31–40 of 60 posts
I think it has gotten worse lately. Lower quality comments and discussion, rehased jokes, unfunny attempts to troll or be edgy
I have a feeling the entire internet became dumber. I miss the early 2000s days when it was still considered somewhat nerdy.
That may be because back in the 90s it took some skill to get online and participate in any way with others. I definitely miss the way people would freely help further technical facets as new technologies came about.
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.
I think so, yes. Even in niche subreddits (arch linux, say) if you ask a question, you'll only get stock answers, as if the other person had done a quick web search, picked the top result from google, and pasted it in.
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.
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).
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 moderato…
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 have a feeling the entire internet became dumber. I miss the early 2000s days when it was still considered somewhat nerdy.
Average computer illiteracy across the entire internet population is down. I never got to experience the era of bulletin services, RSS feeds, emailing your friends, IRC. Where's the tech bro internet? Where's the cool internet with the learning curve? Where am I??
Everything is politics now, every single sub. No exception. That's my biggest problem. And no it wasn't always like this
What are you talking about? No, not every sub is politics, what do you mean?
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