I can't even be sad or disappointed by this news. The "logged only" access to old.reddit.com already led me to use the website way less than before. Considering how reddit's also way less interesting than it used to be in the past, I can only thank the team for making my decision to slowly quit it easier. Thank you guys.
I think Reddit has jumped the shark, but I'm biased. I used to use it, pretty much every day, but I stopped when they turned on "you must be logged in to use oldreddit". I typically was logged in, and I always used old.reddit.com, and you know, that's not the most terrible thing reddit has done, but for me it was the proverbial straw. When I set up my first website, you had to email CERN to be put on the list of all the websites in the world… The web has changed since then (for both better and worse IMHO) but those ideals of the past are still my ideals…
So I started thinking. What don't I like about reddit...
- I don't like the flat subreddit structure - I think it makes duplication (which is wasteful) more common, and (unintuitively) makes things harder to find.
- I really don't like the tracking, the algorithms, the ad-networks (more tracking), the constant coercion that "Reddit is better in the app" (it's not, it's just more tracked). This is actually my major complaint, I'm made to feel more like the product on reddit than just about anywhere on the net.
- I don't like the 'moderators are gods within their domain', it's easy to piss off a mod and get a ban, and no-one cares. I think there ought to be some right of appeal which goes beyond "message the same mods to appeal", it just doesn't sit right
- I don't like the expressiveness (or rather, the lack thereof) of reddit - I like the fact that it's all text, but there's a lot you can do with text that reddit ... just ... doesn't.
I added up what I don't like, and what I do like, and I thought "they blew it". They took something that was awesome and they enshittified it on the holy quest for money über alles. And then I thought "well, what if there was something like reddit, that didn't do that ?"
I looked. I didn't find it. I decided it'd be a fun project to make it.
So, in a month or so (I'm still knocking out bugs that I'd be embarrassed to launch with) I'm going to launch https://blewit.net/ - blewit because (a) I think they did, and (b) because it's a double pun "blue it" as well as "blew it".
I've tried to fix all the things above, and then some.
- I made it have no tracking, no adverts, no hidden algorithms, no dark patterns at all. You get to manipulate your own feed, up/downvotes matter, and no-one is tracking you or selling your data. In fact I only ask for a username and password, not even an email address - we have no data (lol). We set a single, transitory, session-id cookie to stop you from having to log in too often. That's it.
- I've made upvotes/downvotes (which are and have always been "I agree with you" or the opposite) and "this is a cool post" into separate axes, with the latter being the important signal. (https://blewit.net/post/83555697458937856),
- I've made moderation always public with a reason, and a right of appeal to someone-who-isn't-the-moderator-who-you-annoyed. (https://blewit.net/post/83987003737112576)
- I've extended the ```code``` fence to allow different types of code, and enabled group-specific supported plugins to the WASM client that mean you can render (and play) music, see (and interact with) chemical structure models in 3D, or animations, or 3D models or graphs, or maps (https://blewit.net/sandbox). I intend to keep on adding these as the platform grows. Since they're plugins, you don't pay an enormous download cost, apart from when you use them.
Whether it works, well we'll see. It has to bootstrap first, which is always the hard part. I'm planning on targeting communities and getting things working well, group by group, rather than a pedestrian, mediocre universal experience. Example: the circuit-creation/simulation plugin for science.electronics.* will pretty much do anything ngSPICE will do... Online, in a forum :)
Look for a launch, in 6 weeks or so...
Oh, and if you’re interested in a more HN style conversation, both the server back end and the client are written in a language I created - xc (https://compile-xc.org/compiler/language/) which can target x86_64 (win,lin) & arm64(Apple silicon) on a par with clang and WASM amongst others. I believe in “real code”, not just unit tests and fixtures to coerce correctness :)
I can't even be sad or disappointed by this news. The "logged only" access to old.reddit.com already led me to use the website way less than before. Considering how reddit's also way less interesting than it used to be in the past, I can only thank the team for making my decision to slowly quit it easier. Thank you guys.
[tldr: if you’re going to look at anything, go to https://blewit.net/sandbox and tap a button or two]
I think Reddit has jumped the shark, but I'm biased. I used to use it, pretty much every day, but I stopped when they turned on "you must be logged in to use oldreddit". I typically was logged in, and I always used old.reddit.com, and you know, that's not the most terrible thing reddit has done, but for me it was the proverbial straw. When I set up my first website, you had to email CERN to be put on the list of all the websites in the world… The web has changed since then (for both better and worse IMHO) but those ideals of the past are still my ideals…
So I started thinking. What don't I like about reddit...
- I don't like the flat subreddit structure - I think it makes duplication (which is wasteful) more common, and (unintuitively) makes things harder to find.
- I really don't like the tracking, the algorithms, the ad-networks (more tracking), the constant coercion that "Reddit is better in the app" (it's not, it's just more tracked). This is actually my major complaint, I'm made to feel more like the product on reddit than just about anywhere on the net.
- I don't like the 'moderators are gods within their domain', it's easy to piss off a mod and get a ban, and no-one cares. I think there ought to be some right of appeal which goes beyond "message the same mods to appeal", it just doesn't sit right
- I don't like the expressiveness (or rather, the lack thereof) of reddit - I like the fact that it's all text, but there's a lot you can do with text that reddit ... just ... doesn't.
I added up what I don't like, and what I do like, and I thought "they blew it". They took something that was awesome and they enshittified it on the holy quest for money über alles. And then I thought "well, what if there was something like reddit, that didn't do that ?"
I looked. I didn't find it. I decided it'd be a fun project to make it.
So, in a month or so (I'm still knocking out bugs that I'd be embarrassed to launch with) I'm going to launch https://blewit.net/ - blewit because (a) I think they did, and (b) because it's a double pun "blue it" as well as "blew it".
I've tried to fix all the things above, and then some.
- I made it have no tracking, no adverts, no hidden algorithms, no dark patterns at all. You get to manipulate your own feed, up/downvotes matter, and no-one is tracking you or selling your data. In fact I only ask for a username and password, not even an email address - we have no data (lol). We set a single, transitory, session-id cookie to stop you from having to log in too often. That's it.
- I've made upvotes/downvotes (which are and have always been "I agree with you" or the opposite) and "this is a cool post" into separate axes, with the latter being the important signal. (https://blewit.net/post/83555697458937856),
- I've made moderation always public with a reason, and a right of appeal to someone-who-isn't-the-moderator-who-you-annoyed. (https://blewit.net/post/83987003737112576)
- I've extended the ```code``` fence to allow different types of code, and enabled group-specific supported plugins to the WASM client that mean you can render (and play) music, see (and interact with) chemical structure models in 3D, or animations, or 3D models or graphs, or maps (https://blewit.net/sandbox). I intend to keep on adding these as the platform grows. Since they're plugins, you don't pay an enormous download cost, apart from when you use them.
Whether it works, well we'll see. It has to bootstrap first, which is always the hard part. I'm planning on targeting communities and getting things working well, group by group, rather than a pedestrian, mediocre universal experience. Example: the circuit-creation/simulation plugin for science.electronics.* will pretty much do anything ngSPICE will do... Online, in a forum :)
Look for a launch, in 6 weeks or so...
Oh, and if you’re interested in a more HN style conversation, both the server back end and the client are written in a language I created - xc (https://compile-xc.org/compiler/language/) which can target x86_64 (win,lin) & arm64(Apple silicon) on a par with clang and WASM amongst others. I believe in “real code”, not just unit tests and fixtures to coerce correctness :)