Reddit Is Still Useful. It's Also Becoming Impossible

Literally the only reason I'm still on Reddit is due to r/sysadmin and their Patch Tuesday threads. It's been a lifesaver and getting more and more important with every Patch Tuesday as Microsoft keeps screwing things up even more month after month. Like how they screwed up RDP, domain trust, audio etc this month. If it wasn't for r/sysadmin, we wouldn't have known about all these issues (especially the domain trust issue, there was little mainstream visibility over it until a day or two ago... and MS still haven't acknowledged it btw), and we would've been royally screwed over.

If there was an alternative to r/sysadmin - one that garners the same level of user reports and discussion - I'd switch in a heartbeat.

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.

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 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. 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 two (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'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.

- 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.

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 6-8 weeks or so...