddit. It’s in related substack articles, microblogs sites, instagram/threads, and discord groups. Things that Google doesn’t index.
score 5 · canonical
You must be me. I would write the exact same thing, except that i can resist reading the ai summary 9/10 times.
score 6 · canonical
Overall though doesn’t look like Reddit has any competition
For smaller communities, Discord is pretty comparable. Podcasts and video games too.
score 7 · canonical
For sure. I should clarify that I meant Reddit/forum like websites. Discord is chat-first so I kinda put it in a totally different category.
score 4 · canonical
As famously bad as Reddit search is, at least the content is indexed by Google. Information stored in Discord is hard to access, hard to find, and hard to use.
score 50 · canonical
Always bugged me they never spent time allowing a built in “wiki”. They got a forum feature up and running, but a wiki and some level of external searchable exposure would do a lot.
score 6 · canonical
Not only is it walled off from the rest of the internet, it’s controlled by a for profit company on its way to an IPO that will eventually enshittify.
score 28 · canonical
But that’s like all major social media no? The only way out of that is Tildes and encourage people to join other forums like Tildes.
score 5 · canonical
Or a more decentralized social network - one more modeled after the real world. I don’t know what that is yet but I’m open to suggestions
score 4 · canonical
plenty of options out there, but you’re sacrificing massive network effects for all of them. For more niche activities (or super specific aspects of an activity), that basically means sacrificing all that network.
The tech is there. The people are complacent.
score 4 · canonical
It’s more that there’s no one place I can connect with all of my friends and family anymore. That is the functionality missing with all the separate bits. I have some folks on Signal, some only on FB, some on Messenger but not Facebook, a few via Snap, a couple I message on Tiktok for videos.
If I could mass migrate “my people” to even just a few places for chat, life updates and discussions/advice/etc. I would. Even then I doubt it replaces r/Fantasy or more niche conversation spaces. But it would help.
score 4 · canonical
The fediverse (mostly, but not entirely, Mastodon) is… decentralized, anyway. It’s at best debatable if it does or even attempts to model face-to-face social structures. But no single server or corporate entity has the ability to bring down or substantially degrade the entire network on its own. (The best estimate is that there are roughly 1M active users across the fediverse, of which about 300k are on mastodon.social. That’s a concerningly large chunk! But it’s not even half the total network; and the next biggest server is pixelfed.social with 65k, and then there’s an extremely long tail of servers with ~10k or fewer users.)
score 5 · canonical
And Stack Exchange continues to shoot themselves in the foot every chance they get…
score 15 · canonical
Lmao. I honestly haven’t visited Stack Exchange for ages now, kinda a shame cuz I use to look up all sorts of stuff there for code. What’s going on with them recently, you sound like you know stuff!
score 15 · canonical
The vibe of the site was you get beat with a stick for daring to ask a question, but you put up with it because it was the only option. As soon as it wasn’t the only option the site completely died.
score 14 · canonical
Yea I guess I missed all that cuz the question I wanted to ask was always already asked so I just had to Google properly. Perhaps I missed all that!
score 2 · canonical
It can be a very very frustrating experience for all involved. The mods aren’t given all the tools they need either.
score 2 · canonical
I was curious why it felt the site and network had declined over the years, so I spent a few hours one evening reading into all the controversies and history. To summarize, I’d put it down to three points:
- Stack Exchange has had a terrible whip sawing relationship with its power users and community since at least 2016. Wikipedia has the most neutral summary you’ll get on the matter because it involves Twitter cancel culture, a mod being banned for privately questioning a poorly thought out pronoun policy, and LLM moderation policies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack/_Exchange#Declining_relationship_between_users_and_company
- The site’s design has always been miserable for detaching users from their questions and answers. When combined with the aggressive moderation, the site feels toxic to normies and experts alike.
- Discussion on the site design: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389558/stack-exchange-is-failing-its-community
- Hacker News discussion on the moderation and general decline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37120982
- Users go to LLMs instead of Stack Exchange for simple questions, further killing Stack Exchange’s entry rung on the reputation ladder and limiting its future utility: https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/6446/is-mathoverflow-at-risk-of-being-let-down-by-stackexchange-inc
In my opinion, the company behind the network has never known what they wanted to do, and all the attempts to seriously productize and profit have failed. The site was originally co-created by Jeff Atwood who later went on to create Discourse and is extremely well respected by the software engineering intelligentsia ( interview discussing Stack Overflow and Discourse). This last meta post discusses how Stack ignores its community and LLMs ignore the body of knowledge they’re birthed from: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/438708/jeff-atwoods-april-20-2026-blog-post-advice-to-stack-overflow-and-llm-gai-co
score 29 · canonical
Wow thanks for doing all the research! Crazy. I think most users did find the site very helpful. Like I still lke its UI. There’s always ways to improve the UX of course but look at how many terrible slop we have now with AI coded stuff. I did read the accessibility piece. Again I think most websites can’t even get buttons and layout right, like accessibility is pretty much um rarely considered. Feels like the bar is somehow way higher for SE. Look at Reddit now, its decent but the design feels very dated. SE doesnt give me that feeling at all.
I honestly hope SE stays even if its not very relevant. I own a lot of my early career to SE questions and answers.
score 3 · canonical
The design does a bad job highlighting the elements they want users to engage with, and the way questions and answers are presented encourage people to take it personally when their highly detailed question is closed as a duplicate. Of course there are worse designs, but Stack Exchange failed at evolving their design to match usage and encourage positive engagement.
score 3 · canonical
I still like reddit the site, just not reddit the company. But my use has always been specific, often nice subs; old.reddit based; and I have never browsed “all” in my life.
Edit: Fixed a comma. It’s probably not better. Just different
score 50 · canonical
Reddit requiring account login for old.reddit a couple weeks ago completely halted me checking it during work. I’d already been distancing myself from the site recreationally for quite some time, but that really killed any further use of the site. A bit awkward since I used reddit for actual work-related things sometimes, but I’ll make do.
score 20 · canonical
Unfortunately, I had to make a work Reddit account with my corporate email so that I can still check the occasional post…
score 2 · canonical
…i don’t visit reddit frequently anymore but i still haven’t bumped into the login requirement since it was announced last month…
score 5 · canonical
I get it, I stay logged in so it doesn’t phase me. I dislike the things that popup on all and prefer to browse a bit through the subs I like if I’m just hanging out.
score 9 · canonical
I’ve seen a lot of dissatisfaction with that change. For myself, I’d prefer to see my own subreddits and curated front page, so I log in every time anyway.
score 10 · canonical
And that’s a move they made that tanks ad-views and DAUs and then affects revenue and then affects stock price. They’ve done this to themselves. Similar gates on the new site which blocks anon viewers and routes them to the (crappy) app. Tanks numbers. It’s just convenient/lazy to blame Google.
score 13 · canonical
I wonder about that. How many people use old.reddit but don’t use an ad blocker?
Granted, the site is absolutely full of undisclosed spam/native advertising, but I doubt reddit itself gets a cut of most of that.
score 17 · canonical
I like small subreddits. Any of the big ones there’s a lot of spam and very little discussion. What niches are you into if you don’t mind me asking?
More rabbit hole questions if you are up for it (completely optional of course): If I asked you to redesign Reddit’s UI, what would you change? Or maybe what is better from the old.reddit vs. the new.
score 7 · canonical
I use local subreddits, book/reading related ones, and like farmrpg, with dips into things like AskHistorians (though I haven’t for a while, idk if quality has dropped) and Costco as needed. So it’s much more purposeful but not terribly interesting.
I occasionally browse something like law to try to grasp a bit more on policy/court stuff (comments aren’t so useful most of the time).but I’ve mostly replaced that with a lawyer filter on bsky
Old reddit is more text heavy, has less empty space and fits more text on my screen in general for someone who likes reading discussions. I keep adblock on and don’t have ads (plus Idk what new reddit does with pinned posts but they’re large images rather than basic links.) It feels like less flashy images too but that may just be because I only see new reddit on Chrome on my phone before opening it in Firefox if I have searched up an answer to something.
score 12 · canonical
If you start playing farmrpg, feel free to add me as a friend, happy to send you gifts and stuff while you’re getting started!
I’m ‘Russel Sprout’ over there.
score 5 · canonical
I have nothing insightful to say in response to this, just a verbal rolling of my eyes and a snarky “no shit, Sherlock.”
score 16 · canonical