98 replies
1d9h
Reddit was my favorite website growing up. I'd discover new interesting subs, read random posts and comments. The frontpage was somewhat interesting too, but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine.
I still use Reddit but way less than I used to before, and I no longer use it for fun but just to read niche tech subs.
I refuse to use the official mobile app. I've always used Baconreader and then Relay on Android. Relay survived the API changes and adopted a subscription model.
But thanks to Revanced I was able to patch an old version of Relay to use my own API key for free.
Pretty much sums up every popular social media platform these days.
HN is still a good place to learn about whats going on in the tech world and what not because it's simple and filters out alot of "brainrot", although there is an increasing number of comments that soley react at the headline.
Reddit has become like meta, you either have an account or your user experience will be so horrible that you won't use it.
X simply doesn't allow you to use it, atleast it doesn't pretend.
I think we need more simple websites again, but I am not sure about the incentive structure.
I feel like this is another example of a problem that could be easily solved if we had integrated, anonymous and frictionless payments on the web. For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. For a regular user it takes a while to build up even a hundred comments, meanwhile for a spammer, this could quickly become costly. The hurdle of course is that no one wants to put their credit card details into a bunch of random sites, or nearly any site for that matter. If we had anonymous payments integrated into our browsers, it would be very straightforward though, click a button and you give a site a dollar and you're good for a while. This would generalize and improve many other sides of the web as well, from sponsoring open source projects to creators. Removing the payment friction could help improve many things online, but I don't think I've ever seen a feasible, realistic path proposed towards that.
No need to charge per message. Just make every user pay an annual membership fee for entrance. This is how https://communick.com works. I have a small userbase, but zero issues with spam and abuse.
You have zero issues with spam and abuse because you have a small user base, not because of the fee.
Twitter has TONS of paid accounts for spam.
First: citation needed in spammers using paid accounts. Why would they pay to spam, go through credit card fraud detection and so on when a free account is (by definition) zero cost? Mind you, I am talking about pure spam and not crazy sophisticated phishing scams. Those certainly exist in Twitter.
Second: scale. Twitter has millions of users, it is not profitable and is suing advertisers in a desperate attempt to justify its lack of revenue. Let's just say that a miracle happens and I get my dream number of paid accounts (10k at $29/year). The operation would be profitable enough to pay myself more than I ever made in any job and still contribute back to the downstream projects. I could literally close registrations on my service, or start a different vetting process.
All the accounts seen on the popular "ignore previous instructions" screenshots have paid for twitter. There's no reason to believe that these bots don't operate at scale and don't all spend $8 a month.
On top of that, they are effectively paying per word to post through paying for tokens. This does not stop them.
Bots being paid by a state that is a misinformation campaign is not the same as spam.
Assuming the Fediverse was as popular as Twitter/FB, they could simply run their own instances, no need to pay for access through any specific server.
Bots spamming misinformation isn't spam, gotcha. Really moving the goalposts there
I meant spam as shorthand for "bulk send of messages of similar content". Cheap to produce and to send. If bots paid by some government count as spam, then we should also say the same about sponsored content or PR releases.
Anyway, my point is that charging for access to a network where access is already open is good enough for a filter to avoid spam originating from your node. Spammers are not going to be interested in paying $29/year to be able to send posts via Mastodon when they can just create a bunch of accounts on servers with open registrations or simply running their own botnet.
I classify both sponsored content and PR-speak as spam, personally.
Should we start complaining about HN's "spam problem" because of all the "Launch HN" posts? And what about YC companies that have job ads pushed to the top of the frontpage?
Hell, I don't even have to be a complete cynic to make the argument that basically any news piece today only gets to be written if it serves the economic interests of its publisher. That is valid from the NYT and Washington Post to an indie game developer talking about their project on Mastodon.
If everything is "spam", then there is no ham. If there is no ham, there is no way to build an classifier. If there is no way to build a classifier, then what is the problem we are trying to solve in the first place?
Bots spreading misinformation are bad and a problem on Twitter/Facebook/TikTok, sure. But the reason that an entrance fee does not solve this problem is because these networks are built on the idea of controlling what content people get to see. On the "open social web", people are in charge, there is no "algorithm" and manipulation becomes a lot harder.
And then what? No one is going to navigate an instance that is just spam, and other instances will promptly block them.
Right, the incentive will be to create accounts on the popular instances, not on the paid ones.
There was a spam wave some months ago. The spammers were using Mastodon and Sharkey instances that had open registrations. They were not signing up to paid-only instances to become "legit".
Spam is not just unsolicited commercial messages. Remember: Stupid Pointless Annoying Message.
The worst I see on Twitter when I peek in come from checkmarks. Cryptocurrency shills are some of the worst offenders and they seem to have taken over.
That looks to be retrofitted, not the origin of the term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming#Etymology
I know. It's also one of the meanings.
That site wouldn’t have any spam, true. Though not because of the cost, but because it wouldn’t have any users to make it worth spamming. No one wants to pay per message. Everybody would be too nervous and quadruple-thinking “is this message worth a cent?” Once in a blue moon someone would post, get no reply, and be even more unlikely to post next.
And yes, yes, not literally everyone, but enough that it becomes a rounding error.
I think that's well below the threshold people would care.
The problem is that $0.01 is too low, it'd be well worth spending to advertise or propagandize. For context, USA presidential elections will spend billions, they could make ten billion posts for a fraction of their war chest.
People don’t even pay 0.99$ for apps they use all day every day, opting instead to suffer through ads and have their batteries drained. There’s no chance they’d pay 0.01$ per message.
For the vast majority, there are two price points: free and not free. The psychological difference between free and 0.01$ is magnitudes larger than the difference between 0.01$ and 1$.
This is largely because of payment friction: is some scammy site going to manage its own subscription and call to make me cancel? Do I accidentally sign up to some dumb minimum term etc.
I don’t think I agree.
Something that is free is an unlimited resource. Something which costs even $0.01 is a limited resource (even if the limit is very high).
People naturally deal with limited resources different than unlimited. If it’s unlimited, each usage requires no further consideration. If it’s limited, each usage requires evaluating whether to spend dollars/credits/capacity on it.
I use a paid search engine. I paid extra for the “unlimited” option even though I should have fallen well under a lower tier. It wasn’t because of payment friction. (I was already paying a monthly fee, the only difference was the amount.) I paid the extra because as soon as this transitioned from unlimited to limited, I needed to keep a mental accounting of every usage. I needed to consider if each usage was worth buying.
If you give me a sheet of stickers for free I will struggle to stick them on anything. They are, by their nature as a physical thing, a limited resource. Payment doesn’t matter because they were free. What matters is I can run out so I need to ensure I’m making the best use of a limited resource.
It is not. This happens with the App Store, which is as low friction as you can get and is not a scammy site.
So the wealthiest people get to spread the most propaganda?
You could take a page out of quadratic voting and scale costs nonlinearly. Then spamming would be disproportionately costly. This raises some interesting problems like, why not simply create multiple accounts, which have a different tradeoff calculus.
I think you have to have assets worth significantly more than one cent in order to count yourself among the wealthiest. Just my two cents.
Someone built this (a 4chan clone) on ethereum, I can't remember what it's called. It was pretty dead, but the project exists.
Ethereum has (had?) the added problem of fees and latency. After ~2018, doing anything on Ethereum required you to spend like $20 and wait 40 minutes.
Was it Steemit? They had a reasonable amount of activity for awhile, some of it was good content, most of it wasn’t though.
I built it. [1] They didn't come.
[1] https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works
Throwing pennies around isn’t a big enough appeal or a viable business, see my other comment in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41337617
We used to have that for texting on mobile phones. Everyone and their dog hated it with a passion, and now "free" texting is built into the majority of phone plans in the US, even before things like fb messenger and Whatsapp. Same is true for long distance calling.
That only makes it easier for those with the $$$ to control the narrative.
One cent sounds low but it’s not zero, which has a special place in pricing.
Check out this paper:
https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%...
Everything crap about the modern web is a result of commercialization, so I'm skeptical that doubling down on commercialization is going to do anything but dig this hole even deeper.
The friction might be beaten as part of a network effect. Onboard a large internet celebrity, create a payment platform that syncs to open markets, soomething like the ronin bridge, people's funds can then be used to pay to post on said celebrities forums, expand to other web content, not just for posts but for viewing, 402 replaces ads.
The psychology is already there, "all" that's required a snowball to start adoption in the online media space.
Payments are already overwhelmingly frictionless online.
It should cost at least 10 cents. And I think your idea is the future.
A fee schedule would help, but I think what may end up happening is what happened to spamcop. The realtime black hole list at one point shutdown open SMTP relays, but how spammers got around it was Spam As A Service providers like mailchimp, sendgrid, salesforce, maropost, and others. Someone will come up with a fee based reddit spam service one can buy to flood reddit with spam drowning out real people (the 'reals' or 'non-bots').
It seems like there are things reddit could do to squelch spam that it doesn't seem to be doing, like disallowing duplicate text in posts as one example. Beyond a certain karma it seems like posting rate becomes unrestricted and I think more than one post every 10 seconds is spamming regardless.
So I think reddit right now doesn't have much incentive to squelch spam since it's not doing that much, it would take effort, and effort == money.
I think the for profit model is reddit's biggest problem right now. Others have pointed to USENET's problems, but in an open protocol those were things that could have been surmounted with effort. The for-profit problem with reddit looks to be insurmountable and the rate of enshitification will only accelerate.
Probably a clone of the old reddit is in order. Like cleddit (.com is squatted on but not .org or .net) or something like that. Or a new version of the USENET protocol. For all it's problems USENET did reveal what made scientology 'tick' behind the scenes on alt.religion.scientology. Some new version of USENET might also address DMCA abuses also.
I doubt that payments of any kind will help much.
From a purely theoretical level, there's a very broad range of incomes worldwide, so any price point you use to keep spammers out makes it unaffordable to the average person in many nations, and varying pricing by nation just means the spammers pretend to be from the cheapest nation(s).
We also have a demonstration of payment-based messaging systems in that price range with SMS and voice calls, which still get junk. (Nation-specific: my German SIM gets none while my UK SIM gets a lot… but only when I actually visit the UK).
For subscription-based payment filtering, similar — while it's hard for me to determine which of Musks's statements I should take seriously or literally, twitter premium pricing it's still a test of this idea even if it wasn't the true intent behind Musk's assertion.
Was this the initial idea of the Brave browser? Did that succeed to some extent?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwELepvBAVY
People were saying this about email 20+ years ago.
Not sure if it's the case here but there's a tendency for those in tech to think people problems can be solved with code.
Many of the bad things on the internet are a layer 8 issue and collective human behaviour isn't an easy problem to solve.
"good for a while" is incompatible with "anonymous" : which means there's no account that could be linked back to you (think how 4chan is used).
Also it tends to be made illegal for obvious reasons (even if in practice, everyone but the most careful user eventually gets identified by their IP, the logs of which Web servers are legally obligated to keep in most states).
Otherwise, if you actually meant pseudonymous payments, well, Flattr actually tried to do it. Flattr 1.0 basically died in the 2012-2013 Twitter APIpocalypse, while Flattr 2.0 never managed to get enough reach, unlike the Silicon Valley backed, new competitor, Patreon.
Well, reddit became worse than that ~10 years ago because of the inconsistent, absurd, immature unreasonableness of a sizable fraction of mods who added suck and subtracted cool from the world. Maybe this is a pattern common to most all group-oriented social media platforms where community mods skew towards being drama-oriented, elitist, and/or crazy because no one else wants the job and so, like policing, it attracts certain personality disorder-like individuals.
Channel operator drama was a major thing with IRC back when it was popular (sometimes ending to like channel splits or even whole netsplits if the people involved were related to the server operators, bot/flood wars, etc), so yeah, there isn't anything specific to Reddit about it. I wasn't part of it but i am pretty sure you'd see the same patterns in Usenet back when that was popular (and despite the romantization, i somehow doubt that Usenet was all roses before the "Eternal September").
Usenet was the best discussion platform I've ever used. People who posted questions to comp.lang.c without first reading K&R were commonly killfiled. People who posted questions to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring newsgroups without first reading relevant W3C specs were commonly killfiled. It was awesome. Can anyone direct me to a discussion platform created during the past 25 years where people are blocked or banned for failing to RTFM? I'm not aware of any.
Well, they were kind of snippy with me on the FreeBSD forum some years ago when they felt like I hadn't done enough on my end, so there's that
Note killfiles were per-user (they could be shared, but this was optional and required specific clients), so those blocked people were still visible for non-regulars.
The result was that newsgroups were very different for insiders vs outsiders: insiders saw nice clean message feed, outsiders saw tons of low-content messages with no replies and rare nugget of interesting info.
This was one of the big reasons why Usenet died for me: too much spam and useless messages, as there is no group-wide authority (and no, cancel bots never seemed to work)
Today, if you want heavily moderated group, there is plenty - they are simply scattered on the web. Many of them are phpbb-style forums, some discords and slacks (ugh...).
I am sure places like this have their right to exist, and they would probably be a great place to consume… without actively participating. By nature of being strict and exclusionary they will essentially tend towards becoming a relatively small exclusive club perhaps slightly bordering on being an echo chamber. Whether you consider that a bad thing or good, I am not making a judgement call here.
Also the cycle/churn of software is so quick nowadays that manuals are often written as a second or third thought for majority of the projects. So I can not really blame folks for just directly probing for tribal knowledge.
So, in other words, people were banned about as aggressively as they are on Reddit, by a cabal about as small as on Reddit, but they didn't even know they were banned and this is somehow considered a positive thing.
TBH this doesn't sound awesome, it sounds exactly the hotbed that spawns community drama, passive aggressive behavior and other human stuff you still see to this day :-P.
Maybe it's because I'm not at the top % of developers but it feels like this would go over the top for the issues of most developers. I'd guess very few people need to go into uncharted territory nowadays unless using some tiny tool with no documentation to begin with. It's always a big warning light when I notice I'm going deep into anything as it usually means I'm using it for an unintended purpose.
Most of my issues, especially before LLMs have been regarding misunderstanding documentation, knowing I'm somehow misunderstanding it and just needing someone to rephrase it since I'm burnt out going in circles yet have to finish X before the end of the day so I can't let it marinate in my head.
My impression is that communities trying hard to enforce doing your research prior to asking often end up skill issueing plebians. In that line of thinking it might be cool to see a "question difficulty" option on sites like SO. I've never really had a question where I couldn't roughly gauge how complicated it is and if trying to answer questions it'd be cool to be able to roughly filter like you'd do in leetcode.
These are criticisms that are leveraged against stack overflow all the time. I'm more lenient on SO's stance because it at least wants (or claims to) to be a repository for truth, rather then filtering out questions because of "lol noob"
I can see the function of mods being taken over by ai at some point. Pros might outweigh cons.
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human population. Most people are stupid and the only way to have something nice is to gatekeep. Every single time any community grows too large it becomes shit.
I don't think that the newcomers are necessarely worse, but that you mainly lose the ability to know most users by name when the number grow too big.
Not only do the jannies do it for free, I bet Reddit could get them to pay to be moderators, in the same way that free-to-play games exist so that the "whales" (big spenders) can pay the game operator real money to have an unfair advantage over the regular player base.
As if there wasn't already an issue with corporate sponsorship of moderation in some cases.
This would destroy the eusocial for-free moderation by people who simply want to create an environment they value and others benefit from in the process.
Notably, unlike Reddit, HN isn’t a business that needs to be profitable, to my knowledge. It’s a recruiting tool for a major Silicon Valley VC firm. Brainrot isn’t going to attract as much of the talent or stimulate the ideas they’d want to fund, so HN has been good at resisting brainrot. This is my own analysis, I don’t have a source for it.
The internet has always had nice discussion forums that were labors of love of generous people. In the case of HN, the generous person running the forum is actually a company managing billions of dollars. In the absence of a better funding model for the internet, maybe that’s the solution: altruistic billionaires finance more discussion forums that don’t exist to be profitable, at least not directly.
The exponential growth required of publicly traded social media companies drives different motives in moderating and promoting the discussions.
A certain person tried that, but HN has given them nothing but hate over it.
If there’s a specific idea you or others had in mind that was different, I haven’t seen any serious proposals or roadmaps posted. I’d love to see it though, I’d rather things be more decentralized without the contemporary gatekeeping that comes with it.
Also I’m not sure what you had in mind for altruistic. There’s a difference between financing people’s nostalgia fetishes and financing the repairing of society, but either could be squeezed into the definition.
You mean Twitter? It's pretty much opposite from what I want from a platform.
What I want is more or less Mastodon. A feed ordered by date, a complete lack of algorithmic suggestion (unless maybe I explicitly ask for it), a complete lack of advertising, and stringent moderation that enforces things in my preferred direction.
I’m sure there’s some bozo GitHub repo out there that does exactly what you’re asking for. But you or someone needs to make a serious pitch with a viable roadmap and explain how it will add to society, and be prepared to tirelessly champion it as a movement, not just another shitty pet project.
If it’s to service a nostalgia kick then that’s not going to be a big enough sell. Otherwise it needs to be a business, which is obviously not an option either.
Xitter obviously made a lot of mistakes, but the appeal to society wasn’t one of them (the execution is another story), but that’s the only reason it is still around. There’s obviously a demand for it that isn’t being fulfilled.
I’m not referring to “free speech”, I think that is the wrong message to focus on, though I do think big tech and Reddit had that wrong. Social media is responsible for the enshittification of society at large. It just takes a click to make someone an un-person at the slightest offense. Whether that be to exclude them from their social community with a block or ban, or expose something they said out of context.
It’s not really a censorship issue as much as it is a self-censorship issue with the secondary effects that has on society as a whole. To put it more plainly: people are too afraid to express themselves, even under pseudonyms. There are exceptions but when they stand out it has a tendency to look weird, so it’s passively discouraged in that way as well. Even if you are allowed to do so, that doesn’t stop cancel culture from taking things you said or did out of context. You can’t have the old web culture back until that’s solved, and I don’t even know if that’s possible to do.
So instead, we are stuck with gatekeepers and overzealous moderation (though the latter was a problem in the old days too). What a way to live, eh?
They don't have to be billionaires, but they do have to be altruistic. The good corners of the old web were run by one or two guys spending a few hours a week, and that's all that was needed because each corner was small, but there were many of them.
Then go make one. It’s easier now than ever. The social media mistake was trying to make one site everything to everyone but the web is still there.
This.
I miss the old web, the old browser based games. So I'm digging out my old code from shareware I made 15 years ago and turning some of them into free games.
Likewise my blog, converted it from Wordpress into plain HTML. I have more control, at the "expense" of not having a visitor counter system that might go up to 100 if I post a link here but otherwise only goes up to 1-4 views.
This means no need for ads, which is a better user experience directly.
It also means no built-in tracking cookies that I can't remove, and by extension no need for a popup that parrots "we value your privacy" like it's a magic phrase to keep demons at bay even though they "value" the privacy in the same way that a pirate values the cargo of the ship they're taking from at cannon-point.
reddit is still good for some niches. non mainstream subreddits still have decent conversation and you can find help and info about topics or products that you cant find anywhere else. its not what it used to be but if you steer away from the home page and go directly to what you need its still good.
Niches are better served by old plain forums which are still to date, imho, the best way to talk most topics.
Is the reddit experience that much worse without an account?
I only browse old.reddit logged out and log in if I want to to comment before logging out by deleting my cookies. I started doing this after seeing the first "year in review" thing they sent to my account, which creeped me out. Especially not being able to disable this type of data collection, on either of the two sites.
I may be having an easier time of it by using RES though.
It's not just the app, the content itself has regressed. Where previously many subs actually had content related to their name, now it's 90% American political content. Evert r/pics is not immune. It's not just the posts, the comments too have political stances in them too, for many posts even unrelated to politics. It's tiring to read.
American politics has eaten everything, even my beloved Simpsons Shitposting sub. And my Star Trek Memes sub.
When you comment to complain, you get "Star Trek has always been political", "The Simpsons has always been political".
Yeah... but Star Trek memes hasn't always been. /r/SimpsonsShitposting used to be funny, not just sarcastic eye-rolls about [current-republican-bogey-man/woman strawman].
Hopefully after this cycle the MAGAism dies out (assuming Trump doesnt win) and politics becomes boring again
You’ll likely have worse problems on deck in that case, with no fashionable scapegoat to blame this time, even if we consider the effects of the wars alone. If you’re complaining about hearing too much about political drama, that just means you’ve been insulated from the real problems that haven’t reached your social class yet. I predict it won’t be long though.
It is sad. I don’t browse Popular anymore and stick to the subreddits I care about which aren’t political.
Even if you run across a “news” subreddit and comment on something that doesn’t seem Left, you will get banned right now. It’s very toxic.
Best to stay away from Popular
I’m kinda confused by this.
You’re saying that you look explicitly for things that conform to your political views, comment things with your political views, then get banned?
Do you have a link to an example?
r/politics is known for leaning heavily Left. There are a bunch of new subreddits popping up like r/inthenews that if you comment or post anything not leaning Left OR if you are a member of r/Conservative then you will be banned. If you try to use a separate account to bypass the ban then both accounts will be automatically banned by Reddit for 7 days. There is no appeal.
I was banned from r/Damnthatsinteresting, for example, because they said r/Conservative supports abortion. I have never seen that. It’s mostly just Trump leaning articles.
The content died around the same time the app was released. It made Reddit more accessible and thus it got a much wider and worse (and younger) audience than it previously had.
Eternal September
it's a lot better if you mute a sub the first time it fails to moderate off topic political shit. it's fundamentally a moderation issue
also any sub related to anything remotely gender specific immediately gets overrun with incel content (or female equivalent)
but I do think niche or regional community oriented subs are worth frequenting
As most places do, reddit followed the pareto principle. Most people viewed, some peopel comment, and even fewer people post. The people who post, tend to be power users. I feel with the removal of third party apps, they alianated a lot of power users who used to moderate, and post the actually interested content.
Some stayed, of course, but I feel anecdotally that content on reddit now is mainly posted by casual users and bots.
The current anti-Trump content is off the chart. I know it's the elections but for (at least) non-Americans it's not that interesting.
Actually the genuine content (and votes) seems to be a minority now?
Reddit and X are both very bad, where is the non-video fun these days?
I'm from UK and it annoys me too but I can't really blame American redditors for being so engaged. Trump is an existential threat to peace and prosperity so I'll just wait it out.
How many wars did he start, or get started on his watch? Real ones, with dead children, not twitter flame wars.
He certainly continued wars, opting to increase the number of drone strikes even higher than Obama. He's no pacifist.
Every America politician is an existential threat to world peace and stability.
reddit has had off the chart anti-trump content for nearly a decade now, as have nearly every single mainstream media outlet
Their apps and website both keep getting worse and worse.
Reddit is one of those great examples were management and execs all feel like they need to show their impact and justify their salary and just make the platform worse.
Bots and propaganda are literally everywhere. The platform keeps getting worse but I admit it is to some extent addictive.
I am somewhat happy that HN is one of those places where politics are generally avoided.
I am sick of people arguing about geopolitics and national politics like it was some fan battle while not even knowing their mayor candidates programs, hell many don't even know who their mayor is or what their city council is working on.
This stems imho from the dead of traditional newspapers who were often local, in favor of internet media which is in its nature global.
I swear most people in Italy know more about US politics than what's happening in their own backyard, completely backwards.
I thought the site was getting worse because that's the natural life cycle of image hosts and Reddit decided to become an image host.
HN is avoiding it because somebody else pays to run it and there's zero images or videos.
Also re: politics, stuff the federal government does affects me a lot whereas most local governments seem pretty similar and powerless. If the pendulum can swing so broadly ever 4 years I'd better watch it, right?
How can the federal government impact you more, when anything from building permits, roads, garbage collection impact your daily life regularly?
The last mayor of my city decided to make the entirety of the fields in front of my house (in Italy, countryside near Rome) buildable and completely ruined the view from my house and filled it with traffic.
Abortion and trans rights and stuff
Honest question: If, other than voting every 4 years, you have no ability to impact change, why spend the time watching it? Why not spend the time doing something more constructive that you have the ability to impact? (aside from prior to the election to inform voting, of course)
It goes downhill after Aaron Schwatz death , and doomed after investor comes in, they bring political agendas with their money.
The bigger problem is the amount of lazy comments on the site, which are invariably highly upvoted.
I'm so sick of pun threads, and office references and any other popular culture reference.
They've just about made me start to hate Monty Python, which is quite an accomplishment.
The latest is that everyone is beating Dune references absolutely to death.
If someone wants an AI project idea, then a browser extension which used an LLM to score all the comments in a Reddit thread and filter out all the lazy comments would be useful. If it works, most of the comments on front page articles should disappear.
It would probably eliminate most of the actual bot comments as well.
The Reddit app is so buggy and full of features that prevent you from leaving the app when clicking links. It’s so obnoxious. I miss my third party apps.
I tried to use the official Reddit app, but it's buggy as hell. Everytime I launch it I am shown the Reddit logo for ~30 seconds, then it asks me to login again. This is not an uncommon issue, and the advice I've seen to fix it is to enable it to run in the background.
That's what you get when a company spends years neglecting and sometimes actively working against the users and content that give unique value to the platform. The final straw being the API debacle of course. But even before, you could see people who really cared for various communities on reddit just give up and leave because it became too much of a struggle to deal with all the antics or apathy from the company itself.
To be clear, amidst this, reddit was still growing. So from an Excel sheet management perspective, nothing seems wrong. But most of that growth could be found in low effort content that honestly can be found on any social media platform. Where the sort of unique content that did set reddit apart slowly started to decrease in both quantity and quality over the years.
If you'd rather get a daily/weekly digest for the niche tech subs, you can use https://redditletter.com
disclaimer: i created it to scratch my own itch for the reason you list
Lemmy is pretty good but still needs to grow in terms of active communities for any topic the way Reddit is. Still a worthwhile project and probably the most likely dominant alternative to Reddit