I miss the old Internet of 10-20 years ago
Now search sucks Organic engagement sucks Anything creative or thoughtful is driven out by slop or not intellectual content
Specifically I am interested in reading about news and geopolitics
With many traditional media sites both being paywalled and eliminating their comments sections it seems my option, only option is reddit which sucks. Is there anything else out there like and international politics forum that is NOT Reddit where I can read what real people think about a variety of issues facing the world today? Or does that not exist anymore. Maybe 4chan or a conspiracy site but again those all have their own bias. I am more interested in what normal people think and seeing free discussion.
I share your frustrations. I was hopefully for the relaunch of Digg, but it very quickly started to feel like Reddit, especially when people inject politics (with an heavy bias) into everything. I purposely didn’t follow the politics community, as I had a feeling that would be bad, but that mindset very quickly started infecting many other communities and discussions. It seemed impossible to have a good faith discussion of the actual issues. I gave up yesterday, deleting the app, logging out of the site, and deleting my bookmark. I’m too old to waste my time dealing with conversations like those.
Reddit has a meme problem as well. Also a bad mod problem.
There are probably some very high quality mailing lists or discord servers out there, but I wouldn't know where to find them.
If you start a link blog with an RSS feed and an email or some way to comment I will subscribe and participate if it’s good enough.
Start here:
https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/
https://bearblog.dev
Well, then, checkout mine
https://www.rxjourney.net/
Check out mine
https://www.rxjourney.net/
I don’t have any recommendations for you. A big part of the problem is that heavy moderation is necessary to keep forums from devolving into the slop that stands in for discourse these days. For example, even when there’s a fairly good question posted on reddit, the comments are just a string of one liners, snide quips, and snark. Few people know how to engage in thoughtful discussion anymore.
Twitter
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