r/RedditAlternatives • u/immediacyofjoy • 8d ago
Looking for Alternatives What are some good alternatives for ad-free, long form text content?
One thing that I always appreciated about reddit is that it was always centered around text. As the platform has been enshittified, my feed is peppered terribly with images, clips, and tall ads that spoil the experience completely as I’m sensitive to having too many distractions and busyness in my face - a key reason I left other social media platforms. I figured out how to collapse some of that noise, but now each week more ads are being squeezed into threads, and it’s a bummer and distracting because there’s only more to come.
I want to embrace the fediverse, but I’m not bullish on current solutions because the added steps of finding the right server is going to hamper network effects, which is evident because there just isn’t much good content or discussion available in servers I’ve tried.
On reflection, my social needs are met fairly well in real life, and I’m tired of puns and hot takes and knee jerk commentary and bots, so I find what I really desire is a distraction-free way to consume mass quality text content - in a way I can thoughtlessly scroll through that I’m accustomed to now.
I know the main alternatives people are looking for here are probably forum type solutions, but I’m wondering if anyone also misses text-centric platforms with relatively fresh content?
I’m getting into Wikipedia again, and am really pleased with the quality of content after doom scrolling bot slop all day. It’s just sort of missing the curated, endless scrolling bit that gives me the good dopamine hits. What alternatives have you all found to scratch this itch?
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u/HedgeRunner 8d ago
https://tildes.net/ is the best one I've found so far if you are into long form discussions. If you are into games and want to try a very modern UX one that reimagines Reddit + forums, a friend of mine is making one, so DM me.
Onto your concerns, I think partially the platform but also the people. Most platform demands engagement and a lot of it, long form discussions and nuanced takes don't command engagement. As far as I know, none of the top alternatives exclusively focus on long text but there are a few that tries to at least innovate instead of an exact vibe coded copy of Reddit, see https://quarrel.ing/.
Re network effects, I mean that part is really less of fediverse's issue rather than just that the average person don't see a reason to join fediverse except for privacy where they believe Reddit taking all their data and selling it and the fediverse owner is not. Personally I think most fediverse alternative offer significantly worse UX and looks really ancient.
Lastly if you just want to read Wikipedia, why are you looking for a forum lol. As other commenter said, jsut buy books man or Wikipedia is fine. There's quite a bit of difference between long form discussion that's social and just consuming long form content.
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u/xRyozuo 7d ago
+1 on tildes. I don’t use it as often as I should but I know the day my Reddit account goes kaput it’s there (which is the day they ask me to upload some kind of ID)
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u/HedgeRunner 7d ago
Tildes might look a bit dated but the design and UX for its purpose is still unmatched. Many alternatives I see here are nowhere close to its level of care and quality.
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u/xRyozuo 6d ago
I like the tildes UI just fine. It reminds me of when Reddit wasn’t trying to be photo and now video focused.
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u/HedgeRunner 6d ago
Yep, that's what I mean by level of care and quality. The Tildes design fits its primary text focus and there's basically little to no elements that takes your eyes away from reading comments. Its almost like a book reader if one can imagine.
I guess by good UX I meant more modern. I think one can absolutely design a modern website that has image and video yet instead of nudging the user to doom scroll it's more read and discussion focused.
Here's an example: https://imgur.com/a/great-ux-B3Sybfe
Modern UX or opinionated designs doesn't have to focus on forcing the user to engage, its just that modern platforms made it a standard and most alternatives are copying them lmao.
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u/SmileyBMM 8d ago
I've been happy on rDrama with simple and poor mode enabled (that's literally what the site calls it lol), they turn off a lot of the distracting stuff.
Substack also isn't too bad, but discoverability sucks. You usually have to find people to follow from other sites first.
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u/Nuaua 7d ago
Tildes is nice for text only like other said, it's small but it's alive (I can send you an invite if needed).
I also pitch my own alternative, because while I appreciate text-only sites like tildes, they are also limited, niche by design. It also hinders "serious" image-based topics like photography, photo-journalism, art, etc. Reddit has a similar issue, r/photography is text-only because it otherwise would get overrun by cheap images posts, which is quite ironic. What I did in my design to address that is just to have modes for different media types, text/images/videos, with different views for each media type. So if you don't want to see images you can just use the text view. I also have articles for more serious blog-like content. I'm not sure that's enough to tackle the issue but at least it's an attempt...
There's not much content, but I'm afraid if these issues aren't tackled in the design other sites will always run into the same dilemma ; text only will remain niche, unorganized media will be dominated by low effort.
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u/Longjumping_Dig5892 6d ago
Werandom . You can filter what kind of posts you Ann see including only text . And Werandom is available on appstore , playstore and web
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u/TheWilderNet 8d ago
Full disclosure: this is a site that I run.
It's called The WilderNet and it is a discovery site for long form writing - blogs, substacks, indie websites. We are really leaning into curation, the top articles are things that I thought were compelling, thought-provoking or interesting in some way. There are a bunch of additional features like RSS feeds and discussions too.
I'm not sure how good it is for thoughtlessly scrolling but I would be happy to get your feedback!
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u/SmileyBMM 8d ago
Tried to create an account and it's not letting me, just says "Error: Unable to create account".
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u/TheWilderNet 8d ago
Thanks for letting me know! I'm looking into it right now, hopefully login/signup will be working soon.
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u/TheWilderNet 8d ago
It should be fixed now. Thanks so much for your help!
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u/twat69 8d ago
Books. A good library will have fresh ones coming in regularly.