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Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

arstechnica.com

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Re: Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

#51

Post by markx2 »

drivers99 wrote: post #10
mcphage wrote: post #4

Reddit has gotten very aggressive about pushing random subs onto you. I’ve really come to loathe the phrase “Because you interacted with a similar community”. I have muted so many subs, I’m getting sick of the site.

Must be an app thing. I use https://old.reddit.com and don’t get that.

Agreed.

I use old.reddit.com + umatrix + ublock + custom css with tampermonkey

I now see nothing they want me to see.

I am very happy to leech.

Said as a previous mod who helped grow a sub from <25k users to almost 1 million.

Re: Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

#52

Post by CharlieDigital »

haunter wrote: post #43

I haven't noticed anything. I follow some video game and hobby subs through RSS. Everything is pretty much the same.

Definitely a shift towards our base instincts.

Several subs started showing up in r/popular that never did before or as suggested subs.

All along the lines of r/truerateme, r/facerating, r/rateme, r/amiugly, r/OUTFITS, etc. Never recall seeing these before the mod protests but suddenly see them all the time. All very similar in concept: attractive women posting pictures "asking for feedback".

Similar to when you first sign up for TikTok or IG before you start to follow people, the content is mildly sexual in nature.

Several decidedly more right wing subs are being "suggested" to me. One that sticks out is r/canada_sub but there have been others that have a decidedly right lean. (I'm not Canadian)

Several subs that used to show up in r/popular before no longer do or the do so with reduced frequency. r/news, r/worldnews, r/politics. In fact, when the Trump indictment was announced, it was nowhere to be seen on r/popular for several hours while it was the top topic on Lemmy and Mastodon.

I'm not keeping stats on this; just seat of the pants I've noticed a subtle shift in the content.

Re: Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

#53

Post by drukenemo »

everdrive wrote: post #27
halicarnassus wrote: post #2

Did anybody expect Reddit to become a better place after all what happened a couple of weeks ago? I was never a big Reddit user, but I'm sure as hell not going to be one in the future.

I agree with your sentiment, but I do wonder what could replace reddit. It's true that the larger subreddits have been pretty terrible for years. However, reddit has often been the _only_ good source for useful and true user-sourced information. What vacuum should I buy? How can I get some old PS2 game to run on my steam deck? Can I disable the telematics system on a Toyota Tacoma? etc. It's easy to see this sort of…

I completely agree and it often baffles me the lack of nuance I see here on HN. “Reddit became crap”. No it didn’t. Maybe it’s less appealing and valuable than in the past, but it certainly still is a goldmine in more niche subreddits. Or simply to have a laugh at r/funny.

Re: Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

#54

Post by cimov »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #28
mcphage wrote: post #4

Reddit has gotten very aggressive about pushing random subs onto you. I’ve really come to loathe the phrase “Because you interacted with a similar community”. I have muted so many subs, I’m getting sick of the site.

I use old.reddit, with ublock origin not just to block ads but to block specific reddit buttons or things they try to introduce, and with res I have my regular subs I visit added as shortcuts in a top bar. I never see anything I don't want to, and it's very useable this way. I literally never just see the 'reddit homepage', it's always a sub I specifically want to see.

Similar here but without any custom blocking. Could you share your filters and which interface elements they target?

Re: Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

#55

Post by z500 »

jiofj wrote: post #37
mschuster91 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Reddit's own features for moderators are abysmal . I don't know what Reddit's 2.000 employees are doing all day, but people have lamented that for years now without much significant change - and then Reddit just shut down the public API, which made moderation work muuuch more difficult.

If they don't want to moderate for whatever reason (including shortcomings in the moderation tools) that's ok - I also don't want to moderate. What you can't do is close the community. If you care about it it makes more sense to have the usual spam here and there than to completely block every discussion. That's low and petty.

Reddit already closes unmoderated subs specifically so they won't fill up with spam, so what's the difference?

Re: Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

#57

Post by cimov »

TMWNN wrote: post #16

[flagged]

> The Challenor mess should never have happened, but at least the person was fired by Reddit.

I'm amazed he was hired in the first place, they must not have bothered to do any background checks at all.

I think it revealed a lot ideologically about how Reddit operates, in particular this likely explains some of the more controversial subreddit bans in recent years.

Re: Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

#58

Post by cimov »

nickpeterson wrote: post #9

Sort of a side question, but what is the state of the art in open source community hosting? I know a bit about tools like Zulip, but was thinking something more like forums. They feel very dated, which surprises me since Reddit seems a straightforward thing to compete against.

[dead]

Re: Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

#59

Post by cimov »

Devasta wrote: post #47
mythhabit wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened "a couple of weeks ago"?

Reddit started charging huge money for API access. Thing is, reddits leadership are wildly incompetent and those APIs were relied upon by the mods to actually handle the vast oceans of posts that go on each day. Its left the mods with greatly increased workload as they now need to use the crappy tools Reddit gives them, and for some communities like the folks on /r/blind the site is totally unusable. Most subreddits…

Perhaps that's a good thing in some ways. The communities with only a very light-touch moderation to get rid of spam are often the most enjoyable, where you can speak relatively freely without the looming threat of some overbearing mod censoring and banning you because they don't like your opinion.

Re: Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

#60

Post by sentientslug »

Devasta wrote: post #47
mythhabit wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened "a couple of weeks ago"?

Reddit started charging huge money for API access. Thing is, reddits leadership are wildly incompetent and those APIs were relied upon by the mods to actually handle the vast oceans of posts that go on each day. Its left the mods with greatly increased workload as they now need to use the crappy tools Reddit gives them, and for some communities like the folks on /r/blind the site is totally unusable. Most subreddits…

API access is still free for moderation and accessibility tools. It’s just third party clients with high API usage that were effectively killed with the pricing change.
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