Another way is to use the checkbox-and-CSS trick. You add a hidden checkbox next to the element you want to hide, add a label to trigger the checkbox, and then use a + selector to toggle the visibility based on the state of the checkbox. Like this:
IIRC that will mess up screenreaders though. The detail tag is specifically made for this sort of thing and is therefore almost certainly more accessible.
It be more correct to say what grishka said above: "that will mess up screenreaders though"
But if it's more accessible depends on the target user. If you're target are IE users or users with very old browser versions, for one reason or another, more accessible would be to use the CSS toggle trick. But if indeed your target user are users using screenreaders and using recent browsers, then details and summary elements would be more accessible.
A bit anal, but important to consider when talking about accessibility, it's very context sensitive.
Accessibility is specifically about making things accessible to those with disabilities. Unless you are making a joke about the intelligence IE users or those using old browsers, accessibility isn't about maximizing potential reach.
Accessibility is often thought of as just making things accessible to people with disabilities, but it's not just that. Accessibility is mainly about maximizing the reach, not just for people with disabilities but people in any situation.
For example, people who live in South America usually have a lot worse internet connection, and more likely to be on mobile networks, than people in the west. If you're audience is mainly in South America, working on making your application accessible, means making sure your application has low bandwidth usage, can deal with high latency and jitter, and works well for phones.
One only has to look at the definition of the word "Accessibility" to see why you're wrong: "accessibility - the quality of being able to be reached or entered - the quality of being easy to obtain or use - the quality of being easily understood or appreciated".
Not sure where the focus on people with disabilities came from, it's important, but accessibility is much bigger than just that.
> Not sure where the focus on people with disabilities came from
You are right, accessibility _can_ take into account degraded environments, but if you don't know why disabilities are focused on, that suggests to me you are philosophizing on the word, and not addressing actual technical standards that have been put in place. Just google it
"Just Google it" doesn't scream curious conversation exactly.
Your argument was "Accessibility is specifically about making things accessible to those with disabilities" which by no definition of the word, is true. Look it up.
Not sure why I'd have to read the various specifications again when I've already done that. I'm still of the same impression (like most others) that accessibility is much bigger than just making things work for those with disabilities.
"Nodes That Need Layout 3841 of 3987 Layout root#document" seems relevant. So it sounds like the details card is somehow causing a full-page layout for almost every element on the page. Which should be fast, except that every element seems to cause another layout. Or ... something.
Not sure if there's any other details I could give, but let me know if anyone has ideas.
fwiw, it's instantaneous for me on a 2016 laptop running Firefox on Linux w/ Xorg and nVidia. No fans even spin up (and this is an HP, and we all know how much HP fans like to spin.)
So far I haven't come up with any solution. The nested .comment styles seemed not be the problem. Although something in the CSS triggers the slow rendering on Chromium based browsers – not sure yet what.
If any of you have an idea, leave a comment here or in Teddit, appreciated!
EDIT: Oh, forgot to say: Works fine in Firefox, no rendering issues.
Hmm. Not related to the issue you mention, but also on that page, when I click a "Load more comments" link, it takes me to https://teddit.net/r/Bossfight/comments/k6vh5v/bearers_of_th... , a webpage that just says "Cannot GET /r/Bossfight/comments/k6vh5v/bearers_of_the_eternal_duel/genbcos/genr9x6".
On Linux instantaneous in Firefox (78.5.0), takes forever in Chrome (87.0.4280.66) while using 100% of one CPU core/thread (I killed the tab after ~1 minute).
It feels to me like Reddit is only good for hobby or niche interests you might have. The main subreddits and politics are what make Reddit the shittiest. But if you stay away from these it’s ok.
I agree, your experience on Reddit will depend heavily on the subreddits you read.
I'm somewhat active on niche programming topics, and people are usually helpful and respectful.
I like that on Reddit I can stay in my bubble and not worry about the world's every single problem when I just want to relax.
On Twitter, that's impossible. No matter how strictly you curate your feed, at least 1 in every 10 tweets will be something that ruins your mood (politics, drama, bullying).
However, I noticed the tone changed everywhere somewhat. I think I witness the pandemic's toll on people's capacity for empathy by the impulsive rudeness creeping into every niche subreddit I frequent.
Reddit became a shit show with Trump vs Clinton, but now people attack their own for every little sign of life.
We really need a better social network. Twitter, Reddit, HN, Facebook, ... They add little, but break a lot.
FWIW, I've also been noticing this in IRL/person situations:
> I think I witness the pandemic's toll on people's capacity for empathy
There's so many widely varying ways that effects of the pandemic can hit someone pretty bad (financially, mentally, of course physically, etc), and I think that part of the problem is that it's hard to see how real those problems are if you happened to not have suffered those particular hardships.
Personally I found this with isolation through lockdown. People who live with family, a partner or even just housemates seem to not quite understand what happens when the isolation creeps up on you (it creeps). Between the waves, when I could see people again, I could easily tell ones that did know, you could see it in their eyes if they talked about the lockdown period.
It is still quite common on Reddit for users to inject politics into absolutely everything, regardless of the subject. It really is difficult to get away from sometimes.
You are exactly right about the hobby and niche interests. On the other hand, the larger subreddits that represent groups of people (such as a city, sports team, university, etc.) will have that echo chamber effect.
Same here as well. Just a different echo. Like, try to challenge the boys club here and get the elders' disaproval...
The problem is the voting. It's not inherently linked to the content's value to the discourse or even welfare of the collective. Wrong reward metric meets a brain evolved for social regulation in small groups of humans dependant on each other's survival. Like with all problems of modern humanity, we struggle with a novel abundance we created...
Tried this Teddit out, and was suitably impressed. Good job.
It's a shame I no longer visit Reddit, as most popular subs just fall into the echo chambers. I find IRC still pretty good for the technical conversations, and there are the odd old skool forums that are active.
This is why I hang around on HN. Only place I know where I can find other people who agree that today's use of Javascript, 9 times out of 10, amounts to a nusiance.
The show/hide design pattern is annoying, IMO. Should be an accessibility violation; cannot tab through it.
I guess thats why I use a text-only browser. Avoids all the Javscript nonsense, not to mention the next CSS trick du jour.
The irony of complaining about one echo chamber and enjoying living in the 'no javascript' bubble is astounding. Can you use text-only websites for most use cases? Sure. Are people more likely to pay for your product if your website has client-sided interactivity and doesn't look awful? Absolutely.
I really don't get this complain and I've only seen it from developers. Certainly not company owners for pay for server/hosting costs (because they have seen how the insane costs of rendering everything server-side with large user bases). Even common people prefer it the way it is currently. The market has decided.
>So you're asking how to do it without a tool that was specifically designed for that purpose?
Yes, you are correct. This is a hobby project of mine, and one of the goal was to make old.reddit.com like UI without no JS at all. That's what I will do.
>I really don't get the hate for JS these days.
Unnecessary Javascript bloats websites, hogs system resources, enables surveillance, hinders accessibility that’s native to devices and clients, and introduces vulnerabilities.https://nojs.club/
Of course in this case using JS to hide/show comment tree wouldn't really be that bad, but works fairly well without it. Not many have complained.
You can conditionally style elements based on an input checkbox's `checked` state. A label element can also toggle an input checkbox's `checked state`, but contain whatever HTML you want.
Put the two together and you can do interactive elements without JS:
Off the top of my head, so YMMV but principal is all there.
You start getting headaches if you want animate that though (keyframes that animate a max-height from 0 to 9999999px goes some of the way but feels a bit hacky/doesn't give you much control over consistent timing.)
Hehe, I know CSS used to be a lot more basic than it is now, my point was simply that I've been working with CSS for a long time but had somehow missed this nugget.
Which also means that under heavy load, the server just crashes generating templates for that many users instead of just serving JS and rendering on the client-side. There's a reason we do things like this nowadays.
In my experience, this is not much of a problem. Server-side rendering is not that expensive, and can easily serve high volumes of users. After all, it has been used for decades, and is in continued use by most major sites. There's no significant performance difference between rendering HTML and rendering JSON.
Furthermore, there are easy ways to mitigate the cost of rendering on the server side. For example, on a site like reddit, most of the traffic is probably non-logged-in readers hitting the front page, so... cache the front page. Even for logged-in users, the front page listing only could be cached as rendered, since none of it really needs to be live. If liveness was desirable for only certain elements (e.g. voting buttons), it is possible to sprinkle on client-rendered elements.
I remember implementing the comment collapsing thing without JS, you have the "[-]" be a label for a checkbox button, and then you just use CSS to hide the sections for which the checkbox is checked.
Wait, I just realized after 15 minutes browsing this website that I'm not using VPN. Reddit is blocked in my country, so Teddit will be the replacement for me.
I like browsing Reddit without an account, just to read something. But I don't want to install their super big mobile app (1GB+), and I hate their lagging and weird website on mobile.
Not sure if you're on iOS, but Apollo is a very well built third-party Reddit client. It's about 70MB to install, and lets you clear the data cache if you're concerned about storage. You can also browse without an account.
I wish I could get Safari reddit links to open in Apollo without having to copy the URL. First it's "continue in browser" to dismiss the overlay that shows up each time trying to get me to use the app, then it's "read the rest of the discussion" to go from amp trash to the actual reddit site, and now they only load like 4 comments at a time and you need to click a link to load another page each time you want to see the children to a comment.
Apollo is a breath of fresh air, but iOS rules for having a website link open in an app are extremely convoluted and require explicit hard-code dapproval from both the domain owner and app author, meaning even if you man-in-the-middle reddit.com on your intranet to provide the required headers/metafiles, you would need Apollo's author to also add reddit.com to the list of URLs the app is capable of intercepting. Yuck.
If tapping Share -> Apollo isn't ideal for you, there's always the web extension route. You can hack the Sea Creator sample code extension's `content.js` file to replace https://*.reddit.com/ with x-whatever-apollo-url-prefix-is:path/to/reddit/comment if you're serious about doing this in iOS Safari:
It might be possible to ask Apollo to include this, by providing something like the above comments as a feature request. I'm not sure what Apple would think during app review, and Apollo might not be willing to risk it.
Apollo already has a share target that opens Reddit links in Apollo (and can also detect copied Reddit links when you launch Apollo). I just purchased Opener because I want it to automatically launch Apollo when I click a Reddit (AMP) link in Google, but it can’t do that.
If you are on reddit.com, click the share icon, and there will be a "open in Apollo" option. If you end up on an AMP page, you have to click the share icon in the gray bar up top next to the reddit.com header, and there will be an "open in Apollo" option.
Switch to DuckDuckGo and don’t get AMP pages again. You can also use !g at the start of your search to try Google’s results. Search quality is good and I only check Google occasionally when I know I’ve found the answer that way before but it’s not one of the top results on DDG. I haven’t measured but I think this saves me time.
I used DDG for years but switched to Google and StartPage because DDG just doesn’t work well for the types of searches I tend to perform. I found myself using !g for everything.
I need to look into it a bit more, when I used Apollo images were loading so fast I assume they are preloaded before I even clicked on them. If that is the case, that’s not ideal for me - I’ve seen NSFW content make the front page, but I don’t click on it. Just not sure if it is actually loading the content regardless.
Whoa, their app is 1GB+? Why on Earth is it so large? After all of their horrible, annoying, devious and deceitful ways that they've tried to get me to install the app when trying to browse their mobile site I will never ever install that app and this is just another good reason not to.
... What? I've never downloaded it myself (for the same reasons as you), but that doesn't sound true. Play Store says it's 39MB. But maybe OP has that much in media in the app's cache or something.
It's not app's cache I believe, but rather app's data. I think they're different? It's indeed 39MB on Play Store, but after I installed it and used it for a month, it's using 1GB+ storage on my phone (after I deleted app's cache).
Ha, I hate it when apps do that. One of the main reason I got rid of Spotify and my Spotify paid subscription was because their android app gobbled all the free space it could find on a device by filling it with caches music. “Of course Spotify, I pay extra for more storage on me device so you can use it to cache songs and save a few cents on bandwidth, you’re very welcome.”
I’m not talking about being able to download an album actively. I’m talking about Spotify using up all my devices storage to store their own cache, songs I listened to but didn’t select to be downloaded for offline listening.
Ah, fair. Though to a certain degree I still think that's helpful when I recently listened to something but forgot to download it.
I agree though that that shouldn't take up all of your storage and should definitely be toggleable.
If you're on Android, I can recommend Relay for Reddit. I've been using it for at least 6 years now. Super clean interface that implements Android's material design language well. My phone reports it takes ~48 MB.
>Wait, I just realized after 15 minutes browsing this website that I'm not using VPN. Reddit is blocked in my country, so Teddit will be the replacement for me.
There's a weird paradox... I believe in privacy/free speech/etc, however any social media targeted at those usecases tend to be a cesspool of horribleness.
As someone who has moderated various irc channels, mostly about debating / philosophical issues for years, there is a lot of confusion about the dialectic between free speech and moderation.
That is to say, I like to compare a room/channel/sub a bit like a cafe where you never know who is going to walk in. It might be nice folks looking for a pleasant discussion, but it could be drunken brawlers high on their drug of choice, or anything in between and in every kind of mental state you can imagine.
Usually it is some mix in a wide spectrum, and depending on the appeal, the crowd culture varies. Philosophical channels tend to be more naturally selective for civil debaters, but more political ones can be a mixed bag.
And just as you don’t want your bar to end in a riot and with broken tables and a bad rep, you absolutely need moderation. The paradox is solved if you keep the possibility of civil discourse, of speech and to be heard, as high as a priority as a mod as you can.
Stop doing it, and it starts leaning towards one way or the other, inclusionary for one group, exclusionary towards others.
When I modded I often had to take away the misconception that you had a right to be there. You don’t. You have the privilege to debate in the channel, not a right. And as a guest of the establishment you need be mindful of others, and abide by the rules who are not there to curtail your freedom of speech, but to provide well thought out debates.
I don't doubt that has been your experience. However there are several things that some would take issue with.
The first being your framing. The discussion is frequently framed in the following manner: Complaints about having their content remove or discussion groups removed is some sort of nazi-larping shitposter or other undesirable looking to cause trouble. I am sure there are quite a few that may fit into that, but you cannot lump all complainants into that category because it just isn't true.
The second is that is fundamentally doesn't address the actual complaint itself. When people are complaining about removal of content on social media, they aren't actually complaining about the rules per se. They are complaining about how they feel the rules are enforced.
Frequently the compliants are (but not limited to):
* That enforcement of the rules is applied arbitrarily and overwhelmingly favours one particular group based on the personal politics of the moderators. Whether that is true or not is another matter, they perceive it to be so and this isn't frequently addressed.
* Context is frequently ignored within a discussion and because it has certain verboten terms it is removed. This is true because this has happened when content in the UK have been removed because people have used local colloquisms that are considered offensive outside of those communities but not within them.
When you talk about framing, you see it from a currently popular viewpoint on free speech/moderation. However this can be a bit too narrow and circumstantial.
The number one question is : is civil debate possible? And, and second, is the platform suitable for civil debate?
My own viewpoint is from my experience that mass moderation is not possible, or at the very least unlikely to yield results that are favorable to either the platform (say Facebook) or the user. And probably even damaging, as in your banned words example.
In terms of debate, one thing sticks out if you’ve done a lot of philosophical debates, that people are bad at it. That is to say, you need to learn how to debate. I would think moderating can suffer from the same lack of experience. However this entirely depends on the circumstances. I am not quite sure which platform you are thinking of in the first complaint you state.
I do think mass moderation is impossible. If they tried to remove things that were obviously illegal and kept to that I would fine to accepting that. I appreciate there is now government involvement which brings it own complications especially with regards to an international business. So maybe it is just not possible.
> In terms of debate, one thing sticks out if you’ve done a lot of philosophical debates, that people are bad at it. That is to say, you need to learn how to debate. I would think moderating can suffer from the same lack of experience.
Funnily enough a friend who went to Berkerley University was making the same point about debate today in a discord chat. I will admit I am more of a layman but try to stay away from many of the common fallacies in argumentation. It is an interesting idea that moderation itself is something that would need experience.
> I am not quite sure which platform you are thinking of in the first complaint you state.
I would say reddit being the prime example. People always bring up the really vile stuff e.g. r/jailbait, r/natsoc (or whatever it was) as examples, the first I would remove in a heart beat as it isn't a free speech issue. However the list of subreddits and the posts that were being removed were often a lot less controversial IMO.
However one of the other comments, somewhere else in this thread I responded listed a lot of "right-wing" content in itself is somewhat objectionable. People have to remember that includes centre right libertarian types (like myself, I am a free market capitalist) and people who just believe in more old fashioned traditional values.
It is an improvement over reddit's gradually worsening interface, however it is still based on reddit's private platform.
For an open source alternative on a public platform, there is matrix or member.cash
Well these days Lemmy is the hot new reddit alternative, based on activitypub. I would think that's what people wanting a reddit alternative should look at.
I never was admin of a NNTP server, but I don't think it's true about scaling or moderation.
From what I know when you're admin, you decide which groups you allow on your server. The controversial stuff is really on groups starting with "alt." which are as I understand created ad-hoc. "alt.binaries" for example is where it's mostly pirated stuff is at. I saw many servers that had restricted list of groups, and "alt.binaries" was often restricted, partially because it might be pirated, partially to reduce disk footprint.
As for moderation. Once you have server you can moderate and send messages that will remove offending content from any group. Because it is decentralized it is really up to admins of other NNTP servers to decide whether they will respect your moderation messages or not.
There's nothing paradoxical about this. In fact, people arguing for platforms to more heavily moderate content are implicitly requesting what you describe.
Actively silencing voices doesn't stop those people from speaking or change their minds, but it does push them to find new places to converse with others who share their ideas. As such, it should come as no surprise that people with fringe or hateful views make up many of the early adopters on explicitly lightly moderated platforms.
Well of course this was going to happen. If you remove "objectionable subs" (which is arbitary as I will explain below), the first place they will move is the places that won't remove them and then people say "look see this is what happens when you don't do moderation, this place is toxic man". Well of course they are going to be concentrated on the sites that don't have stasi like moderation. This has to be some form confirmation bias.
Btw what is a "objectionable content" can be completely arbitrary e.g. a subreddit that was a criticism of consumer culture was removed, there was nothing on there that could be considered objectionable. I won't even get into the removal of criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party since Chinese companies own a large stake in reddit now.
>subreddit that was a criticism of consumer culture was removed, there was nothing on there that could be considered objectionable
I know which one you're talking about, and although I'm not saying it should have been banned, there were plenty of highly upvoted objectionable comments there which the mods consistently let slide. Let's not pretend it just randomly angered some Marvel fan Reddit admin.
All I can see is a very blurry picture of a women carrying something. The chart is also unconvincing, considering that the same chart also shows republicans beating democrats 2:1 in another time interval (near the very left of the chart). All in all, not very convincing.
The Republican Secretary of State and his officials says there’s nothing unusual about the video in question. So, is the presumption now a vast conspiracy involving democrats and republicans to turn the election for Biden?
They can post it somewhere with standards of evidence if they want to be taken seriously. Why waste time looking into it on the off chance it has more veracity than everything around it?
A glaringly obvious logic fail is “any apparent fraudulent behaviour must be on behalf of the winner” - er, no - it would be much more likely for the intended benefit of the less ethically sound candidate.
(Which one that would be in this case is an exercise left for the reader)
To me it seems worse. Let's see here, the first 10 things on the page are all political, and right-wing or extreme libertarian memes:
* A stonetoss comic about the relationship between race and IQ. This was the top post on the page. It was posted by a user with the username "NationalSocialism".
* A comic caricaturing an asexual person who decries Christmas but celbrates a silly celebration of their own, supposed to show hypocrisy
* A comic showing a caricature of a fat black woman shouting in a white woman's face, and the white woman pushing her away. The title is "At this point if a White woman looks at a Black wrong she is a "karen""
* A post from the "Controlavirus" sub-forum, arguing that lockdowns mean life has lost its color. (One of the only non-caricature comic and reasonable posts I could see on the front page)
Even on a bad day, load up the Reddit front page and it's nothing like this, even if you were to browse for hours, you wouldn't see an endless stream of reductionist memes a 14 year old might find funny.
Reddit is a worse version of HN for nuanced and well-argued discussion. Ruqquus seems to be a caricature meme sharing board, and even one which lacks even the pretense of a varied userbase. At least Reddit pretends. When I visit a site that's supposed to be better than Voat, I don't expect to be greeted with the exact same thing but with more memes and less news sources.
Scott Adams when talking to Sam Harris said there is "two movies on one screen".
I consider myself a "center-right liberatarian", however when doing political compass tests I come out right in the middle of the quad. I frequently try to _steelman_ the opposition.
So lets go through your examples:
> * A stonetoss comic about the relationship between race and IQ. This was the top post on the page. It was posted by a user with the username "NationalSocialism".
The Stonetoss comics I've seen pretty racist and usually contain anti-semetic tropes. So I will give you that one. No argument from me there.
> * A comic caricaturing an asexual person who decries Christmas but celbrates a silly celebration of their own, supposed to show hypocrisy
There is a lot of people even on the left that believe a lot of people have replaced traditional religion with some other form of spirituality. Usually this person proclaims themselves to be an athiest and laments about traditional religion while claiming to be. It is a trope, but there I've certainly seen it and it is somewhat of a hypocrital position.
So I don't see anything particularly wrong with this based on your description.
> * A comic showing a caricature of a fat black woman shouting in a white woman's face, and the white woman pushing her away. The title is "At this point if a White woman looks at a Black wrong she is a "karen""
The person that posted it could be racist. However to give someone the benefit of the doubt from your description this is commenting on the perceived hypocrisy. Karen means "entitled white woman" and I've seen it used as an insult (to deflect from the actual issue) to a white women making a valid complaint about someone behaviour (and that person happened to be black woman).
> * A post from the "Controlavirus" sub-forum, arguing that lockdowns mean life has lost its color. (One of the only non-caricature comic and reasonable posts I could see on the front page)
A lot of people are suffering due to the corona virus lockdown. My grandmother's dementia has gotten worse because visits to her are very restricted due to the lockdown and it been very upsetting to my mother.
So out of the four examples you have given. Only one I would find objectionable based on your description. Whereas you have found 3 that are objectionable.
> Even on a bad day, load up the Reddit front page and it's nothing like this, even if you were to browse for hours, you wouldn't see an endless stream of reductionist memes a 14 year old might find funny.
I find most of the content of the front page on reddit trite. It is full on worn out pop culture references, consumer culture nonsense, cute animals, strawmanning right wing politics and ideas and other crap that I am not interested in.
As for "reductionist memes a 14 year old might find funny", most of the people that spend a lot of time online on these sites are younger. I've noticed as someone that is almost forty is that a lot of this is younger guys blowing off steam online because they are frustrated by their circumstances.
Scott Alexander in one of the essays said it right. He did look at Voat as an example when he did. His quote (from point III)
> if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong
Not a knock on you but this reminds me why I hate speaking (writing) example via analogy.
There's so much horrible surrounding using "witch" as the noun, what with the traditional "hey, that's a nice plot of land you've got there" that proceeded the accusation.
That's your historical witch-hunt. A convenient way of killing your neighbor. Heck, maybe it's an appropriate analogy.
I scrolled through the comments to see how many times this link will be posted, because this is the best answer to why censorship sucks, but somehow lack of censorship usually doesn't improve things.
However, sometimes I think that the concept of "web forum" is fundamentally broken, and need to be rethought properly, instead of making the same mistakes over and over again, because the whole thing is just incompatible with our instincts and needs.
Probably the greatest design mistake is having a front page that is shown by default to people who are not logged in. Because then it matters a lot what gets on this page and what does not. (Somewhere else in this thread people pointing at the front page of Voat. Somewhere else, people complaining about posts being removed from the front page of Reddit despite getting many votes by readers.) If you have one front page, there is going to be a war about what gets there. And the winner will most likely be a censor or a spammer; either someone with superior rights, or someone who dedicates most effort.
Compare with e.g. e-mail. You do not have one global front page of e-mail, so that people could become hysteric for there either being too much of X or not enough X. You have literal Nazis sending e-mails to other literal Nazis, and yet e-mail itself does not get the image of a "Nazi supporting technology". Probably also because other people's e-mails cannot be easily found and linked on Twitter.
Which leads me to another design mistake: making things public by default, as opposed to private by default. Public things can be linked, share, and wars started about them. What about having a limited exposure for everything instead? So that an anonymous user cannot see anything. Just like with e-mail. Just like with real life.
Why do people keep making these mistakes repeatedly? I believe it is because they optimize for profit through advertising, not for optimal debating experience. And making people yell at each other for 24 hours a day is the approach that maximizes ads shown.
But also users... they don't really want to be exposed to the worst parts of internet, and they don't really like the idea of being censored... but they like the possibility of being potentially read by tons of people... not realizing it means either online wars or censorship. It is hard to design a system that will show your content to uncensored masses, without something bad happening as a result. (But it isn't necessarily impossible. In real life, we have books that can reach millions, and yet the readers are not instantly interconnected with each other, or with the author.)
So I think the proper design should mimic these things from real life: talking to each other, debating in small groups, publishing books. No sharing. If I tell you something, you can quote me by copying my words (just like you can quote me in real life), but there is nothing in the software that will confirm that I truly said that. If I publish a book, you can't automatically find out who else is reading it; you can only ask the people you know, and they may deny it; even I cannot find out who read my book, unless people tell me. Probably a few more rules. In some sense, many of these are "anti-features" that prevent you from doing something that would start an avalanche.
Then you can have a platform with seven zillion witches, but as long as you do not add them as your friends, you will not be impacted by their existence. The only way to find out about their activity is to join them. The system is not optimizing for having you join as many debates as possible. It is the other way round: you need some of your friends to introduce you to the existence of witches, then you may ask to join them, then maybe they will accept you. Only then will the witchcraft content start appearing on your screen.
I am the Co Founder of Noomi[1], and we are trying to rethink the way Forums work. Our approach is somewhat different, we believe that forums were made for early web and have not evolved for the time where everyone has access to the internet. Internet by design is about broadcasting your ideas to the world, at zero marginal costs, and it has a huge reach.
I agree to the point about having a front page shown to people by default. Every forum in the world today works on push mechanism - you go to a link, browse threads/posts, and engage with the ones you like. Its the user searching for the content, and more often than not, would find something he objects too as well. What if we reverse the process? The content you like comes to you by default and you search for specific things you may want to find more about.
The problem with having private rooms is that it becomes sort of an echo chamber, and we dont want that to happen. It's a difficult problem to solve, and we have a few hypothesis on how to approach it, but we havent gotten there in terms of traction.
[1]: Noomi is an interest based social network, enabling users to find other people as excited about topics as they are. https://getnoomi.com
Well, the majority of those adopting these types of platform are people so insufferable they've been pushed out everywhere else rather than Ye Olde Neckbeard.
If you're looking for a low-cruft, minimalist alternative to Reddit or Twitter that's focused on live conversation, check out https://sqwok.im
Disclaimer I am building it.
Key Points:
- Minimalist design with focus on readability & usability.
- Real-time messaging meets news aggregator - All posts have a built-in chat room including presence, typing activity, etc.
- Fast, open, simple - Anyone can view posts simply by opening the url, minimal click to start talking. Create sharable chat rooms on the fly essentially
- Follow other users in real time & join them in conversation.
- No voting - Relevance is based on chat activity and excluded voting entirely.
Very nice concept and design. One thing I partially dislike about hn/reddit/youtube/etc is that most of the discussion has already occurred once I have arrived at a post. Although I admit that I find reading others' online discussions addictive, having a more real-time chat attached to a post like on sqwok is appealing. It means anyone can jump in and steer the discussion at any time, and not just be forced to tack on a comment at the bottom that will likely never be seen, buried under the weight of the existing discussion.
I have some feedback:
1.
One part of the interface confused me. From the "trending" tab I clicked on a post in the list. Then, I clicked the left-facing chevron above the post, which to me looked like a "back" button. After clicking, I was taken to the page of the user that made the post I was on. I expected to be taken back to the main trending list. This applies to both the desktop layout and to the mobile layout.
2.
An aspect of the design that rubs me the wrong way is the amount of persistent screen space dedicated to the content of a post in the desktop layout. The content of the post is generally pretty small, yet it takes up over half of the screen, and it appears there is no way to collapse it (?).
Once I've viewed the content of the post, I no longer need to see it, and would probably just want to engage in discussion in the chat with full focus. However, I'm still stuck with the main post taking up over half of the screen, and the chat boxed into its smaller panel.
In the mobile layout of sqwok, the user can click onto the chat tab, and the chat is given the full screen. I like that for a text or image post. On the other hand, for a video post I may want to view the video and read the comments at the same time.
thank you for checking it out & the thoughtful feedback, I appreciate it!
1) I've received this same feedback about the chevron being confusing before and I think this cements that it needs to be updated to work like a back button on both desktop/mobile. I think that makes sense since the author of the post can be clicked on right below that.
2) I agree with this that it'd be nice to have a way to adjust the screen space and make just the chat focused on desktop, and perhaps a split screen mode on mobile. I think it's a good idea and will have to explore building that. One thing I'm not sure of is where/how to display the content of the post in a chat-centric desktop mode? I was thinking either horizontal strip along top of the chat, or maybe a minimized box floating top-right of the chat (like picture-in-picture style)?
hey good question, and it is experimental so we'll see how far it goes, but I think you could get more granular to detect things like unique message author/over rolling time period, account age, perhaps a private vote people could add or other metrics to try and filter out noise.
To follow up with that, I want to try and mimic real life as much as possible, and avoid the incessant dopamine feedback loop that voting/liking promotes. That's sort of my guiding idea, to keep it razor focused just on conversation.
I checked out your website and the premise seems to be pretty solid. I've been browsing 4chan lately and while the place is certainly a cesspool most of the time, I loved the ephemeral and almost real-time discussion format. sqwok seems like something I'd use. However, I think you might have heard this already, what the hell is the sqwok name. How do you even pronounce it let alone memorize it!? I think you know what my suggestion is.
Thank You! The desire for ephemeral real-time discussion is what really drove the idea... As for the name (lol), at the time I was trying to think of something that represented what it was about, and came across the word "squawk". That name is pretty common but I liked the play on it "sqwok" because it's 5 characters, easy to spell & remember. I decided to roll with it, but have a backup just in case!
Hey, the entire project is running aws services w/serverless py api, websockets, ember.js frontend, about a year to build so far... This is the 2nd go-around with an older v1 that was scrapped & rebuilt.
"Loading more posts", i.e. no pager/paging. That is not good. How do I go back to where I left off (easily)? I do not like infinite scrolling for many reasons. This being one of them.
hey, I definitely agree with you & I've thought about the scroll position issue recently. I want to improve it either by supporting both infinite scroll and paging, or find a way to build a hybrid that displays a page, while also having the scroll position retained. I'm with you, just have to balance what things to tackle in what order.
hey, thanks for checking it out, and yes there is a 20 char limit on the username length for now.. I looked around at other social sites and that seemed to be about the common length. Were you hoping to have a much longer name? I do plan to add a "display name" that can be whatever length
Would probably switch in a heartbeat if I could expand the posts without opening a new tab. How difficult would it be to port Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) to this? Or is there some browser extension that lets me accomplish roughly the same thing?
I think I'm one of many people who spends most of their time lurking anyway.
Might still give it a go...if I wouldn't browse reddit as much with the added friction of opening links to view posts, maybe I shouldn't browse reddit as much anyway.
This is really challenging thing to do without any client-side JS. It would require downloading media (not just little thumbnails) of every post in the current subreddit view. I might make a feature where people can enable (disabled by default) certain features from the preferences which enables them to use features like this which require client-side JS.
Is there any way for a browser plugin to use client-side JS without the site using it? I know this might be a stupid question, but I know very little of extension and frontend development.
That aside, if it isn't too much work to add or support RES features, I would love it and totally use teddit. I (and perhaps some other people here) would even be willing to throw a few bucks your way to help with development/server costs if you open up a donation page.
I feel exactly the same. After they butchered m.reddit this seems like a viable alternative for mobile, but is just missing the ability to enlarge images/video without opening the post for me. Happy to open comments etc in a new tab ofc
There's also https://bibliogram.art/ for instagram, invidio.us instances for youtube. Only if there would be a way to "walk around" imgur - I'd be happy already.
Dark mode, no ads, similar to old.Reddit.com layout. That’s all I need and this is good. Hope it’s not in some violation of Reddit and gets taken down.
Reddit's not real picky about interfaces like this, especially if they're not for profit. Really the only time they say it's problematic is if you try to pass it of as an official client or use their branding too heavily (Apollo, a client for iOS, had to change up their icons because it looked too much like the reddit Snoo).
Can you elaborate on what is so good about the old reddit layout, or bad about the new one (apart from performance)? The way I use reddit, what it does now actually works better for me (again, apart from how slow it is): I subscribe to a mix of subs with like 50% of image and video posts. Which I can now just see full size without clicking, and quickly scroll through if not interesting. With old.reddit and teddit, I have to look at a tiny thumbnail to decide whether I'd want to see the full version. Similar for text posts: being able to read the first couple of lines isn't that bad.
Reddit has probably the strongest network effect of any community product so it’s surprising and good that they still have an API that enables stuff like this.
If they could find a way to mirror v.reddit.com videos (using an alternate host, like streamable or whatnot) that would really be a welcome addition.
Also, for now it seems you can't log in to your reddit account (maybe that's by design), which means you have to bookmark your subs using e.g. teddit.net/r/videos+haskell+woodworking which honestly is not that bad.
After I realised how long I was spending mindlessly browsing Reddit, this is what I ended up doing. I nuked my account and just bookmarked the subs I was subscribed to. Now whenever I feel like I need a hit of Reddit, I visit one of my bookmarks and do a quick catchup. I've done the same with YouTube and have found I spend far less time on these sites now with just the slightly added friction of deleting an account (which I believe now offer no real benefits at all if you're just consuming the content).
Hi. As someone new to frontend, could anyone tell me how frontend for lightweight-but-very-functional sites like these (also hackernews) built? Do they use something like Next.js for server-side-rendering? Which frameworks would you recommend to build a social network, if one wanted to avoid Single Page frameworks like React and Vue?
Having built sites of similar levels of interactivity, we would have used some sort of server side framework with a template library (A custom PHP framework+Smarty, Spring Boot+Thymeleaf, Python+Django), without any front end frameworks at all. We would use jQuery a little, and later some Bootstrap. But these days vanilla JS would probably suffice for what we'd generally have used jQuery for. This is probably a bit old school at this point, I'm sure.
jQuery is a relatively small dependency and it's still more expressive than vanilla JS so I wouldn't hesitate to use it if it felt appropriate.
One could also reach for something like Preact if some components are too complicated for manual imperative updates. You can use it without a build step and only for some parts of your pages. For compatibility you can ship a server-rendered component that you then throw away if the client has JS enabled (although that would require you to implement it twice).
You don't need to use react and vue as single page frameworks, you can just use them for reactivity / events. There are lightweight alternatives for that too.
If you do it that way you don't need server side rendering since your JS is only handling events and there are no client side components or anything like that.
I think the backend directly emits HTML. Some JS (without libraries if I'm not mistaken) is used on the client side for things like voting. I don't know how it does persistence or what its infrastructure looks like.
Outside of AWS and the cloud bubble, bandwidth is extremely cheap. You can get dedicated servers (aka actual hardware) with 100Mbps of unmetered bandwidth for a couple bucks a month.
Oh.. Yes. I assumed that they hot linked (a word I haven't used in 10 years) all the images/videos from reddit / imgur. But no, they seem to re-host everything. Which is admirable both from a privacy and "fairness" perspective, it lessens the burden of Reddit.
But yes, without ads or fees, it seems unsustainable.
True. But there is no other way to call the Reddit API safely without proxying it through.
I have had a very similar idea for sometime and even thought of adding a prompt optionally to get the Reddit api key from the user and store it in localstorage and use it from the browser. But never got around to doing it.
This is almost similar and the code is open source anyway. So you can run your own instance just replacing the API key. This is what I’m planning to do.
There are many layers to privacy. If you want privacy from both Reddit and Teddit, then it sounds like a VPN is what you need.
I think Teddit's focus on privacy is the removal of ads, tracking beacons and other analytics that the official Reddit front-end includes, perhaps at the cost of - as you put it - having Teddit track your actions via proxy instead (although you're not logged in, so all they get is your IP).
If you run it locally then you remove the proxy problem but then you are talking directly to Reddit, but - unless you use a VPN - that seems unavoidable.
So pick your poison, or add another layer like a VPN to the mix.
Are VPNs really private? It feels like VPNs are the best way to centralize data about people who are worried about their privacy or have something to hide. How trustful are the most popular VPN companies? In the end, you do run 3rd party software and send all your data through 3rd party servers.
While logged in on Reddit, go to this page: https://old.reddit.com/subreddits, then copy the url from the "multireddit of your subscriptions" link in the sidebar to the right, replace the "old.reddit.com" in it with "teddit.net", and bookmark that.
reddit has become overrun by their moderators and staff. reddit went from open discourse to pushing reddit staff agendas, not to mention the erasing of Aaron Schwartz.
The overall state of the site is just sad. I'm eager to see what replaces it next.
A certain Ghislaine Maxwell seems to have been a very active moderator too. It's not a radical idea that all major social media platforms are now under attack (possibly successfully) from people and organizations pushing narratives and becoming a moderator is probably the easiest way to do it.
While an improvement on Reddit's user interface is welcome, it is yet another way to interact with privately curated content.
There are now countless clones and alternatives to Reddit and Twitter that advertise themselves as free-speech (Gab, Parler etc) - yet they all share the centralized model, where user accounts are really owned by the platform and where speech and users can be removed. What I really want from this decade is a real free-speech solution, where users and discussion cannot simply be removed when it becomes inconvenient.
https://member.cash is just one interface to the Member platform. The database is open (on a blockchain) and the source is open (github) thus it is easy to host a mirror. For example, https://member.bchd.cash
Even if all the mirrors become corrupted or taken down, there is a desktop version to access the platform ( https://member.cash/p/7ec2547d6e )
It is truly a public platform and very censorship resistant.
The real reddit loads them in the same page without a refresh like you are expanding a comment thread. It is one area where a little bit of JS improves the user experience.
You can see the behavior without logging in by going to the old reddit site.
That sounds like a foolish thing to do. Teddit terminates your TLS connection to Reddit, and all you have is their promise to not use that position of power.
> Reddit almost certainly does a better job protecting your privacy and security
Even better.
I never understand this line of thought. Existing players are abusing their position, SO we wont migrate to a new player because what if they also abuse the position ? (which is in fact advertising itself on privacy explicitly)
Isn't the correct term mirror? In any case, this is awesome. I hope the developers add a feature that lets you see removed comments, and previous edits as well. Or maybe even a "time machine" type feature. That would be cool.
I believe they're referencing the part of the comment right before they brought up time machine, where it's mentioned that they'd like to see deleted comments and an edit history.
I agree with the sentiment, users who delete their own comments should have their privacy respected. Same goes for edits.
Great site! One annoyance (with potentially no good solution) is that when a Reddit comment links to another Reddit page rather than changing the link to the teddit equivalent, it links to Reddit causing Reddit to shout at me for having the audacity to brows Reddit on my phone without their app. Both i.reddit and ww.reddit work the same way so maybe there is a good reason not to hijack links, but just wanted to say.
Are there any sites that are a complete alternative to reddit instead of just a different frontend? I found https://dev.lemmy.ml/, but they don't seem at all concerned about privacy. They have no privacy policy, so I found a site that generates a privacy policy for them, & they still haven't added a privacy policy.
Speaking of, are there alternative Reddit backends? It would be interesting to be able to take one of these sites or Reddit apps and point it at an alternative backend that provides identical functionality with different data.
Is it just me or front-ends of giant platforms are becoming more mainstream? First Individious, then Nitter, now Teddit. I think this speaks volumes of what modern webpages have become. Too bad that those sites will probably pull the plug and make changes that simply break those front-ends.
I originally used something else, but enough people complained about it being weird that I made the default a boring white/grey one. There are 10 other color schemes you can choose from in the dropdown in the footer though.
You can just send me an email to the address in the announcement blog post, and I can give you an invite: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (that offer's open to anyone, but please read through the post so you know about the site's goals/principles/etc.)
It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I mostly just don't want to constantly deal with large influxes of users because of drama on other sites, persistent trolls, and things like that.
It doesn't show by default to logged-out users, but we've got a devoted group set up for Advent of Code that's reasonably active so far, if anyone's participating in that and would like to join us: https://tildes.net/~comp.advent_of_code
I would highly suggest anyone interested in joining the community. We are always interested in having more varied voices and engagement on the platform.
After running the native ios reddit app through pihole I was shocked about how _little_ information was leaked to third parties or even reddit itself. Did I miss anything?
How do people make these? How can you get all the content from a site and display it on yours? Are you using the reddit api, web scraping, or something else?
very promising! needs some reddit enhancement suite features and expanding comments probably needs to be dynamic instead of a page reload. but it looks great! will continue to use it
What value could they realistically get from aggregated Reddit browsing habits if they're not selling ads or even setting cookies? If they just want to see what's popular they can just use the Reddit API to get that data, or just go to the site.
"Why should I trust whoever runs this" is a very different question than "How can this be privacy focused", unless you believe people always have to act unethically if they can.
Isn't Reddit now a Chinese surveillance of Western culture and a gateway for their propaganda? I feel that a good chunk of the platform has been infiltrated by people pushing Marxism and downvoting any other view.
I don't think it's sensible to characterize the entire site that way when there are many subreddits that have very different communities within them.
While I do agree many, particularly the more popular ones, aren't for me (where it seems very little actual discussion happens), there are some small subreddits I enjoy such as r/selfhosted and r/linux.
Subreddits are definitely how it manifests, but the problem is with the design itself.
Upvotes and downvotes with effectively no restrictions (unlike, for example, HN, which has a variety of restrictions in place) plus the fact that every subreddit is a weird little dictatorship/oligarchy where moderators are given the tools to unilaterally direct conversation / silence dissidents / etc was always gonna be a recipe for disaster (in retrospect).
Certain subreddits being small and focused enough to avoid this (for now) doesn't make Reddit not a cesspool.
I gave up on reddit a couple years back, but this might make me rethink.
With so many things turning to mud, this is a good thing.
What I cannot figure out is how they do the [-] show/hide stuff without javascript?
Even hacker news - which is relatively lightweight - uses javascript for that.
EDIT: ...and I'm back. It's like eating a box of candy for dinner - sugar rush and no nutrition.