Is there a good alternative to Reddit? I've been a pretty heavy user for almost a decade but they have been disappointing these past couple of years. I hate how their "principles" aren't consistent. They ban certain subreddit for certain violation while keeping others that fit the same exact category. They never provide an answer to the commuity either. Where do I go to now?! HN is my only safe haven left...
I'm still on half a dozen different forums. A few general chat ones, and a few specific to hobbies/interests.
If anything, the quality of them has gone up since most of the "I just want lulz" people went to reddit. The software is better than ever too, with Discourse and XenForo adding modern web features.
There's also a few "new reddits" like Tildes which are quite good.
No single one of the above replaces reddit as a whole, but combined I find it much more enjoyable than reddit these days.
Because they are a million times easier to browse when all on one site and there (usually) aren’t any worries about cross-promoting different subreddits. It also makes it a lot easier for knowledgeable people to poke their heads into a random thread and offer an opinion compared to going to another site.
Unfortunately, all of that was a lot better 10 years ago.
> It also makes it a lot easier for knowledgeable people to poke their heads into a random thread
That rarely happens in practice. Knowledgeable people's comments have to be made at the right time in a post's popularity window (< 24h) for it to have been upvoted early enough for other users to see. If you come across a thread that's even a couple of days old, on a popular sub, you won't bother commenting because you know no one will see it. Unlike a message board, new replies to an existing topic do not take it to the top of the thread list page.
It is usually the opposite situation that is true. A certain post hits the Reddit front page (usually a meme or political post), and all of a sudden the community is overwhelmed with new subscribers, who are either trolling/brigading because they don't like the content, or simply bringing down the quality of the conversation by posting more memes etc., because that's what they think the sub is about.
However, people who would create a forum for a topic were often more dedicated. Same for those that seek out such a forum. You also got a lot of different quality of content from dedicated forums. At least for technical ones from my experience.
That's how it should be. Too many people start posting on forums without any respect for the norms of the place. That worsens the experience for everyone.
Those whose criteria include "their commitment to free speech" usually have an ax to grind about something, which would explains if they've been banned from other places before.
> That's how it should be. Too many people start posting on forums without any respect for the norms of the place. That worsens the experience for everyone.
Not really in Metafilter's case. It's norms changed under the feet of a significant fraction of its long time community members. I also wasn't talking so much about norms than a rather narrow range of orthodox opinion.
To put it in HN terms: think of it as a forum where it's orthodox to love Ayn Rand, think in Objectivist terms, and a transgression to voice anything but the most indirect critical perspective of her or her ideas. You might not realize it because there are tons of great threads about other things, but God help you if you venture the opinion that the government should increase mandatory taxes to fund assistance programs for the poor.
