1y ago

Reddit had a front page that we all shared

It wasn't always great, but it was something we could check into when we weren't in our niche subs.

IMO, like it or hate it, to get people to migrate we need to do a better job of recreating that general feed first.

When something is culturally relevant, it should surface there for discussion in an obvious main thread that's risen to the top where we all gather. Right now there is took much work and choice involved in the first experience. Redundant posts cannibalizing comments and ultimately not facilitating the big discussion that Reddit could be.

Many other priorities to be sure, but Devs should work to make their default app experiences dump new users into a default view of the best version of this feed. Communities should also share and sticky same guidance on how to set up that best user experience (maybe per app), it should be unavoidable information (to start at least).

I know growth isn't the main focus here (or an actual focus at all maybe), and it shouldn't be, but if this is to satisfy the urge to connect on a better scale that Reddit satisfied, it needs to be impossibly simple to "walk into the room" see everyone talking about the titanic submarine in this one dedicated corner, and comment blindly that you think they should be called "hoagies" and not "subs".

What do you think?

15 comments

Hi there! This would probably be a better fit for the Chat community. I know there's a question at the end of this submission, but I feel it's more of a discussion prompt, if that makes sense. There's been a good amount of good discussion on this post, so I'll leave this be.

I had blocked so many subs, including most default subs, that my front page would not resemble someone else's. The raw front page of reddit was complete trash for a variety of reasons.
- Yeah I think this sentiment really depends on what era of Reddit we're talking about. Even as early as 2011 or so you had people making accounts specifically to avoid the euphoric fedora enthusiasts of /r/atheism on the front page!
  
  do the narwhals Bacon at midnight? my dead dog's vet's cancer survivor grandmother took this photo just before her husband died of heartbreak isn't it beautiful? oh look it's fat shaming and creepshots
  shudder reddit was not great for a long time.
- Same here. I also had a lot of multireddits that I curated to basically be home pages for interests/topics. I spent most of my time browsing those, and rarely went to r/all.

A shitty front page that perpetually showed me content that was two days old.
- You’re talking about Lemmy, right? Sorting by anything but new gives you the same posts for days on end.

I'm probably the odd one out, but I really liked browsing r/all to get an idea of which topics were causing a stir in communities I don't personally frequent. I'd love to see enough growth to allow that to happen here.
- Yeah, I had managed most of the decline of Reddit by using RES to shift my browsing into two phases:
  My personal front page, with all of my subscriptions (whitelist)
  /r/all, through a subreddit and user blocklist (blacklist)
  I was also very aggressive about blocking people with high karma, so the overall effect was that I was following my interests with the whitelist, but avoiding the echo chamber with the blacklist. Also hoping for enough traffic for something similar long term.

Mastodon's "Explore" section does a good job of aggregating the "Trending" [whatever that means without a real algorithm] posts from all servers that federate your instance, so the kind of front page experience you're describing is definitely within the realm of possibility. Someone would just have to build it.

I feel like this is already filled by "Local" view. It's how I use Beehaw, as my "front page" filled with random nonsense and news, and then I have another instance account that I use for my niche interests

I disagree on a number of levels.
For one this is untrue of reddit. Sure if all you did was browse the front page logged out or /r/all this was kind of true, but a lot of people subscribed to some subs unsubscribed to other subs so my front page might look nothing like yours. Likewise reddit had an algorithm that weighed which of your subscribed subreddits got the most front page real estate which would also change up your front page a bit.
There is a fear that fragmentation would be the death of lemmy/kbin when in fact fragmentation was present on reddit. /r/gaming was default but there were so many other game subreddits from /r/truegaming patientgamers games pcgaming various console subs retrogaming and I could go on. In fact the ability to find a smaller sub with better discussion and a different vibe is one of the reasons why reddit alternatives took so long to take off. If /r/shaving isnt cutting it then I can create my own new subreddit /r/wickededge to better service my needs.
Reddit was full of reposts, redundant subreddits, repeated news, and different cultures. Reddit did use to be a bit more unified in experience back in like 2010 but we've come a long way since then. I think killing off /r/reddit was the beginning of the end of the more unified reddit.
But that said I can click all and sort by hot and I suspect that a lot of the larger instances with similar philosophies are going to find similar content in a similar order because of how everything is networked. So we will still have a fairly unified all.
Finally I dont think that lemmy should try to follow the footsteps of reddit. I think that a series of smaller but lively communities is healthier for discussion and enjoyment than a huge mega one. Reddit's front pages got TOO big and the quality of discussion suffered while thousands of people would rush into the comments of a threat to make the same exact joke first(even if the thread was several hours old). It's why I unsubbed from a lot of the defaults. If you didnt get to a thread a minute after it posted then you may as well be writing your comment out and throwing it into the trash. If you do get there in time, enjoy unrelated comments trying to be noticed by replying to you along with 100 people saying the same reply without actually wanting to talk.
At its core this style of site is a universal comment section for links and a message board. I think we're already on track to become big enough for threads to not be ghost towns, while being small enough that you can actually get a word in edgewise and the good comment not be buried by a low effort bad joke.
- Well said. In my 12 years on Reddit (yikes lol), I probably browsed /all or /popular less than 12 times. Power to those that enjoyed them, but the highest-populated subreddits were never the reason I enjoyed the site. If I found myself on /all it’s because there was something in my life I was desperately procrastinating doing.
  
  It would always be fun when a subreddit you were on had a thread that made /r/all and the thread would flush down the toilet.

15 comments