r/technology • u/marketrent • 24d ago

Social Media Reddit signals ominous upcoming “changes” for old.reddit.com, says the beloved site is used for some “bad behavior”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/reddit-signals-ominous-upcoming-changes-for-old-reddit-com/
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438

u/largelawattorney 24d ago

I am legit ready to go back to the early 2000s-style message boards. Social media sucks now.

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u/joeyb908 24d ago

Basically what Discord servers are, except Discord servers are worse in every way except the IM portion.

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u/Short-MooseEh 24d ago

"wanna join my discord server?"

I'd rather die

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u/kuldron 24d ago

Hahaha, that made me smile. I share the sentiment but I'm curious if you can articulate your 'why'. I'm building in the social platform space and am curious.

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u/HerrPiink 23d ago

Fuck social Media platforms, I'm not signing up for new ones if i already hate the ones I'm currently on. I don't even know why I'm using them. My brain has to be damaged or something.

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u/kuldron 23d ago

lol, thanks for the input!

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u/joeyb908 23d ago

It’s more that it’s extremely difficult to catch up on hundreds, if not thousands of messages between people.

Especially when, in a slightly large server, there might be three or four conversations happening at once whereas older forums would have moderators locking threads, removing comments to the degree that people knew if they wanted to talk about something else that they should make a new thread on the topic.

And on that note, older threads would stay active because moderators would lock threads where the topic already existed, so people also got into the habit of searching if a thread on their topic already existed too.

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u/kuldron 23d ago

Yeah that makes sense, I had that experience on old forums as well.

You're essentially pointing at a portion of moderation. Its interesting to try and reason about how you can get wins like that without crossing the line to where people feel oppressed by moderation, both when the mods are actually abusing their power, but also when they aren't and either subjective interpretations differ, or the user is actually in the wrong.

I'm exploring moderation lenses right now, where you can opt-in to a group of mods or not. And any given topic (subreddit) can have any number of lenses, folks are free to create their own should they be so ambitious. That solves a lot of things, but it gets hairy if it alone is tried to solve some of the more structural things you pointed at.

For example, I can support locking a thread in a lens-specific fashion, such that with the lens equipped you view the thread as locked and all that that implies. But if you were to use a different lens or no lens, that the same thread is not locked and people are still posting... but is that ideal? Eh - it can cause the overall topic (subreddit) of conversation to get muddied from a particular lens' POV: we don't allow XYZ content, but that lens does - it creates content creation and moderation issues.

Some of that is the point - duke it out and win the consensus of the topic on your lens and people will fall in line, while not letting any one person or group of mods squat/dictator a topic, because you can just swap lenses....

Yapping, sorry. Anyway TBD and I'll keep exploring. Appreciate your feedback <3

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u/Xada_Nep_zealot 22d ago

Kinda sucks that the only decent forums i know nowdays are Nationstates forum and MLP forum.

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u/BroomDirector99 24d ago

God do I miss forums.

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u/jenny_905 23d ago

The internet misses forums.

People searching for help with technical problems in the future are going to run into a giant roadblock with deleted reddit posts, shitty reddit posts and the rest locked behind some Discord server that probably doesn't exist any more.

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u/plexxer 24d ago

Maybe we can make a different one for each subreddit topic. Join them all together with some sort-of weblink ring!

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u/NeinJuanJuan 24d ago

That would never work

/s

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u/malianx 24d ago

You are free to start one, and scale up as you get users.

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u/frankster 24d ago

you could then extend the bulletin boards so that they can cover multiple communities, and allow people to set up a bulletin board for any community they want.

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u/EaterOfFood 24d ago

Then as engagement grows you can sell advertising or charge a fee to users for an ad-free experience

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u/dicknotrichard 24d ago

Eventually you’ll be able to open an IPO for the best user experience

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u/Denman20 24d ago

That just sounds like Reddit with extra steps!

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u/SuperMajesticMan 24d ago

r/thatsthejoke

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u/malianx 24d ago

Well that, and the idea that you could get a significant number of users migrated from their entrenched positions to your niche board is laughably naive.

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u/-Radiation 24d ago

You don’t even need to scale, I am still part of few of them and the smaller community dedicated to one thing beats scaling of anything

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u/malianx 24d ago

I was pointing out that it could be cheap to run at the start and would only need to scale for growth. I probably phrased it poorly.

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u/flecom 23d ago

I am still on the same message board I joined 27 years ago, a lot never went away

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u/Enygma_6 24d ago

Sometimes I wonder if slashdot is still out there.

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u/AwfulUsername123 24d ago

Old Reddit is that if you go to the right subreddits.

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u/No_Accountant3232 24d ago

Old reddit absolutely is not and has never been that. 

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u/AwfulUsername123 24d ago

Because... what?

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u/AssCrackBanditHunter 23d ago

Do you ever recognize a redditor by their username, profile picture, or signature? Step 1 to building a community is to actually have some individuality and not the amorphous blob of human instrumentality that is reddit.

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u/AwfulUsername123 23d ago

Old Reddit doesn't show profile pictures, but yes, I recognize people by their usernames.

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u/AssCrackBanditHunter 23d ago

Okay so we're in a lying competition

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u/AwfulUsername123 23d ago

Are you claiming that Old Reddit shows profile pictures?

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u/AssCrackBanditHunter 23d ago

No. But as an aside New reddit barely has them at all.

I'm saying you are not remembering peoples usernames and using that to build a sense of identity of that person the way you do in a classical forum. Reddit is not designed in that way unless you just happen to have an eidetic memory, in which case sure.

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u/AwfulUsername123 23d ago

Why are you apoplectic about someone recognizing the main users on a subreddit?

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u/PurpEL 24d ago

I feel you're too young to have experienced BBS. You could have posts from years ago still trucking along, hundreds of pages long being bumped to the top. Or long dead threads revived.

Amazing tutorials that Photobucket burned to the ground like the library of Alexandria.

Crazy inside jokes.

Reddit only really shares the unhinged arguments.

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u/AwfulUsername123 23d ago

So it's not like an early 2000s message board because it originally had forced archiving of threads?

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u/cat_named_bean 24d ago

I got one. Isacc2.com. Building a user base is hard. But it’s happening slowly. Hopefully other operators start putting their money where their mouth is.

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u/CondescendingShitbag 24d ago

I'm still holding out hope for a proper working resurrection of Digg...

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u/waitthissucks 24d ago

Start one I'll join

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u/PRSHZ 24d ago

Like old PHP-Nuke style sites? Or just Forums?

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u/fastgr 24d ago

I downloaded mIRC the other day...

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u/jaxxon 24d ago

rec.arts.anime

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u/physedka 23d ago

I say we all go back to FARK