As the years pass and I pick up new niche interests, my instinct is to turn to Reddit to find like minded individuals, but more and more increasingly I find that misinformed and poorly researched content is becoming the default and taking over the more quality content.
Is this everyone else's experience with Reddit lately as well or I'm just becoming more of an asshole as I age? Genuinely curious what others think.
Reddit has an inherent problem in that the only people who are moderators are the people with the time and inclination to be moderators. These people tend, to borrow the previous language, to be below average in certain dimensions.
Reddit naturally incentives low effort content. A thoughtful essay that takes thirty minutes to read will fall off the new or hot pages simply because the people who see and read it are still busy reading as the submission decays. A funny meme that can be consumed at a glance will get quick upvotes and enter a positive feedback loop where more people see it, more votes, more people see it, etc.
Finally, reddit's developers seem to have no idea what they are trying to do. I mean "developers" in a broad sense encompassing the entire company developing the product. They reproduce useless and obnoxious features, clutter their UI, degrade the core user experience and so on - chasing engagement metrics. Perhaps these, um, improvements, appeal to a certain audience, but my intuition is that audience repels a different sort of audience.
In short, I do think reddit has gone downhill and is accelerating. My account there is 12 years old but I stopped using it regularly 4 or 5 years ago.
This is true, and applies to pretty much the entire web at this point. Back when it was people blogging, and getting replies on other blogs, there was time to sit and ponder, and edit things, even after posting them, before they were read.
We all want that feedback to know we've been heard, and our time spent writing and editing wasn't a total waste. The walled gardens optimized on filling that void, and turned it up to 11. They did it via algorithm and structure of computer mediated spaces, all optimized by corporations that MUST seek profit, by law.
I'm thankful every day for Dang, and this little peaceful contemplative space. I try... not always successfully, to accept when I've disturbed the peace and gotten the odd downvote by the community here.
People often say that HN is as good as it because of dang. So perhaps there's a lot of correlation between community quality and moderator quality, and how good moderators don't just happen... you have to filter and hire them to some extent.
I definitely miss the way people would freely help further technical facets as new technologies came about.
Where's the tech bro internet? Where's the cool internet with the learning curve? Where am I??
(not even sure if this is the right code, which illustrates my point I guess)
Upvote/downvote wars are also ugly.
(And it's not just reddit; I used to enjoy ars technica before its comment section degenerated into flame and downvote wars.)
HN is one of the few exceptions where touching one of these electric rails even in passing doesn't seem to destroy everything good, but it still isn't immune to upvote/downvote wars.
I think both sites have groupthink dynamics to a point that isn’t pretty, HN markedly less so but it’s still present. This is likely a byproduct of downvoting having such an outsized effect on comment visibility.
"but there is currently very little activity there for some of my interests."
my interest is mostly media and even before this past week it feels like every subs got polarized over the years. Anime subs drawing lines over what kinds of characters and genres you can talk about, gaming subs banning discussion of certain games over staff politics of a multi-thousand employee company, art subs devolving into arguments over nude figures (art subs, where you submit typical artistic exercises and expressions which include figure drawing). And you can make an entire essay about how r/movies has shifted over COVID.
They come from a good place, but they do not at all come from a realistic or reasonable one. And some are just outright toxic. Maybe if I could stick to something super niche like woodworking I'd be fine, but man has media as a whole just gone into overdrive where everything is political.
Local subs are extremely political. I quit bothering as every post is about something the governor did that literally doesn't affect the city or anyone in it.
The problem isn't their message or political stance, it's more than they usually bring absolutely nothing to the table and absolutely no one asked for political theory classes from the internet equivalent of an unpaid internet janitor/average random subreddit user.
It used to be mostly confined to the default subs but i guess reddit grew so much (and with most of the new users using the default subs first) that the end result was inevitable
Places where you see everyone rally around comments like "save that for r/politics. this is where we come to talk about how much the EAGLES suck, not the president."
When someone eventually makes an account and delves into the more niche subreddits, that's the culture that they're expecting and as more do it, it starts to change the culture of the niche subreddits as well.
Ironically the secret to reddit's success was that it was just left alone with very few changes for so long. The front page was already a dumpster fire at that stage, but a dumpster fire mostly contained to the top 20 subreddits. Now that it's more clever about pulling in posts from more niche subreddits that are doing well, or based on geolocation, it pulls people into the subreddits more which accelerates the Eternal September effect.
Well..
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/
:)
It's actually what brought me to HN.
There are still some subreddits that are worth reading though. The trick is to focus on subjects that aren't interesting to people who are poorly educated or under the age of 25 (e.g., programming languages that are rarely used by junior programmers and, preferably, rarely used in industry).
It's too bad that sometimes I just wanna have a semi-coherent talk about a game or movie or tv show and that just doesn't happen on Reddit anymore. Either it's an inactive sub and you get 0-1 responses to a prompt, or it's a very active sub and suddenly you're being accused of being a shill or a troll or sockpuppet or any other kind of false flag because you dare have an opinion.
People blame it on Eternal September, but it's really handing a new site, barely resembling the old site, to Eternal September and banning the old site.
What reddit is trying to do is to build an entirely new business with new customers, while retconning the brand that it built while becoming a household name. It's rational; there's no reason why reddit should be valued any higher than a 4chan, and they're looking for one.
Part ways better PR (4chan rarely had "ban waves", and by design of the site and the community it's harder to make those stick). Part ways different focus; Reddit focused on regurgitating content, not the community. That came a few years later. Curation is always a valuable asset on the internet and the voting mechanic worked well enough in the beginning to curate pretty much any given topic.
Once that was set in stone, it was a seemless shift to target their growing audience with all kinds of ads and other engagement. 4chan remained more or less the same (focusing on image macros and community) while Reddit pursued to pretend to be facebook with it's newer features. The question that remains is will there be enough creators to keep the site in tow once the frustrated "old guard" inevitably leaves.
It's time to move on and look back at your decade of use and ask what you really missed out in terms of community involvement and how the web has changed. Forums are dead. :(
I just wanted to enjoy some media puns without devolving into some banter of pedantry, political escalations out of nowhere (I like show -> I support [bad thing in one moment of one episode of show] and I am a bad person for it. What?), or well, no response at all because it seems there's little/no response on older forums.
Really does suck. Reddit isn't really for discussions anymore, and most media stuff I can find seems to have moved towards discord servers, which is horrible for long form discussion. I like the concept of nested discussion so I can just minimize that moment when two people argue for 50 comments, but I miss pretty much everything else about the old gamefaqs days, for instance. People can still be pricks but it didn't seem like the entire thread of EVERY post was being prickly.
The quality of submissions is also abysmal—for every interesting or thoughtful post I see, there are dozens of really basic troubleshooting questions. And I mean really basic stuff. You can only give thoughtful answers to "how do I connect to WiFi/install GPU drivers?" for so long. At some point you start copy/pasting links or just ignoring those threads.
In my experience even the most niche online communities begin to seem “dumb” after you’ve spent significant time on them, as the once-novel information gets rehashed endlessly.
The real question is not whether Reddit is rotting, but of where to go after it?
* Unless incredibly niche, subreddits reach that poor quality threshold so fast now.
* Marketing firms have learned how to use reddit with a huge amount of thinly veiled advertising, SEO Spam, Karma farming and bot presence.
* Discord, slack hacker news etc. seem to have eaten away at some topics, programming community engagement for example feels like it’s dropped off a cliff.
I think it has gotten worse lately. Lower quality comments and discussion, rehased jokes, unfunny attempts to troll or be edgy
AnimalMuppet's Law: "Bad users drive out good". (Within an online community.)
I don't think it's gotten any worse. It's just part of the make up of the community. It's DNA.
Sad to say, like all Empires do, all social media websites are born, grow in prestige and then decline away into garbage. Look at enough social media websites and you will be able to find them at all stages of the progression spectrum.
Starting in January I was spending a lot of time on the internet for personal reasons and the transition in March was very clear to me.
I think this is becoming the default for the internet/society in general. Rather than it being a Reddit problem, it’s simply manifesting on Reddit, as it is most other popular websites.
IMO reddit reached peak dumb a few years back and has floated there since. I'd imagine this is its final resting place.
