Reddit Drama and the Haskell Community

Reddit is a “social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website” that hosts discussions for many different communities. There has been a lot of drama related to the site lately, which is summarized in the 2023 Reddit API controversy page on Wikipedia. While I largely avoid social media, I follow quite a few technical and local communities on the site, and I have gotten a lot of value from them. This blog entry is about Reddit drama and the Haskell community.

Context: How I Use Reddit

The vast majority of my interaction with Reddit is via RSS. RSS allows me to easily follow posts to various Reddit communities, with a priority on my time.

When I see a post that I want to check out, I open it in my web browser. Reddit has two web user interfaces, a new one and an old one. I greatly prefer the old web UI over the new web UI, and I use the Old Reddit Redirect browser plugin to automatically change links to the new web UI to use the old web UI instead.

I use the Reddit web UI in a Reddit container, using the Firefox Multi-Account Containers plugin. This sandboxes Reddit usage from all other sites that I may visit in my browser.

I do not comment on Reddit very often, and I rarely rate (“upvote” and “downvote”) content. I never login when reading content on Reddit. I only login when I comment or rate content, and then I logout immediately afterwards.

I occasionally want to access Reddit on my phone. A web UI is available on such devices, but the quality is quite poor. People suspect that this is on purpose because the company wants users to use their app to increase ad revenue. Unfortunately, the official app is even worse. I use the third-party RedReader app and find it quite nice. I never login on my phone; I only use it to check/read posts. This app is not being shut down due to the recent changes.

/r/haskell

/r/haskell has been the main Haskell community on Reddit for about fifteen years. It was set to “private” on June 12 to protest the Reddit changes. In private mode, not even old content could be read, so this was painful for anybody in the Haskell community who wanted to reference previous discussions during this time. On the positive side, this brought more attention to the protest. On the negative side, people searching for solutions to problems got promising search results that would no longer open. There is a lot of discussion in the “r/Haskell is going dark” thread on Discourse.

From June 20, /r/haskell was set to “read-only”, and a vote was held to determine what to do next. In read-only mode, people can once again read old content, but new content can only be created in specified threads. There is a lot of discussion in the “Vote on the future of r/haskell” threads on Discourse and Reddit. The actual vote took place on Reddit, and it was unfortunately flawed.

Reddit has support for voting using “polls,” but they do not work with the old web UI that so many people use exclusively. The /r/haskell vote was done by rating specific comments that specified the options. In a “poll,” one can vote for a single option, while rating comments allows one to “upvote” or “downvote” each option. This negative voting greatly changes the dynamics of the system. The biggest problem, however, was that many people in the community did not understand that they needed to rate specific comments in order to vote. Many people “upvoted” other comments that they agreed with and were later unhappy to find that their votes did not count.

The results are the rankings of the official comments, which I think is calculated as the number of “upvotes” minus the number of “downvotes.” There is a lot of discussion in the “r/Haskell will remain read-only” threads on Discourse and Reddit.

At this point, the plan is keep /r/haskell read-only. People are encouraged to discuss on Discourse instead of Reddit. There are many people in the Haskell community that are happy to avoid Reddit, while there are also many who do not care about the Reddit drama and would prefer to re-open /r/haskell. It is possible that Reddit will force /r/haskell to re-open, but that has not happened yet.

Reddit Alternatives

In the above-linked discussions, there has been a lot of discussion of alternatives to Reddit. Many people are eager to use an alternative, while detractors worry about usability and community fragmentation.

Usability deserves further comment. Reddit threads are hierarchical, like a tree with the top post at the root. The hierarchical nature naturally groups relate comments (replies) on the page, and the UI allows users to “collapse” subtrees. Many people find that these features make Reddit much more user-friendly when compared to sites that do not have these features.

With /r/haskell in read-only mode, Discourse is where most community discussion takes place. The software is open-source, it is hosted by the community and is not reliant on a company whose interests do not necessarily match those of the community, and it already has many members. Critical to many community members, it has an RSS feed. Many people dislike Discourse, however, because it does not display content hierarchically and therefore cannot collapse subtrees, making long discussions difficult to read.

Another alternative is kbin.social/m/haskell. This software is also open-source. It does not have support for collapsible subtrees yet, but the functionality is being developed (PR). It has an RSS feed, but note that it does not validate and may therefore not work with all feed readers.

There is mention of Lemmy, which is also open-source, but I have not seen a link to a Lemmy Haskell community and suspect that it does not exist (yet). Attempts to search for one resulted in an error. I checked out a random post to a different community and see that it has collapsible comments, but I personally find the UI to be much more difficult to read than that of Reddit. It supports RSS.

There is mention of lobste.rs, which is also open-source. It is heavily inspired by Hacker News and does not host separate communities, but perhaps it is possible for the Haskell community to host our own instance that is just for Haskell discussion. It has hierarchical threads, can collapse subtrees, and supports RSS.

There are a number of other existing Haskell communities listed on the community page of the Haskell website. Some members of the community still prefer mailing lists, and some lament the decline of Usenet newsgroups.

My Opinions

I have not been a huge fan of Reddit (the company), long before the recent drama. I think that Reddit would best serve as entertainment (like Digg), and have long worried about valuable communities being hosted on the site. I would much rather advocate use of open-source software that the community can host itself, or at least use a service hosted by a company whose interests better match those of the community.

I abstained from voting about /r/haskell because I can empathize with both sides. If it were up to me, though, I would re-open the community to serve the many people who prefer to use it. People use poor software created by profit-oriented companies all the time, and Reddit is no different. In the long run, I would love to see better community software be developed, and I look forward to when such software beats Reddit on every metric.