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For the content degradation, I find that creating an account, unsubscribing from all the default subreddits, and subscribing to niche subreddits works well. There are still plenty of great smaller communities within Reddit.
It was always weak as far as posts and activity in the larger subreddits etc due to the natural effects of huge numbers of random users. The quality of users has declined enormously because of memes and just general public use, but that's the way it is.
Reddit is not really that special, it had explosive user growth due to lack of options out there and ease of use for most to just engage and/or run small forum-like communities. It was almost dead! Back before some big missteps by other players made it get really lucky in user growth. A momentum boost from a fluke.
And that's where the value/real stuff is: the rest of it - all the countless smaller communities -- reddit is basically a forum system for them, and they with the help of dedicated mods etc, people that care about the connections and community, it works great. That's it. That's all it is.
old.reddit.com -- You're welcome.
> mostly useless answers
Any sufficiently popular platform degrades like this (including the entire internet itself).
> or it's just unavoidable to get this degradation after the userbase grows too much?
Pretty much. HN has pretty ferocious moderation, which is required unless you want every other response to be "sigh unzips." You see this in individual forums in general...once they grow past a certain size, the original intent is watered down, discussion suffers, etc etc.
That said, there are plenty of places on reddit that are still great.
But you're right, it's slower to load and generally slower to navigate, although opening and closing a post is a smidge faster for me in the new ui. I think Reddit got enough VC capital that it has to try to make a return on and they still haven't really come up with a great way to monetize the communities they host. So they're blowing money on engineering and probably seeing more users.
I'm not a product person, idk what the real answer is on what Reddit should have done. I agree I dislike a lot of what they added to it, but I'm just not a product person. I guess having steady growth and a reasonable amount of ad revenue just wasn't cutting it after a while.
You call it degradation, Reddit calls it "explosive growth". The UX redesign was hugely successful in attracting new users, users who could then be monetized. The "useless answers" are wildly popular responses because people generally prefer to meme, not solve problems. Your complaint essentially boils down to, "Why do people not behave how I want them to?" and that, my friend, is a question as old as time itself. Fr…
Mobile users fundamentally engage with the platform in different ways. For one, they form a different demographic segment than older users, and secondly the mobile app frames and filters content in uniquely mobile ways. High-signal content is much more difficult to craft on a mobile device so more mobile use represents a greater proportion of content noise.
Early adopters seek high-signal over content quantity and will move platforms if the opportunity arises. Such a migration will play into future case studies critiquing Reddits MAU-chasing at the expense of hollowing out their long-time user base.
"Both sides" fallacies, typically having a political meaning, are naturally going to get exploited on social media sites where both sides upvote the poorly baked, emotionally charged fallacies.
It is alarming to me as a statnerd that the NBA and NFL communities seem to be getting dumber as time goes on, not smarter, but I'm not positive this is a Reddit problem (but possibly, due to how mainstream it is now).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What products would this be in reddits case? I don't see what subreddits that show up on /r/all are secretly advertising.. The better explanation using Occams Razor is that optimizing for engagement metrics means that low-quality, broadly appealing shallow content simply is more popular
Low-quality, broadly appealing shallow content also drives away anybody interested in putting in effort
Also, anyone interested in putting in effort should unsubscribe from any sub that shows up on /r/all and find smaller communities; that's where the real value proposition of reddit lies.