Sure, but what does that even mean? I cannot trust them to load the topics from /r/ruby or /r/haskell correctly because of nefarious purposes? Perhaps they have replaced all the posts with Python propaganda in the hope I wouldn't notice?
> The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.
It's only a matter of time before reddit too becomes too inauthentic to trust. Not only is it directly funded by advertising, its audience is mainstream enough for advertisers to invest time and money posting fake opinions in order to make it look like it's coming from real people.
I seriously hope I never see comments or news about people appending hacker news to searches. I don't want advertisers to kill this site when they catch wind of it.
> r/programming back when that was one of the top subreddits.
It was also a default one, IIRC, and when I joined had far more activity than /r/funny. Pretty sure a lot of people were very upset when it stopped being a default.
I was teaching myself to code when I first encountered Reddit, and I followed the language hype on proggit as if it were gospel - I learned Common Lisp because proggit was giddy that Reddit was written in it at the time, and I subsequently learned about macros, and functional programming, and that Erik Naggum wants you to get off his damn lawn and stop asking dumb questions in comp.lang.lisp, then it was the Ruby hype, then Erlang, then Haskell etc.
All very interesting stuff to delve into, but yeah, I thought I'd never get a job programming if I was struggling with Haskell's type system, look at all the regular workaday coders on Reddit who're loving it! (I know, I know.)
That said, I really benefited from the Erlang hype period, the ideas in Erlang/OTP were very interesting indeed, even if I didn't quite understand what a finite state machine was, and what it was useful for, when trying to grok gen_fsm. But the actor model, the deliberate choice to treat failure as normal and build accordingly, that stuck with me all these years. Hell, I even ended up printing off Joe Armstrong's thesis to read on the bus to work.
Reddit was a great replacement for forums, especially for technical topics, IMO. But their "reopen the sub or else landed gentry" approach directly hurts tech communities, because the mods of a technical sub are often domain experts in the technology it's focused on, and a lot will disengage and move on.
At least, I know two of my fellow mods in a small technical sub have disengaged dramatically because of Reddit's approach, and they will be a massive loss to the sub.
But then, small tech subreddits aren't exactly a massive money-making market niche, so yeah. It is sad though.
I'm afraid I don't want to dox myself so I can't post publicly stuff from my employer. And I don't really have time to do what ask and write it up in my free time.
I doubt something the size of reddit would run properly on Python, but I think both mine and the commenter I replied to had the point that most sites on the internet WOULD run fine without all the bloatware and overengineering complexity. Very very few sites have the traffic that reddit does. Most websites belong to the long tail, and for those almost any tech stack would work - so why choose a needlessly complex one?
> use old.reddit or third party apps are the power users
Are they?
> they all say they transitioned to a third party app
Have they? Who asked?
Im inclined to believe a lot of these things. I used to work for a large network of forums in the late 00s. We had a lot of traffic but didnt require 2000 employees (literally only 5 dev to manage 250mil monthly pageviews). In all reality we might been reddit if we got lucky, but we didnt. Oh well. So, I tend to side with the users, but I do understand the behaviors in play. Im not trying to be argumentative just to blindly support reddit, but so many people are just throwing out stats as if they are correct with zero proof. Its almost impossible to have an honest conversation when the facts are being made up on the spot. This whole situation has become so emotional.
> An API may be technically public, but not for the hoi polloi. I would expect Reddit would bar API access for moderator lists that it has officially hidden.
So what? If you are going to claim something as true you can't just say 'but the data was too hard to access so I claimed it anyway'.
I call bullshit on the parent's claim and no one has said anything to prove otherwise.
> (Commenting from a throwaway account because they are going to lynch me otherwise.)
No, you're just using a throwaway account because you know it's going to eventually get banned, just like it has already mostly happened in the recent flurry of similar posts that you and your unsophisticated friends have made.
Unfortunately for you we play more than enough Secret Hitler to know when it's time to yeet somebody out of the server right away. Can't wait to meet your new alt, maybe next time you will be able to post more than one message before I ban you :^)
> They have a whole Discord server where they upvote and promote posts about Zig.
We have more than one Zig Discord server where people share links, most of which do get posted on HN. If you think that would be enough to game HN, you really have no idea about anything you're talking about.
> (The program won't even compile if you try to write 'hello world' with non-ASCII characters.)
Zig is not yet v1.0 and we do recommend caution to anybody that wants to invest in Zig, as they will have to deal with all the breakages that are expected in a healthy pre-1.0 language.
>I looked at analytics of a site that had a post trending on Hacker News and Reddit with more than a thousand upvotes and more than a thousand comments.
Reddit is a very diverse site and not a tech savvy site overall. This just means the subset of users who liked this, likely very technical link, blocked GA. To use that to claim 58% of all reddit users block GA is very disingenuous imho.
>Otherwise, Reddit is great for technical stuff and niche community communication.
I used to believe this but its becoming clear to me that for just about every subbreddit for my different niche interests, a common theme emerges of a dogma endorsed by the community. This might be a concept, an idea, a tool, something sold, something not sold, but whatever it is, the community latches on it hard and doesn't let go. If you offer different experiences to the contrary of the dogma of the day people either ignore you at best or downvote and get combative.
>I've mentioned it before, but Reddit is so incredibly, unbelievably user-hostile nowadays that I don't understand why people use it. I understand that it provides some with a sense of community, but they've shown time and time again that they don't care what you think, they only care about what they can extract from you.
I didn't notice that, what do you mean? any examples?
Also this is untrue
>They no longer let people view nsfw boards without logging in
Sure, but what does that even mean? I cannot trust them to load the topics from /r/ruby or /r/haskell correctly because of nefarious purposes? Perhaps they have replaced all the posts with Python propaganda in the hope I wouldn't notice?
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