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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

#21
In a decade this essay will still be available on some web archive, but the author will be fully grown, and the zeitgeist that shaped his adolescence, which is already dying, will be as transparently foolish as is, to contemporary sensibilities, a 1970's punk rocker shouting 'The Beatles suck!'

It is true Reddit is a pile of garbage, but it was a worse pile of garbage when its community was posting kiddie porn and creating 'N-chain' comment threads.

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

#22

I cannot buy into a wholesale generalization that mods are power tripping people who deserve our contempt because they are lonely. 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 q…

Sounds like you haven't met any reddit mods. And no, web3 offers nothing except the ability to try and control your digital currency and make money off you.

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

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s not an echo chamber. It’s a meeting place for people who agree on the same things. That’s like calling a CNC machine forum an echo chamber.

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

#25

I have a different take: The main problem with reddit is in how badly it's bungled its several different redesigns over the last few years, and how it's slowly ruined its users' experience in misguided attempts to drive mobile traffic to its app. 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)…

No post body was provided.

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

#26

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.

That's another reason, indeed. I get that moderation is hard, but the way reddit handles it is awful. There are so many, potentially conflicting interests among reddit stakeholders, but the admins seem to be single-minded and narrow-minded. Recently, they closed "tumblr in action", which now has moved to another site, a reddit clone called saidit.net. However, don't even try to visit that site: it is a truly pestilent rat nest. The net effect is that the echo chamber becomes stronger for all sides. Great outcome for no reason at all. Well, there is a reason: reddit wants free moderators. Paying would lower their dreamt IPO value.

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

#27

It might not be possible to create a public forum in a way that it stays thoughtful and interesting even when it becomes popular. 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 p…

Almost half the population is below average in whatever way you wish to judge them and the bar for entry for most applications is as simple as clicking a button in an app store.

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

#28

People complaining about Reddit remind me of that quote from Bjarne Stroustrup about computer languages: “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” A lot of people use Reddit. I've been on since nearly the beginning and seen it go through various phases. They started getting serious about moderation after Gamergate and they're still serious about it since they wa…

I strongly agree with your comparison, I think it's apt. There's just no way to have a tolerably pleasant public-facing community online without some kind of moderation, and people have been railing about moderators in said communities for as long as those communities have existed. That doesn't mean moderation is an easy job, or that it shouldn't be done judiciously or consistently, but it can't be abandoned.

My first reaction when I heard Elon Musk was buying Twitter was "have he and his team figured out the moderation problem?" followed by "he probably hasn't given it much thought because if he did he would realize he doesn't need that headache on his way to Mars."

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

#29

I have a different take: The main problem with reddit is in how badly it's bungled its several different redesigns over the last few years, and how it's slowly ruined its users' experience in misguided attempts to drive mobile traffic to its app. 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)…

Just use a third-party app like RIF, and you'll get a fast, minimalist, customizable interface plus privacy.

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

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s not an echo chamber. It’s a meeting place for people who agree on the same things. That’s like calling a CNC machine forum an echo chamber.

And yet it used to be something very different.
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