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The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

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Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#2
Its not just awful mods, its awful paid admins. It was a step in the right direction to ban hate speech. The people they hired have decided that being mean to racists is “hate speech”, while ignoring actual hate speech and letting racist spaces thrive. This is not what people meant when they asked reddit to do something about hate speech.

Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#3
It's honestly astonishing to see how poorly the leadership team at Reddit has been executing. People shit on Twitter (Zuck called Twitter "a clown car that fell into a gold mine") but Reddit is so much worse.

The fact that Reddit didn't have a decent mobile app until a few years ago is unbelievable. Indie-developers were shipping a better reddit mobile apps than the company.

Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#5

It's honestly astonishing to see how poorly the leadership team at Reddit has been executing. People shit on Twitter (Zuck called Twitter "a clown car that fell into a gold mine") but Reddit is so much worse. The fact that Reddit didn't have a decent mobile app until a few years ago is unbelievable. Indie-developers were shipping a better reddit mobile apps than the company.

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Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#8

Quoted post unavailable.

He's obviously not referring those subreddits. If you read the piece he's talking about subs like r/news, r/politics, r/worldnews, etc.

If you don't think r/politics is an echochamber then I don't know what to tell you.

r/fatFIRE was a great subreddit I used to visit frequently but it grew very quickly over the past few months and the mods haven't scaled accordingly. The moderation has gotten really, really bad over the past few months and the sub is now just filled with dumb posts like "what handbag do rich people buy"? It used to be far more technical, interesting discussions around real estate investing, taxes, etc.

Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#9
I hate how many online communities have centralized themselves around reddit and discord. I'm involved a lot of communities and fandoms where everybody congregates on those two platforms, and those two platforms alone. Things were a lot better in the 00s when these sorts of communities existed primarily on webforums.

That said, I'm not sure how many of the problems are problems with reddit itself vs how many of the problems would still exist on other platforms even if reddit didn't. Forum moderators have always had a reputation for being napoleonic idiots who abuse their power for extremely petty purposes. The problem of corporations and wealthy celebrities buying out moderators and admins to push their narratives and silence criticisms of their products[1] could easily have happened on webforums.

There's an unfortunate drive towards centralization in online communities these days that we'd all be better without. I personally think fediverse is the best solution to this as it centralizes communities without centralizing the actual platform, but I'm not so confident it will succeed when it's up against well-funded and well-established platforms like facebook, reddit, etc.

[1] i don't have any real proof there's a monetary interest involved, but I'm perma-banned from /r/startrek for saying that the creators behind "Star Trek: Picard" and "Star Trek Discovery" probably aren't even fans of Star Trek based on the shows' many discontinuities with their predecessors, and it makes me wonder if the mods are on paramount's payroll or something. This should not be a controversial statement after how terrible the most recent season of Picard was.

Re: The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos

#10

It's honestly astonishing to see how poorly the leadership team at Reddit has been executing. People shit on Twitter (Zuck called Twitter "a clown car that fell into a gold mine") but Reddit is so much worse. The fact that Reddit didn't have a decent mobile app until a few years ago is unbelievable. Indie-developers were shipping a better reddit mobile apps than the company.

Why would they need their own app when they have good APIs and enough people to create perfectly good third-party apps for them?

The only reason I can see is monetization, with your own app you can control the user engagement better.

I specifically don't use their app because I explicitly don't want all the fluff features they've added over the years. That's also why I still use old.reddit.com.

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