I’m going to go a bit further and say that kids today are not worse than in the past. It’s been 20 years since I taught computers but the doom and gloom here could have easily been posted in 2002 with only minor rewording.

GUIs got good with the launch of the Mac in 1984, and by the launch of XP & Mac OS X in ‘01 good GUIs were cheap. This brought computers into way more homes and exposed them both to kids who liked them for their own sake and to kids who saw them primarily as a tool.

I think people like this handwringing about kids not understanding computers on a deep enough level for their taste are just being obtuse.

I write software now instead of teaching and I write the kind of software that people should be able to just use as a tool.

We’ve had 20 years where the vast majority of computer users understand latin better than they understand their computers. It’s fine. It’ll continue to be fine.

There’s a saying here in Germany that roughly goes “If you’re at a dinner with 1 Nazi and 9 people who say nothing, that’s a dinner with 10 Nazis”. That’s how it is with HN. They can’t hide behind “just some commenters” when they’ve got years long harrasment campaigns and then update HN’s code in order to get arround Hector’s attempts to stem the tide.

The comments are all gone now. But as Hector points out, it takes weeks or months for the moderators to actually do anything. In my opinion they don’t get credit for removing these comments once the threads are stale.

And then when people try to limit HN traffic to their site and stop the harrasment campaign, Dang updates HN to order to circumvent it.

The Asahi team got a massive amount of harassment from HN, it took HN weeks to remove any comments, months to remove them all, but they were very keen on getting around Hector’s HN block.

WTF? HN is one of the best communities. What exactly is “toxic” about it?

Their years long harrasment campaign against one of the main developers on OpenGL because she’s trans, and the project lead for AsahiLinux because he stood up for her come to mind. I’m interested in graphics stacks (because I’m bad at it myself) and you basically can’t discuss OpenGL there because they hate Alyssa Rosenzweig for existing.

There’s a reason why lots of people block them entirely and that HN doesn’t respect those blocks basically tells you all you need to know.

Re: competition, I agree Lemmy isn’t going to absorb all of Reddit right away. But it might make a dent.

This won’t happen. As soon as any one instance of Lemmy grows other instances will just defederate it (like so many Mastodon instances wanted to do with mastodon.social) and kill whatever growth there is.

I don’t mind that Lemmy will remain small. It’s fine by me, but anyone expecting Reddit to ever notice Lemmy is kidding themselves.

Reddit’s metrics are ad sales. And I think the impact here is going to be slower, and take longer.

Twitter’s fall has been faster because existing competitors like Facebook and Instagram can take some of their users, Mastadon takes another chunk, and Substack launched their Twitter clone Notes already. Not to mention Bluesky’s expanding public beta. If you liked Twitter and want that experience somewhere else, you’ve got good options.

Reddit has no real competitor. There’s stuff like Hacker News, but their community is small and extremely toxic. Nothing else comes close. Until there’s a true Reddit competitor, their demise will be slow and could be easily turned around.

You and I are of course on Lemmy. But lets be real, Lemmy isn’t a competitor to reddit. As I write this comment there are 3 users online in this community. And given how there’s already a huge amount of in-fighting and defederating amoung different Lemmy instances, this will never really take off.

Regular people don’t want to sign up for a service and only to have it suddenly become much less useful overnight because they failed some purity test they didn’t even know they were taking.

Twitter had to kill 3rd party apps twice in order for the mastodon migration to happen. First they did it in 2011 and then again after Elon bought the company.

I imagine a true Twitter > Mastodon level migration away from Reddit won’t happen yet. But once they inevitably dump old.reddit.com, it might.