No one mentioning FARK. Predates reddit and super friendly community.

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captarne@reddit

Am I the only one that gets inundated with constant video ads, I can’t go there any longer.

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Fark died a long time ago, and amusingly the nail in the coffin was a site redesign along with a "you'll get over it". People didn't. Over the next several decades, many sites repeated the same mistake of trying to force their communities through site redesigns made with ill-intentions, killing themselves in the process. The dregs that remained formed a different culture and it's more like a swamp today.

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Particular_Ad_9531@reddit

What actually killed fark is when they introduced a paid tier. Paid users got access to everything first which killed a lot of the user generated content (for example almost all the free users stopped participating in the previously super popular photoshop contests as the paid users got a 24h head start). It also split the community as the paid users got early access to all the comment threads and largely used that time to call the free users idiots. The free users all ended up leaving for digg and Reddit.

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obeytheturtles@reddit

Man this must have all happened after I jumped ship. My memory of TF was that it was mostly just extra meta content. I don't remember people actually getting access to threads before the general community, and I definitely don't remember real hostility to free users (besides the occasional "pleb" jokes).

I left because I got caught in the crossfire of the NSFW protests, and had an old account banned for basically just shitposting in a protest thread which got nuked from orbit.

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covalentcookies@reddit

TF had raw access to all submissions.

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Apprehensive-Theme77@reddit

Wasn’t TotalFark around for a long time before the design change? I don’t remember there being a controversy over it.

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headzoo@reddit

Plenty of major sites revamped their design without any problems. It's only going to kill small sites when users were already fed up with the site anyway. Twitter and Facebook for example have been through countless design iterations. Users deal with it because they deem it worth their time. A site dies when the users don't care enough to keep it going.

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ChristopherRoberto@reddit

Some of these redesigns are indicative of a company forcing bad changes on their users, usually in hopes of squeezing out more money. It's been a last straw several times, but there's also a whole hay bale that precedes those events.

Like, with fark, people point to totalfark or removing boobies or the site redesign, but those all happened in a small window where they went aggressive to their users. Which people call a last straw is subjective, but the hostility to their own users was the theme.

With digg, the diggv4 redesign gets the blame, but the site was a disaster for a couple years prior to that. It had been taken over by power users and cartels who controlled what hit the front page like mrbabyman without the site admins doing anything about it, and it was poorly maintained where the year leading up to v4 was a constant struggle to get a comment to go through.

With slashdot, the torrent of complete garbage, off-topic spam, and reposts that started to fill up the front page without the admins seeming to care about the decline in quality got people looking elsewhere, and instead of listening and addressing this and trying to get their audience back, they tried to be more off-topic and more spammy and eventually pushed this so far that they did a "firehose" redesign to try to have digg-level nonsense. HN instead tried to be like old slashdot.

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weirdplacetogoonfire@reddit

Also Duke sucks

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yukichigai@reddit

Eh, a lot of the old crew stuck around, especially once people figured out how to un-fark the site using Stylus (and now Stylish).

That said, it's definitely not a replacement for Reddit. Maybe for specific subreddits, particularly any of the news subreddits, but by itself it's not nearly enough.

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LardLad00@reddit

Was that redesign the one that took boobies off the front page? I didn't quit using the site that day but in hindsight it was the beginning of the end.

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ChristopherRoberto@reddit

I don't remember the timeline for losing boobies, but here's one of the redesign posts from when it went live in 2007. Was a last straw for a lot of people.

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LardLad00@reddit

Looks like the boobies change happened the year before: https://www.fark.com/comments/2140570/Save-boobies!-We-moved-them-did-you-notice

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MikeyW1969@reddit

Nah, it's dying. It's no longer a place for debate and discussion. It's an echo chamber, nothing more. The site flip flops on issues if a Republican comes anywhere near supporting it, which is ironic, because during the Obama years, we joked (on Fark) that Republicans would stop breathing if Obama endorsed it.

In the last year, they've even started celebrating the deaths of people whose politics they don't know, finding the drowning death of Mitch McConnell'S sister on law to be "hilarious". They're pro censorship now. They seem to only care about body counts. And now, you have people openly advocating for armed revolution if Trump wins. Hypocrisy abounds at Fark now, it's toxic as hell, and ANY posy that isn't 100% in agreement with whatever they have decided is the right answer gets you blackballed as a Trumper. I mean, pointing out that openly advocating for another insurrection is not a good idea got me the label.

If you don't want an interview with the FBI, I'd recommend NOT going to Fark.

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FunkMastaUno@reddit

Well it's either that or hardcore Gen X and Boomer racists, that's the two sides on Fark. It's basically just the worst of older white men, on both sides of the aisle. Good riddance.

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ConcretePeniz@reddit

Friendly community? Fark is a shithole full of the worst people on the internet. Site needs to be nuked.

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OkStomach3965@reddit

I am so old that I believe Jelloboy insulted me. Also, -fb is the father

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ImpatientMaker@reddit

I won two photoshop contests there. Good times.

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toscaninidacron@reddit

Maybe somethingawful.com since we're suggesting web 1.0 sites? 10 bucks to join to keep the riffraff out but it was great fun back in the aughts, wonderful community with subforums that are somewhat reminiscent of the subreddit structure here on reddit.

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silgryphon@reddit

I loved fark, but then I found reddit to better and moved here

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magnora7@reddit

Cool site that I once loved, but the culture there has really drank the mainstream kool-aid when it comes to a lot of topics

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Freak80MC@reddit

Do people who seriously say stuff like "drank the mainstream kool-aid" not realize it's genuinely okay to be more mainstream in some or most of your opinions?

(I'll use a very non-controversial, or so I hope lol, example here)

It's like saying "Oh believing the Earth is round is too mainstream, I gotta believe it's flat now to go against the popular opinion!" Being contrarian for it's own sake is not cool or hip.

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Significant-Dot6627@reddit

It’s a dog whistle to find others who are Fox News, alt-right sites, etc. fans. When I first started hearing the term about seven-to-eight years ago, I was so confused. Many of these type or phrases make no sense logically.

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based_and_upvoted@reddit

Their comment smells like stealth rightoid

Opened their profile, four scrollwheel turns

Yep, stealth rightoid

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magnora7@reddit

It is a problem when the mainstream media is so far away from what is actually public opinion, that's what I'm actually referring to

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jhayes88@reddit

This is the mobile version of the site...

Case closed.

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Passenger536@reddit

Works fine on my end.

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TheJivvi@reddit

That BBC headline is interesting.

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PlutosGrasp@reddit

Still brutal

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jaymz668@reddit

Have you seen Reddit on mobile browser?

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SquirrelFull7224@reddit

It must be avoided at all costs. I have been using alien blue, then Apollo. Reddit mobile sucks which is why they’re committing suicide by killing 3rd party API access. I won’t be back when Apollo turns off.

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Qetuowryipzcbmxvn@reddit

The reason people are looking to leave Reddit is specifically because of how shit reddit's first party ux is and now they're trying to force us to use it.

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PlutosGrasp@reddit

No. Apollo only.

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yukichigai@reddit

It's also got this stupid popover for their Twitch stream that is super annoying.

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KimJongFunk@reddit

It looks like a website running on the first iphone lmao

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jhayes88@reddit

I mean.. I was using mobile Firefox. It should've worked. I double checked to make sure that it wasnt on desktop view and I refreshed to also be sure it rendered right.

Thats still awful lol.

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TTEH3@reddit

Doesn't work for me in mobile Chrome either.

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other_goblin@reddit

Looks better than any mobile site I've seen. Mobile sites are almost unusable in all cases lol. Desktop site is always better.

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SatisfactionFun69@reddit

Jokes on you, i like that style of UI. Maybe my eyes haven't gone to shit like some people.

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jaymz668@reddit

No it isn't https://imgur.com/RDqCMOo.jpg

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jhayes88@reddit

Judging by your screenshot, yes. Its still terrible.

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ecclectic@reddit

And there is no functional mobile app either, unfortunately.

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Metallkiller@reddit

Is the data model generally the same as Reddit? Maybe an existing Reddit app could be repurposed.

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ecclectic@reddit

There used to be an RSS feed, but I'm not sure anymore

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ImUrFrand@reddit

iirc RSS is depreciated at this point.

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jhayes88@reddit

Their site is farked

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slobonmacabre@reddit

😭😂

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OrangutanBeard@reddit

I think it's better to suggest FARK is an alternative to /r/news etc. than to Reddit itself.

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weirdplacetogoonfire@reddit

Yeah, it's more or less one big pot. Part of the formula that made Reddit work was the ease with which diverse topics can centralize communication via subreddits.

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whatproblems@reddit

also sun threads. fark comments are just one giant thread chain

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AhLibLibLib@reddit

What the fark

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Ok-Celebration-4405@reddit

Drew fucked up with ultrafark thats for sure.

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Dwedit@reddit

Fark is not comparable to reddit because submissions are approved by admins rather than upvoters alone.

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niomosy@reddit

It's one of the precursors to Reddit. Slashdot being another.

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NocturnalPermission@reddit

Loved FARK. Is “Florida” still a tag?

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RetroDad-IO@reddit

Yes, yes it is

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NocturnalPermission@reddit

Because, Florida?

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BeatlesTypeBeat@reddit

Yes

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MoS29@reddit

My wife actually met with the creators one day like 2 months back or something for work. I had never heard of it until she brought it up. She liked talking to them a lot.

"They were kind and fun and funny and good people."

Apparently they were pretty happy with their small little niche community. That was of course before things got crazy more recently with reddit so I wonder what they're thinking now.

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jhayes88@reddit

This is the mobile version of the site..

Case closed.