Hello everyone,

I have come here from Reddit because I am tired of its community. Among astroturfing, advertisements masquerading as “organic” content, site admins intervening in any subreddit to uphold nebulous rules and standards, kleptomaniac moderators that singlehandedly control dozens of the biggest subreddits, users stuck in a pointless pursuit of karma, endless reposts of recent content, absurd brigading and invasions, subs growing to the point where the user base no longer understands the sub’s purpose, a front page open to the highest bidders and site-wide censorship, there are so many deal breaking issues that no longer make the site worth my time as for the most part it is neither funny nor thought-provoking. For the most part the site feels like a hollow advertising platform to me.

Like many users here, I seek to return to a semblance of the earlier internet, before the major social media sites like Reddit became colossal advertising platforms driven by money and select individuals instead of being proper communities. Unfortunately, growth of the userbase seems to be a big driver of this problem, with Usenet’s “Eternal September” being one of the earliest examples (although one that I have not witnessed). Many small subs I joined started becoming worse when the userbase started growing faster than new users could become accustomed to the subreddits, leading to more and more posts missing the point of the subreddit and simply being designed to outcompete hundreds of other concurrent posts in terms of karma to strike it big and get to the front page (hello reposts). Meanwhile the job of being a moderator becomes harder and harder to do, to the point where it is not surprising that mods of major subreddits are extremely invested into the site compared to normal users.

I have been researching alternatives to Reddit because I enjoy the structure of the site, as I find it more logical to center such a largely anonymous site around topics rather than individual users (which Reddit doesn’t seem to agree with because they added personal user feeds for no apparent reason). From the few posts I have read so far, this site appears to have potential. The pyramid of debate is a promising standard to hold the community to, and the two different upvote types are also interesting.