hello again. i wrote about forums and what makes a good one and spent a little bit of time dunking on reddit. and hopefully you like it okay bye

i don't know if there are a lot of folks who still consider reddit to be much of a forum (maybe barring some of the niche subreddits or something) and its more or less melded with every other social media type site. while i do appreciate sites like forums building up communities with recognizable/persistent 'casts of characters' - i don't think that's something that usually affects the experience of someone who is just reading/scrolling through - which is probably most of reddits users. that kind of thing becomes a lot more of a benefit when you are the one posting, since you have at least some idea of who's going to see/engage with your posts. several years ago i tried getting into some of the indie game dev reddits and it was pretty unappealing. you basically have to anticipate that literally nobody has any context for what you are doing or who you are, and half of them probably hadn't touched an indie game before either... it really limits the type of discussion you can even try to bring up

yeah i don't disagree that reddit has a purpose, but i've been posting elsewhere for a long time and i think the thing that keeps me coming back to the forums is the quality of discussion. i think having a cast of characters sometimes leads to people trying to be the main character of a thread and have a gimmick that everyone recognizes, but i think for the most part recurring people just want to genuinely participate in similar threads and it's cool to actually feel like you're having a conversation vs. just shouting into a void

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The saving grace of Reddit is that it is still compartmentalized to some degree. r/Programming is just programming if you will, but within it the quality can vary wildly! More they are pushing for the endless feed just like every other social media.

The day they end old.reddit.com and v1 API access is the day that Reddit dies from a philosophical stand point. That day is coming soon especially with a looming IPO.

it's really kinda crazy that reddit 2.0 was a step down performance-wise. especially when we're at the point where creating fully client-side-rendered apps is starting to become less and less popular now that SSR frameworks are getting really good.

Absolutely, I feel it particularly hard as my daily runner is a Core 2 Duo laptop from 2009. When running on slower machines it becomes apparent just how bloated a lot of modern web has become.

Same here, haha

welcome!

Not to be a negative nancy: I'd say that the only benefit to Reddit is its sheer size. You're bound to find something useful there eventually (usually out of a search engine query) because of it. But, the quality of the site overall is extremely lackluster and the "community" is not good. I can feel my brain rotting whenever I have to be on the site for more than 10 minutes. I can accept that some subreddits aren't this bad, but the majority are. Very few of the comments are ever insightful or useful. It's more of a cesspool than 4chan because it's more of a hivemind.

In my mind, the main difference between Reddit and forums is that comments on Reddit can be up/downvoted. People don't have to think and then write up a response, but rather just click a button. On a more proper forum like this there is no point system or reaction system. You have something to say? Then think it out and  a r t i c u l a t e  it in a response. At least on 4chan controversial replies don't get blasted into oblivion by hiveminded downvoters. In fact, those posts often get the most traction of anything since each post is held to the same "standard" or other. It's even better on here because you can't easily see all of the quotes of or replies to a given post, forcing you to actually engage with what's already been posted.

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