On modern social media, even if you had a group full of smart and reasonable people, the platform itself is injecting crap that may well drive out many of them.
I rececently returned to Reddit since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies. I looked at the new-Reddit interface and shuddered: ads are being shown among comments, and many comments are hidden by defaul because apparently discussion and community brings insufficient engagement for a modern ad-based internet business. Even if I and a tiny, tiny percentage of people are still using the old-Reddit interface, obviously the overall culture there is going to be molded by the default one.
My favorite Reddit UX scam is that you tap on comments to collapse them along with their children, UNLESS they’re an ad that masks itself exactly like a comment in which case you tap it with the intent of collapsing it, but instead you inadvertently increase RDDT shareholder value (at the expense of the time you waste closing the webview)!
I'm saying you don't even need a substitute. Genuinely looking back, I was more anxious when I would browse reddit in my free time.
I promise, disengage from social media (and the doom news cycle for that matter) and you'll be happier, or at least you'll worry about stuff you can control instead of stuff you can't.
"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else.
The USA democrats and "left" have been overton window'ed so hard that a actual democratic socialist, Mamdani, is compared to being a communist. https://nypost.com/cover/november-5-2025/
There's also hundreds of Lemmy federated servers. I'm sure some are actual communist. But there's plenty for all walks of life. And it's like Mastodon in that regard.
And honestly, if "killing SNAP and other public benefits for poor people" is capitalist, I want nothing to do with that. That is completely ethically bankrupt. Doubly so being one of the richest countries in the world. Absolutely 0 people should be starving. And I'd also say that 0 people should be involuntarily homeless. (some may want to, and choose to be vagabonds and travel. they should have that right! but they should also be able to choose to have a home.)
>"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else.
This is a 2000s era meme that was started to try and get people to see reason and vote against Bush, but it is not true and has not been for coming up on a decade. The Democratic Party is to the left of many European left parties, especially on issues like immigration and freedom of identity, and its politicians (especially the young ones) regularly pitch welfare state expansions that are more generous than European counterparts (see Kat Abu on 'medicare for anyone physically present in the US, for free'; a more generous offer than even the NHS).
Is that the democratic party or a fringe left that is trying to accomplish something as part of the party ? what policies did the democrats actually implement across the years? Bernie is considered by the democratic party leadership to be a radical(hes not) and would prop up anyone but him
>What policies did the Democrats actually implement over the years?
Roughly in order: Don't Ask/Don't Tell repeal. Dodd-Frank. Lily Ledbetter (extends the statute of limitations on equal pay suits). Making it clear that sexual orientation and gender identity are equal to race in hate crime law. Banning lifetime coverage caps so your insurer cannot simply decide your life is not worth living and banning the practice of excluding pre-existing conditions from healthcare coverage so that you are not enslaved to whatever employer you happened to be working for when you got the worst news of your life. Establishing the CFPB to end unfair credit practices like medical debt reporting. Capping the cost of insulin at $35 per month for Medicare. Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. ACA subsidy expansion. People our normie centrist presidents put on the bench decided Obergefell. People our normie centrist presidents put on the bench are protecting human expression.
You have to engage in motivated reasoning not to recognize these things as making life better. If you want to make life even better, consider voting for Democrats. When you don't vote for them, they become the minority party. When they are the minority party, no amount of impotent screaming or saying please can turn 49 votes into 61 votes, nor can it force Republicans to help them help you.
Bernie is a loudmouth with almost no legislative accomplishments that spent his life building his own brand and ratfucking the party. Of course the party leadership doesn't like him. When you get a rock in your shoe, do you like the rock?
Actual leaders are in the trenches right now embarrassing the GOP with this shutdown to force them to make COVID-era healthcare subsidies permanent. What's Bernie doing except derailing news events to complain that party leadership isn't supporting his faction in comparatively irrelevant local races?
Ah yes, so one candidate for the Democratic primary (she isn’t even a Dem primary winner yet) for one of 434 Congressional seats may have a position that on the edge might be slightly more “left wing” on one issue in one of the more right wing Western European nations, is clearly evidence that the U.S. is no longer far to Europe’s right…
To be fair, setting aside my snark, I don’t disagree with you. The real problem here is simply the fact that the single axis left-right political framework is insufficient to capture even the simplest democracy in the world right now.
And the US has made huge leaps to the left on some axes, but is still far to the right of the European center on many other axes.
The OP says tankies. Those kinds of extreme left are extreme even by non-USA standards. A European-style democratic socialist like Mamdani would be, one hopes, to the right of them. Tankies were largely forced out of European mainstream parties after the shocks of 1937, 1956 and 1968.
Lemmy is occupied by tankies and Marxist leninists and that’s not my type of lefties. They also espouse violence which I don’t like.
For example the main federated server is called lemmy.ml ml standing for Marxist leninists. They are also the developer server hence all federated servers have to federate with them.
I built my private version of Infinity for Android. The steps were 90% automated. They were in a Reddit thread like this one (I just pasted the first thing I found now), although I don't know if the build process still works. https://www.reddit.com/r/Infinity_For_Reddit/comments/1izm7c... -- you have to side-load the app, which is a little tricky because you have to load it onto your phone. I think put it on a private Google Drive.
Maybe similar solutions exist for iOS, but maybe the side-loading is not as easy?
Anyway, on Windows/Chrome I use uBlock Origin and never see any ads in Reddit online. There was a lot of drama about reddit selling out in 2023 (I was sad to see Infinity die), but there are tech solutions to avoid its enshittification.
Not to mention that, at least on the iOS app, the button to close an ad is in a totally different place than the rest of the UI screens, which is always in the top-left of the screen. A small “X” is placed in the middle-left of the ad image, to make you spend an extra second finding it, which I would assume they are happy to report as a user engagement metric to their advertisers.
I don't, the utility of reddit has declined over time for me but there are still a handful of reddits that I enjoy but them killing old.reddit.com is absolutely what will push me off the platform entirely.
Though at this point I spend (or waste depending on PoV) much less time on reddit than I used to.
weep? I'd finally be free. I wish this site would disappear too. Whoever designed these algorithms got me good, at a young age, and I don't think these sites have been a net positive overall or on me personally
We are already free. If we keep returning to a few subreddits, it's because we can't find an equivalent community elsewhere. If they kill the old interface, we'll eventually use the new one if there are no other alternatives, no need to lie to ourselves.
Iam nearly 15 years on reddit now and I would miss it if i cant use old. or a good client. Iam sure sooner or later it will happen and ill most probably leave.
Reddits quality went downhill over the years but there is more or less no successor/competitor. It will be over and buried forever. Eternal september gets them all.
Side note: be free if you want to and dont make it dependent on decisions others do for you.
I don't know how anyone can use the official reddit mobile app for more than 5 minutes. Between the ads and terrible interface it's an awful experience. But I also hate facebook so I'm clearly not the target audience for this stuff.
RedReader is a much better interface but lately has been having issues for me so I just haven't been using reddit. If and when they kill that client I'll be done with the platform.
I first joined reddit in 2010 because it was the best place to see other people's minecraft creations. I no longer have an account but by far the most commonly suggested videos for me when I view the front page without an account are
1. Car crashes
2. Street/bum fights
3. Conspiracy theory content (UFOs, Anti-vax, chemtrails)
4. Anti-semitic videos (one such video was titled "Kanye was right about everything")
5. Anti-muslim videos (weirdly I get a lot of Indian majority subreddits that post a lot of hate videos about Pakistan/Muslims)
Every single one of these categories produces feelings of outrage. Reddit has just become a fucking hate machine. Not just hate toward other races, but hate toward the entire human race. Every video shows someone doing some anti-social shit, like people driving like total assholes, or running people over, or getting hit by a train after cutting off traffic, or beating each other senseless in public. In the 1990s there was a huge outcry over violence in media because of Mortal Kombat, Doom, and The Matrix, but here we are today watching actual people die on dashcams regularly. This has to be just bad for us on a really primal level
When I visit Youtube in a privat tab from my German IP all I get is "be afraid of the other" alt right "vote for AFD", "chemtrails are here to get you" kind of videos. Not a singel "cute cat" or "interesting science fact" in sight. :-(
It's almost as if they like the population to be afraid.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but with ad blockers I never see ads on Reddit. I honestly don't think I've ever seen an ad on Reddit at all, with a tiny exception for ads for other Reddit offerings, which is very recent for me.
Not saying they're not on there, but the ad blockers must be doing a pretty good job on that site.
My theory is that Reddit as a community-builder died when their moderator crisis started, prompted by the API pricing issue. I swear I haven't seen a funny, Redditesque thread since then. No copypastas, none of the old memes. It's all slop, meaningless comments, and generic content these days. Endless reposts. I don't know what happened to Reddit…
I rececently returned to Reddit since there are no other remaining discussion venues for one of my hobbies. I looked at the new-Reddit interface and shuddered: ads are being shown among comments, and many comments are hidden by defaul because apparently discussion and community brings insufficient engagement for a modern ad-based internet business. Even if I and a tiny, tiny percentage of people are still using the old-Reddit interface, obviously the overall culture there is going to be molded by the default one.