What is the next Reddit, for you?
Just saw that Reddit has removed Aaron Swartz from the list of co-founders, and was wondering, what online communities do you really like that serve the need for discussion and play which aren’t HN?
Reddit has become a heavily censored website that supports only one political viewpoint. For instance, I cannot say on reddit that BLM by definition checks off all boxes for a terrorist hate group because I will be banned. This goes for large swaths of society in general where people have gone from free speech advocates to raving lunatics ready to censor, ban, cancel, and fire anyone who does not support their views.
Next reddit will start with free speech and, if it becomes popular, eventually the anti-free speech people will move in and turn it into reddit.
What the past few years have shown me is that we need a place for serious discussion that is not influenced by bots, propaganda, and astroturfing. Public opinion and awareness on current events on sites like Twitter and Reddit is getting swayed by all sorts of bad actors and this is wreaking havoc on our society. I think if we actually care for a healthy community, the future is in communities with verified identity so that there is actually some sense of accountability from the people that post there. Whether these types of communities will gain any traction is another story...
I’d really love to see an exodus back to Internet forums. I forged a lot of great relationships while I was growing up on forums, and I learned programming through hacking on extensions for little communities I was running.
It will probably need to come from outside of Silicon Valley. The monoculture there is too hostile to any contrarian ideas.
I’d put money on the next Reddit being from somewhere like Texas.
I think the next reddit will be self-hosted subreddits, ones which can be easily forked, split, synced, archived, and with portable accounts.
Doesn't sound like it was a recent thing.
NNTP, which can be decentralized. I have wrote a NNTP server software, although it may help to implement some other things to go with it, such as: federation with other NNTP services (which might or might not use the same software; the protocol is the same regardless of what software it is using), web interface (I have some requirements, such as requiring the NNTP server information and message ID to be displayed even if scripts/CSS is disabled), email subscriptions (many people prefer mailing lists, and this is a way to make such a thing to work), etc.
I am working on quitting reddit and joining the "homebrew website" camp as the bulk of my online presence. I don't expect it to be the next reddit, because I don't want a next reddit. The internet on social media is big, fast, and dehumanizing. I want the internet to feel smaller, slower, and more personal. I think the only answer is for everyone to build their own website. Unfortunately there's not much money to be made in that.
Reverting back to specialised phpBB forums. Full circle.
Reddit without bots
I'm sick of the dark arts of manipulation of algorithms to present views as normal, even when they work against people's best interests
Recently its been niche discords. I’ve had a bit of luck being able to find and converse with people behind some popular things.
A communication platform needs open transparent democratic governance, like the Debian project.
Making a Reddit-alternative right now - although nowhere near ready to share yet, unfortunately.
They removed Aaron Swartz? You've got to be kidding me.
The solution will be separate forums, in which the forum owners have a stake in maintaining a healthy community. Reddit has willingly allowed itself to be overrun by politics, and it's now bordering on being disinformation. An example is the Libertarian subreddit, which has been completely overrun by liberal and trump supporters. People who visit it get visibly confused.
There are a number of projects for building reddit-like communities . Lemmy and whatever the *.win websites. People are also workign on federated solutions which would remove the hassle of having to create an account for each separate website (https://github.com/ProjectHoot/)
Going back to having separate forums would be great actually
I don't know about the next reddit, but lemmy and tildes.net seem like a nice alternative.
I wouldn't say next reddit but there's https://voat.co a lot of those expelled from reddit have moved there.
There's lobste.rs for developer only stuff