Comment by beloch
9 days ago
Where Facebook has gone, I fear other U.S. social media is headed. Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in, which suggests they're doubling down on user tracking. On top of that are the increasing privacy, censorship, and disinformation concerns that come with using any U.S.-based social media.
There is clearly a need for facebook/reddit alternatives for useful groups like the one you describe. There are things like Mastodon out there, but they haven't gained much traction. What will it take to get people off of platforms that are actively hostile to their users? What is keeping existing alternatives from being used?
I find the fall of Reddit to be particularly upsetting. In its prime it was one of the best social networks I'd ever used and I found incredible value in it - but after having my app blown up by their API changes and the continued (unsurprising) push away from their old open platform to a more "curated" experience, it doesn't feel like the same place anymore.
I want someone to actually smack Steve Huffman. Not hard, but enough to get through the veneer of We Take Your Feedback Very Seriously And-
No. Enough. The community is fucking screaming at you
Someone that loves their users does not fire the mods in response to API change protest. And censorship galore, and too much power concentrated in the mods and site
If you want the community to be in control of the platform, you should be pursuing a community-controlled platform, not a capitalist-controlled one.
1 reply →
Honestly? Reddit is a massive public manipulation platform.
Consider that the daughter of the guy who purposefully weakened his product's encryption on behalf of Mossad (and was considered a hero of the state), the same daughter who was rubbing elbows with the world's richest and most powerful people, was a reddit powermod with moderation power on a huge number of major subreddits.
Anyone who thinks that the ~500 most popular subreddits are anything but government/corporate manipulators is deluding themselves.
I couldn't agree more. I suspect 80%+ of all comments now are bots. Paid for by the highest bidder. The entire front page is undoubtedly bought and paid for, as well. Subreddits are only allowed to survive if they don't threaten the paid for messaging and advertising.
2 replies →
Reddit recently blocked access to anything marked NSFW on old.reddit.com unless you upload your ID to Persona (Thiel's company).
Do you have a source for that? I can still access anything nsfw on old.reddit.com from Europe.
They're still A/B testing
> Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in
They haven't for me (just tested before posting this comment), which I realize might be temporary. Have they published a policy, or did you get caught in A/B testing hell?
They did publish a policy and announced it a month or so back. Phased rollout, it took a while before it started applying to me. But now I am unable to use old.reddit at all, and I can only use new reddit on a desktop browser - and only for a little while until it covers the content and tells me I have to login to continue.
I know why they did this, I get it, but they did me a favor by severely curbing the time I might otherwise waste on their web site. For that I thank them.
Well, that sucks.
Thank you for the information.
I was blocked as well, so did my wife.
A quick google search shows thousands of complaints on, ironically, Reddit itself. So it's probably not just an A/B test, more likely a gradual rollout.
My phone is blocked but not my desktop (yet).
I guess the upside of reddit selling all that post data to AI firms is I'm not sure I'll really need to use reddit anymore. Which means I'll never login to post since I won't be seeing other threads to distract myself with. Which seems like long term will hurt reddit's future data.
I think it's a staged rollout. People were complaining about it a few days, but I didn't get blocked until this morning.
Probably a phased rollout based on region. I was blocked almost a month ago and never got back in.
I abandoned my 5k follower Twitter account for Mastodon a few years ago and 1700 people followed me there. I expect out of the 5k Twitter followers most of them are bots, so I probably lost nothing.
The secret to making alternative platforms work, is actually engaging with them and pretending the toxic platforms you hate no longer exist.
I am a bay area serial founder, with no Twitter, Meta, Google, Apple, or any such other centralized surveillance capitalism bullshit. I do not even have a Signal account as centralization is fundamentally incompatible with freedom and privacy in my eyes. Never gets in my way of doing anything I want to do or talking to anyone I want to talk to.
People sure do like to make excuses on why they still -must- use those platforms even though they do not -want- to. Absolutely never let a platform hold you hostage. Let no one own you if you want freedom.
The smartest people I have ever interacted with are on platforms like IRC, Matrix, and Mastodon. I would rather build a social graph of thousands of people that also really value freedom over thousands of people that make excuses to stay trapped in walled gardens any day.
> People sure do like to make excuses on why they still -must- use those platforms even though they do not -want- to.
They are not always excuses and you really should understand that if you have tech industry experience.
Try having a small business in some niches and doing so without Facebook.
I cannot think of a niche where one could not be successful without Facebook, but by all means present a specific example.
4 replies →
> and pretending the toxic platforms you hate no longer exist
Thank you. One reason I spend more time on my Mastodon feed than my Bluesky feed is there are fewer people there complaining about Twitter. Less rage and complaining in general.
I'm 99.99% sure your audience is tech people.
Tech, privacy, law, activism, authors, artists. All types on these platforms.
Social media in general is doomed. Adverts, invasive tracking, and AI slop have killed it.
Rather than creating tiktok but open source, we should just dump the idea entirely. Social media was a net negative to society.
It all depends on what you count as social media. We had platforms before "social media" was a term that would now fall under it for many people and I am not eager to get rid of all of those. Sure, burn the algorithm, the centralization, etc. but I will keep talking to people online both privately and semi-publicly.
I'm honestly surprised that there isn't a successor platform to Reddit overtaking yet considering how far they have gone with the enshittification.