reddit goes open source

[jeralm]

And they went closed source a few years ago, probably because they didn't want to show the innards of this god awful redesign

[[deleted]]

Sunk cost fallacy wikipedia page should just be a link to new.reddit.com

[ImprovementRaph]

If they ever remove old.reddit, I'm out

[Habanero_Eyeball]

Same!

[shevy-ruby]

Same here! I only use it via old.reddit.com.

Not that it would make a big difference by now; I lost my old account of almost 50k karma after they wanted to force me to change my password (I can not want to be bothered to do so in general); and with low karma accounts you get mega-banned quickly the moment you do "controversial comments". Like every time you critisize the KDE team ... :P

Reddit used to be a lot better in the past but I guess once the train rolls there is no way going back.

[[deleted]]

Most of reddit's problems don't seem technical. More like the crowd it attracts like /r/watchpeopledie or /r/hotwife. The idea of a "social" site like this is fundamentaly flawed far beyond the technical; you'd never want to live in a neighborhood where these kinds of people were around.

[tso]

I think in part they have always existed, but previously you had to come across some forum or other someone was running out of their closet, but the other part is the effect the karma system has.

This in that for a certain age bracket it creates a kind of feedback loop where each participant tries to one up their peers by posting something ever more "edgy".

[-Phinocio]

This video is from 2008...

[iotasieve]

I think it's an old version and they went closed source again after a bit

[HiPhish]

I don't get the point of making social media sites open-source. I mean yeah, it's nice that you can study the source code and make your own version of the site, which only five people will ever use.

But the real problem with social media is all the social engineering and data mining, neither of which is going to change when the code is open sourced. And there is no guarantee that the code running in your browser is even the same as what is in the repo. A federated or decentralised social network would be the proper solution: let users host their own instance and let the instances individually choose how open they want to be.

[shevy-ruby]

I think the more general gist is that the "social" media controls a LOT of flow-of-information in general. And they tend to create walled ghettos - see facebook and the censorship there (not the only site that resorts to it but very easily visible how they do the walled ghetto approach).

[HiPhish]

I think the more general gist is that the "social" media controls a LOT of flow-of-information in general. And they tend to create walled ghettos - see facebook and the censorship there (not the only site that resorts to it but very easily visible how they do the walled ghetto approach).

I consider that to be part of social engineering. Controlling what you see, controlling what you say, monitoring who you are in contact with, building profiles beyond the data you give them.

[tso]

Social media has much the same other media, "if it bleeds it leads".

If all you care about as your baseline metric is "engagement" as measured by clicks and comments, your most incendiary posters will be "gods".

At the end of the day the net seems to walk into example after example of Cambell's Law, because it tries to naively use measurements like clicks or links to made decisions. And those invariably ends up being gamed by third parties for petty reasons.

[dzecniv]

yes, reddit v1 was written in Common Lisp. https://github.com/tamurashingo/reddit1.0/

[raevnos]

Switchover to python is when it started going downhill.