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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29674 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Reddit matters, unfortunately.

When reddit came out in 2006, I was instantly enthralled. I loved the branched conversation style over single-threaded forums like PHPBB that dominated the web before. It was a new architecture for conversation, a better one. Plus, it had a smart, techie community that was fun to discuss things with.

Fast forward to today, and the world loves reddit. It's ranked as a top-10 website by traffic. Reddit is the default place to find an intelligent discussion on any niche topic. Whenever I have a medical issue, or I want to explore a new piece of technology, I go to Reddit. When I want product reviews for a pair of leather boots, I go to Google search and type "Best men's leather boots reddit". The cutting edge LLMs are being trained on reddit content. It's an important piece of the foundation of web content.

Which is unfortunate that it's moderated so poorly, and that policy comes from the top down. You know what I mean. themotte.org is one of several diaspora communities that fled reddit due to its heavy-handed, leftist moderation.

It's incredibly frustrating to use. My politics are somewhat esoteric but definitely of the right. On an occasion I'm baited into a conversation with political valence and I'll state a right-wing argument, and more often than not my account gets banned. On X, I saw screenshots of an /r/askReddit post "Republicans, why are you voting for Kamala this time?" and it had had thousands of upvotes and comments. The equivalent self-post "Democrats, why are you voting for Trump?" was banned with zero comments. If a thread is allowed to live for a few hours that draws popular heterodox views, it results in the inevitable thread lock and thousands of deleted comments to prevent "hate"

From my memory, the leftward drift of reddit seems to have occurred over the last 10 years. It hit an inflection point with the election of Trump and the ban of /r/TheDonald. It accelerated again since 2020 with BLM. That was the year that the TERFs were banned en masse (a community that mattered to me, as it helped me get over my own trans-dreaming and be happy with my gender).

Reddit's politics reflect the fact that the company is based in San Francisco. But it is left of center for San Francisco, which puts it far, far to the left of the nation.

And it's a shame! I'd love a higher-quality general purpose discussion forum. The world needs it. When Elon liberated X, that provided an important venue for free speech. But X optimizes for a high-addiction feed of quick information bites. It doesn't allow for as in-depth discussion and community building.

What would such a forum look like? I have some ideas:

  1. It would maintain the threaded format beloved by so many

  2. It would be seeded by a high quality community, such as that found here or on LessWrong

  3. It would have some sort of governance body that would maintain high quality of moderation for the main subs

The easiest, but not cheapest way to liberate Reddit would be to find a billionaire backer to buy it. It's a public company and its marketcap is a hair under $10 billion. The other alternative would be to try to get an alternative off the ground, perhaps building on active and healthy diaspora communities. It would be possible, for example, to give new users credit for karma they have earned on themotte or LessWrong. Selfishly, I would love a forum where I could ask questions to the high-functioning on-the-spectrum folks that populate these places. Reddit without the bottom half of its IQ spectrum would be a superior place for discussing nootropics, health, AI, and similar topics.

I'm a computer programmer. I care about providing community discussion forums. I've spent a good chunk of my life on them. I'm kinda bored at my day job and looking for a new adventure. What do you think?

What do you think?

If you have a popular forum that is free to join then people are incentivized to push products and narratives because it creates a way for them to advertise for basically free. People are gaming the system with bots and other tactics.

I think Elon Musk came to realization that the only way to solve this issue on forums with anonymous users is to gate content creation behind a paywall.

If you're going to gate a forum behind a paywall it would probably need to have something else that is worth paying for that also attracts a community with shared values. Then the paywall gated forums are a bonus, instead of the main feature.

I'm not endorsing this, but https://petersonacademy.com/ is an example of a paywall gated social media platform.

I think Elon Musk came to realization that the only way to solve this issue on forums with anonymous users is to gate content creation behind a paywall.

The problem with that is that it won't be "anonymous" once the credit card payment info of all the users is stolen or leaked. Personally I will never give my credit card info to any forum where people talk about sex or politics.

I'm surprised Elon hasn't done anything with twitter. He's talked a lot about wanting to save free speech and keep the free marketplace of ideas going, except twitter's format is absolutely garbage for discussing and sharing ideas. From it's inception it was always more top down and geared towards established brands and personalities using it to soapbox or advertise. He spent all that money on the massive install base, but hasn't really done anything with it. Even for the people that have followings they tweet out to it's a chore. I occasionally will see for example that one motte user that quit and created the schism and now posts to twitter effortposting on there and they will have to break their posts up into multiple and rely on users knowing to use some 3rd party tool like threadreader to make it more legible.

You'd think it wouldn't cost that much to spin up some reddit clone but with alternative modding or some kind of free speech list of user's rights to balance mod power. Combine with twitter's userbase and now right wing people or even dissident left no longer need to ever frequent reddit.

You'd think it wouldn't cost that much to spin up some reddit clone but with alternative modding or some kind of free speech list of user's rights to balance mod power. Combine with twitter's userbase and now right wing people or even dissident left no longer need to ever frequent reddit.

It's simply too late for that - Twitter and its format have too much recognition. You can't guarantee people would stay on the new platform, and it wouldn't even make as much sense for governments and institutions use Twitter - a place to post updates about what is happening. Following the account of your representative makes sense, subscribing to a subreddit about them feels odd, at least to me.

I don't think Elon has any idea how to use Twitter for making free speech, er, freer. He does not strike me as the kind of person to have particularly nuanced thoughts about how to moderate speech to actually make for a better platform, he seems to have baby's first thought on free speech, "Oh, some people want me to ban others? I won't ban anyone they say!"

...instead just try to filter for the intelligent liberals and leftists.

I'd say that the Motte is full of '90s-style intelligent liberals. Old-school economic leftists aren't common but aren't totally unheard of, and social democrats are common enough to be unremarkable. We do lack for woke and woke-adjacent folks.

That said, I am quite conservative by Motte standards, so this is a view from the right.

I don't endorse Richard Hanania but I sympathize strongly with much of his recent writing on this topic.

I don't usually read Hanania, but he is sharp. Is there a post or two of his you would recommend on the issue?

But it was obvious to most at the time that the distribution would inevitably drift rightward, until you have what you have now.

The distribution drifts rightward because a huge portion of leftists will consider a site to be biased towards the right and full of fascists merely because the right is permitted to speak at all. If the site doesn't give in and censor the right, these intolerant leftists will flee, making the site drift rightwards.

I think Reddit is a more sophisticated psychological operation than is publicly known. There is compelling evidence that Ghislaine Maxwell ran one of the top moderator accounts. The account MaxwellHill was an influential power-mod on the default subs since Reddit took off and it posted almost nonstop since the early days of Reddit’s acquisition. The account shared common interests with Ghislaine Maxwell, was named after the nickname of Maxwell’s estate (Maxwell Hill), and randomly stopped posting the week Ghislaine was arrested. (Imagine possessing powerful influence over a community for more than a decade, spending about every day on it, and you randomly quit forever without any sign of discontent and no public comment.) Ghislaine on her Twitter (iirc) showed an early interest in forums and I think specifically mentioned Reddit. Ghislaine’s father Robert Maxwell was a media mogul who has been labeled “Israel’s Superspy”, and Ghislaine was partners with Jeffrey Epstein who is theorized to be an Israel-associated intelligence asset rather than a financier.

I also think that the Reddit feed structure betrays its utility as a psychological manipulation operation. There’s a community called “AmITheAsshole” which is inorganic. The top content often follows the same structure: “is [following tradition or conventional wisdom] and [having a special affinity to family] good, or does it make someone an asshole?” The answer is going to be that it makes you an asshole, a status which is to be deterred. This acts as psychological shaping for the Reddit user where he gradually learns that everything he has learned is wrong and can’t be trusted, and that he can only rely on Reddit for what is right. This is accomplished through dramatic and unusual social dilemmas. This cognitive habit is kept when the user consumes the rest of Reddit’s content which is commercial + political slop. Now the user is primed to assent to what is presented on Reddit, because he has previously learned that Reddit overrules everything he has understood before.

There is definitely room for a Reddit competitor and I think making one is one of the greatest moral acts a programmer can do today (unironically). If you’re serious about making one let us know because there’s a lot of psych wisdom that can be implemented to make it take off.

I’ve noted elsewhere the incredible coincidence that Maxwell’s father was the man ostensibly responsible for privatizing science journals, and reddit wunderkind programmer Aaron Swartz killed himself awaiting trial for trying to pirate all of JSTOR. I appear to be the only person who thinks this could be the seed of a conspiracy theory that /u/AaronSw was “convinced” to kill himself by /u/maxwellhill.

There is definitely room for a Reddit competitor and I think making one is one of the greatest moral acts a programmer can do today (unironically).

IMO we've reached a point in the technology adoption curve where the hard piece to build such a competitor is not programming. Acquiring and keeping a critical mass of users while dodging politically-charged lawfare (copyrighted content, criminal activity, pornography) seems like the real missing piece. And the users are probably more difficult than the lawfare.

Even people who use Reddit hate Reddit. “Redditor” is synonymous with loser online. Reddit clones have been terrible for a number of psychological reasons which are actually pretty easy to deal with.

Just thinking aloud here… This site is a Reddit clone of sorts. I don’t know if the current codebase would allow users to set up a second “sub” without requiring them to create new accounts, but let’s just say for the sake of argument that it does. From there, don’t you think the biggest obstacle preventing this site from becoming the next Reddit would be the userbase?

Userbase and moderation, yes. The_Donald branched out to be a multi-subreddit diaspora site, with KotakuInAction and the QAnon sub migrating there… along with genuine Nazis, genuine white supremacists, etc.

I know that you're not wrong but it never ceases to amaze me that genuine Nazis support a man who was literally Grand Marshal of the Salute to Israel.

IIRC, themotte.org is a stripped down version of rdrama.net, and they have subreddits holes. Creating a Reddit clone isn't a technical challenge anymore.

I feel like Reddit is mostly dead. Or at least in very heavy decline.

Whenever I look into a particular topic, there's a 80-90% chance the discussion is happening on twitter or discord. The big subreddits look alive but if you look carefully, you'll quickly realize they are incredibly heavily botted.

As far as smart people, there seems to be a very strong correlation between intelligence and intolerance towards censorship. Every worthwhile sub I can think of has moved elsewhere. There's a couple news-related ones I still glance at occasionally because reddit is good as a news aggregator but that's about it.

As far as useful information, you can simply ask an LLM. They've already been trained on everything reddit had to offer, and they can be as kind, patient and detailed as you want them to be. They'll never delete your question because it's a 'duplicate', they can provide sources and you only have to wait <1sec if you have anything urgent. They lie sometimes but so did people on reddit.

Even where not botted, they're... running into problems.

I'm sure some amount of /r/ffxiv is software talking to itself, but a wide variety of information has just moved elsewhere for other reasons -- if you want DPS guides, the Balance is better formatted than anything you can do in reddit; if you want raid strats, either youtube or thepfstrats are the only real options; if you want crafting stuff there's TeamCraft; if you're trying to learn about Baldesion Arsenal or Bozja you're pretty much stuck in Discords. Only some of it's explicitly censored (eg game modding for FFXIV is in a gray area, and corresponding has moved almost entirely to Discord and carrds), but a far greater part just found it better to use the reddit as a recruiting nexus and nothing more.

Similarly, there's a couple central FIRST reddits (/r/ftc and /r/frc), and they sometimes have news or useful questions, especially during their respective seasons proper. But almost every serious discussion happens in Discords or a classical forum (chiefdelphi) or a team-specific website.

I don’t think Reddit can be salvaged as unless you’re pretty far-left, there’s nothing really there for you. Even if you’re fairly middle of the road centrist, the pile on that comes from suggesting things that would be absolutely normal in the offline world is incredibly huge. And so if you try to simply allow crime think, not even supporting it, you’ll drive off the existing user base who think communist ideology and radical woke are normal discourse. So you’d buy it, make the changes, demod as necessary to allow freer discussion, and all the users flee to something that suits their tastes.

The other thing about fora that big is that it’s actually really hard to have a real discussion unless the topic is really niche. If you aren’t commenting on a popular topic within ten minutes of it being posted, save yourself the effort because nobody is going to read past the first 50, and you’re likely number 10,000. That’s not nearly as conducive to conversation as a place like this or other small fora where even if I come upon a thread I care about later, it’s still at least plausible that I can do something other than shout into the void.

Finally, outside of product reviews (which I suspect are likely bots anyway) most of the comments are just not that insightful. I attribute a lot of this to the speed necessary to get a post actually read. The time it takes to compose and edit a post to say something interesting means that you can get swamped out of the top 50-100 (the zone people will read) by the time you finish writing the post. This leads directly to a lot of stupid one-line “dad jokes” and puns, a ton of “this. Came here to say this, I agree with this,” threads that are just painful to read. Add in that the majority of the population of Reddit is college students who think they’re intellectuals, often with no real insight into anything they’re reading (and again, the speed of comment-writing necessary to actually be read at all means nobody actually reads the linked article) means that what you get is whatever you’d find in a freshman college course at best. No an interpretation, but actually pretty much what you’d find in a freshman class textbook with no understanding of what it means.

It's still alright for some small subs. That's the main thing for quality discussions on reddit (with the downside that you'll have to wait much longer for replies). As soon as the masses of idiots start piling in, it's over.

Even with small subs, they’re a bit better, except that for the most part, the population of Reddit is heavily skewed towards college-aged liberals who think they’re highly intelligent but in main are midwits who don’t understand the difference between their knowledge of a subject from their introduction to [subject] course and real knowledge.

On most subjects, I would absolutely advise against taking advice from Reddit unless you’re running it through an actual expert first, because most of them are basically wrong with great confidence on anything more complicated than the very basics. And the other thing is that people often misrepresent who they are. They’ll give legal advice like they’re a lawyer in legal threads and when you dig into their history they’re either 18-21 and in college, work in a completely unrelated field, or maybe don’t have a job at all. Most of the “tech” people are basically working the help desk, not high level security or programming or anything of the sort.

And this also comes with the problem that you have to find the extremely niche places on Reddit that aren’t full of bots, trolls and people fighting for credit.

They seem to think that acquiring some bits of knowledge has actually made them smarter than they were before. And they think that the confident reproduction of some knowledge, or the appearance of knowledge, will get them the status of an intellectual or professional. They fricking love confident-sounding posts. And it seems like the upvote/downvote system (with instantly visible vote counts in most subs) funnels a lot of activity into circle-jerks.

Maybe I've been lucky in that one of my main interests is hard to fake experience in, so the subs for it are kinda good most of the time.

But as a whole reddit has gone down the drain.

I don’t mind it much as a place to jack around. But all this concern about reclaiming Reddit seems to be based on the idea that there’s something inherently important about Reddit to save or reclaim. It just hasn’t been my experience with the site that it’s anything much more interesting than Tumblr except for left leaning college aged males. All of these places are essentially created as circle jerky places and really are easily taken by entryists.

I’m thinking it’s probably better to simply create a separate set of fora that speak to your interests than trying to save a site that doesn’t offer much value.

The most stunning revelation I have seen on the motte is the fact that people actually like and prefer reddit-style discussions

What style of discussions do you prefer?

Well, forums of course.

Can you explain why? In my opinion, forums only work for threads with single-digit active participants. Otherwise the discussion keeps derailing constantly, and people keep having conversations past each other, with new participants bringing up points made two pages previously.

I was part of a particularly active forum 20 years ago, and on active threads, moderators regularity had to remove comments by posting "No derailing! Open your own thread on that topic!" Which is trying to force the tree-style comment format onto a system that doesn't support it.

Tree-style comment threads pretty much solved that issue 15 years ago, and I never looked back. Introducing voting on comment quality might have been a mistake in general, but I maintain its a good idea for technical question threads - because it can get the objectively correct answer to the top quickly.

Reddit threading only works for 1-1 conversations. As soon as you add in a couple of responders, you're either having multiple separate convos or just ignoring a lot of responses.

Whenever I write a top level post here, I'm usually responding to two, maybe three people and leaving the rest unanswered, because there's no way to keep up with 20 different responses. Each response is isolated, likely ignoring the content of other people's replies and failing to generate any kind of group discussion. It's one of the big annoyances of reading the Motte, you often have an interesting OP, 50 replies, and then perhaps 1 or 2 more in-depth conversations as everyone is replying to one person and not to each other.

Contrast with a forum thread, as soon as a top level post is made you have a group conversation ongoing, with people engaging with multiple other responses and a lot more depth.

Reddit threading is good for Q&A style discussion, and it works a lot better for "megathreads" like this one, but in most cases a forum is simply superior

I think I pretty much agree with you. But unless you're in a thread with only a few other people, forums also never had the "group discussion" feeling, either. "Shouting at a riot" is more accurate.

you're either having multiple separate convos or just ignoring a lot of responses.

This is exactly what happens in an active linear thread, too, but now the separate convos become a lot less readable because they aren't organized by topic.

you often have an interesting OP, 50 replies, and then perhaps 1 or 2 more in-depth conversations as everyone is replying to one person and not to each other.

True, but again, that's just group size. Can you imagine a linear forum with a weekly discussion thread with 1500 replies? It would be unreadable. So each top level comment would need to be its own post with linear comments. This is how Elements and Slack handle replies to messages - you can start a thread from every message, but only once. No nested comment trees. I find it useful, but the way they do it can be just as confusing as tree-style, since the newest messages can suddenly appear far upstream.

Still, probably better group discourse than tree-style comments. 50 replies per week would still work nicely for linear comments. Maybe worth a try.

Forums definitely wouldn't work if you carried on with motte-style megathreads, you'd have to create a new topic for each culture war item.

Which is basically what DSL does, and I find it perfectly readable. You do lose the accessibility that megathreads have, hence why so many people stay here and don't go to DSL, a lot of more niche topics would never get any attention with individual posts.

It's interesting you bring up Slack and Elements, as they are basically the next stage in internet discussion - which is Discord. As reddit cannibalized forums, so discord is cannibalizing reddit. And yet, I think if you polled older internet users who had experienced all three, you would get majority agreement that forums > reddits > discord. Nonetheless, the internet inexorably moves towards the latter.

I'd be interested to see what an imageboard style cw thread would look like. >># links preserve structure without all the excess quoting needed to distinguish individual conversations within forum topics.

The only solution is congress to declare that all kind of communities above in which above x% of US citizens participates are public foras with some congress mandated minimum and maximum user rights in relation to 1A. Internet gravitates to winner takes all - it is so far impossible to prevent it, so we should to protect the ability of the people to participate.

I think the better approach is to give platforms the option. If you want to moderate based on content (meaning that you don’t allow perfectly legal things to be posted because you don’t agree with the content) then you’re liable for any copyright and trademark, or libel violation that occurs just like a magazine would be. If you’re a neutral carrier, then muc( like the telephone providers you are not responsible for the content of speech used by users. Let them choose.

The only solution is congress to declare that all kind of communities above in which above x% of US citizens participates are public foras with some congress mandated minimum and maximum user rights in relation to 1A.

Unless you chose a pretty small X, this is gonna cover at least the Catholic Church :-/

Catholic church online presence in the form of social network is pretty modest.

Who said anything about a social network, you just said any community with a large percentage of members.

If someone wants to make their own site to do that, they can go ahead,

Not easily. If the new site becomes popular or well-known in any way, the woke mob will go after it and try to get it shut down by the advertisers, payment processors, or Cloudflare. (Or the ultimately the government, which doesn't work in the US yet, but they're trying hard to change that.)

Have you come up with an argument for why this should not be done to you instead, since freedom of speech is "worthless at best"?
Why shouldn't anyone who finds you "harmful" or simply irritating get everyone like you kicked off the Internet or arrested? What principle do you have against it?

Btw, can you link the community you moderate, so we can see what your policies look like in practice?

But it is left of center for San Francisco, which puts it far, far to the left of the nation.

Why is "the nation" relevant? It's not too far to the left of the subset of Americans that are very online.

Another way to think about is that if you look at the crosstabs the last election by age and compare with the average demographic of Reddit's readership you'll get the idea.

The front page of Reddit is not representative of any group within the United States, even the extremely online.

It's evaporative distillation at its finest. Reddit leaned left from the beginning. Conservative views were downvoted. The conservatives left. Then centrist views got downvoted. The centrists left. Etc...

This is not just "young people". It's people who are at the tail end of a long selection process. It's actually similar to how the views of academics are so insane.

The entire internet leaned left from the beginning.

I think you’re right that in the decades hence, self-selection has narrowed and polarized it much further .

Erm, pardon me for quibbling, but my sense of the early internet was that it more consistently leaned libertarian, which is to say, pro-freedom, rather than straight left. The rise of social media in general and Facebook in particular is what made the move leftwards inevitable in my view, compounded by smartphones and the accompanying push notifications designed by the literal Devil himself.

It was libertarian and anti-authoritarian back when being pro-liberty was pro-left and back when the right had some semblance of power. Back then naughty song lyrics and books with gay themes were sticking it to the man, now the man twerks to it in the corporate gay pride parade.

You can pardon me then for being cynical, but it seems pretty clear that it wasn't the kind of principled David Frenchism. Or at least that the real internet libertarians were a small fraction of the populace.

that.dune.quote.jpg

The Ron Paul fanaticism on the internet of 15 years ago was real, not calculated.

Sure was. Just wasn't the majority or even plurality.

Why is "the nation" relevant?

Not just "the nation", the world. It's a global website.

It's not too far to the left of the subset of Americans that are very online.

After they've banned everyone that disagreed, they've found that everyone agrees... Not particularly surprising.

Another way to think about is that if you look at the crosstabs the last election by age and compare with the average demographic of Reddit's readership you'll get the idea.

What makes you think you've got the direction of the causality right here?

Well, I was confining myself to the anglosphere. I have no idea what the Chinese zoomers are doing on their social media (which isn't reddit anyway).

If you think there's a causal relationship here, millennials born in 85 were already 20 by the time Reddit launched. It seems much more parsimonious to explain their moderation policies as approximately reflecting the population-as-weighted-by-online-time than to claim that the moderation policies moved millions of people 1SD politically.

EDIT: I should add, the population-as-weighted-by-online time is not a uniform sample. The more well-adjusted aren't spending hours and hours online, especially not volunteering to moderate. It's a bit like Trace's wikipedia bit -- the platform belongs in a large sense to those willing to put in the work/effort.

Well, I was confining myself to the anglosphere. I have no idea what the Chinese zoomers are doing on their social media (which isn't reddit anyway).

The world consists of a bit more than the anglosphere and China, and even the anglosphere is not a monolithic blob.

It seems much more parsimonious to explain their moderation policies as approximately reflecting the population-as-weighted-by-online-time

I don't see how. Reddit literally bullied one of it's CEOs away from their position, for being too censorious, and even though the CEO left, the vibe shift she represented was still being cranked up. I've seen no evidence that their decisions were driven by popular demand of their userbase, and like I said the causality is just as likely (or more!) to be going in the opposite direction.

the platform belongs in a large sense to those willing to put in the work/effort.

Putting in the work/effort to become moderators and ban all opposition is not the same thing as being representative of population-as-weighted-by-online time.

I think you’re mixing up two things. I agree there wasn’t a lot of pro-moderation demand or sentiment. But most of the users were still left of the median Democrat and were mostly ok that the weird maga crowd got booted.

I never said anything about a pro-moderation sentiment, and I don't think I'm mixing up anything, one is just the explanatory mechanism for the other. The majority of Twitter was also left of the median Democrats, and were mostly ok with the weird maga crowd getting booted, until Musk unbooted them. The booting is how they become a majority.

The left-of-median-democrats were already a majority on Reddit/Twitter before the bookings.

That's kind of why the user base as a whole shrugged -- even though they wouldn't have agitated for ejecting anyone, they weren't going to get riled up over this particular instance.

even though they wouldn't have agitated for ejecting anyone, they weren't going to get riled up over this particular instance.

That doesn't make them left-of-median-democrats, that makes them apathetic, and yeah, this is exactly how it works, and it only proves my point.

And the point about Twitter is that isn't it funny how it doesn't feel so majority-left, the moment people got unbooted.

The other alternative would be to try to get an alternative off the ground, perhaps building on active and healthy diaspora communities.

The main problem with alternatives is that it only attracts people who even see the need for an alternative, people who consider Reddit being captured by one side of the culture war is a problem. That means you get for the most part people on the other side of the culture war (of which not all of them are high IQ either, that means you probably get flooded by people who just really want a place to spam the N-word) and the very rare few people who are on the side that captured Reddit but are actually principled enough to prefer a neutral platform. If you get a site whose members are all hyper aware of culture war topics, the best case scenario is that you get a website where culture war topics dominate (see: The Motte). Worst case scenario is something like poast.

Those you are missing out on is the large contingent of not terminally online people who don't care that much or are unaware of the culture war stuff online; a lot of my friends are like this. Those who don't see it as a problem that reddit is captured, because they still get enough engagement on their posts. While you might not care about their opinions on culture war topics, you might actually want to hear what they have to say about IT, about cars, about AI, about health, etc...

To make a viable alternative, you need normies too. Reddit is a natural Schelling point for communities on any topic, until you break that aspect of it. Either Reddit's reputation has to be ruined, or you have to offer something that's technically better that becomes the first place anyone interested on a community on any topic would check out (and not just terminally online contrarians).

I think the main problem actually is the government and advertisers enforces a certain level of censorship. Just look at the "shots fired" at the Telegram founder when he refued to play ball. So unless someone can answer how they will fund it, and how it will stay independent of government demand for "enough censorship"

Reddit when it started was not full of normies. It was full of tech nerds who had some, um, interesting characteristics. Remember, "le Reddit army", "narwhale bacon", "r/jailbait", etc... The site had a weird, fedora-wearing energy.

The normies showed up later. When the normies first arrived it was probably the golden age of Reddit, say 2012-2020. But after 2016 right wings views were censored and the site gradually descended into what it is today.

So I do think it's possible for a new site to start that appeals to a niche and then grows to include normies. But obviously the initial niche can't just be a right-wing witches.

Reddit when it started was not full of normies.

Yeah, but it was also technically superior to the incumbent (Digg) AND appeared at a time where the said incumbent had created a window of opportunity by going through a badly recieved overhaul (Digg 2.0).

If we assume the 90-9-1 rule is right (90 percent of people are only interested in lurking, 9 percent are "remixing", sharing or commenting, and 1 percent are creators), when Digg cratered, reddit almost immediately captured the 9%. It just turns out that until about the mid-2010s, that was mostly tech nerds, but as more and more normies became constantly online, that 9% started representing them. Normies were not participating in online communities on other websites than Reddit or Digg, they were not participating in online communities at all.

It just turns out that until about the mid-2010s

We have the iPhone to "thank" for that. The mobile VT-100 that a "smartphone" is becoming actually usable and cheap enough to be universal is what launched Reddit and Twitter (and to a point, Facebook) into the stratosphere. Phones before that were too slow, the screens were too small to sit in front of all day, and mobile data was too limited/expensive.

It's also why IRC had its resurgence [Discord is not meaningfully distinguishable from an IRCv3 implementation, complete with message persistence]- because you can be always online to answer questions in a way you actually had to be sitting at a computer to do before (which is why forums, then Digg/Reddit, took over from IRC in the late-'90s-early-'00s).

You can track the rise of the leftist moderator through that as well: if we assume that leftists are more likely to have fake office jobs, then the fact they're able to use their VT-100s at work bestows them a significant power advantage over rightists simply by being able to show up. Take that ability away and their advantage evaporates.

if we assume that leftists are more likely to have fake office job

If you look at the kind of people that moderate the top subreddits, I'd say the amount of work they'd have to put to keep track of everything would mean they have no jobs at all, or this is their job, and they probably glow in the dark.

Either Reddit's reputation has to be ruined, or you have to offer something that's technically better that becomes the first place anyone interested on a community on any topic would check out (and not just terminally online contrarians).

Technically, there is a third option, the one that's deployed frequently by SJ - "destroy Reddit's technical capability to function, such that people can't use it anymore". It's just that that's really hard for such a large platform that doesn't have many external dependencies.

I would love a new and better Reddit.

The problem with Reddit is that it is so incredibly easy to game and astroturf. /r/thedonald did it in 2016 and they were wildly successful. Then the admins put their fingers on the scale and banned them. Today, left wing shitlibs are doing all the same stuff but get away with it. The front page is all just low rent political memes now.

Major subreddits that used to have milquetoast funny content are just left-wing bot farms now: https://old.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/

And leftist activists have taken over abandoned subreddits and then game the rules to get their posts on the front page. One trick: if a subreddit has a post with an outsized number of upvotes it gets promoted. So, if a sub with only 10,000 users has a sub with 10,000 upvotes, the algo sees it as a valuable post. This must be the most important post in the history of this subreddit! Except it's just some Kamala is Brat meme on a subreddit supposedly about economics.

In any case, there are good subs out there. Slatestarcodex is still decent. Redscarepod is good. But mostly it's a wasteland. Bots and activists rule the day. It's a tragedy that anyone is exposed to this stuff.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/

I don't have the stomach to open these, but I can't get over how much text there is on the thumbnails.

Just living up to the stereotype that leftist memes are giant walls of text (that also utterly fail as memes).

I'm old enough to remember when Stephen Colbert was funny and it was the right-wing's attempts at humor that were cringe.

So add that to the party realignment I guess.

Those are decoy memes. The real ones are the successful ones that everyone believes, like "ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN Trustworthy, Fox bogus". Or "climate change means we have to do everything the left wants", "inequality", "the rich are that way because they take from the poor" etc.

Sure, leftists control nearly every aspect of society. But can they add text to an image and make it funny? No, they cannot.

Reddit's politics reflect the fact that the company is based in San Francisco. But it is left of center for San Francisco, which puts it far, far to the left of the nation.

This doesn't get the causality right in my opinion. When you look at the big censorious changes that happened on Reddit, they were usually demanded by the volunteer moderators, not by the paid admins. Mods going on strike is what caused Reddit to ban /r/NoNewNormal just days after the the CEO posted a poorly-recieved announcement defending free speech and debate. Mods also whined for years about "brigading" by /r/TheDonald. What they were really upset about was that TheDonald was attracting a right-wing userbase.

This is part of why it was such a big deal when Reddit decided to steamroll the mods on the unpopular API changes last summer. They had literally never done that before. They always caved.

Reddit banning /r/NoNewNormal happened in a context where the US Government was pressuring other social media sites to ban covid dissidents, vaccine mandates were increasingly criminalizing everyday life for dissidents, and on the streets of much of the rest of the world, police were beating the shit out of them when they protested. If anything Reddit's mere banning of a single subreddit was relatively moderate compared to what everywhere else was doing, both online and off.

(1) It would maintain the threaded format beloved by so many

The threaded format does not allow a comment to have multiple parents (forcing a person who wants to reply to multiple comments simultaneously to use username alerts instead), and is not compatible with chronological viewing (forcing a person who wants to view all comments chronologically to open a separate chronological view, sometimes called "firehose"). For that reason, I prefer the imageboard (4chan) style.

It's more a BBS format than an imageboard format.

I loved the branched conversation style over single-threaded forums like PHPBB that dominated the web before.

It's funny you say that, because I honestly really miss forums, and how they've been completely displaced by Reddit and Discord.

4chan/imageboard style threads have been my favorite for a while, especially ever since you could load the replies in a little preview window by mousing over them.

Reddit won because it's a better system. The old school forums without threading are really painful to use. DataSecretsLox gets 1/3rd of the traffic that themotte does for example. And the posts are lower quality, imo.

I'm old enough to remember when old school forums were the ones with threading, and engines like PHPBB were accused of wasting their traffic by the old guard.

Less of this, please.

I also very much prefer the forum format - Reddit's thread structure feels more like a comment section, to me. It makes it easier for comments to be lost, and much harder to search for past posts as well.

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