The notion of “summer reddit” went hand in hand with notion of “mom’s basement” and even “touch grass” in a way.

Namely, all are dated ideas from millennials that are still thinking the person on the other end of the comment is sitting in front of a computer, as the default. It ignores the simple fact we all have the internet in our pockets and can be chronically online AND actually out in the world doing things at the same time.

Why does removing them from the site also mean cutting their user count from Active Users though?

Not only does it still exist, newgrounds is unique in that it is a long-running website from the early days that is still being run by the same person (never bought out or sold), still has no ads (despite funding issues), still has the same basic focus, still hosting the same content, and is still more or less exactly the same despite some UI changes.

Granted part of that is there hasn’t been any real pressure on it, but still.

Genuinely, it is the kind of thing that I would want to put behind glass, because it is an abnormality in this wasteland we call the internet. It’s this beautiful little corner that has been allowed to remain as it is, unmolested by the terrible bullshit around it.

I’d take that bet.

I would love to believe the situation is as you believe it is, but I just don’t see it.

As others have said, the usage on old reddit appears to be exceedingly low, around 1-2% if developers are seeing it accurately.

We know that the vast majority of all usage nowadays is mobile, or at least hybrid. And at least half of those mobile users are on iphones, where they have no choice. The only thing that keeps old.reddit working on my phone is Firefox extensions.

The unfortunate truth is the reason reddit and so many other platforms get away with rampant enshitification is that the overwhelming majority of users are either incapable or unwilling to find ways around it if it requires a modicum of effort or results in a slightly less polished experience. They just accept it and become increasingly angry and frustrated with the platform, but refusing to do anything else except continue to use it.

Developers see these numbers and they plan for it. They getting extremely condescending about it, too. Why listen to the “vocal minority” of technically inclined power users when you can pay attention to the majority of silent people who accept literally anything because they have to.

Gone are the days where the majority of your users are going to be tech savvy. When your user base was made up of informed, technical users on desktops, what you did with your software or your site would directly affect your numbers. Those users knew how and were willing to try other things if you fucked around.

Nowadays, with phones in everyone’s pocket, your user base is everyone, and unfortunately for all of us, that everyone includes the majority of people who will drink a shit sundae over and over again before they will even consider going to different restaurant.

It’s not actually a captive customer base, but it effectively is. They’re just held captive by their own tech illiteracy and lack of patience. What those people do determines the future of the industry now.

It’s mostly that it’s just an older site and the voting/review system goes back by over a decade. Much of the information you’re gonna get on there is just dated, pure and simple, and that reflects in the rankings.

And as you said, the categories aren’t curated well enough. Too many unrelated suggestions.

Only issue with alternativeto is the comments and reviews are all dated, some by over 10 years, and often don’t reflect the current state of the software.

A lot of the information on the site just feels very stale in general.

Downvotes are part of the whole curation aspect of the site, and it’s a valid part of the democratic system. For all the whining about being “censored” because you got downvoted, there’s countless cases where downvotes influence the sorting algorithm positively.

Garbage shouldn’t sit on the same level as fluff comments no one bothered to vote on.

I’d 100% donate to them if they accepted donations.

If they accepted donations, you wouldn’t want to.

The reason uBlock Origins surpasses all the others is because of who the lead dev is, what they believe, and why they do it. They are absolute hardline and believe in what they made. It’s not a job.

You don’t need to be that kind of person to be a good developer, but when it comes to something like an adblocker and privacy protection, you want people like him who won’t falter or sell out. You want those true believers.

If he accepted donations, then he wouldn’t be the kind of person that made uBlock Origins what it is.

You’re lying, because uBlock Origins refuses donations. They are adamant about the purity of the project.

This is more or less how it worked on Reddit. The admins handled vote spam or abuse, there was absolutely no expectation for moderators to have that information because the admins were dealing with the abuse cases. Moderators only concerned themselves with content and comments, the voting was the heart of how the whole thing works, and therefore only admins could see and affect them. Least privilege, basically.

I think a side effect of this, though, is that it increases the responsibility on admins to only federate with instances that have active and cooperative admins. It increases their responsibilities and demands active monitoring, which isn’t a bad thing, but I worry about how the instances that federates openly by default will continue to operate.

If you have to trust the admins, how do you handle new admins, or increasingly absent ones? What if their standards for what constitutes “harassment” don’t match yours? Does the whole instances get defederated? What if it’s a large instance, where communities will be cut off?

I don’t ask any of this as a way to put down this effort because I very, very much want to see this change, but there’s gonna be hurtles that have to be overcome

Ultimately I think the best solution would need assistance from the devs but I’m lieu of that, we have to make due.

Admins only. Letting mods see it just invites them to share it on a discord channel or some shit. The point is the number of people that can actually see the votes needs to be very small and trusted, and preferably tied to a internal standard for when those things need acted upon.

The inherent issue is public votes allow countless methods of interpreting that information, which can be acted on with impunity by bad actors of all kinds, from outside and within. Either by harassment or undue bans. It’s especially bad for the instances that fuck with vote counts. Both are problems.

Sure, but by the same token, mods are just as capable of manipulation and targeted harassment when they can curate the voting and react based on votes.

On reddit, votes are only visible to the admins, and the admins would take care of this type of thing when they saw it (or it tripped some kind of automated something or other). But they still had the foresight not to let moderators or users see those votes.

Complete anonymity across the board won’t work but they’re definitely needs to be something better than it is now.