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

Right now, here's the process for browsing a subreddit on mobile without the (ads and tracking loaded) reddit app:

1. Navigate to subreddit. Find out which of two (non-NSFW) or three (NSFW) "experiences" reddit decides to give me on mobile.

2. Depending on experience, jump through hoops including random "get the app!" prompts, failures to load content, failures to load nested comments, and outright refusal to display all the content in a thread unless I install the app.

3. If on an NSFW subreddit, and on about 50% of "unapproved" non-NSFW subreddits: Be blocked from viewing any additional content by an unremovable prompt. (Often, content loads in before the prompt, so you enjoy about 30 seconds of looking at your content before it's blocked.)

4. Give up, and go to old.reddit.com, which is ugly and not designed for mobile, but at least works okay.

Desktop isn't much better, but I have long had browser extensions installed that redirect everything to old.reddit.com on most of my browsers, so it becomes less of an issue.

If reddit took away my ability to use old.reddit.com, I'd probably stop browsing the site within weeks.

There’s all kinds of motivations for being a mod. I rarely find a sub where mods aren’t dealing with far more BS than they are putting out.

If I don’t agree with how mods handle a channel, I leave.

I think it’s important that we question the usefulness of blaming society for the lack of quality in “default” content. Yes, you’re funneled into these channels. Yes, Reddit is seeking to get people to consume them. Yes, the interest of advertisers override all others. Yes, Reddit constantly inserts unwanted subs into my feed.

Yet Reddit is still a place I can curate to the subs that align with my interests & values. it’s not dead yet.

I don’t expect any social media platform to give me the defaults I want. I’ve accepted that I can take responsibility for the content I consume.

What I’d like is to build tools that enable people to more easily filter for that content. I believe we need stronger filtering tools, not weaker.

This is where I do wholeheartedly agree with author - the loss of Aaron and RSS feeds was the end of the cyberpunk movement in the browser based web.

I don’t know if web3 genuinely offers a second chance, but I do know that I will continue to want the ability to learn from thoughtful people of all walks of life. That requires the ability to filter out everything else. At this point, I’d rather select keywords to filter than to surface & happily pay for the privilege.

I’m so tired of being spoon fed the empty calories of outrage.

The first problem is that thoughtful and interesting content rarely attracts many readers.

The second is that if many readers show up, the discussion quality is going down. So there would need to be strong centralized censorship to downvote the low quality posts and prevent accounts that play the populism game to gain traction.

Pretty much since the day I found out about reddit in... 2008-ish?, everyone in the online communities I knew thought it was filled with awful pseudointellectual teenagers and college students, that the upvote/downvote system was horrible and encouraged people to post low-effort content, the moderators were overzealous and clueless, and in general there was no sense of community due to the size of the site + lack of individual identifiers beyond usernames, like avatars and signatures from a typical internet forum of the day. Basically, reddit is just as bad today as it was a decade ago.

But I'm sure for people who had their first internet-social experiences on reddit, they remember it a lot more fondly.

I will concede that objectively speaking, "new Reddit" is an abject failure (and the fact that old.reddit.com continues to exist is a testament to the such) and that it's much more heavily astroturfed by major corporations now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September