I wish there were alternatives to Reddit. If anyone has a recommendation, let me know.
Lemmy think on it and get back to you.
Reddit does shitty stuff, but at least I’m able to find stuff on there. Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me. It’s not easily searchable, and search engines can’t index it. If people aren’t fastidious about replying to messages they’re responding to, it’s just a nonsense stream of consciousness from dozens of people.
That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.
I use Opencore Legacy Patcher to run unsupported macOS on my older Macs. They used to have an excellent Reddit group that was easily searchable and rammed full of really good advice on how to fix common issues.
A couple of years ago they shuttered the group and moved everything over to Discord, and it’s been hell ever since trying to figure out how to fix something if it goes wrong.
You search for your issue, find someone talking about it, then have to pick through the dozens of replies either side to try and figure out if there’s anything useful. There are dedicated support threads now, but hardly anyone uses them, so they’re not helpful.
I really, really hate Discord as a support medium, and can’t for the life of me work out why the OCLP mods chose it over Reddit.
I’ve used OCLP, and I didn’t even realize they largely switched to Discord. That explains why finding some info was such a PITA when I was playing around with it.
I will never understand why people choose to use Discord as a forum replacement. It’s just such an awful platform for that.
Related Meme: Me and the person who had the same problem 14 years ago (Meme Image: Knight 🛡️ sits next to a skeleton 💀)
With the mass adaption of discord these kind of “nice search engine finds 🔍” will become rare again.
And I heard that reddit also has a special search engine deal with google while blocking others?
I don’t understand why discord is so popular for communities. There is 0 permanence, and google does not index it so not even organic growth.
Discord is a black hole of knowledge except for the ai training companies.
Because its very easy to use and does stuff no other platform does (make it extremely easy to voice/video chat with multiple people streaming screen and essentially make a forum in 2 clicks)
That’s all good but those features are not what makes a good discussion forum. This, what we’re typing on, is an example of a good forum.
I’m gonna keep posting on Lemmy and hope that helps. Our collective communities should not be in the hands of mega corporations.
Can someone tell me what happens if my Lemmy instance host shuts down 💀? Will my posts be deleted?
Welcome to the new era of enshittification where you’ll eventually have to subscribe to access or make posts, and none of it will be searchable on any search engines.
At least Reddit is searchable, while Discord is not. Not trying to defend Reddit though.
At least Reddit is searchable
How long until they restrict viewing the full contents of posts without logging in?
I think Facebook won’t let me look at their videos without logging in
For Videos I can get it, since that costs much storage and bandwidth for the host 🎞️. But for raw text/html? No.
I advocate for two things, oddly things I never would have in earlier internet:
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Paid forums. A one time payment for registration.
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Strict rules and quick bans. But allow offenders to buy back in. Permaban for serious offenses. .
Why? Because if it costs you $10 or 15 to re-activate after screwing around, you’re much more likely to read the room and not fuck around too much with others. It encourages users to point out bad behavior, and mods to act decisively. If the mods or management totally suck, then it can go sour, but that’s true of any community.
In this case though it can at least partially help to offset costs from shitty users, and keep bots at bay by making them cost a registration fee.
I don’t love it as a “solution”, but when Facebook was small, people behaved better. But now people post the most unhinged shit ever under their full legal name, so no amount of daylight is going to put the proverbial trolls back in their cages. Just gotta lock them out of civil spaces.
You wanna talk about Honda engine tuning here with us? Don’t be a fucking asshole, or get banned.
You wanna chat with fans of 50s cinema and the rise of modern camera film technique? Do it without brining up woke/trump/biden/Covid or get out.
I like that we have free stuff like lemmy and reddit for now, but bots are getting far, far worse.
Hate that aspect of social networks as well. Someone has to moderate manually in the end, once a community is not finely curated. Since that is not pleasant experience.
Thats why I Love the idea that users have to show some merit before allowed to join a community. But that kind of system does not scale well. And social networks usefulness is all about scale. There are contradicting forces at play here.
Ideally the world would be moneyless
Honestly to avoid the immense botspam coming for small orgs, you need either a literal army of volunteers, or some kind of “realID” type check to verify they’re human, and I hate that concept immensely as well.
Giant if, but if you could do a one way cryptographic check against an ID to verify its legitimate, without sending anything off the server elsewhere, then a forum could bind your current username to a state issued ID, at least until it’s reissued. And then you could at least reasonably think these users are human.
But who wants to give that info to a stranger online. Even if the hash is unique to the site based on their own seed, the average person doesn’t understand that, and it feels like handing over your actual privacy.
Setting aside that PCs don’t have NFC readers as a standard feature as well.
Everything I think would be effectivd boils down though to needing to know that something exists in meatspace on the other end, and being able to use that to manage your bans. At least 10bux is just money, and not your ID.
This is the thing, the balance of anonymity and preventing people using that anonymity to be a tit.
In my opinion, one of the answers is keeping the signal-to-noise high: Make sure that there are enough sensible people in a community that if someone starts acting up, they’re alone. And then they can either correct their course, or get banned, ideally before the next moron shows up.And part of the way of achieving that is raising the barrier to sign-up, if only a little, and rate limiting.
Revisiting this many weeks later: what do you think of the idea of super users who can be delegated an ability to silence/quarantine other posters?
Admin
Moderators
Superuser
User
Maybe if they only had the ability to flag a user and put them in "time out, and it couldn’t stack or be consecutive from one superuser, etc?
I dunno. It might be a good way to help police the content without making people volunteer to be full on mods. And it can be treated as a semi privileged role, that expires are X months and only X number ofnactive users in good standing can have at once?
A little complex to implement, but it might at least let mods crowdsource the task of stemming the worst of things.
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Yeah everyone like “AI content flood oh noooo, AI AI AI” yet very few mention this much much bigger issue of centralized algorithmically controlled walled gardens where everyone is. That’s kinda like WeChat in China. It is hard to have real democracy or freedom of information (or privacy of any sort) when only a few big corporations have the social networks all locked down. The bad thing is because of the social network effect it’s extremely hard to get people to switch even if the alternatives are even better! So much momentum. We need to find out a way to be able to help distribute users because the software isn’t the problem anymore and neither is infrastructure or any of the other stuff that is given the big guys advantage really. The biggest problem aside from the social network effect is monetization I suppose. Still, it’s hard to even start any kind of method of monetization for alternative platforms or decentralized platforms when you can’t get anybody to switch in the first place or can’t get critical mass.
