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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

Even Reddit subs for niche interests can suck now, precisely because of Instagram culture. I follow some subs for certain outdoor hobbies, and while in the past we would discuss gear or the specifics of various routes, now all most people want to do is post selfies in impressive locations. Reddit has killed off many of the old forum websites, so it is not as if one can just go back to those to get substantive conversation. Indeed, substantive conversation seems to be dying out overall, because just posting selfies gets one more social appreciation.

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While it's not really a "niche" interest, the travel subreddit is a particularly prime example of this. ~6-7 years ago, I remember that subreddit had a substantive amount of text posts that were mostly about suggesting trip itineraries, destinations, travel tips, travel stories, etc. Now, I just opened it up and every single one of the top 20 posts is an Instagram-style photo post.

The comments aren't any better. In the past, I remember that even on photo posts, there would be substantive comments discussing the destination pictured in the photo. Now it seems its mostly unsubstantive "oh wow so beautiful", "what a wonderland", "wish I could go there", etc. There are some exceptions, but they're rarer.

I really wish there was a good solution to this, or at least a place to go to avoid the "instagram culture". Unfortunately, as you mentioned, all of the non-"instagram culture" sites have been mostly pushed out by monoliths like reddit. And as for solving it, it seems that most of society is still not convinced that "instagram culture" is a bad thing that needs to be solved in the first place.

edit: I just opened up the "top posts of all time" page on that subreddit, and of the 600 posts I scrolled through, 599 were photo posts that were submitted within the past year (there are probably even more, but I just stopped scrolling at 600). The lone non-photo post was asking for help finding a missing person. Every other previous text post (even the megathreads giving advice for popular destinations, which used to be a huge part of r/travel) have been drowned out by the "Instagram culture" posts.

FWIW, the /r/travel rules explicitly ban "clickbait, spam, memes, ads, brochures, surveys, vlogs, blogs or other self-promotion". So I can't post a link to my travel blog, even if it happens to have in-depth content that I think others would find interesting, but I can post visually arresting photos.

Those rules don't ban text posts, which is what I was talking about. Having meaningful discussions about travel without promoting a travel blog or ogling over a photoshopped picture from a designated "instagram photo spot" is possible, and used to be commonplace on r/travel, but just isn't anymore.

Check out my company's travel forum for text content http://www.city-data.com/forum/ but if I'm to be honest, the most travel content is on TripAdvisor forums. Reddit doesn't compare here, it's basically random, not curated, Instagram travel photos.

>I really wish there was a good solution to this, or at least a place to go to avoid the "instagram culture".

4chan travel board /trv/ has very little instagram-like content - it has other issues though.

Please let me know if you have any ideas for reversing this.

I help moderate a mid-size subreddit (100,000-500,000 subscribers) and we're completely overrun by low quality content.

We tried adding new rules, silently removing/banning offending users, and making repeat announcements, but it seems like it's too little too late. A rehashed joke post can easily receive 100+ points in an hour while a good post may receive, at most, 20 points in the same time.

Don't allow photos or video.

Let's ask Reddit to allow moderators to manually change the algorithm and apply different rules for jokes/ images/ self. i.e. in order to rank, a joke would need 5x as many up votes than an original content/ discussion/ post.

No photos, no video, no memes.

The problem with reddit is putting together a deep thoughtful piece is worthless because it will be yesterday's news and confined to obscurity in a matter of hours. This didn't happen on forums where the topic got bumped every time there was a reply.

It’s seems like that issue could be solved by tweaking the ranking algorithm to prefer recent comments/activity.

I miss old school forums. I've been visiting my old haunts and they're all deserted now. Reddit has eaten them all and the internet has become poorer as a result

On another mid size sub we decided to take a hard line: Text posts only, automod flags on image links, banning people who break the rules.

It changed the sub significantly. Some people liked the more serious tone, some people felt like the fun had been sucked out. At the end of the day, you can't please everyone.

Making the barrier to post low-quality content slightly higher will always help. For instance banning direct link posts and only allowing self posts.

This is just an idea but ...

Don't make voting visible and don't show people their points. You still need voting so popular topics bubble to the top. You still maybe need user points so users who post bad content get bad scores? (maybe you don't need this).

What you don't need is for any of it to be visible. User's seeing their points go up is a gamification technique that pushes their (and my) button. "Oh! I just got 150pts!" feels so good so I'm compelled to try to get more points.

I notice my point total here on HN. Every time I see it go up I'm conscious of a little pleasure bump I get "oh, some people agreed with me or thought my post was useful!". I've thought about writing a browser extension to hide it from myself. Mostly the only thing I want to know is if I got replies.

Limit the number of subscribers to 50K or so. Only let new ones in when old ones churn. Remove the ability to post images.

I've experienced the same things with the same communities. The forums for the outdoor/backpacking community seem to have seen a dramatic slow down in the last few years (I run a used backpacking gear 'for sale' post aggregator and have seen a decline in # of posts over the years - with reddit/subreddits being the only venue that's growing) and the subreddits seem to be 'growing' but their post quality (obviously, this is my opinion and it's not necessarily shared with everyone involved) is suffering greatly.

Yeah, there's a reason HN is text only. The medium dictates the message. If a medium has images, then that medium becomes dominated by images because images are much more captivating that text.

I think we're seeing a dramatic slowdown in the people actually participating as well. I'm seeing club participation down for a lot of activities.

I've noticed this as well. Even activities which are widely popular eg, Football, American Football are apparently struggling. The niche sport that I do isn't doing too badly, but the clubs aren't attracting new members and many of the new participants aren't staying in the sport long term.

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