Comment by curun1r
5 years ago
I’m a believer in just creating a subreddit. It’s free and easy, many people already have Reddit accounts and it’s a much better forum than the ones that would be self-hosted, including moderation tooling and bot ecosystem. The threaded discussions are also better than what Github offers.
I agree that subreddits have a very low barrier to entry, but all that comes at a cost. Among other things, one of those costs is that your content is no longer owned by you.
Should Reddit decide to take itself private, or make ethically questionable decisions, etc., you are locked in due to the networking effect.
There’s risk in everything…self-hosted forum software run by an open source project also has a potential of going offline, either because hosting becomes onerous/expensive or some sort of database issue. Discord and Github have the exact same potential you’ve mentioned for Reddit. There’s no perfect answer.
If it's quality conversation, it will be quoted elsewhere, mirrored (if only to add ads!) and even archived for example on archive.com. Blog posts will be written that refer to it as a rationale for doing that way.
That isn't different for Discord though and reddit can be crawled at least.
Telegram group/channel can take care of those concerns
Right. Good luck having a conversation as the channel grows. There's been several times where I've joined a channel, asked a question, and my question is gone from the screen before anyone is able to answer. Slack/Discord are way better than Telegram for support.
How is Telegram different from Reddit in that regard? If anything, it seems much less accessible while sharing all the risks mentioned by GP.
The biggest downside of Reddit is that it's so darn hard to find your own posts. The Reddit search seems completely broken for this, so you rely on DDG/Google etc. but this is far from perfect.
I downloaded all my messages with some script, but that doesn't seem complete either since there are messages missing I'm *sure* I posted on Reddit. It's also not very convenient.
Why do I want to find my own posts? Sometimes I write something at length explaining X, and then a few weeks, months, or even years later someone asks about X again and I want to link my previous detailed post.
IMO if you write "at length" explaining something, copy that to your own blog or at the very least a markdown file on your own computer. Don't rely on a 3rd party site for archival.
And this is where you find your own posts: https://www.reddit.com/user/SaveVideo/posts/
And comments: https://www.reddit.com/user/SaveVideo/comments/
Searching is crap, but it's Reddit so no news there =)
I usually save things (not just Reddit comments, also HN etc.), generally speaking the bar of what I publish on my site is higher than what I may write in a comment. Sometimes I get around to polishing stuff, sometimes not. Other times it's just too specific to really publish on my site.
Finding stuff in the chronological list takes forever.
You need a certain amount of reddit karma to make a subreddit IIRC. You can farm it, but it's yet another thing unrelated to working on your project you need to do, plus it takes time (could take days).
The whole process is opaque too, it feels distinctly like "we have arbitrarily bestowed upon you the privilege of operating subreddits... for now".
I like the reddit format so I've tried this option myself.
The iphone 6 is actually a very decent device. I don't consider it safe to alienate users for using it.