Ask HN: Is Reddit Becoming Dumber?

I think it's regression to the mean. When reddit was relatively small it was possible for them to have a group that was, on some dimensions, above average. As reddit becomes larger and larger those dimensions return to the population mean. That feels like, and is, a decline in quality.

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.

I think there’s a few newer factors at play over the last year or two in addition to the usual problems (anecdotal of course).

* 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've been reading all of your comments and there's one theme I think we're neglecting to discuss, engagement is down too. Because of it's growing popularity and the limited amount of screen real estate, the ranking algorithm has to be a lot more discriminatory. This ends up meaning that any given user posts mostly low performing posts which discourages quality. It's like YouTube, soon "redditors" will be equivalent to "YouTubers".. or maybe "tiktokers"?