I’m a Reddit refugee who was on that platform for 10+ years. I saw not just a tremendous amount of controversies, but attempts at introducing alternatives to Reddit during all of them. The 2015 blackout saw a ton of alternatives suggested, and if you go back and look at them many have either not survived or never achieved their stated goal of serving as a viable alternative to Reddit. Places like Voat, Ruqqus, or Parler promptly turned themselves into extremist shitholes and imploded. The truth is most internet communities which found and advertise themselves as an alternative to Reddit die.

However, I think this newest wave of searching for an alternative has more legs than I think I’ve ever seen, and the key to that is the kind of users who are moving. The people who were pissed off by the recent changes are the old guard of the internet. These are the people who still remember searching for and finding RIF, Apollo, or AlienBlue (before it was bought), and have the technical know-how to care about the quality and usability of their platform. I think you all are people who engage with their online spaces with intention, and because of that I believe that we have more of a shot at making this work than I’ve witnessed since I joined Reddit all those many years ago.

In order to make this all work out though, I think it’s really important to cast our thoughts toward what made the websites that have come before us successful. Every single one of these spaces have distinct ways of interaction that indirectly communicate their ideologies. Memes, in-jokes, and lingo form the backbone of online communities and help to direct users back to the source, but they never gain real purchase without a unique viewpoint. I’m pretty sure I can confidently suss out whether a meme comes from 4Chan, Reddit, or Tumblr, just through the message conveyed and the template used. For an online platform to have relevance and draw, I believe it absolutely needs to have an individual and communicable perspective.

Now I am aware that much of this is organically generated, but I think we underestimate how much of it isn’t. The structure of a website clearly communicates to users its core values, and users almost certainly respond to that. The fact that users are by default anonymous on the Chans absolutely contributes to the unique “flavor” of those websites, and the subreddit structure of Reddit allows it to contain a greater variety of clashing values. We can already see some of this on the Fediverse, the tension engendered by the federated instances I think places greater emphasis on building consensus. The fact that an entire server can be excised at will from a group of other like-minded server owners means that one has to always have an eye towards the common consensus, and I think we will see many fights over this in the not-so-distant future.

So as we go forward, and while we are in the most nascent part of this website’s lifespan, I think we should be discussing and commenting on what we think is most important about this space. I’m already seeing that people think that Kbin is “nicer than Reddit” and you’re more convinced that you’re interacting with real people. I think this is all good, and I think that while we’re making content, we need to have an eye on putting that particular spin on all the things we brought over from where we came from. Eventually, we need to get to the place where we’re creating unique meme formats, and having our own slang, but for right now we need to be thinking hard about what we want out of our online lives and how this website can be built to serve those purposes. I think the risk of not doing that, and forever being only a federated Reddit clone is going to leave people forever jonesing for the experiences they had on Reddit, and this space is going to die just like every other attempted alternative has before.

TLDR: Now that we’ve all left Reddit, for this new place to live my opinion is that we need to have more discussions about what our principles are, and we need to make unique content that brings people to this website.

  • Kotking@mastodon.social
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    1 year ago

    @bttoddx I never considered myself old guard, but I do have badge for 11 years on reddit. I was mostly a lurker that never interacted with sub unless I was really into topic or OP message was interesting to discuss (mostly anime, games). The only big thing I witnessed was r/animememes collapse. It was stupid collapse over a word, where they didn’t want to judge and ban word Trap. It gone so obnoxious they banned for usage of the word which is de facto isn’t a slur. 1/

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      1 year ago

      @bttoddx What reddit did this time in comparison to 11 years of me using it? Their blatant disregard for communication. I saw bad signs where porn will be unavailable, but I can find elsewhere( with ads compared to reddit on Relay/your app). The first murmurs when Apollo express him dumbfounded by idea Reddit can be so dumb what made me uncomfortable. I didn’t discuss this on reddit, but some people picked up on it, which led to blackout. When blackout started I stopped my reddit activity. /2

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        1 year ago

        @bttoddx I heard about Mastodon from reddit once in last month, so this was my first new account. I hopped to kbin after sticking to latest sub community I was attached. I have grand plans even if futile to breathe new ideas in community and help those who don’t want to use reddit because people are still there, people are leaving and they don’t know which place will make them cozy as when they used reddit with their own app of choice. Reddit decision is outright slaughter of peoples work… /3

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          1 year ago

          @bttoddx … Not only for information gathered, but also for those silly bots, moderation bots, reminder bots and many other type of software that aren’t built-in in reddit, they are hosted by someone somewhere and trying fediverse you start to understand that. What reddit claims is that bots and apps are taking their value, but apps and bots has their own costs of hosting/advertisement etc. Reddit is a place and we know what happens to places when people start ignoring it. Abandonment. /4

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            1 year ago

            @bttoddx I never truly used Twitter, but reddit was my source on it and 🍈 did a number on it. Reddit will go slowly as Twitter is going slowly, because people that invested in them are still feeling cozy there. Myself? I was cozy with Relay so most my traffic was from my phone, you can guess why I switched. Now I am interested in fediverse, trying to make community across services and servers. So if someone comes from reddit in search of information for game I am interested, they will find it /5

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              1 year ago

              @bttoddx You might notice that I have written out as if I was on word count, which is precisely that. I am trying to stick to Mastodon while searching with my Kbin account on threadiverse. I even explored hubzilla and funkywhale to see how they work and interact. I enjoy that fact that I can make contact with people and not be gated by my lack of language, be forced to make new account, depending on hey he is from x platform as me we can get along type of deal 4chans, redditors etc. /6