[HN Gopher] Archive your Reddit data before it's too late
___________________________________________________________________
Archive your Reddit data before it's too late
Author : xavdid
Score : 406 points
Date : 2023-06-09 16:06 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (xavd.id)
(TXT) w3m dump (xavd.id)
| renewiltord wrote:
| Any different from https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request ?
| mesid wrote:
| The post says that that data is barebones whereas the tool can
| get much more.
| Macha wrote:
| Though the only field they show that's not in the GDPR export
| is the subreddit, which you can get by parsing the URL
| thefifthsetpin wrote:
| They discuss that in the article: Reddit does
| have a feature to export your data into a GDPR archive, but
| it's pretty barebones ... the highest fidelity data comes from
| the API.
| bmitc wrote:
| The API is limited though. It cannot retrieve all historical
| data.
| w0m wrote:
| do we know what the new limit will be yet?
| bmitc wrote:
| The API is already limited. I don't know what it is, and
| it's undocumented as far as I know.
| remote_phone wrote:
| I delete all my accounts every year or so. I don't understand
| people's fascination with their own data online. It's mostly less
| than worthless, so their fascination with storing stuff they will
| never read again is weird.
|
| I have a friend who, back in 1998 or 1999, printed out all his
| emails. He was really active on IRC so he had a lot of email, and
| he wasnt savvy enough to know he could copy his mbox. He carried
| those papers around with him for decades and finally realized he
| never flipped through them once so he recycled them all. I think
| that's the case with almost all the data that we produce. It's
| not useful for us, but probably useful for companies like Google
| to create models of our thought patterns.
| manicennui wrote:
| What reddit data do people care about?
| doctoboggan wrote:
| I would love to be able to download and archive all the posts I
| ever upvoted. Honestly that would have more value to me than my
| own comments. Does anyone know if there is a project for this?
| xavdid wrote:
| This project could be made to support it, but it currently runs
| without auth. there's an endpoint for it:
| https://www.reddit.com/user/USERNAME/upvoted.json
| INGSOCIALITE wrote:
| %s/Archive/Delete/g
| Yhippa wrote:
| Why did people not get this apoplectic when Twitter and Facebook
| killed 3rd party clients?
| daveidol wrote:
| Probably because Reddit's mobile pretense was literally born on
| third party apps, as there was no official mobile client for
| years.
|
| Plus - it's the manner in which Reddit has conducted themselves
| here. Not just the fact they are making the changes, but how
| they went about making them.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I deleted my account when they killed Tweetbot. It was a
| reminder of how much contempt they felt for their users and it
| prompted me to do something I'd been idly considering for a
| while anyway.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| They don't rely as much on unpaid outsiders to run their
| communities. As in, you're more likely to get banned altogether
| from Twitter or Facebook by some automated system, while Reddit
| relies on volunteer moderators so most of the time, bans will
| be on a per sub basis by those volunteers.
|
| On top of that, afaik, Facebook and Twitter didn't try to
| spread lies about 3rd party devs using the drama as leverage to
| blackmail them. I don't recall much about when Facebook did it,
| but with Twitter, I think Musk was pretty straight with saying
| that those 3rd party apps cost money to support and he'd rather
| do it in house.
|
| Finally, Reddit relies on volunteer moderators, but does not
| (and has for years promised but failed to) offer the associated
| tools moderators need. So all those are third party things
| which also end up in doubt with these changes. With the way
| Reddit have attempted to deny that they want to kill 3rd party
| apps despite it being obvious, and the lies about devs, I think
| it'd leave an even more sour taste to everyone if they tried to
| carve out an exemption for specifically moderation tools, since
| it'd make it even more apparent what their goal is.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I did delete all my tweets and my Twitter account. But the
| majority of people don't take action or aren't aware of what's
| going on, in the general case. So they passively suffer a
| worsening user experience forever or until there's a big enough
| crowd for them to follow to a new option.
|
| Reddit/Twitter only caring about short term metrics and
| survival don't care about the further out timeline.
| kennethrc wrote:
| Huh. So apparently I'm in the minority here- I point a browser at
| www.reddit.com , skim a few favorite forums, maybe make a comment
| or two then do something else for the rest of the day.
|
| IOW, is the sky not falling for my use-case?
| the_doctah wrote:
| >I point a browser at www.reddit.com
|
| Shocked anyone tolerates this horrible interface over
| old.reddit.com
| pugworthy wrote:
| Also user of the regular plain vanilla site. Shocked that
| people get so passionate about this thing.
|
| Queue the, "I'm leaving the community!" posts I guess.
| skrause wrote:
| I also point my browser to www.reddit.com, but have I have
| the old interface enabled in my user settings. The domain
| old.reddit.com is not required to use "old reddit".
| kennethrc wrote:
| "Get New Reddit" is in orange at the top of the window; I'm
| still using the old interface (via cookies, I guess).
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I wanted to learn about D8-THC the other day from firefox
| focus, on the reddit mobile site, and since it has to do
| with a drug, it did not give me an option to view on the
| mobile site, either download the app or go to the home
| page.
|
| Like c'mon. Every other site doesn't care I'm using a
| permanent incognito window except for reddit.
| layer8 wrote:
| Old.reddit.com isn't that great on mobile, i.reddit.com
| (recently disabled) was better IMO.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I don't care either. One of the complaints about API
| restriction is that helpful bots will break, but honestly I
| find all of those bots annoying anyway.
| lytedev wrote:
| Most people browse reddit on their primary media consumption
| device which is their smartphone. Most people use a browser on
| their phone that is not AdBlock capable. Reddit with ads is
| obnoxious IMO.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Adguard DNS works pretty well for me. I just use the Reddit
| web app on mobile.
| ris58h wrote:
| Same but using Firefox with uBlock.
| kennethrc wrote:
| > mobile
|
| Yeah, I'm either on my laptop, or the official(?) Reddit
| Android app if I'm bored outta my skull somewhere and need
| something to look at (which is very rarely).
| MrMan wrote:
| I use the browser on my phone
| chx wrote:
| It is. You can enjoy your favorite forums because moderation
| tools exist. They won't.
| CivBase wrote:
| The upcoming API change seems to primary affect three use
| cases:
|
| 1. Moderators used many tools (including bots) which relied on
| the API to improve their moderation abilities. This indirectly
| impacts all users to some degree.
|
| 2. Users with disabilities often used third party apps to
| improve the site's accessibility. This significantly impacts a
| small portion of users with disabilities.
|
| 3. Most third party app users had concerns about the UX of the
| official Reddit app and mobile site - or at least wanted to get
| rid of ads. This is probably the least use case in terms of
| "importance", but directly impacts the largest portion of
| users.
|
| I'm part of that third group. For me, the sky is definitely not
| falling. But the degraded usability of the mobile site creates
| enough friction that I will probably reduce my Reddit usage
| quite significantly. Frankly, Reddit is probably doing me a
| favor by encouraging me to use their site less.
| andrethegiant wrote:
| Does it capture saves and upvotes too? I use those actions more
| than posting and commenting.
| xavdid wrote:
| It doesn't, but you could probably trick it into loading those
| from your GDPR archive (by renaming the file).
| rounakdatta wrote:
| Shameless plug: I've written a utility which delivers you your
| favourited posts and comments. While it doesn't support
| backfilling at the moment, you're welcome to take a look:
| https://github.com/rounakdatta/my-best-of-reddit.
| winternewt wrote:
| By favourited do you mean upvoted or saved? I'm interested in a
| tool to do the latter.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| https://notado.app has supported importing saved comments
| (and tweets, and hn comments etc) for a long time now. Even
| if you don't want an account long-term, you can use it to
| dump your saved (text) posts to a machine readable format for
| later.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Awesome, I really wanted something like this. I have a lot of
| reddit posts and it would be neat to cringe at my younger self.
| e40 wrote:
| @xavdid Very nice tool. I was able to trivially find my earliest
| post (17 yrs ago). With comments, sorting on the timestamp only
| went back to 2021, though. Is this a feature?
| xavdid wrote:
| The paging API only gives back 1k comments (which for you is
| apparently back to 2021). You can request your GDPR archive
| from Reddit and point the tool at it and you'll have a more
| complete archive.
| daveidol wrote:
| This is very helpful! Thanks
| nunez wrote:
| This only gives you 1000 posts. You'll need to ask Reddit for an
| archive of all of your data. Their SLO is 30 days. I doubt that
| now given the madness going on.
| rr808 wrote:
| Please delete all my old stuff. Esp the embarrassing comments and
| likes.
| koboll wrote:
| "before it's too late"? Is GDPR being repealed or something? Kind
| of a FUD title.
| w0m wrote:
| There is information missing in the GDPR dumps that's available
| in the current API. Things like `score`. Whether that matters
| to you is up for debate; but access to that delta is likely
| going away.
| xavdid wrote:
| Reddit's API is changing (and getting worse) at the end of the
| month. They haven't exactly said what is changing, but they've
| mentioned that:
|
| - there will be stricter limits
|
| - NSFW content won't be served through the API
|
| So depending on how you use Reddit, this sort of export may not
| be possible in the same way after the cutoff.
| edent wrote:
| Errr... why not just use their official tool?
|
| https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
|
| I sent in a request and a few days later had a bunch of .csv
| files containing everything I've done with my account.
|
| OK, CSV isn't JSON - but it's pretty easy to parse or import into
| a database of your choice.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Does this confirm they don't keep data on prior versions of
| comments that have been edited?
| wvenable wrote:
| I did it this way as well just to make them work for it.
| samstave wrote:
| They should get the Christian from Apollo to make their data
| /u/ exflitration aide.
| gte525u wrote:
| Can't you just add .json to different urls to get it that way?
| lapser wrote:
| I just get a page not found.
| warning26 wrote:
| It says "wait up to 30 days", which feels excessive.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Also probably more complete than shreddit and whatnot. Since
| I would assume they delete stuff internal data that isn't
| available publically.
| pohuing wrote:
| That's the limit according to eu regulation
| https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-
| protection/r...
| jwilk wrote:
| It's mentioned in the article:
|
| > _it 's pretty barebones - only the plaintext of the comment,
| the subreddit name, the timestamp, and weirdly, the number of
| awards_
| winternewt wrote:
| Oddly the article doesn't mention what else the script in the
| article exports. Does it do my saved comments and
| submissions? That's what I'm most interested in.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Boy, I sure can't wait until 2 days after this "strike" occurs
| when people can move on to whatever we're supposed to be outraged
| about next. Most people (a) have a better version of information
| actually worth saving already saved somewhere else, and (b) have
| zero use for their reddit posts without the context surrounding
| the post.
| xavdid wrote:
| I'm not sure it'll be possible to create rich archives of your
| own data once Reddit's API changes go through, so I made a tool
| that creates a SQLite archive of everything (that you can update
| over time).
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Is there a way to get past the 999 comment limit?
| xavdid wrote:
| That's a limit on Reddit's side. To download more, you need
| to download your GDPR archive and import it using this tool.
| There's a command for that.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Ah, thanks!
| ajot wrote:
| Thank you! I'll try it later.
|
| As a sidenote, the circuit-y background of your site makes it
| unreadable with Dark Reader addon. I disabled it for your site
| and it looks great, but maybe you would like to check it.
| xavdid wrote:
| Thanks for flagging! I'll take a look- I'm not familiar with
| that extension. It does auto color-changing, so I hadn't
| thought about it.
| mywacaday wrote:
| I'm on android with my theme set to dark, couldn't read the
| text without a lot of difficulty as the circuit almost
| matched the colour of the font.
| xavdid wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning, I'll take a look!
| cevn wrote:
| It happened to me too, but I would say more an issue with
| the extension's logic than the site. I think it tried to
| reverse small-looking elements with logic that they won't
| be too bright.
| sroussey wrote:
| Can you not do a GDPR request for all your data? (Or the
| California equivalent)?
| xavdid wrote:
| You can, but it's different (and less complete) data
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| What is funny is there seems to feeling of urgency to get data
| from Reddit even though it's basically the users who are making
| subreddits private. The protest really does seem to me like a
| "cut my nose off to spite my face" protest.
|
| Realistically, there are ways to protest that increase costs.
| Everyone uploading 20minute videos of their wall for example.
| That would increase costs but not really affect how user's use
| the site. People want to hit their pockets yet all they can think
| of "If we don't use it, that'll hurt them" when if it really hurt
| them they wouldn't allow it. They own and control the site, they
| can make it impossible to make subreddits private with probably a
| few minutes of code - just make the process error out for a few
| days and then remove the error at the start of the request.
| w0m wrote:
| > The protest really does seem to me like a "cut my nose off to
| spite my face" protest.
|
| It's a bit of both - reddit exists and is profitable because of
| user engagement/activity.
|
| Reddit is shutting down primary way many (most?) user prefer to
| access it.
|
| The symbolism of making communities dark isn't just to hurt
| Reddit; it's also to forshadow the state of the apparent
| NewWorld reddit is ushering in.
| joemi wrote:
| > Reddit is shutting down primary way many (most?) user
| prefer to access it.
|
| I doubt that most people using reddit use third party apps. I
| even doubt many people do.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Apollo has 1.2 million users, 900k daily users. Reddit has
| 50m daily users. 400m monthly. I would say power users are
| more likely to use third party apps. But even of the power
| users it's a percentage.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| > What is funny is there seems to feeling of urgency to get
| data from Reddit even though it's basically the users who are
| making subreddits private.
|
| The reason to archive your content is because (1) you want to
| delete your account or (2) losing access to a free API will
| make it difficult to do later.
|
| Subreddits going dark is just a day long protest, no one needs
| to archive content due to that.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think the primary goal here is to make Reddit less useful on
| your way out, pulling copies of your data for yourself but
| removing them from the platform is just one good way to do
| that.
| [deleted]
| phoenixreader wrote:
| Data-wise, what additional data does this include compared to
| Reddit's default export?
| xavdid wrote:
| Yeah, great question! This includes markdown instead of
| plaintext, the upvote/downvote score, controversiality, and
| more. It can grab anything out of a full comment response:
| https://www.reddit.com/user/xavdid/comments.json
| WalterBright wrote:
| I figure I'll get sent to the gulag sooner or later anyway.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| Imo, the most valuable data to save is not what you have posted,
| but the things that you have read that have made a substantial
| difference in how you view and exist in the world.
| snicker7 wrote:
| AKA memes from r/AdviceAnimals
| tikkun wrote:
| There's also: https://github.com/aliparlakci/bulk-downloader-for-
| reddit
| taylodl wrote:
| Archive your Reddit data?
|
| You guys must be using Reddit way differently than I am. It's
| just a social site. The subreddits I subscribe to are hobby-
| related. People sharing what they're doing with regards to their
| hobby. What data would I have to archive? If Reddit were to go
| away I'd just find another similar service allowing me to hangout
| with people interested in my hobby.
|
| What are you guys doing?
| taylodl wrote:
| Wow! Okay, I've learned some people are using Reddit _very
| differently_ than I 've been. I can see why you would want to
| archive your data.
|
| As I side note, I have a peculiar fascination with how people
| use tools so differently, how they work them into their
| workflows and make them their own.
| Forricide wrote:
| I wrote short stories on Reddit for around two years, mostly
| for fun and practice. Nothing that needs to be saved, but it's
| nice to have this kind of thing around if you want to look back
| in the future!
| palijer wrote:
| Writing detailed technical answers to very bespoke problems,
| writing and creating art as part of a small internet community.
|
| Reddit can be used many ways. Maybe archiving your stuff isn't
| important to you and that is fine.
| wvenable wrote:
| I just tried installing this from my very new Linux install (I
| didn't even have pip installed!) and got the following error:
| File "/home/XXX/.local/pipx/venvs/reddit-user-to-
| sqlite/lib/python3.10/site-
| packages/reddit_user_to_sqlite/reddit_api.py", line 1, in
| <module> from typing import Any, Literal, NotRequired,
| Optional, Sequence, TypedDict, final ImportError: cannot
| import name 'NotRequired' from 'typing'
| (/usr/lib/python3.10/typing.py)
| skibbityboop wrote:
| Works well to just spin up a python:3.11 container via Docker
| or Podman and do the pipx + reddit-user-to-sqlite
| installations, then run the utility in there. You can mount
| some folder as part of starting the container or copy the
| reddit.db file out of the container before throwing it away.
| Avoids any changes to your real system at all.
| samstave wrote:
| sad thing is that if your username is banned - it gives
| error... cool thing is that you can pull any username you
| want... (unless banned as stated)
| xavdid wrote:
| If you can get your GDPR archive, this tool will still work
| a bit. I have features planned that will support that
| better.
| rolobio wrote:
| You are on Python 3.10, you need 3.11.
| wvenable wrote:
| Ah that is the latest I have available on Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS.
| xavdid wrote:
| Ok, this is fixed! Released as 0.3.1
| wvenable wrote:
| It worked!
| xavdid wrote:
| Sorry about that! I'll try to allow older versions early
| next week!
| powersurge360 wrote:
| You may consider using asdf or some other Python version
| manager to get a newer (or older) Python
|
| https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf
| xavdid wrote:
| Ah apologies, the other commenter looks to be correct that it
| needs 3.11. The typing imports honestly aren't important, so I
| might be able to pull them out of the runtime.
| diabolo96 wrote:
| I always thought "reddit is cesspool" was a meme. I made an
| account a month ago after lurking for months and good god its
| worst than i imagined. It was fun when browsing and commenting on
| small subs but write anything in the bigger one and you'll get
| swarmed. Just don't steer from any of these narratives :
| 1.America is always good. They never did anything bad. They saved
| the world and they're heroes. 2. Apple is god. 2. China and
| Russia are very bad. American invasions were justified. 3.
| Chinese,product, companies are all bad. All they do is copy the
| almighty American companies.
| CivBase wrote:
| Idk what subs you hang out in, but in most of the subs I follow
| one of the easiest ways to farm upvotes is to simply trash on
| the USA. I see one of those "Stop complaining about your life.
| There are literally people living in The USA." memes[0] at
| least once every couple weeks and it always performs well.
| "America bad" is a very well known trope in the Reddit
| comments.
|
| [0] https://i.redd.it/you8wci1y7x51.jpg
| d35007 wrote:
| > 1.America is always good. They never did anything bad. They
| saved the world and they're heroes.
|
| What subs did you look at? My experience on Reddit is the exact
| opposite. There's even a subreddit where people whine about
| people whining about how awful America is:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AmericaBad/
|
| > 2. Apple is god.
|
| What subs did you look at? Even /r/apple frequently hates
| Apple.
|
| > 2. China and Russia are very bad.
|
| I do see these sentiments a lot.
|
| > American invasions were justified.
|
| What subs did you look at? What invasions are we talking about?
|
| > 3. Chinese,product, companies are all bad. All they do is
| copy the almighty American companies.
|
| I see this one a lot. Especially on subreddits devoted to
| military hardware and any time someone mentions TikTok.
|
| I think the truth is that people remember the things that evoke
| an emotional response. It sounds like you get upset when you
| hear people say bad things about China and when you hear people
| say good things about America. You forget, or just don't read,
| all of the comments that contradict those people.
| [deleted]
| apartment1234 wrote:
| [dead]
| nutate wrote:
| This is akin to saying get all your trash back from the landfill
| before it closes.
| clnq wrote:
| > The non-monetary value Reddit as a knowledge store is literally
| priceless; it's a modern-day Library of Alexandria.
|
| Is it though?
| EamonnMR wrote:
| It's mostly a modern day graffiti covered bathroom wall, but
| it's also unfortunately got some good knowledge trapped in it,
| from between the collapse of forums and the rise of Discord
| respectively as primary niche hobby gathering places.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Am I the only person in the world that just uses a browser to
| access Reddit? No ads, no nags, no idiotic crippled "app"
| interface on a postage-stamp screen...
| joemi wrote:
| No. But most people who aren't affected aren't going to take
| the time to comment and say "This doesn't affect me." Most of
| the people being vocal about these recent reddit changes are
| those people affected by the changes. It can feel like it's
| doom and gloom and the end of reddit when you read comments
| about it, but in reality, it probably affects a very small
| percentage of reddit users. (Though from what I hear, it might
| affect a large percentage of the mods. So _that_ might end up
| having effects on the larger user base. We'll have to see how
| that plays out.)
| jsz0 wrote:
| I got chased off Reddit by a cabal of power hungry woke mods
| stalking me. I'm going to be celebrating when Reddit becomes the
| next Digg. They did it to themselves and deserve everything
| that's coming to them.
| quaintdev wrote:
| All this debate regarding Reddit makes me wonder do we even need
| these communities. HN sure has value to offer but something like
| Reddit and YouTube are huge waste of time. Before 2000s people
| lived their life without these communities. They lived without
| the constant influx of info and opinions from others. And it
| seems they were way more happy than us. Probably because they
| were more focused on solving their own problems than global
| problems. Who knows if that's exactly the thing we need to solve
| global problems.
|
| None of the online communities are necessary to live a happy
| life, not even HN.
| berkle4455 wrote:
| > do we even need these communities
|
| Absolutely. Though I think we go back to individual
| sites/forums (like HN is for startup/tech basically) instead of
| centralized platforms like reddit.
| taude wrote:
| These forums still exist and are still out there and used by
| everyday people. Every one of my reddits that I follow has
| some other alternative forum that is active. Some examples,
| of of the top of my head: AVS Forums [1] for home theater
| advice (instead of r/hometheater), or Home Barista [2]
| instead of r/espresso, or Road Bike Forums [3] etc.
|
| I actually don't mind the reddit charging for their APIs and
| making money for this convenience of single sign-on, cross
| searching, discoverability, moderation, user rating, etc...
|
| People should just use the regular apps, which work plenty
| fine, and move on with their life. Or, pay the third-party
| apps so they can afford the api usage.
|
| [1] https://avsforums.com/ [2] https://www.home-barista.com/
| [3] https://www.roadbikereview.com/forums/
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| While forums are fine, their UX is usually inconsistent at
| best, and often just bad. Plus you lose out on a few
| quality of life things, like a single login, cross-posts,
| and saved posts.
| Whatarethese wrote:
| I'm not positive but this might be the most out of touch
| comment I've ever seen. You can literally learn anything on
| YouTube. Coding, drywalling, fine carpentry, fix your own car,
| build an EV from the ground up, how to grow certain types of
| plants, discover more about the universe.
| procarch2019 wrote:
| I disagree. There's a huge amount of garbage out there, sure,
| but some communities are super active and can be used for
| learning. Take the PowerShell community for example or
| SysAdmin. I pop on those regularly to ask and answer questions.
| Google questions related to IT (and I'm assuming other areas of
| interest) and I bet there's a Reddit post that comes up in the
| top 5-10 results (along with stack and other well known
| forums).
| djhworld wrote:
| Subreddits are not communities like forums were, on forums
| you'd get your regular cohort of people alongside newcomers and
| you'd start to recognise names, in jokes etc.
|
| I don't think Reddit has that same vibe, I barely 'know' anyone
| on the subreddits I frequent as the nature of it is transitory,
| at least for the topics I'm interested in, people will stop by
| to ask a question and leave or lurk.
|
| That's not to say I don't enjoy using Reddit, it's just not the
| same as forums.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| It's hard to have a good sense of community when you have
| thousands or even millions of participants.
|
| That said, I remember the earlier days of reddit with lots of
| novelty accounts. I think these days the only surviving
| novelty accounts I've seen are Shitty Watercolor and Poem for
| Your Sprog.
| _proofs wrote:
| i politely disagree. as another commenter pointed out it
| depends on the size and overall subreddit visibility.
|
| you can find visible and recognized posters just like you
| would any online forum in smaller subreddits centered around
| a thing like writing, programming, music.
|
| check out r/zen for example where there is absolutely an
| infamous user: ewk and quite a few other regs who engage him
| in healthy (and perhaps.. toxic, depending on your worldview)
| discussion(s).
| caponate wrote:
| Forums are a way better method of discussion and storing
| useful information. I still find information on my cars
| from forum posts 15 years ago. They're usually a smaller
| community without the big overseer admins of sites like
| reddit and shitbook, waiting to nuke your entire forum for
| something they (or now their Ai) view as a transgression.
| Some of my best friends I met on car forums when I was in
| college, and our board is still going strong.
|
| I will agree youtube is super useful though.
| bananamerica wrote:
| While it is true that larger subreddits are unlike forums in
| that sense, smaller and medium subs can be very much like
| that.
| manicennui wrote:
| I find it baffling that anyone is unable to see the value of
| YouTube. There are incredible resources available on YT for a
| wide variety of topics and interests. There are multiple
| categories where nothing else comes close anymore (e.g.
| cooking, gardening, movie reviews, live music recordings,
| architecture). There are amazing math, science, and programming
| videos. There are great interviews with a wide range of people.
| There are people who break down guns, electronics, etc. and
| explain how they work. You are really missing out if you use YT
| to watch the default recommended content.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > something like Reddit and YouTube are huge waste of time
|
| When people say this I wonder, what planet are they from? When
| my wife and I are away from one another we get a kick out of
| sharing Reddit posts with each other. YouTube is one of the
| best ways to learn new subjects. Both platforms are a great way
| to stay involved in a hobby.
|
| Hacker News is great, but it's pretty much a glorified
| subreddit. There's almost no difference.
|
| And for those suggesting there are better alternatives than
| Reddit, what are they? Facebook? (Barf.) Reddit is doing
| something very annoying with their APIs, but for what it does
| it's pretty much the only game in town for now. I might look at
| browser plugins to make their website easier to use.
| digging wrote:
| It strikes me as the attitude of someone not familiar with
| the platforms. I can recognize their evils and harms while
| still appreciating how mind-bogglingly much I've learned from
| them.
|
| The issue is that all tech companies treat their products as
| all-or-nothing options. It is not theoretically impossible
| for YouTube to exist without terrifying levels of data-
| harvesting, unfair creator monetization, and the weird shit
| they do with kids.
| xvector wrote:
| Useful niche communities for every hobby, profession, etc
| raphaelrk wrote:
| I wonder whether AT Proto, the protocol used in bluesky, might
| make for a good base for a decentralized reddit alternative.
|
| - public
|
| - extensible
|
| - bring your own client
|
| - domains as usernames
|
| - federated but with escape hatches so you're never tied to a
| single host
|
| - considerations for twitter-scale from the start, eg with "big
| graph servers"
|
| Still under a waitlist / closed for now / under very active
| development, but seems very promising.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Just backed up my data, ~60 posts and ~1000 comments. Thank you!
| Worked flawlessly (except for pythons incredibly convoluted
| package system for dabblers like me, but that's not your fault)
|
| Feature request: delete all comments and posts (can only be done
| 1 by 1 afaik). There used to be a nuke Reddit chrome extension
| but it appears removed and/or out of date.
| xavdid wrote:
| Glad it worked well for you!
|
| I think that's out of scope for this project, but I've seen
| some other comments in this thread linking to tools that do
| just that!
| MicropenisMike wrote:
| Your reddit data is already available via torrent, along with
| everyone else's, but you'll have to dig for it
|
| Reddit comments and submissions collected by Pushshift:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36038684
| visarga wrote:
| > Your reddit data is already available via torrent, along with
| everyone else's, but you'll have to dig for it
|
| you'll have to digg for reddit
|
| FTFY
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| >Pushshift
|
| Which has also been shut down by Reddit as part of this whole
| fiasco. I think March is the last month of archive data
| available.
| operator-name wrote:
| Who knows what's going on at this point.
|
| >Pushshift will come back online for mod tools within two
| weeks; we are creating an approvals process to avoid
| impersonation.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/143rk5p/reddit_he.
| ..
| winddude wrote:
| end of 2022 it really starts to fall apart, I think most of
| the posts are there until March, but comments are missing.
| mrtksn wrote:
| That's reassuring. There are some subs like StableDiffusion
| that I don't want to lose. So much original work and history on
| Reddit.
| 26fingies wrote:
| imo this is not the beginning of reddit's enshittification. if
| one can even pick a beginning that is probably when they started
| the redesign.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Does this include any contextual data surrounding your posts,
| like what you replied to, etc? That seems to me to be as
| important as what someone has written.
| xavdid wrote:
| not in the data dump, but it has a permalink. I could store the
| comment chain, but it'll balloon the number of API requests and
| storage size pretty spectacularly. It _does_ capture the title
| of the post that your comment is in, if that's helpful!
| wackget wrote:
| Can you please add this as an option? Context is extremely
| important. If it's also possible to save the _content_ of the
| post, that would also be extremely useful.
|
| Finally one additional suggestion which I guess might be
| doable (?) would be to submit the post URL to archive.org and
| include the archived URL in the database dump.
| xavdid wrote:
| I can look into it! Do you mind filing a GitHub issue?
| joshstrange wrote:
| Why is there a 1K comment limit and can you add a way to override
| that? Just hitting the reddit API looks like it will fetch
| further back.
|
| I looked at my 1000th comment in the archive and it's only back
| to Sat May 28 2022 (I guess I comment a lot), if I want to save
| 10+ years I'll need a higher limit.
|
| Edit: Looks like this might a reddit limit? I'm seeing other
| tools mention 1K. I guess I'll use Reddit's data export tool
| instead.
| xavdid wrote:
| Yep, Reddit's paging API only gives you the most recent 1k each
| of comments and posts.
|
| I'd suggest starting by fetching recent posts, then download
| your GDPR archive and run it through the tool as well (the
| `archive` command). Then it'll be as if you fetched everything
| from the web API (best of both worlds).
| capableweb wrote:
| 1k limit is a reddit limitation, not this specific tool
| acyou wrote:
| If you hope Reddit dies, you are also indirectly hoping for HN to
| become more like Reddit, because that will be one of the
| consequences.
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| Done!
|
| (And, the process was really easy, just as the blog post
| described. Requires Python 3.11+.)
| halfjoking wrote:
| Too late? I already lost a ton of data in the covid purge. (was
| active user of /r/NoNewNormal) Every comment, post or interaction
| on a banned sub is suddenly deleted permanently with no way to
| retrieve it. That's really losing data, not a made up crisis of
| "enshittification."
|
| Most people worried about the API change have the "correct
| politics" so your data is safe. It's only people who participate
| in wrongthink that need to backup everything.
| xavdid wrote:
| Your comments / posts from banned subs are available in your
| Reddit archive.
|
| This tool has iffy support for adding rich data for deleted
| comments, but I have some plans.
| irrational wrote:
| > When I heard the news, I realized I'd be upset if I wasn't able
| to access my contributions anymore.
|
| Clearly all I've put on Reddit is dross. I can't think of
| anything I'd care about losing.
| ezekg wrote:
| Personally, I wiped all of my personal Reddit accounts last year.
| I now use short-lived anonymous accounts which I also wipe after
| awhile. I use Shreddit [^0] to wipe the account before deleting
| it. I do wish that I was able to backup some valuable
| conversations, but I honestly wouldn't find much worth in the
| backups without the additional context. So perhaps something to
| explore -- also storing the context of a particular comment with
| a configurable depth.
|
| [^0]: https://github.com/x89/Shreddit
| daedalus_j wrote:
| This works, and I certainly respect your choice to do so, but
| if we ass start doing this it removes a huge amount of the
| value from the platform.
|
| For example I just recently went searching for a solution to a
| problem, and found 3 reddit posts with what must've been
| solutions because there were "awesome, works great!" responses,
| but I'll never know what those solutions were because the user
| had deleted their posts.
|
| I mean, we could all just use Signal with disappearing messages
| enabled I suppose, that would keep anyone from utilizing "our
| data"... I fear we'll just doom ourselves to asking the same
| questions over and over and over and over if we can't build
| lasting, searchable, repositories of knowledge.
| william- wrote:
| How ironic that Reddit's new API limits are likely causing an
| uptick in calls leading up to the change...
|
| Not just mass archival / reads, but also database writes from
| Shreddit usage, etc.
| faangsticle wrote:
| I did the same, and reddit actually chain banned ("suspended"
| as they call it) the remainder of my accounts and started
| banning any account as I made it, until I made sure to wipe
| their tracking cookies & switch to a new IP.
| btbuildem wrote:
| I make sure to tether off my phone when doing weird ops on
| reddit, they can't seem to correlate the banks of mobile IPs
| with my accounts (yet).
| sdfghswe wrote:
| Uhhh why don't you apply the standard to HN?
| irrational wrote:
| I've been using Redact. Does anyone know the difference between
| Shreddit and Redact?
| leokennis wrote:
| I also open short lived anonymous accounts. I just sign up
| using a temporary more or less anonymous mail address (lots of
| sites that offer this), input a bogus birth date to be able to
| see all posts, recreate my subscriptions and multireddits and
| I'm good to go for another 6 months.
| asdff wrote:
| All your comments are probably crawled anyhow. You can't delete
| anything from the internet.
| brunoqc wrote:
| How on earth are you able to live without your reddit karma? I
| mean, I don't own a house or have a family, but at least I have
| 475 reddit points.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| I have ~100k on reddit, but somehow hacker news managed to
| make my ~500 points feel far more valuable.
| jeron wrote:
| likewise. I have over half a million on reddit but all I
| did was crosspost links and make funny comments that
| probably wouldn't land on HN
| pc86 wrote:
| I hate to break it to you but neither is particularly
| valuable.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Pfff, I'm collecting HN points for a rainy day; they're worth
| at least 10 Reddit points each!
| samwillis wrote:
| HN Karma obviously!
| revskill wrote:
| What's the point of HN Karma honestly ?
| asmor wrote:
| I would absolutely trade in public displays of karma for
| having a random username assigned to every one of my
| posts with my history being obscured while still keeping
| track of "karma" for moderation / feature gating.
| krapp wrote:
| The same point everywhere - to drive discussion to
| popular posts and away from unpopular posts, and to
| encourage conformity to board culture through operant
| conditioning and gamification. If you give people a
| number and tell them that number is special, they'll do
| whatever they can to make that number go up, and to avoid
| whatever makes it go down.
|
| At least in theory. In practice it's utterly useless
| because it's based on incorrect (or possibly outdated)
| assumptions about the nature and goals of HN's userbase
| (which I've decided to call the "good hacker" fallacy.)
| JohnFen wrote:
| Impressing the ladies!
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| make the groupthink easier to track via API
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| That sweet ability to downvote.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| I trade mine in for its current dollar value by messaging
| pg and he wires over the cash.
| bckr wrote:
| To give you dreams like the done I had last night where I
| lost 6 points and decided to delete my comment so I
| wouldn't lose any more.
| ilyt wrote:
| See the key is to get into thousands and not care about
| 0.1% changes either way. Bollock enough and someone will
| upvote it.
| egeozcan wrote:
| Are you really asking what's the point of having...
| points?
|
| They are points!
| samwillis wrote:
| Endorphins when you see it going up.
| revskill wrote:
| So practically useless right ? But i have an idea of
| chrome extension to hide karma. I hate to see my karma
| point. I just don't care.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Just use uBlock Origin to block that particular DOM
| element.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Surely, if you hate to see it, then you do care, right?
| swayvil wrote:
| Everybody likes to see their numbers go up.
| just-ok wrote:
| Except on the scale
| tazjin wrote:
| Some HN features are gated on karma.
| 0zemp3c wrote:
| replacement for real life achievement
| paulddraper wrote:
| That deep feeling of fulfillment.
| warning26 wrote:
| Once you have more than 500, you unlock downvotes! Worth
| it for that alone.
| revskill wrote:
| Does HN have any guidance on when and why to downvote ?
| Or just personally ?
| tmpob wrote:
| In my experience it's when you post something that
| someone has a strong opposing opinion about. Same for
| flagging, seems to be treated as a super-downvote most of
| the time.
| swayvil wrote:
| In theory : Does the comment contribute to the
| conversation?
|
| In practice : Pure jellyfish-brain embrace/reject
| reaction. A gaggle of flatworms with keyboards
| cratermoon wrote:
| In the guidelines,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html see the
| section "In Comments". Comments violating those
| guidelines are reasonable candidates for downvoting.
| revskill wrote:
| [flagged]
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Paul Graham has posted his thoughts about it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
|
| I think that sites really shouldn't have guidance on this
| sort of thing, because nobody would follow it anyway. If
| you only have upvotes and downvotes, people are just
| going to upvote stuff they like and downvote stuff they
| don't like, and any individual will have different rules
| about what "like" or "doesn't like" means to them.
|
| Waaaaay back in the day, I did like how Slashdot had
| different categories for voting, e.g. "Insightful",
| "Funny", "Off topic", etc.
| ilyt wrote:
| I wonder how it would work if we had different kinds of
| upvote/downvote.
|
| Then again if given a choice between "I disagree" and
| "you're a moron for saying that", people would just pick
| second if it is a disagreement about something they feel
| strongly about
| JohnFen wrote:
| Personally, I would find that helpful.
|
| When my comments get downvoted, sometimes I can figure
| out why. It's frivolous, off-topic, just plain wrong,
| etc.
|
| But quite often, I have no idea whatsoever, and I'm
| always curious about what the issue was. I think
| potentially valuable information and personal learning is
| lost.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| > Waaaaay back in the day, I did like how Slashdot had
| different categories for voting, e.g. "Insightful",
| "Funny", "Off topic", etc.
|
| Even that got abused, as comments people didn't like
| would be modded off-topic or troll.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I'd like to see a site that punishes people for
| downvoting for the wrong reason.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Please, pray tell, how would you even determine if
| something was "for the wrong reason".
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Honestly we don't need downvoting at all. Just upvoting
| to allow good stuff to rise, and flagging for hate speech
| and illegal stuff.
| tezgon wrote:
| It may just be a natural internet behavior to suppress
| that which you disagree with.
| lostlogin wrote:
| If you remove the word 'internet' you're right in track.
| civilitty wrote:
| You are stealing: downvote. You are playing music too
| loud: downvote, right away. Driving too fast: downvote.
| Slow: downvote. You are charging too high prices for
| sweaters, glasses: you get downvoted. You undercook fish?
| Believe it or not, Downvote. You overcook chicken, also
| downvote. Undercook, overcook. You make an appointment
| with the dentist and you don't show up, believe it or
| not, downvote, right away. We have the best patients in
| the world because of downvoting.
| revskill wrote:
| If he steals things from a thief, will you downvote ?
|
| If the urgency bus drive too fast, will you downvote ?
|
| If he playing music too loud under the rain, will you
| downvote ?
|
| ...
| civilitty wrote:
| Whoosh: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eiyfwZVAzGw :)
|
| It's a humorous commentary on how fickle HN karma can be
| swayvil wrote:
| It empowers us to disappear distasteful opinions.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| Downvoting. But it's easy to karma whore up to 500.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Not sure if you mean keeping track of total upvotes or
| just the voting system in general. In either case, just
| for a start, I think discussions are easier to have &
| follow along with when someone can just upvote a comment
| to engage in the discussion vs posting something like
| "+1" or "^ this" or "I agree", and the number is the same
| feedback in lieu of meaningless posts. Voting also helps
| with ordering (as opposed to time based ordering),
| whether your total karma is displayed or not.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 475? Not 47.5k? I think you can easily have 7.5k per 3 months
| or so on Reddit. HN is way harder.
| ilyt wrote:
| I disagree, it's extremely easy on both. Like, sure, it is
| slower on HN but community is also smaller
| stefncb wrote:
| The average upvote count for comments here is 5,
| anecdotally. On reddit it can be in the dozens, even
| hundreds depending on subreddit. My abandoned reddit
| account I had for 2 years had 39k karma, and I wasn't
| obsessed.
| egeozcan wrote:
| Every time someone down-votes me here, they kill my future,
| bit by bit.
| tazjin wrote:
| Good news: Your karma stays around even after you delete all
| your posts/comments!
| chaostheory wrote:
| Bad news: it depends on how you delete your comments. If
| you just delete your comments via the delete button, Reddit
| will still archive your last 1000 comments and posts. Not
| sure how shreddit and other similar apps work, but I think
| you need to update and replace your old posts with
| something blank like a space before you delete them. My
| knowledge might be out of date, so feel free to point out
| that I'm wrong.
| barbazoo wrote:
| It replaces the comment with a predefined string: https:/
| /github.com/x89/Shreddit/blob/master/shreddit/shredde...
| EMCymatics wrote:
| It is impossible to interact in some subreddits if you dont
| have xyz karma or have a # weeks old account
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| for most sites like that... i probably don't want to be
| there anyway.
|
| except HN of course
| hello_moto wrote:
| You don't interact. Let them die slowly.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It is the normal lifecycle that platforms die. Look at
| MySpace.
| hello_moto wrote:
| You don't interact. Let them die slowly.
|
| Reddit interaction is meaningless echo chamber anyway.
|
| What's the point to get your "2c" heard in Reddit?
| Redditors are the minorities.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Reddit is a really, really, really good system for
| connecting people who have a niche interest. You can
| still do forums and so forth for those things, but
| discoverability isn't nearly as good. It's been co-opted
| by venture capital and is becoming less so, but right now
| it's a great community unmatched elsewhere on the
| internet in it's scale and quality.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It probably depends on the niche. I've found reddit
| occasionally useful for this, but the community on reddit
| tends to be a bit monolithic, so I've not found reddit
| useful as a sole, or primary, source of this sort of
| thing.
| chx wrote:
| Benson Leung who is fairly well known for his USB C
| reviews is now a moderator of /r/UsbCHardware/ and
| through him I was able to fix a bug in the USB C
| specification. I have no idea how I would've done it
| without the connection Reddit provides. I posted the
| bugfix at https://superuser.com/a/1536688/41259
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Reddit is a really good system for getting incredibly-
| niche oriented persons to subsume a subreddit, drive a
| bunch of engagement, yet suck all the usable air out of
| the channel, and make it next to impossible for a
| interested-but-casual user to meaningfully participate.
| Just like Twitter, the people who make the service their
| personality get to enjoy the network effects, and
| everyone else might as well be spitting in the wind.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Reddit wasn't "co-opted" by venture capital. It was
| _built_ by venture capital!
|
| It literally started as a result of the founders taking
| money from YC and pivoting away from their original idea
| and to Reddit at Paul Graham's request.
|
| Hear the story here:
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-huffman-co-
| found...
| chrisan wrote:
| > Reddit interaction is meaningless echo chamber anyway.
|
| Everywhere can be an echo chamber, even here.
|
| Reddit is nice for the small subs/communities where you
| can talk about something niche so you don't have to go
| register in some archaic phpbb forum that might go away.
|
| The bigger the sub, the more likely it will echo. Much
| like the bigger the story here the same effect will
| happen. I think that's just humanity. It is very easy to
| identify and move on/not follow those subs.
| jmondi wrote:
| Curious why you are contributing here?
|
| Arguably, Hacker News is a lot of an echo chamber too.
|
| What's the point to get your "2c" heard on Hacker News?
| Hacker News users are even more of a minority than
| Redditors.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > What's the point to get your "2c" heard on Hacker News?
|
| Archiving helps me know more about myself. Primarily, I
| use forums as a way to archive my viewpoints and how I
| have reasoned them. It's spectacularly rewarding when
| discussions devolve into an argument and I know
| specifically how and why I came to a certain conclusion,
| because I can reference thoughts that I reasoned before.
| Rarely, I find my views challenged in a constructive way
| that informs and changes the mind of one party or the
| other...if only on tangential topics. That's always nice.
|
| It's also handy to listen to the echo chamber to get
| ahold of the zeitgeist of that particular group, which is
| useful when interacting with other people in real life
| that espouse particular aligned views. Now you can have
| an interesting conversation, you might not have had
| otherwise, which is a practical benefit.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Their account is from 2007 and has <2k karma. I'd say
| they stand by what they wrote on this platform too.
| [deleted]
| enkid wrote:
| There are legitimate use cases for reddit interactions.
| Some of the smaller communities in particular, discussing
| specific games or health conditions for example, actually
| are excellent. Most are not that good, however.
| radpanda wrote:
| I mean, I hear you if you're posting your opinion as
| comment 18,753 on an r/news post about the former
| president. But I've had some genuinely helpful
| interactions on smaller subreddits - things like getting
| guidance on how to repair old Nintendo Game and Watch
| hardware. It's not about getting one's opinion heard,
| it's about giving and getting help among folks who share
| the same hobby.
|
| I don't have any affection for Reddit itself, but there
| are a couple of subreddits where I guess the small but
| critical mass of folks for a hobby somehow ended up
| there, and I hope they land somewhere else as Reddit
| commits suicide.
| penultimatename wrote:
| I'm going to miss the computer hardware sell/trade
| subreddits, they're one of the most active I've found and
| saves 20-40% over eBay or similar. All require a minimum
| account age and karma to reduce the risk of scammers.
| mhitza wrote:
| IMO reddit/HN feel similar as communities if you clearly
| steer away from the most popular subreddits
| testacct22 wrote:
| The difference is, HN is a separate website, with reddit
| the different communities start to bleed into each other
|
| Imo: there's too much stupidity in the popular
| subreddits, sharing a space with that is too much to ask
| ilyt wrote:
| Not that much, not unless they are related somehow (say
| /r/games and /r/pcgaming). Even then they can feel quite
| differently depending on moderator policy.
| tenpies wrote:
| I do find that there is no better indicator about the
| quality of a sub-reddit, than that class of requirements.
|
| The more karma/age/posts they require, the more likely the
| place is a cesspool of some sort.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| A lot of subreddits - especially smaller ones - would be
| instantly overrun by spambots without these requirements.
| ilyt wrote:
| I've made a lot of alts and that never has been a
| problem, just post some vaguely affirmative comment in
| popular thread and boom, 50 karma.
|
| The whole idea is utterly stupid because it is far too
| easy to get on popular low effort subreddit and get some
| points for posting absolute garbage, then go and bother
| people in niche subreddit.
| martey wrote:
| While karma requirements are easy to overcome, many
| spammers don't go through the effort to do so.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| I've found a very light set of restrictions - possibly
| even only on select posts - is tremendously helpful for
| content quality. But anything beyond a light set quickly
| throws the whole community off kilter and into a self-
| congratulatory echo chamber.
| codingdave wrote:
| The key question here is: "So what?"
|
| And that is not a snide, snarky question - it is a sincere
| inquiry. Why is interacting in subreddits with karma gates
| important to your life?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Some of the serious technical discussion subreddits I use
| for technical discussions won't allow anyone with new
| accounts or a low amount of karma to participate.
|
| If you're trying to have a technical discussion, you'd be
| locked out.
| jtode wrote:
| Sounds like a terrible place to centre your support
| system on.
| ilyt wrote:
| That's like whole week of commenting!
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| I laughed.
| 13of40 wrote:
| Man, those are Hacker News numbers. About 300 times as many
| people have upvoted my drunken rants on Reddit.
| corobo wrote:
| Hopefully one day we can redeem it for cash with all that API
| money they're making off the posts that generated it :)
| abcd_f wrote:
| Do you destroy your comments that have replies though?
|
| If you do, that's a fairly nasty and thoughtless thing to do
| and I would strongly encourage you to revise your approach to
| commenting and/or privacy.
| riversflow wrote:
| Completely disagree. Not archiving/recording everything for
| eternity has be the de facto modus operandi of the human race
| since time immemorial.
|
| Reddit had the privilege of hosting user comments, and they
| squandered the trust they built. Social networks live and die
| by the good will of their users, creators/users taking back
| what they made is the consequence of acting in a way that
| users don't like. Deleting all my comments out of every
| conversation I had on reddit and destroying all the value is
| _the point_ , I don't want Reddit to have that value.
| joemi wrote:
| > Deleting all my comments out of every conversation I had
| on reddit and destroying all the value is the point, I
| don't want Reddit to have that value.
|
| So, "if I can't have it, no one can"? That's something
| parents typically try to teach toddlers _not_ to do.
| lostlogin wrote:
| You can prevent doxing yourself by deleting an account.
|
| If someone becomes suspicious that they know an account
| holder, watching recent posts can lead to doxing.
| Deleting can be a safety mechanism.
| joemi wrote:
| Indeed. This is fine by me and it's great that you can do
| this in this kind of case. But what's being discussed is
| people deleting all their posts because they're upset at
| reddit for their recent policy changes, and that's what I
| think is not a good thing.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| In this scenario, "no one can" is the uncaring
| corporation who has chosen a path to ruin any good will
| with the community.
|
| The content people have created for free on reddit is
| literally the only form of leverage they have aside from
| actually going to the site.
|
| Sure some lost soul could use that tidbit of info, but
| they'll only have Reddit to blame.
| joemi wrote:
| Yes, "no one can" means "the uncaring corporation", but
| it ALSO means "everyone else in the entire world".
|
| > Sure some lost soul could use that tidbit of info, but
| they'll only have Reddit to blame.
|
| No, reddit isn't making anyone delete all their content.
| The person deleting all their content is to blame. They
| could just walk away, but instead, they're purposefully
| making reddit worse for everyone.
| danShumway wrote:
| > but instead, they're purposefully making reddit worse
| for everyone.
|
| Yes, specifically because of _Reddit 's_ actions.
| Specifically because _Reddit_ made decisions that made
| them no longer want to contribute to the site 's success
| and (incidentally) also because _Reddit_ offers no way at
| all for people to opt-out of furthering the company 's
| commercial interests and no way at all for people to
| refuse to reinforce the network effect keeping the site
| afloat without also damaging the community.
| op00to wrote:
| It's my content. I can do whatever I want with it. I can
| delete it. I can change it. I can leave it be. It's not nasty
| or thoughtless. It's mine. Who is anyone else to tell me
| whether I want to take my own content down?
| rightbyte wrote:
| It messes up the threads. Sure, I don't mind. Like, it
| doesn't make you a bad person. But I would prefer it not
| being possible at bulk in forums. Maybe, 10 deletes per
| year if you accidentally write some PI or something.
|
| I like how HN allows deletes for some time. At multiple
| occasions I have deleted some comment that was flame or
| stupid after 10s and saved others the trouble of reading
| it.
| nabakin wrote:
| I wrote this comment a couple years ago, but unless something
| significant has changed, it still stands.
|
| Be careful. Shreddit does not get rid of all reddit comments,
| only the ones on your profile. Reddit stores a list of the last
| 1000 comments and posts you've made to your profile and that
| list is what Shreddit and 99% of reddit 'deletion' tools use.
| To truly remove all your comments and posts from reddit, look
| into reddit-shreddit [0]. Despite the similar name, it is
| completely different and leverages all your posts and comments
| from a reddit data request to delete _all_ of your reddit posts
| and comments. It is infact the only method I have found, except
| for perhaps a GDPR deletion request, that is truly a complete
| deletion.
|
| However, this only covers the deletion from reddit itself.
| There have been periodic reddit archivals ever since it was
| created. Up to 2015 they were done yearly, ever since they have
| been done monthly. Since they have always been up for download,
| all of your reddit data will still be out there, however you
| can remove your data from the main source of these archives
| called pushshift. I haven't done it personally but I've seen it
| said on reddit, you can email the dev of pushshift or dm him on
| reddit and he will remove your information from his archive.
|
| [0] https://github.com/nixfu/reddit-shreddit
| phpisthebest wrote:
| The seems to use the same API that is going to be changing
| pricing, so I assume one either will no longer be able to
| create the free api keys required in step 4 of that app's
| setup instructions
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Given that data collection companies would have long since
| archived your comments into their data stores, deleting all of
| your comments after a few years is likely only harming everyone
| else trying to read old threads through the website (rather
| than data collection archives).
|
| It's becoming increasingly frustrating to read old Reddit
| threads about technical issues where someone went back and
| deleted all of their posts. Trying to guess what was discussed
| by reading every other comment is a frustrating experience.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| I get the frustration, but it still would to put pressure on
| them. Because even though the data might have been
| scraped/bought, it means that people would not _go_ to reddit
| to find information, as it 'd be deleted/worthless.
|
| So yes, it's acknowledging that you can't take back the
| scraped data, but you can at least poison the well for others
| who would use it.
|
| And yes, it _would_ harm current users of reddit. That 's
| kind of the point, because I don't think reddit makes any
| significant changes unless they get significant pushback from
| the thing they're trying to sell -- #s of users.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| If it was a big problem for Reddit they'd probably make it
| impossible.
| riversflow wrote:
| > It's becoming increasingly frustrating to read old Reddit
| threads
|
| Yeah, that's the point. Users are clawing back the value they
| gave to Reddit because they are angry with the decisions the
| company has made.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I'm happy to see it, but it's a little surprising (and even
| frustrating) that _this_ ended up being the straw that
| broke the camel 's back. Reddit has deserved this for a
| very, very long time for more serious abominations than
| trying to monetize the site.
| joemi wrote:
| I think that's pretty close to a "if I can't have it no one
| can" attitude, and it's a net-negative for the world.
| acover wrote:
| The data will be out there forever, you are just making
| it harder for Reddit to use it.
| riversflow wrote:
| Should no one ever protest anything as it would be a drag
| on the economy?
|
| No, I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe that _being a
| doormat_ is less of a net-negative for the world than
| doing the only thing of actual consequence.
|
| Deleting my comment history is activism against a
| corporations which has decided to flex its muscle in a
| way I don't like.
| danShumway wrote:
| I also get annoyed when I see missing comments, but I
| don't think this is a good reading of the situation.
| _Reddit_ is restricting access to its API. It 's not good
| for the world if a company can say "look how much value
| you're giving everyone, you're morally obligated to them
| to let us keep abusing you." Users aren't obligated to
| play into that trap. I mean, if I'm going to treat
| content on Reddit like it's a public good that I'm
| morally obligated to provide, then maybe it's bad for a
| for-profit business that fights with its community to be
| in charge of that public good.
|
| Particularly in the context of the current API decisions,
| the thing Reddit is doing is closing off access to that
| data. A user saying, "fine, but if you're not going to
| allow open access then I'll stop treating my content like
| it's open access and I'll remove it" is I think a pretty
| reasonable response (both for the user and for society).
| The alternative is Reddit gets to lock down that data,
| but because it hasn't gone _all the way_ yet and
| completely locked it down, everyone is still obligated to
| let them keep that data? It just doesn 't make sense.
|
| It was brought up above, but Reddit archives exist. So
| it's not necessarily like the content is entirely lost.
| But it's less convenient to access, and that's
| purposeful, because it's bad for society if we allow
| commercial gatekeepers in front of communities to guilt
| users into making it easier for them to lock down and
| commoditize that data. It can be a difficult line to
| draw, but there are situations where it's worth just
| ripping off the band aide and saying, "if a site is not
| being a good steward of its community, then the site
| doesn't get to keep using that community's stuff as a way
| to attract users to the site."
| tezgon wrote:
| They're not removing the information for good, rather
| requiring one to go to a different site to find it. Seems
| like a sensible method of dissent.
| joemi wrote:
| Are you speaking for everyone deleting their content? I
| would bet that _most_ of the people doing this are not
| moving it to another site, but just deleting it forever.
| delgaudm wrote:
| Somewhat OT, but I think it's interesting that YC has
| specifically employed patterns on HN to prevent deleting the
| comments you've made.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| I'm torn about this. On one hand I love finding old comments
| with solutions to my problems, on the other hand it's easy
| enough to identify an author based on simple word statistics,
| so deleted your account isn't enough to prevent an old
| comment to come and bite you in the future.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| I actually like that. It's quite often that I stumble upon an
| older Reddit thread when searching something specific and the
| (presumably) valuable comments are just [deleted]. True,
| people might want to erase some things they said, but it
| makes Reddit a lot less valuable as a search resource.
| [deleted]
| rektide wrote:
| I agree. The fear mongering & sending yourself to /dev/null
| is out of hand. To me a particularly virulent new pattern
| that is super anti-social. I think most of ya'll are
| enduringly good humans & we're better as a world with your
| thoughts shared.
| wpietri wrote:
| Maybe you could trust that these enduringly good humans
| have decided to do things for reasons that suit them?
| rektide wrote:
| There's so much discussion about deleting yourself. There
| should be some words online encouraging people not to
| jump into black holes. I hope people consider & think on
| the loss that self-deleting causes, when considering.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think it's rather the other way around. People self-
| delete comments because they feel they don't dare to be
| themselves.
|
| The risk is very low but the consequence is high if you
| get targeted online in various ways (someone has a grudge
| and doxes you, or you are the target of a social media
| pile-on)
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not only that, but sensibilities change. Even if you are
| thoroughly polite and respectful by today's yardstick,
| you have no idea what is going to be taboo in 20, or 40
| years. Think back to some of the things you might have
| posted to ephemeral BBS systems 20 years ago. Things you
| said that were innocent then, but might get you fired and
| canceled today. Euphemisms that were acceptable then and
| terrible now. When comments are stored permanently, all
| it takes for a future motivated enemy is to trawl through
| your 20+ year old posts to find something that shows
| you're a horrible person by tomorrow's different
| standards.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I get your point, but looking back over the last 30 years
| of my commenting on various internet fora (and more than
| that if we count BBSes), I honestly don't think I've ever
| said anything then that would upset anyone in that way
| now.
|
| Things haven't changed _that_ much.
| rektide wrote:
| I can definitely see _some_ shifts happening. I dunno, I
| see that both ways. No super strong feelings.
|
| In general though I just think the fear is way overblown.
| The damage to society of everyone selling Fear
| Uncertainty and Doubt is real & heavy, is a burdensome
| tone. The damage of so many people jumping into the black
| hole is real. And most of us are not going to be targeted
| people, and our transgressions even at their worst online
| are really nowhere near a real danger to us.
|
| But having an online existence, being part of the
| written/online universe is a risk. Yes. Opting out &
| becoming nothing is a very easy available way to get rid
| of risk.
|
| I still think it's a farce of high degree how much fear
| are swallowing. I think it's colossally disproportionate
| to the risk. We also don't get to societally wrestle with
| questions of grace & mistakes & maturation if we insist
| on the supreme personal security of having said nothing.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I can definitely see some shifts happening
|
| Oh, sure, I agree. I just think they aren't as great as
| some people think.
|
| > But having an online existence, being part of the
| written/online universe is a risk.
|
| This is true, and is why I've never used my actual, real-
| world identity in any online fora. Instead, I have a
| handful of alternate (but persistent) "personalities".
|
| It's the only way I am OK with saying what I really think
| about anything. If I were readily identifiable, I
| wouldn't participate in any public online discussions.
| The risk is just too great.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I also used shreddit a year or two ago. Though for more
| personal reasons. It's so great I could delete my old history
| completely.
| tmpob wrote:
| Your posts and comments will still be available in the
| Pushshift dumps. These have been released as torrents, so
| there are many thousands of copies of these already.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| in my experience, its always the current digital trail that
| gets anybody interested in more sleuthing
|
| and archives on different sites arent used to link to a
| current digital trail
|
| Like if you were running for political office, nobody is
| going to start with the archive to try to match to an
| unknown current user that they further want to link to the
| candidate. They'll start with the candidate and try to link
| to a current username and then maybe extend that to
| archives of related usernames.
|
| But if you really nuke and start over you're fine, people
| just aren't that motivated. Your own witness protection
| program.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Oh yeah I'm sure they are but it was more about the feeling
| of it. I wish more platforms offered this.
|
| I rotate all my accounts every year or so, same with this
| one.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Also the Internet Archive.
| gsich wrote:
| I have gone over to fullquote any comment I make on reddit
| because of this toxic style. It's not exclusively your comment
| anymore if you post it to a public place.
| malablaster wrote:
| Same. I delete my Reddit account, posts, and (sometimes)
| comments regularly because screw that cesspool.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Another option to nuke ..
|
| Last night I wiped my old and well used account with Android
| App "Redact":
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.redact.app
| tmpob wrote:
| I do the same on Reddit and similar sites (including HN),
| though I never delete any comments, just the accounts. I've
| become increasingly uneasy about leaving a digital trail,
| especially as there are increasingly advanced techniques to
| correlate accounts via stylometry.
|
| For Reddit specifically, if I needed to, I would look up old
| comments in Pushshift if I could remember enough information to
| locate them - keywords, approximate date, subreddit, username.
| It's somewhat annoying that this service no longer exists.
| Though there are dumps, and backups of those dumps, so
| hopefully someone will release a similar search tool for these,
| eventually. Perhaps also including the data scraped by Archive
| Team. Maybe I'll have a crack at it myself as a side project.
| faangsticle wrote:
| HN doesn't allow you to delete comments anyway. You can try
| emailing dang and he'll give you some excuse about how he
| doesn't need to care about GDPR and data protection laws.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| To be fair HN is purely a US entity; GDPR doesn't apply as
| much as the EU might insist it does.
| faangsticle wrote:
| YCombinator, the parent of HN, does business in the EU.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| That I did not know. Thanks for clarifying.
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| GDPR applies as long as your service is used by EU
| citizens[0].
|
| [0]: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-
| protection/r...
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Sure, that's what the EU claims. Doesn't make it so.
| mcdonje wrote:
| If you simply delete your account, the comments live on but are
| anonymized. The username is [deleted].
|
| It's a lot easier than deleting all your comments before
| deleting the account, and as others have said, it preserves the
| conversation for future people.
|
| I'd much rather learn what a bunch of deleted accounts thought
| about in a thread from 10 years ago than getting only a partial
| conversation.
| tazjin wrote:
| I've been using this: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/
|
| It runs client-side in the browser and has filter & export
| functionality if you want to retain anything.
| IanCal wrote:
| I tried this but it found only a portion of my comments, and
| exported less than 200. Just be careful to check things
| before deleting
| LukeShu wrote:
| You know what I love? Finding threads like this in
|
| > OP: Posts a question
|
| > Anon: [deleted by shreddit/PowerDeleteSuite/whatever]
|
| > OP: Thanks, that solved my issue!
|
| It's a modern version of https://xkcd.com/979/ !
| anifru wrote:
| Have you found a quick way to transfer all your subreddit
| subscriptions and saved posts?
|
| I would prefer short-lived anon accounts but have been too lazy
| to write a script to transfer those myself.
| ezekg wrote:
| I save the posts I really care about in my browser bookmarks
| or copy/paste the valuable contents to a note on my phone.
| For subs, if I don't resub then I wasn't really interested.
| Starting a new anon account is a good way to get rid of the
| cruft in your home feed.
| rekoil wrote:
| I have an account that's older than some current reddit users
| have lived, I've pretty much never deleted anything from it but
| I plan to replace all comments and threads I've created on that
| account with something like the following text: "Removed in
| protest of reddits idiotic 2023-06-30 API rule changes."
|
| Shreddit looks like a good tool for this, just have to tweak it
| so it doesn't actually remove the data, just replace and leave
| it.
|
| Would be fun to also build a tool for restoring the content
| should reddit reverse its idiotic API decision. But why bother
| doing that when they wont...
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I do the same thing. I wonder how inflated the subscriber count
| is on many popular subreddits.
| spiderice wrote:
| It looks like Shreddit relies on the Reddit API to work. Is
| this tool going to break with the API changes? Or is personal
| API usage unaffected?
| hunter2_ wrote:
| From what I've read, personal API keys (issued to anyone)
| will continue to work fine, but apps that expose a way to use
| arbitrary keys (like in a settings UI, rather than hard-coded
| at build time) will be deemed in violation of ToS,
| specifically so that personal keys can't easily be used by
| the masses as a workaround for apps that have a 1:many
| dev:user ratio.
|
| If you can build an app (or clone what someone else has
| built) that contains your key, you can proceed. This is
| fairly high friction for mobile apps, like building/patching
| an .apk and side loading it.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Reddit has a lot of good info. This is to the credit of the
| people posting there. But I hate it when good helpful info or
| part of a conversation that was going to answer my problem
| becomes a deleted post because Im GoNnA dElEtE aLl My ReDdIt
| DaTa
| randombits0 wrote:
| So you end up with the value of what you paid. Got it!
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Paid ecosystems wouldn't have open discourse at this scale
| jedahan wrote:
| I ran this on my user about an hour ago, and all my messages
| are still on reddit and also libreddit frontends. I wonder if
| their api is ignoring the user-agent, or there is a very long
| cache time.
| simple10 wrote:
| The GDPR / CPRA data request allows for downloading all data.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
|
| Has anyone here tried it? I'm curious what kind of formatting is
| used for the data dump.
| specialist wrote:
| My misc digital personas have gone to the great /dev/null in the
| sky many times.
|
| BIX, CompuServe, FidoNet, usenet, dozens of email accounts,
| voicemails, interviews, chat logs, facebook...
|
| Heck, I have zero trace of the specialty BBS (and network) I
| hosted. Which was my everything at the time.
|
| Young me thought it'd be great to record and archive my
| lifestream.
|
| Current me is glad it didn't work out.
|
| Sure, I may have written some clever bits of code & prose.
|
| Now I see great value in forgetting. It's hard to adapt, grow,
| accept, forgive, and be forward looking while lugging around a
| lifetime of baggage.
|
| If I ever did say something useful, I'm confident someone will
| pick up the thread. Whether independently or by quoting me, it's
| all good.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| >These changes mark the beginning of the (apparently) inevitable
| enshittification of Reddit as a platform
|
| This started long ago, when the new UI was announced. This was
| the first obvious "we're going to make it worse for everybody
| because that's how we operate and there's nothing you can do
| about it" step for me.
| xavdid wrote:
| At least until now, we could mostly ignore it. It's gotten much
| more forceful; I'm now worried about old.reddit.com more than I
| was before.
| nfriedly wrote:
| I made a series of reddit posts that collectively involved a fair
| amount of research, so I ended up copying them over to my
| personal website in order to have a better primary source.
|
| But I'll probably run this to grab everything else.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Hehe, many of my articles started as a comment o put too much
| effort in (eg https://sonnet.io/posts/use-rainbow/ vs
| https://reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/qsb8wz/_/hkc60bz)
|
| Even 5k people reading content on my site would be better than
| 50k people skimming through the comment section.
| cpeth wrote:
| Is Lemmy the leading candidate for a viable reddit replacement?
| Are there any other serious efforts in this space?
|
| HN has such an insane depth of talent that I am surprised I
| haven't seen a few ShowHN posts that read something like:
|
| "Hi guys, I was bored last weekend so I thought it would be fun
| to build a reddit clone as a single Rust binary with an imbedded
| bespoke graph database. It uses a fine tuned LLaMA model for
| optional auto-moderation. So far it's handling sustained 1.6M /
| posts sec on my 2015 MacBook Pro. If I have some time this next
| week I will add distributed mode with Raft or CRDTs. Hope you
| guys like it."
| dsir wrote:
| I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take
| on the online community space. We've built a place to
| monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created
| on the platform and have been specifically targeting content
| creators to get them to offer their communities as a product
| alongside their content.
|
| The communities that form around content creators tend to be
| high in engagement and are a sort of naturally occurring beacon
| for connecting like minded people together online. That is the
| core of social networking after all.
|
| https://sociables.com/creators
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Personally I think the best alternatives are what we've already
| been using: discourse, Matrix, Mastodon, Zulip, Github Issues,
| and community forums.
|
| For finding new interesting content, I strongly believe that
| instead of creating a new platform someone should create a
| "hub": a centralized aggregator which presents all of these
| platforms in a consistent format. A place where you can find
| various forums and Zulip / Mastodon instances, get a feed of
| their posts, and even create accounts and make posts/comments;
| but it doesn't host the instances or posts themselves, it just
| uses their APIs. It can also host some of the archived /
| scraped data from SE and Reddit for consistency. The reasons
| being:
|
| - The platforms I mention already exist for many communities,
| and there's already a lot of difficulty in finding content.
| This has been a good idea way before platforms started closing
| off their content
|
| - Creating a fully-centralized platform is actually way harder
| than creating a decentralized one. At the same time, it's very
| important that whatever platform we use is easy for newcomers,
| easy to find content, and fast; all properties of centralized
| servers. Hence, the centralized entry-point and hub but
| decentralized instances works well.
|
| - Mastodon has a centralized hub but tbh it sucks. Discourse,
| Matrix, Zulip, etc. have none. And of course there's no hub
| which supports all of these platforms together.
|
| - I've only heard bad things about Lemmy and the UI is crap.
|
| I would absolutely love to help such a project but, like many
| unfortunately, don't have the time or networking ability to
| start it myself. But if I see a Show HN or something similar
| which seems like it's actually getting momentum I will try to
| contribute
| bsnnkv wrote:
| I created a read-only version of something like this[1] to
| view discussions across subs/hn/lobsters/tildes/substack for
| any given link. I really like the idea of what you're
| suggesting.
|
| [1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/finding-interesting-
| comments-dis...
| pig208 wrote:
| Interesting idea. In a sense this is also kind of
| "decentralized" in terms of hosting because you are just
| using the APIs, and the service itself will just be provided
| via a client managing the credentials. But I don't quite
| understand how this will be so different from Matrix has been
| doing. Basically, the application is just a centralized hub
| with bridge to different communities. Wouldn't this just be a
| "yet another standard" situation?
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Yes.
|
| What makes this approach really stand out is that, _even if
| there are 5 different aggregators, it doesn 't matter,_
| because they're all aggregating the same data. And _even if
| someone decides to use one of the existing platforms (e.g.
| discourse), posts /comments from this aggregator to the
| platform still show up_. So this is actually a way to
| alleviate the "yet another standard" issue (though I
| acknowledge it won't be as good as a single common
| instance, due to different formats).
|
| Matrix is a start. But when I go to https://matrix.org/, I
| see a giant header and "Try Now". When I go to
| https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now/, I see a
| bunch of clients. When I go to
| https://app.element.io/#/welcome and click "Explore Rooms",
| I see random forums including some russian forums.
|
| I think that you go to the site hub, you should immediately
| see a feed of curated popular posts and a "Create Account"
| form, similar to https://reddit.com/r/all, along with a
| search bar and list of filters. And when you create an
| account, you choose some suggestions and get presented with
| various communities, also like Reddit. Most people are
| barely even going to try your site, if you want them to
| join and put real effort into contributing you need to
| present good content as fast as possible.
|
| Another issue with Matrix is that a lot of content just
| isn't on Matrix. As well as Reddit and other existing
| communities. For example, Rust has a subreddit, discourse,
| Matrix forum, and Zulip, and probably a discord somewhere
| too. There should really be a single platform where I can
| see posts from all of this, because I'm definitely not
| going to be checking each one individually.
| timeon wrote:
| Sometimes best alternative is just absence.
| mayormcmatt wrote:
| I think the closest analog is Tildes.
|
| https://tildes.net/
| busymom0 wrote:
| I am the developer of HACK, hacker news app for iOS, android
| and MacOS, one of the top hacker news apps on the app stores. I
| have been working on a decentralized link + text sharing site
| called AvocadoReader for last few weeks. I describe it as a
| "Decentralized public community of communities for sharing
| links, text and media. "
|
| I am hoping to have an extremely early beta next week. Here's
| what I have so far. Got the post submissions and community
| creations working:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/mim2X9H
|
| I shared some implementation details here if people want to
| read more:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/been_wor...
| holler wrote:
| There have been and will continue to be numerous alternatives
| created all the time. The problem is creating a clone of X is
| rarely ever going to succeed, simply because cloning products
| doesn't create a compelling reason to leave the original
| (unless you have the resources/network effects of e.g. Meta).
| You can check r/redditalternatives for a constant stream of
| projects.
| ArjenM wrote:
| Time will tell where majority groups migrate to, I'm mostly
| afraid it will be ever more fractured islands that slowly fade
| for a good long while before one dominant platform slowly gains
| traction again as was the case with Reddit.
|
| Lemmy looks a little too technical for majority users to
| consider I'm afraid.
| reaperman wrote:
| The people who would enjoy building a reddit really don't want
| to run a reddit. The people who want to run a reddit,
| shouldn't.
| derefr wrote:
| Why would building it require running it? It's just software.
| There can be a separate installation of it per community.
| Like WordPress, or any old phpBB forum.
|
| > The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't.
|
| The people who want to run _something that 's like
| Reddit.com_, shouldn't, sure.
|
| I don't see why e.g. a YouTube content creator shouldn't be
| able to have "a Reddit" (i.e. a single-subreddit installation
| of Reddit) in the same sense that they have "a blog" or "a
| Discord." The whole point there is that it's a cult of
| personality, so the moderation incentives align with the user
| expectations.
|
| I also don't see why a community like /r/AskHistorians
| wouldn't be excellent at running "a Reddit" of their own. (In
| fact, that would be much better than currently, as they could
| run a very heavily modified fork of Reddit that uses a
| moderation queue for comments; requires that toplevel
| comments on posts are either follow-up questions [according
| to some LLM] or come from verified historian accounts; allows
| questions to be merged; etc. ...Hey, wait, that's just
| StackExchange!)
|
| Also, did you know that LessWrong.com used to be "a Reddit"?
| That is, it was a single-subreddit fork -- I believe the only
| one ever allowed, as some one-off gesture -- of the
| proprietary Reddit codebase. It worked pretty okay for that
| community! (Though it never received updates from "upstream",
| so it code-rotted, which is most of the reason they moved
| away from it. This wouldn't happen in an open-source Reddit
| project.)
| kaszanka wrote:
| Reddit actually used to be open source until mid-2017:
| https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I think the "subreddit" form being the decentralized aspect
| to a greater hub would be a better format than lemmy, which
| is basically a whole reddit that can attach to other
| reddits. Want a community? Run an instance equivalent to a
| subreddit for your topics. Want an offtopic or a circle
| jerk sub? two more instances.
|
| The only real censorship power the main hub would have
| would be a de-listing, but it wouldn't take down the
| instance entirely.
| ris58h wrote:
| > There can be a separate installation of it per community.
|
| "Reddit - Dive into anything". You will kill the UX with
| such separation.
| derefr wrote:
| I don't know what you think of Reddit as, but I think of
| it as two things:
|
| - a collection of independent niche communities that are
| just using Reddit for hosting, whose members don't think
| of themselves as visiting "Reddit" but rather as visiting
| those specific community forums. This is the valuable
| part of Reddit, that generates and gathers original
| content and novel discussions that can't be found
| anywhere else on the Internet. This is the part
| everyone's rushing to preserve/archive or migrate
| elsewhere.
|
| - a Usenet-like set of generic default-subscribed
| "category" subreddits, that just act as content
| aggregators to bubble up the "least controversial" stuff
| in each category from across the Internet. Nobody cares
| much about this (other than Reddit's investors), since
| it's just another view on the same content that gets
| surfaced through every other social network one way or
| another.
|
| If you think of Reddit as _just_ the valuable part, and
| forget about the junk, then you can reinterpret the
| Reddit UX like so: Reddit _just happens_ to have a
| single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple
| communities ' posts, just like Twitter has a single-pane-
| of-glass view for a feed of multiple accounts' posts. But
| 1. this isn't crucial to how users engage with these
| communities; and 2. you could preserve this property
| anyway, by having a shared SSO system (like how
| WordPress.com works) and by making Reddit-the-software
| federate its posts through ActivityPub. Then a "Reddit
| client" would actually just be a fancier kind of RSS
| reader that also knows how to post to individual
| communities' servers. But each server would still be
| "sovereign" over its own administration, being able to
| ban or approval-queue users, etc.
| ris58h wrote:
| > I don't know what you think of Reddit as
|
| A set of subreddits that people browsing casually.
|
| I don't think that there are many communities that live
| only on Reddit. Most of subreddits are pretty casual.
| Even niche ones. Niche communities already have other
| places to have discussions. They aren't core audience of
| Reddit. The core audience browse a 'junk'.
| timerol wrote:
| > Reddit just happens to have a single-pane-of-glass view
| for a feed of multiple communities' posts, just like
| Twitter has a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of
| multiple accounts' posts.
|
| I disagree with the "just happens to have" part of this.
| The single-pane view is the killer feature of Reddit for
| me. I've tried to engage in smaller forums before, and
| small, niche communities have valuable but infrequent
| content. Being able to see which of the small communities
| have fantastic posts today is valuable, and encourages me
| to participate in some of the less headlining posts.
|
| For a good example, consider /r/ultralight, which is a
| backpacking community focused on keeping weight off your
| back. 90% of the posts are "Help me shave weight! (The 10
| pound lead weight I carry is sentimental and non-
| negotiable.)" Slightly more interesting are new product
| reviews, and the best are overviews of product
| categories.
|
| I would not visit a standalone forum for once-a-month
| interesting content. But I'll definitely follow the sub,
| which leads me to 1) see all of the most interesting
| posts, and 2) engage with newcomers occasionally when I'm
| on reddit and nothing else is catching my attention.
| ("You really don't need the lead weight - just carry a
| picture of it for sentimental value.")
| derefr wrote:
| Let me put it another way, by making an analogy to a
| service that (surprisingly) does this one thing
| correctly: Tumblr.
|
| Tumblr "just happens to have" a dashboard, but that
| doesn't really matter, because each blog _also_ has a web
| subdomain that serves both the blog 's posts, _and_
| serves a (public, unauthenticated) RSS feed for said
| posts. Which means that I can just subscribe to all the
| Tumblr blogs I care about through my RSS feed reader of
| choice (which is a single-pane-of-glass _I_ control, and
| one which muxes together many _other_ posts-once-a-month
| sources as well) and forget that the Tumblr dashboard
| exists.
|
| And the Tumblr dashboard itself also _doesn 't need to be
| operated by the same company that hosts Tumblr's blogs_.
| It could just _be_ a fancy RSS reader, that uses Tumblr
| 's API only for posting. And so it could be a third-party
| app, without needing to make _any_ (authenticated) API
| requests to Tumblr, when all a user is doing is consuming
| content.
| [deleted]
| dsir wrote:
| > I don't see why e.g. a YouTube content creator shouldn't
| be able to have "a Reddit"
|
| I've been building a platform to target this specific
| thing. It seems like the biggest asset that creators are
| creating are the communities that form around them and
| their niche. In order for a creator to capitalize on this
| they currently tend to leverage a combination of different
| platforms like Patreon, Discord and Reddit with their
| community often times spread out amongst the different
| platforms. What we've done is combine everything into a
| singular place to allow them to offer their communities as
| a product alongside their content.
|
| https://sociables.com/creators/
| derefr wrote:
| I would note that YouTube/Twitch content-creators create
| subreddits for a very specific reason: they ask their
| communities to share links to "relevant" content there,
| and to upvote the links that the community would most
| want _the content-creator themselves_ to see. Then, when
| the content-creator feels too lazy to make real content,
| they instead start a screen-recording + video session,
| sort their subreddit by "top - this week", and start
| clicking through the posts and live-reacting to them.
|
| It's in theory equivalent to a "share things for me to
| react to" Discord channel -- but the fact that it's
| Reddit means that it has automatic chronologically-
| segmented userbase-wide voting rounds applied to the
| links, which makes it easy for the content-creator to
| react "blind" to a bunch of "interesting" things in a
| row, without needing to do any pre-filtering for things
| they haven't seen yet, or editing out boring things, or
| showing anything that would break content-guidelines on a
| livestream.
|
| Does your software have an answer to this use-case?
| dsir wrote:
| So within a community on our platform the creator can
| create different discussion boards for all the relevant
| topics related to their niche. Within those discussion
| boards, posts can get "bumped" to increase their
| relevancy within the board. We have an aggregation feed
| as well which shows the most relevant posts across each
| board within the community. We are working on expanding
| the ways in which we aggregate the most topical posts
| across different time spans for the reasons you
| mentioned.
|
| As far as content moderation, we are leaving it mainly up
| to each community to self moderate. We are also looking
| into leveraging AI to assist with flagging posts for the
| moderators to review to help improve their job.
| quaintdev wrote:
| People keep suggesting Lemmy but I think decentralized social
| media is preferred by technical people like us. But in real
| world only centralized social media seems to work. So why not
| adopt a model that will be good in the long run, how about
| something like Wikipedia non-profit Reddit alternative?
|
| Someone already did this [1] as stackoverlflow alternative
|
| [0]: https://codidact.com/
| holler wrote:
| There already is a wikipedia social network created by
| Jimmy Wales himself.
|
| https://wt.social
| samstave wrote:
| And thus, ' _reaperman 's law_ was born.
| s1k3s wrote:
| I have a 1:1 clone of old.reddit in my PC already, I built it
| for fun a few months ago. It's a one week task for a senior
| web developer anyway. The thing is though, most people don't
| care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with
| their official apps. It's just not worth the stress IMO.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| And then there is IP blacklisting, prevent login after 5
| tries, rate managing, all the edge cases ...
| mandmandam wrote:
| > most people don't care about these changes and will
| continue to use reddit with their official apps.
|
| Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and
| StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that.
|
| "Most people" _will_ take notice when the people who made
| Reddit worth looking at leave. It might linger for a while,
| with rehashed posts from bots and the like, but it 's
| walking dead right now.
| polski-g wrote:
| Reddit was worth looking at because the creators were
| literally starting up fake accounts to ask/answer
| questions. This could probably be automated with GPT in
| today's age to make Lemmy or whatever a possible
| migration path.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and
| StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that.
|
| it was early days when audience consisted of internet
| geeks. Today its also a lot of casual users who may not
| care about api drama much.
| dt3ft wrote:
| I'm building one, but I don't think it merits a Show HN. You
| can check it out at https://flingup.com
| hedora wrote:
| This exists:
|
| https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
| skrowl wrote:
| [dead]
| not_a_shill wrote:
| The hardest part about making a new reddit isn't the technical
| side
| danenania wrote:
| Exactly. It should be more like:
|
| "I hacked this together with the worst code you've ever seen
| and the server is crashing every 5 minutes, but a thousand
| people signed up today and usage is growing exponentially."
| cpeth wrote:
| Hmm I assumed the opposite. The mass exodus of long time
| users who are pissed about the API changes won't happen
| until there is a destination that can handle the migration
| without servers going down. It will be interesting to see
| what happens.
| danenania wrote:
| Focusing on tech and scalability before getting users
| will just result in a well-engineered ghost-town. People
| would rather use something slow and buggy if that's where
| the activity is.
|
| It's much more of a marketing and PR challenge than a
| tech challenge. Having a site that works well would be
| nice too, sure, but finding a way to get tons of users
| signed up (and keeping them engaged) is far more
| important.
| b33j0r wrote:
| Haha, I'd say just wait another day.
|
| But what is the value of reddit anymore? I have one of the
| oldest accounts, and I loved it.
|
| Last time I logged in (not a joke) it told me I had a new free
| avatar that was a girl? That I'm stuck with? And I had to pay
| money to make myself look like a dude?
|
| And we thought hats in TF2 were lame.
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