I think reddit was killed by a moderation that only allows the most norrowminded persons to have their echo-chamber.

Any moderation position that can be filled by an unemployed shut it will be filled by an unemployed shut in.

Yiu either have to pay your mods, like hn, or have your mods pay you, like the old BBS boards that reddit and stack overflow replaced.

Problems of the 2010s.

Today you can use an 8b model to flag all problematic posts. The only issue is that all the posts are also by 8b models.

That would've happened regardless. But the alternative --- zero moderation, 100% free speech --- is how you get flamewars and spam like Slashdot and tons of other forums before it suffered from.

Well, Reddit surely didn't help the issue with how it was all handled.

AI has certainly killed Reddit.

But where do people turn next? There were a lot of benefits to some of its niche communities.

Everything kind of fractured apart and now those niche communities are building up again elsewhere.

Discord has a lot (looking at my discord I see, gaming, programming, clothing/fashion/aesthetic, language, dnd, music, keyboard / hardware, dance, etc... communities).

I've noticed a lot of the major reddit communities have matching communities in the fediverse, specifically the ones with old reddit-like UIs. (lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, mander.xyz, etc...).

I've also noticed a lot of web-standards / browser developers and some gamedevs moved to twitter-style fediverse sites (e.g. mastodon.social, indieweb.social, infosec.exchange, hackyderm.io, floss.social, fosstodon.org, etc...).

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I think the fediverse is working well for the niche communities for three reasons:

- Having that little bit more initial friction to learning how the fediverse works has made it better since it keeps out the low quality spamming users.

- Niche communities can only grow organically within their own spaces (since forcing them makes them seem inauthentic).

- The big plus of the fediverse is being able to follow/interact with users/communities across the boundary of being on another website. So it doesn't matter if a niche community you want to follow springs up on another website, you can follow them and participate from the website you already use.

For example: the old reddit-like communities that I follow (listed above) appear in a single feed in my programming.dev account (since that's the first one I joined), and the old twitter-like communities I follow appear in a single feed in my mastodon.social account (since that's the first twitter-like one I joined).

Is there a resource for finding these fedverse?

I don't think an alternative exists. Reddit was very unique. The last great BBS (in a sense) that non-Internet natives "got".

Before astroturfing on Reddit at scale was possible, it was an extremely reliable place to get perspectives from real people about loads of things. It's still useful for this purpose, but the same level of trust isn't there.

Now that social networking a la short-form video is "it" right now, I'm not sure if something text-based will thrive again like Reddit did. (People have been trying to make Lemmy the thing, and it's less popular than Mastodon.)

>Before astroturfing on Reddit at scale was possible

It has become so difficult to tell what is karma farming and what is people not bothering to search before asking.

In a strange way, what already started happening to the "other side" of Reddit six or so years ago with the emergence of OnlyFans turning that into a place where people just want to sell you was a precursor to this.

That’s entropy for you.

Society is a Ship Theseus; each generation ripping off planks and nailing their own in place.

Having been online since the late 80s (am only mid 40s...grandpa worked at IBM, hooked me and my siblings up with the latest kit on the regular) I have read comments like this over and over as the 90s internet, 00s internet, now the 2010s state of the "information super highway" has been replaced.

Tbh things have felt quite stagnant and "stuck" the last 20 years. All the investment in and caretaking of web SaaS infrastructure and JS apps and jobs for code camp grads made it feel like tech had come to a standstill relative to the pace of software progress prior to the last 15-ish years.