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Comment by fc373745 | Hacker News Reader

There is a phenomenon when older and older groups enter a social platform, the quality of that platform deteriorates for the younger generation, and perhaps maybe even overall. We saw this with facebook, We saw this with twitter, and we're now seeing this with Reddit.

(yes, there is twitter outside of tech, and it's content quality is extremely poor and juvenile)

Reddit, at one point, was just science, memes, an occasional atheist post, and and A list Celebrity AMA every other day - a platform that provided niche content mostly for age 18-30 year old Americans.

Now with the flood of all sorts of ideas from all fronts, It has become way too overwhelming to really digest what everyone has to offer - Diving deep into reddit will eventually and inevitably get anyone upset and bothered.

As Reddit builds its foundation upon favoring ad populum, it is starting to become evident that not every voice should be heard, especially when the average american individual is as uneducated as he or she is.

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

― Isaac Asimov

I'd like to one up Asimov - that it is not a false notion, but literally the core tenet of what democracy is.

That all opinions are of equal value.

And in all honesty... this is dangerous.

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I've been using Reddit since 2009 (after the Digg exodus for ironically - a bad redesign.), and the biggest change I've noticed (aside from the terrible single page app they switched over to) is how massively popular schadenfreude content is now. Subreddits like "Justice Served" and "Public Freakout", "Malicious Compliance" "Entitled Parents", the list goes on and on.

It's all "This person/people/group did something bad and now are getting their comeuppance." and the site has become like a nerdy version of World Star Hip Hop.

You really can't browse the regular Reddit front page without encountering a lot of content that is designed to upset you. I've started to actually hate using Reddit. Niche subreddits are still useful in limited ways, but it's a shame to see things go this way. Reddit had a good run.

You’re right. I’ve been on Reddit since 2012. But over the last 2-3 years, the front page seems to feature more controversial or upsetting content. I wonder if Reddit promotes that to increase engagement metrics.

There's also tons of "memes but named differently" subs. Cursed images, blessed images, blursed images, etc. images. They're all picking from the same pool of reposted content.

Some of the best stuff has actually been long form comedy writing from the sports subreddits during the lockdown. It's good banter, unlike the twitter screenshot repost subs like murderedbywords, kamikazebywords, etc.bywords.

Agreed. It seems mostly a tool to enrage people now. I cant stomach it anymore, the tin foil hat wearing part of me would say there are larger forces at work here. The flipside of these subreddits(public freakout, etc) is that a non-trivial percentage of these things are/could be fake.

To the main point of the article- Reddit must really get a lot of dough monetizing user data because its as bad or worse than ad/malware...

There definitely are larger forces at work, plenty of times I see what is pretty clearly political propoganda on the front page. Iran had a lot of success in r/worldnews [0]. I actually noticed a lot of pro-iran propoganda on Reddit when the US killed their general, the post would be pro-Iran and all the comments would be against it, mostly stopped after they shot down the plane though.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/volunteers-found-iran...

It's a shame that Reddit relies so heavily on their "default" front page experience.

99.9% of people looking at Reddit will never see how good and useful it can be. My front page is just the stuff I'm into - a couple dozen niche subreddits with good cultures. It is nice. It is my favorite place on the internet.

Most people will never take the time to make an account and curate their subreddit subscriptions.

Could that process be improved and streamlined? Absolutely yes. When you make an account -- or perhaps even before -- it should probably hold your hand and walk you through a preferences discovery process.

As it stands now, customizing Reddit is effectively a collection of "power user" features and we all know how that goes: only a tiny fraction of users will ever bother.

Agreed. Also, with the redesign UI there is no way to manage your multireddits, making it a chore to curate content. I have to go to the old reddit version of the sub to add or subtract it from a multireddit.

I thought multis are just URLs you can bookmark.

With the old reddit design, you can create your own Multireddits. If you switch to old reddit (click username dropdown > "Visit Old Reddit"), and hover over the "Join" button on a subreddit, you should get a menu to check and add that sub to a multireddit (or create a new one). Some subs with custom CSS break this functionality, but this is a way to curate and categorize your subs. So you can read posts from all of you favorite programming-related subs together in one multi and all your favorite cooking ones in another, etc. Once you have them set up you can use them in the new redesign, but to manage them you need to go back to Old Reddit.

Reddit is completely infested with politics too, many subs that you wouldn't expect to be political are clearly aligned a certain way.

And this was the reason I finally deleted my account and stopped browsing Reddit. It was hard to find any sub that didn't turn in to a left vs right argument. I intentionally avoided political subs and anything news related but unfortunately most discussions some how turned political.

Yeah, I’ve noticed recently. For instance /r/ActualPublicFreakOuts is quite conservative, in comparison to /r/PublicFreakOuts

That happened as a reaction to PublicFreakouts becoming ProtestsAgainstPolice

>the site has become like a nerdy version of World Star Hip Hop.

Wow, this is an excellent comparison. You're absolutely right.

>You really can't browse the regular Reddit front page without encountering a lot of content that is designed to upset you

This 2 minutes of hate thing is prevalent on HN as well. "Content that is designed to upset you" is right.

Reddit is not quite dead yet, but if I had to pick a specific point when Reddit began its downfall it quality, it was definitely when r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu exploded in popularity, and Reddit shifted to primarily a place to get terrible 4chan memes.

I think screenshots of Tweets had a much more detrimental effect than 4chan memes.

Yes absolutely. The turning point for me was when I visited r/all one day and the first page was almost entirely screenshots from Twitter

I used to visit /r/amitheasshole for a bit until I realized that subreddit was just porn for a certain type of personality. I found it super distasteful and left.

I don't even understand why people would live their life with that much anger and hatred. I would literally see what was obviously just a miscommunication or bad actions with good intentions that could be resolved by communication and people would just vilify the person.

yuck.

Interesting that you feel older demographics degrade a platform. For me, it’s the opposite: I am really starting to appreciate hobby forums that are dominated by people a couple of decades older than myself. This tends to happen to independent website forums when now the younger generation eschews them for walled gardens like Reddit.

The reason for that is that older people are less likely to be using mobile, and they are more likely to create long-form text content. You can actually have substantial discussions with them and share detailed tips and reports. Compare this to the relevant Reddit subreddits, where each day’s new posts have largely devolved to vacuous uploaded photos or memes, and the discussion thread is often a lot of vacuous one-sentence replies.

> Interesting that you feel older demographics degrade a platform. For me, it’s the opposite

Agree. More mature users means less bullshit. A corrected statement would probably be something like: if a platform is used mostly by younger demographics, then an influx of older people degrades that platform for the younger people.

Which seems pretty obvious.

More mature users means different bullshit. The flight sim community is an example of one I'm involved in which has many forums with older users that grew out of 90s forums or even older BBSes and have a large older audience.

I wouldn't call those forums as having less bullshit than say the Reddit, which has the younger parts of the community.

You are right, young people degrade a platform just as much as anyone else.

The only platform in which this phenomenon can be applied to is probably Facebook.

    Interesting that you feel older demographics 
    degrade a platform. For me, it’s the opposite: 
    I am really starting to appreciate hobby forums 
    that are dominated by people a couple of decades 
    older than myself.

Yeah, it's funny. Older demographics "ruin" some platforms and really excel at others.

This is all 100% subjective, but I think many people would agree that older demographics are.... not always much fun on "general purpose" social networking platforms like Facebook.

Leaving Facebook's substantial ethical concerns aside for a moment, Facebook and Instagram stopped being fun real fast once everybody's parents and aunts and uncles showed up. It's simply too easy for Uncle Bob to repost anti-vax stuff or whatever he's into, and most people would prefer to keep some of the fun/exciting parts of their lives private from their families.

But, like you, I've gotten into some hobbies where the older folks have just a freaking amazing online presence - just super generous and talented people; absolute superstars of the community.

Older intelligent people are the best. Older uneducated+opinionated people...not so much.

Yes. Additionally....

There are a lot of older people who are intelligent and uneducated but have a really tough time distinguishing "fake news" from "real news."

My sister is in her 50s, is intelligent and kind-hearted, and winds up linking to fake news sites alllllll the time.

A lot of those sites are absolutely insidious. They look like reputable news sites: your same basic layout as any mainstream news site. Frequently updated with multiple news articles per day. Many even sprinkle in a lot of innocuous syndicated stories from the Associated Press or some other press service.

But... look a little closer and all of their original content pushes some particular agenda.

For example, my sister linked to one that looked pretty legit. Had a bunch of soft news stories. But, look a little closer.... and there were thousands of disturbing articles about how it was harmful to have abortions or be LGBT.

If a publisher has an agenda, okay. That's fine. We all have viewpoints and agendas. But masquerading as a neutral mainstream news site, so that you grasp for some unearned credibility from folks who aren't tech-savvy enough to know the difference? Yiiiiiikes.

Some folks will point out that this criticism could be applied to Fox News or MSNBC as well. I wouldn't totally disagree, but what I'm saying is that there are fake news sites out that that are waaaaay more extreme and insidious.

I think it's clear that it is harmful to be LGBT (especially T). This is obvious in the clearly higher rates of suicide of these demographics.

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be inclusive, but lets also make sure we're not pretending that there aren't problems there. You can't try to fix a problem you won't acknowledge.

Now, perhaps you meant something else when you said harmful, I just interpreted it that way because I would have expected you to say 'bad' if it was the case that the articles were judging the people themselves (much like a religious person might).

You are confusing "harmful" with "at-risk"

Then please explain it to me.

In short, you appear to be mixing cause and effect; i.e., correlation is not causation.

A higher suicide rate among the LGBT population can mean two things:

1. Being LGBT causes a higher suicide rate

2. Being LGBT is correlated with a higher suicide rate

The first conclusion postulates that the mere state of being LGBT, independent of environmental, social, circumstantial, or other factors, increases suicide risk; in other words, no matter how accepted or ostracized LGBT people are, no matter their upbringing, no matter any other factor, they will always have a higher suicide rate.

The second conclusion, on the other hand, allows for the possibility that some external factor can come into the picture to produce the observed result, and that being LGBT does not innately mean a higher risk for suicide. For example, perhaps LGBT people are relegated to a second-class place in society, with reduced opportunity to find love and having to constantly act in an “unnatural” way in order to be treated fairly. These additional stresses can add up to an increased suicide risk, without which an LGBT person would have a “normal” suicide risk.

By saying “ I think it's clear that it is harmful to be LGBT”, then bringing up suicide rates without mentioning possible confounding factors, it seems you’re drawing conclusion number 1 from above, which, strictly speaking, is too strong of a conclusion to draw given the stated data.

I suspect you're trolling, but here goes. I'll stick strictly to facts and abstain from all moral judgement.

In most of the world, LGBT folk face a number of additional stressors compared to non-LGBT folk. These stressors include some or all of the following:

- Inability to marry partners of their choosing

- Inability to openly date partners of their choosing

- Imprisonment or death

- Dismissal from their jobs

- Abandonment by family

- Loss of children

- and so on

Whether or not you feel those stressors are just or not, certainly they contribute to poorer mental health outcomes, to put it mildly.

In principle, I agree. Theoretically older users should be more emotionally stable, and produce less drama.

In practice though we’ve seen FB become basically the conspiracy theory fever swamps during a demographic change. Maybe there is some other factor beyond the age of the user at play here, but I certainly have no idea what that might be.

My reddit account is over 10 years old, and I think we have different views of why Reddit is on a slow decline.

Every single sub-reddit will, at some point after its first few users, need to decide if it will be a meme/image macro sub, or not. Every sub that implicitly allows memes, will eventually become a meme sub if the mods choose to do nothing. It seems there are large numbers of users on Reddit that feel entitled to let "upvotes and downvotes" be the ultimate and only modding that should happen on a sub-reddit. These users will balk at any notion of getting rid of memes because "what else is there to discuss"? For them, the worst thing to happen to their feed is for there not to be a huge dearth of mindless content to consume which is heavily remixed and re-used all over the site every single time they login.

They will also deny that any sub that allows memes will somehow then "become a meme sub". They seem willfully ignorant of what happens to meme subs, and seem to think "if people upvote it, then that means they want it", ignoring how the people who upvote most frequently and the lowest quality content are those that rapidly consume meme content.

Reddit is ruined by these super passive consumers of memes. Not anti-intellectualism, but just those that want to go to reddit, see funny shit, upvote it all, and then get on with their day. And they demand to see that EVERYWHERE.

I mean yea, but it's ruined by anti-intellectualism too.

>the worst thing to happen to their feed is for there not to be a huge dearth of mindless content

FYI, "dearth" means "scarcity or lack", which I think is the opposite of the intended meaning here?

My bad, thanks! I did mean the opposite

I don't think it's that simple.

I left /r/patientgamers after the mods came out and declared they were going to be LGTBQ friendly, which meant any discussion about those issues, even if they were related to a game (for example the remake of Baldurs Gate) would result in a ban. The argument made by a lot of people is that the community should get to decide if that's something they want to discuss, not the moderators (and I agree).

I also left /r/fitness when they decided what they needed was a female moderator. They specifically decided they wanted a new moderator and that moderator had to be female. As if male moderators are unable to identify sexual harassment.

I don't want to be moderated by people who have a political agenda. Fullstop.

I didn't go to /r/fitness because it had a 'diverse' moderation team, I wanted to go there to discuss with fellow fitness enthusiasts. I didn't want to go to /r/patientgamers because it was a "safe space", I went there to discuss with others who also mostly refused to buy games for $60+ USD.

Too often moderators forget why they're there, and think that just because they have the power to means they should. There is absolutely a time and place to let upvotes make the decision of what stays and what goes. Not always, but very often it's true.

Did you find a /r/patientgamersWithLGBT and /r/GenderAgnosticFitness, or did you cut off your gaming and fitness experience to spite the mods?

If someone who identifies as LGBT wants to discuss fitness or patient gaming, great. lets do it.

But this can happen without moderators banning anyone who brings up LGBTQ. The idea that you must ban those discussions in order to have LGBTQ participate is doing that demographic a disservice.

To contrast that, I'm Native American. Imagine if dang felt the need to ban any discussion involving Native Americans because he felt it was necessary to allow me, and those like me, to participate in discussions.

That's not how that works. It's how misguided people work.

edit: Also, to answer your question. It turns out the world doesn't revolve around reddit and I'm able to find communities without reddit (or simply leave it behind).

Reddit skews consistently young though. Too young for many people's tastes (including mine). There is just too much meme-noise in subreddits that are not well moderated. Shallow thinking and childish antics derail any deep conversation.

You are correct that reddit confuses truth with popularity though. That meme needs to die

Yes, on Reddit the zoomers are a larger problem than the boomers.

Default subreddits today basically feel like being in elementary school all over again, the average age is like 14.

"Hey I am 14 years old developer and I made XXX, for my first XXX, please check it out"

Funny enough that childlike behavior is probably from people in their 30s

>Reddit, at one point, was just science, memes, an occasional atheist post, and and A list Celebrity AMA every other day - a platform that provided niche content mostly for age 18-30 year old Americans.

This seems to mostly outright ignore some of the more controversial subreddits that existed/flourished in the past. There was a significant amount of content, including entire subreddits, dedicated to sexualizing minors.

It feels revisionist to think reddit has only recently become flooded with controversial content.

I never really got the outrage for that subreddit. Minors are sexualized in society all the time, especially by various magazines, and it's completely, 100% legal and accepted.

IIRC there were accusations of CP being put up and not taken down in a timely manner. For that reason I'm ok with the subreddit not being there, but the whole "sexualization of a minor" thing is a red herring.

just imagine if someone got up in arms about a magazine putting a picture of a 16 y/o with big tits on their cover. No one does unless she's explicitly in a sexual position.

Excepting of course that just as you and many here do, you assume your opinion in the group of having higher value. Yes it is easy to pick out the obvious bad opinions but it becomes far less easy to do so when the issues are divisive because both sides can be correct but you can guarantee both sides can have proponents who think the other one is an idiot.

Reddit's issue for me is that many supposedly good subs are so completely toxic to any opposing view they may as well not exist.

It is far too common that the easiest to pick out are the loudest

Let's not forget the Eternal September that ruined newsgroups.

I don't think it's really an age issue per se. The problem that a group/demographic/tribe/whatever makes a place hot, then a bunch of people that don't fit their description show up wanting to get in on the fun. The result is the original group packing up and moving on. You see this everywhere from Facebook to gentrifying neighborhoods.

I presume the change in tone and content on reddit is due to mobile users moving to the site. It is probably good for their click rates actually, but discussions were a lot more relaxed 5 years ago. I still use it, but only for niche subs.

I always rolled my eyes at people denouncing the quality of default subs. They weren't good but also not that terrible. Now it isn't necessarily terrible, but just extremely stupid. Nearly every comment.

Well over the last 5 years or so it's just got more commercially focussed - mainstream, populist, more tracking through app use = more advertising dollars. It's just the shift towards full commercial focus.

Things get popular : someone decides to use it to increase their wealth.

I agree 100% here. Comment sections on reddit are approaching YouTube-level lows.

I think you are incorrect in blaming older people for this issue. I would argue it's simply the increased user base regardless of age. When things are niche and communities small conversations tend to flourish and surprisingly I think echo chambers are a bit less of a problem since dissenting views can often be voiced without down vote floods etc. As the user base increases you get further from the group of people who were passionate enough about subject X to be early adopters and into a more generalized audience. That general audience is often not interested or not equipped for indepth discussion of X. That mentality also leads to down vote parties I think. I have seen it in a number of subs that I used to really enjoy. After reaching a critical mass of users they have become meme and low content post factories. I suppose part of that is an increase in users who specifically care about generating up votes so they generate as much content as possible which inevitably leads to low quality stuff.

Opinions are of equal value [...] this is dangerous.

I disagree that it is dangerous. Of course not every opinion is worthwhile, but since opinions got labeled as too dangerous, they got much more appeal for others. Otherwise it would just be another stupid opinion.

I think this had a large negative effect on many subs since people somehow lost the ability to just ignore something or write their own opinion as a response. Everyone was screaming for mommy moderator.

Today people get a heart attack if someone writes that the earth is flat.

I think all opinions have value, but that value is not necessarily intrinsic.

So 'the earth is flat' has value in indicating a person's ignorance (or trollishness), possibly associating them with a group (good for them; useful for others).

I find this perspective fascinating, because I totally disagree. I started using reddit in... 2007? (I remember a lot of content about the economic crisis and Occupy Wall Street.) I feel that the change in reddit has come from an influx of younger users, not older ones.

When I joined reddit, I had the sense that most users were 25-45. If you revealed you were 20, you were a baby by reddit standards. There was a sort of unspoken (and sometimes, outright) filter preventing younger users from enjoying the experience. The community of users wouldn't tolerate poor grammar and misspellings. Users were torn apart if they posted a news article about a study without posting a link to the actual study. Users ignored onions from other users if they were unable to cite sources.

The site was ugly. Before the redesign, it looked like it was built in '98 and never updated. I remember a friend of mine being completely turned off by the site because of the visual design, without paying any attention to the quality of the content. There was much more of a learning curve to using the site than there is now. That served as a deterrent, whether intentionally or not. People who genuinely were interested in the content and the conversation stayed, and users who were more interested in a spoon-fed lazy entertainment website stayed away.

Now, it's not uncommon to see posts from 13 and 14 year-olds. I've even seen content from people as young as 7. I think this has had a significant impact on the decrease in quality of content. The redesign has certainly made the site more inviting to the average user. I think this is a chicken-or-the-egg situation, in that I can't say whether the influx of new users was a result of the redesign, or the cause, but it doesn't really matter. The point is that the content has shifted from more slow-burn, idea-challenging content, to entertainment designed for instant gratification. There's nothing wrong with that kind of entertainment in itself, I just prefer the former.

I agree. I shouldn't have led with that sentiment.

The reason why I did so was because I was recently browsing an AskReddit post asking "What Movie Will you always Recommend". (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ij0ha8/what_movi...) And as I viewed the top answers I remember thinking to myself that reddit is older than I perceived it to be, although it may just be appreciation for classics as I, too, have many 80-90s movies that i would highly recommend.

That being said, I do believe that the older demographic ruined Facebook.

Since writing the comment, I don't think it's correct to label an age demographic as the culprit but rather the rise in popularity in general, and the overwhelming effect it can have.

In democracy two stupid people have more power than one smart individual.

On the other side what kind of existing system is better than democracy?

If you have enough money you can buy the influencing of a lot of less analytical people.

In the UK we combat that by strict regulations on money spent influencing voters. Sadly, despite proving Brexit campaigns were backed by an excessive amount of money routed through a Russian oligarch the result remains (unintended ironic use of 'remain'!).

Democracy can only work with probity. If the people don't know the truth they can't vote for their choice.

Benevolent dictatorship seems likely the better option, just choose your dictator carefully!

>Benevolent dictatorship seems likely the better option, just choose your dictator carefully!

"Where have all the good philosopher kings gone?" :)

Top 50 sub-reddits are controlled by the same people. This should say enough about the platform.

Every once in a while one of those individuals gets "pissed off" and bans individuals 1 by 1 on all the subs they mod.

I suspect you may have overlooked who shows up between the kids and the older users: internet marketers. Marketers want clicks, eyeballs and engagement and they do that by sharing viral content, most often outrage porn.

As long as a given platform is also a vehicle for building an off-platform audience, marketers will inevitably show up and shit all over everything.

    (yes, there is twitter outside of tech, and it's 
    content quality is extremely poor and juvenile)

This is not my experience at all. It's extremely dependent on whom you follow, obviously, but there are a lot of people posting funny and smart things on Twitter.

The extremely casual / shitposting crowd is more drawn to Instagram, Tiktok, etc.

Like any medium, 99.9% of stuff on Twitter is garbage, but it's still primarily a text - based medium and I think that requires juuuuuuust enough effort to drive away the most casual of casual posters.

The character limit of Twitter also imposes a certain clarity of thought and composition. It's like being forced to fit your thoughts into a haiku: it's restrictive and frustrating, but you can sometimes wind up with concise little gems you wouldn't have come up with otherwise.

> especially when the average american individual is as uneducated as he or she is.

I find this generalisation tired, offensive and without merit. If they're so uneducated why are they still sending craft into space, producing wonderful poetry and creating innovative ways to leverage the Internet?

The people who are developing spacecraft, writing poetry, or reshaping the internet are not "average Americans."

Neverthess, I agree that the statement is without merit. I think this stereotype comes from Europeans, who tend to be more worldly than Americans (for example, nearly everyone in Europe speaks both their native language and English).

What Europeans tend to forget is that in Europe, you can hop on a train, airplane, hell, even a car, and within an hour be in another country, for less than the price of a fancy dinner.

America, by contrast, is huge. As a result, travel is more expensive, more time-consuming, and much harder when it comes to finding diversity.

The average American is most certainly not writing poetry or building space craft.

Insightful comment. This falls in line with conspiracy theories: while on the whole its good to be critical or skeptic, when you use all kinds of extraneous data points to make it fit your pre-chosen theory, it no longer is science.

Part of it could also be that older people are more economically and politically interesting -> more interesting to target for ads, tracking and political persuasion.

Or just the fact that older people are the decision makers deciding on these (deteriorating) things and they are more likely to target platforms they're aware of and that they recognize.

How do you determine what is "intelligent" and thus worth listening to and what is not? How can you rely on your inherently very flawed human genetic machine to not fool you into various thought patterns that have no rational basis at all, but just serve your tribe, your family, or your short term self interest?

If this was Reddit, I would give you Gold for this post.

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