Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 519 posts

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

#81

Post by Capricorn2481 »

foolfoolz wrote: post #70
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel anyone has improved upon what Reddit is doing? Or have you only found satisfaction in specific communities on specific sites? Are there non traditional communities like Tildetown that you enjoy?

tiktok provides better “communities” with more organic content. it know it sounds weird but you can get into areas of tiktok very similar to a subreddit. the lack of centralization like public karma, mods, sticky posts, etc actually helps

That's surprising to hear. I would've thought that'd be the last place I would look for community, but maybe I'll take a look

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

#82

Post by koshergweilo »

bojan wrote: post #10
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #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.

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.

Also ads. Specifically more data to better target ads.

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

#83

Post by czhu12 »

I'm curious what reddit even aspires to be at its greatest.

Most of the popular subreddit's comment sections have top rated comments being something totally predictable and sarcastic.

Right now the top post on r/news is [1]

Contrasted to the equivalent story on hackernews: [2]

There isn't anything remotely thought provoking in the top rated comments on reddit as there is on hackernews.

It seems to me this isn't due to censorship or corporate influence, but purely due to the fact that the reddit post has 100x more upvotes (and therefore more viewership) than the hackernews equivalent.

In the pockets of reddit that have a small but active community, I think it's easier to argue that the original essence and charm of reddit is still very much alive.

I'm skeptical that even without all the corrupting factors mentioned in this article, that reddit would ever be a place for the masses to engage healthy discourse and speech

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/vjpfbh/supreme_court_...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31862258

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

mjr00 wrote: post #18

As someone who was involved with many internet communities long before reddit, it sounds like the author is just experiencing the eternal September[0]. 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…

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by koshergweilo »

jotm wrote: post #63
dvh wrote: post #36

Reddit works fine for me. In R/W mode I use only /r/diypedals and /r/guitarpedals and for daily dose of doom and gloom in R/O mode I use /r/news and /r/worldnews. I access it only via RSS reader and it navigates me directly to compact version which loads instantly and works well on mobile.

I'd stay away from the latter two, like not even read it. I made a terrible life changing mistake by reading too much of these subreddits. It's user generated content, mostly by people who hate their lives, hate society and hate others, aided by the traditional media they link to. By the time I saw that reality is different and so much better than the doom I got on Reddit, it was too late.

> I made a terrible life changing mistake by reading too much of these subreddits.

I don't understand. How could you make a life-changing mistake by reading the news?

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

#86

Post by bryans »

The issues are so much worse than what is being described in this post. Reddit-appointed moderators are used as a protective layer for all of the company's shady, anti-social and sometimes straight up illegal behaviors. The perfect example of this is RPAN, their recently defunct streaming function, where a dozen subreddits were created by the company and populated with moderators, who then spent two years brazenly lying on behalf of the admins at every opportunity and constantly gaslighting the entire community.

They lied to advertisers by inflating viewership numbers 35x higher than reality. They sold their top broadcast mechanism to these advertisers, but repeatedly told the viewers that what they were witnessing was community-created content. The "algorithm" had a built-in caste system which was manually manipulated and curated by admins, while they directed mods to convince the community they don't even have the ability to manipulate the rankings. They even allowed the sexual proposition of minors to take place on a daily basis, while both mods and admins were fully aware of it -- never mind the reports, they were sometimes in the chat while it was happening. They permanently banned anyone who discussed any of these issues, without hesitation.

And this list is just the tip of the iceberg of Reddit's Black Mirror-esque methodologies. The moderators are extremely loyal to the admins, because there are significant perks involved, not least of which being that moderators have notably become a hiring pool. It's no coincidence that the mods who are the most willing to lie are the same people finding employment within the company.

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

#87

Post by NalNezumi »

I used reddit for the first time in 2020 and only because a researcher friend told me to ask a question about implementation details of a paper I read. It gave me a good answer and to my surprise had some relatively famous names in the research field in the subreddit.

That said, it also seemed to me like it's (maybe intentionally?) designed to promote bad faith communication[0]. Combine that with the Eternal September phenomenon it seems like an place of inevitable decay; whatever subreddit there is struggling against entropy.

I think I saw an add about "Reddit: the Frontpage of Internet" but I think a more apt catch phrase would be "doormat"; all the rude, dirty people stomp all over it to get to the internet house. The mattress is mud ridden and smells.

And the design of it is like a room without any windows with a broken AC making it humid, mold ridden and hot. And it was made right next to a Highschool and gives free entrance vouchers to the students. Some subreddits might try to carve out a space in the room, keeping it clean and everything but when most people coming in is bad faith and the room is so hopelessly inhospitable, it's just a matter of time.

[0] https://consilienceproject.org/endgames-of-bad-communication...

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

#88

Post by tux2bsd »

root_axis wrote: post #55

> What started as a bastion of independent thought, Reddit has slowly devolved into a den of groupthink, censorship, and corporate greed. This is revisionist romanticism. Reddit is just a collection of forums like the many hundreds of thousands that came before it, and continue to exist alongside it. Reddit is also so incredibly massive that making sweeping statements about its quality or composition is meaningless,…

No post body was provided.

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

#89

Post by Capricorn2481 »

unconed wrote: post #80
bawolff wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're basically just calling people names that have no commonly agreed definition. Something something about glass houses and stones.

Why would it not have a definition? Here's one. "Woke": an extreme form of contradictory progressivism popularized in the 2010s, which favors censorship and ostracization over intellectual engagement. The idea that you can't define it is an example of the dynamics at play. The notion that non-woke people know exactly what's going on is unbearable to the woke. It implies that they are not at all "changing the status q…

The point being that was a definition pulled out of your ass that not everyone shares, and then you got on a soap box of opinion-based nonsense that you "feel" is right. You are speaking from nowhere but an emotional place and trying to dress it up in pseudo-intellectual analyses of the state of the world, and it shows.

For some, the term Woke goes no farther than "they cast a black person in this movie."

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

#90

Post by thefz »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #73
coffeeblack wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My critique of Reddit isn’t so much about moderation per se, as it is about one-sided moderation. The ban of anything that opposes “the message”. It started around 2015/16 and it was very clearly visible in all subs.

They have only banned extreme political ideologies with vaguely violent leanings, and have done so for both sides of the spectrum

The problem with Reddit is that they banned unilaterally the right wing.
Post reply on HN